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ABSTRACT In its analysis of the work of independent Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella from 1970 to the present day, this article seeks to engage with the politics of signification and virtuality. Its broad surveying sweep interrogates questions of origin or identity, particularly with regard to national identity, and does so by focusing on the split, the caesura, that emerges in Portabella's cinema between cultural heritage and genealogy, which permits a poetics of the political image. Its discussion first addresses questions of representation before moving on to issues of fragmented national and supranational space in a context of cultural memory.
For Tatjana Gajic
What follows is an attempt to map out a theoretical approach to continuities and discontinuities in the work of Pere Portabella. My argument seeks to critique the obsessive preoccupation with origin or essence, particularly that of national origin, that has plagued writing on Spanish film in order to engage with the politics of signification and virtuality. More specifically though, the broad surveying sweep of this article - from 1970 to 2009 - focuses on the split, the caesura, that emerges in Portabella's cinema between cultural heritage and genealogy as manifested in the poetics of the political image. To this end, I want first to discuss the variety of ways in which representation comes to be interrogated in his films before going on, in the second half of this essay, to address the question of space.
I would like to begin with a brief discussion of a couple of sequences from two films that Pere Portabella directed in the early 1970s. The first is from the 1973 film Acciò Santos. In this twelve-minute short, Portabella's longtime collaborator, composer, performance artist, and virtuoso pianist Carles Santos prepares to play Chopin's Prelude Opus 45 in C sharp minor. The camera records him surrounded by the team of lighting and sound technicians as he warms up his fingers before playing the piece. At what is almost exactly the midway point in the film Santos stops playing and moves to an adjacent table. The musician then listens (with us, the spectators) to the recording; after a few moments he places earphones over his head to listen alone and in silence. The camera moves slowly towards him, stopping...