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ABSTRACT In this essay, I read Jacinto Esteva Grewe's Lejos de los árboles (1972) as the exemplar of the Barcelona School's struggles under the late-Francoist film industry to develop its own brand of exhibitionism to expose and denounce the dictatorship's methods of producing and reproducing the nation through cinema. In the first part of my essay, I attend to the nationalist cinema; in the second, I turn back to the early cinematic activity of the nineteenth century; and in the third and final part, I demonstrate the Barcelona School's attempts to demythify Spanish nationalist cinema through the use of certain techniques such as repetition and interpellation that have been staples of the medium since its advent. Thus I filter the Barcelona School's mimicry of nationalist cinema through Tom Gunning's lens of the early "cinema of attractions." I propose the disruptive exhibitionist cinematic loop as the aesthetic form the Barcelona School's political position takes. My reading of the way the loop functions in Esteva's film works toward an understanding of this configuration as constitutive of the School's entire body of work.
"This is an exhibitionist cinema." Tom Gunning defines "a cinema of attractions" as a predominant early cinematic form "that bases itself on . . . its ability to show something" (382; emphasis in original). The Barcelona School, an elusive group formed in contestation to the late-Francoist, Madrid-based Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC),1 avails itself of many of the techniques of "a cinema of attractions" to unveil fascist machinations. It does so by reproducing the "presentational style"2 of the documentary and popular cinema that the Franco dictatorship embraces. This demonstrative style has endured in narrative and nonnarrative cinema since the dawning of cinematic activity. In their mimicry3 of this style, the Barcelona School's avant-garde and underground films criticize it as a cover for fascism's exclusionary ethics. The School's body of work counters the ad nauseum displays of uniformity and inclusion representative of the nationalist cinema with its own reiterative expositions that convey an ethics of hybridity and emancipation. Indeed, Gunning even asserts that the exhibitionist quality of the early cinema would later attract and be exploited by avant-garde and underground cinéastes because of its revolutionary possibilities (387). The participants in the Barcelona School typify this...