Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Volume 14 Number 3 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/slac.14.3.315_1 ANDREA MEADOR SMITH Shenandoah University Savages and saviours in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia/ Even the Rain ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Acclaimed Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) is a fictionalized account of the Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000, whose title alludes to local protestors’ claim that the US-based corporation Bechtel sought to control and tax even the rain water that peasants collected. While También la lluvia may be a thoughtful attempt to denounce the oppression of native peoples, it in fact epitomizes the white saviour trope that has been prevalent in American and British cinema for years. In this study, I argue that the film adheres to what sociologist Joe Feagin calls a ‘white racial frame’ that perpetuates the perceived universality of the white European gaze by depicting fictional filmmakers Costa and Sebastián as ‘white saviour’ figures and indigenous community leader Daniel as a ‘noble savage’. The result is a film made by and for white westerners that replicates traditional western ways of portraying racial and cultural difference. Icíar Bollaín Spanish cinema También la lluvia gaze white saviour ‘Indians,’ as everyone knows, were invented by Europeans. (Rebecca Earle) Early in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia (2010), filmmakers María (Cassandra Ciangherotti) and Sebastián (Gael García Bernal) taunt their producer Costa (Luis Tosar) for attempting to save money by shooting a film about 315 1. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 2. Between 2000 and 2008, the Bolivian-born population of Spain increased from fewer than 4000 to more than 240,000 (Mazza and Sohnen 2010). 3. See Luis MartínCabrera (2002), Isabel Santaolalla (2005, 2012) and Patricia O’Byrne (2010). Christopher Columbus’ conquest of the New World in the Andes instead of the Caribbean. Costa retorts, ‘[f]rom the Andes or wherever, man, what does it matter. They’re Indians. Isn’t that what you wanted? […] They’re all the same’.1 Although Costa’s reminder that Bolivian extras will work for a mere $2 per day temporarily appeases Sebastián, the inquisitive viewer will indeed wonder: Why Bolivia? Why not one of the many other regions of Latin America or the Caribbean that boast indigenous, pre-Columbian populations? Whether intentional or coincidental, También la lluvia was filmed at a key point in Spanish-Bolivian relations (as was Fernando León de Aranoa’s Amador [2010], which premiered three months prior and starred Magaly Solier as a Bolivian immigrant working as a caregiver for an elderly man in Madrid). The shooting of Bollaín’s film in October–November 2009 coincided not only with Bolivian president Evo Morales’ first official visit to Spain but also with the year-long celebration of the nation’s bicentennial of the 1809 Chuquisaca Revolution, also known as Latin America’s ‘first cry for independence’. Morales made his first presidential visit to Spain in September 2009, at which time he addressed a crowd of more than 7000 compatriots in Madrid’s La Cubierta de Leganés. Despite the guise of a welcome ceremony sponsored by the Bolivian Embassy, Morales’ anti-colonialist, pro-immigration speech bore a striking resemblance to the start of a re-election campaign; in fact, given the sixtyfold increase in foreign-born Bolivian residents over the previous decade, by visiting Spain, Morales was likely courting as many as 250,000 potential voters.2 His proclamation that all human beings have the right to live in any part of the world would have been especially attractive to an audience of Bolivians who, after 1 April 2007, could no longer enter Spain without a visa. ‘When Spaniards and Europeans arrived in the Americas, our ancestors never called them illegals’, he claimed (González 2009). Both as an actor and as a director, Bollaín has been associated with cine social, a social realism subgenre of Spanish film that surged in popularity in the late 1990s, and her tendency to ‘compel[s] her audience to grapple with all aspects of a problem and the complexities of its causes’ has become a hallmark of her career (O’Byrne 2010: 168). In fact, critics have suggested reading Bollaín’s Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Bollaín, 1999) as a response to a particular cultural crisis: Spain’s transition from a fairly homogenized and isolated society during the reign of Francisco Franco to a multicultural nation that, at the end of the twentieth century, began to attract economic migrants from around the world.3 Patricia O’Byrne, for one, argues that, by portraying the once-colonized Other as a Spanish immigrant, Bollaín calls on the Spaniards to awaken from their slumber and respond […] [Bollaín and screenwriter Julio Llamazares] oblige their audience to reconfigure deep rooted concepts of Self and Other and to consider the potentially enriching effects of transcultural encounters and the potential for harmonious conviviality. (O’Byrne 2010: 177) Following the work of scholars such as O’Byrne, who read Flores de otro mundo as a response to the forced transnational encounters between Spaniards and Caribbean immigrants that began in the 1990s, I present the possibility of reading También la lluvia as a response to another forced encounter, this time between Spaniards and Bolivian immigrants a decade later. 316 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas A transnational production between Spain, France and Mexico, También la lluvia has garnered significant international acclaim, grossing approximately $6 million and winning a number of prestigious awards. In addition to its selection as Spain’s entry to the Academy Awards, it was awarded Mexico’s Ariel Award for Best Latin American Film and won three of thirteen Goyas and six of eight CEC Awards (Spain’s Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos), for which it was nominated in 2011. Bollaín herself asserted that the metacinematic También la lluvia was her most ambitious and complex project to date (Rivera 2011: 48) and its budget of €5 million far surpassed that of her previous films (Santaolalla 2012: 200). The cast includes the internationally renowned actors Luis Tosar as Costa and Gael García Bernal as Sebastián, a Spanish producer and Mexican director duo who have joined forces to make a film about the atrocities committed during Christopher Columbus’ conquest of the New World. Deeming it too expensive to shoot in the Caribbean with Taíno actors, and presuming that audiences will never notice the difference, producer Costa decides to save money by shooting in Bolivia and hiring Quechuas as extras. The filmmakers hire Cochabamba native Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) to play Hatuey, the legendary Taíno leader of a rebellion against Spanish conquistadors in the early sixteenth century, but Daniel’s participation in local protests against the privatization of Bolivia’s water system threatens the future of the film project. Throughout También la lluvia, Bollaín intertwines the past, the present and the future by interposing scenes from Costa and Sebastián’s historical film (past), with the shooting of said film and authentic news footage of the Cochabamba riots (present), along with clips from a behind-thescenes documentary being shot by videographer María (future). The result is a multifaceted film that explores both the historical and the contemporary exploitation of indigenous communities in Latin America. During the nine-week shoot in Cochabamba, filmmakers Bollaín and Paul Laverty went to great lengths to exercise cultural sensitivity when interacting with indigenous communities: they met with water-war activists, attended public assemblies, employed indigenous cast and crew members and compensated local communities in ways that would benefit the group as a whole (García 2011: 13). Bollaín and Laverty, who have a history of making socially conscious cinema, supported the community where they were filming by providing financial support to a local film school, supplying bricks to complete the construction of another school and purchasing a computer for a library (Santaolalla 2012: 209–10). While it is clear that the makers of También la lluvia exercised the utmost care in working with and representing their indigenous colleagues, it cannot be ignored that their film adheres to Feagin’s definition of a white racial frame, ‘an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate’ (2010: 3, original emphasis). At first viewing, the primary theme of También la lluvia appears to be the abuse of native peoples at the hands of ruthless conquistadors, be they representatives of the Spanish crown or of modern-day multinational corporations. It could also be argued that the primary theme is the making of a socially conscious film or even the increasingly problematic lack of access to clean water worldwide. For this spectator, however, it is racial difference that takes centre stage in También la lluvia and the major theme is the white European attempt at racial understanding. I suggest that, like Bollaín and Laverty, the audience of También la lluvia is www.intellectbooks.com 317 4. With respect to film studies, E. Ann Kaplan does not use the term ‘white gaze’ but rather employs the phrase ‘imperial gaze’, a gaze that ‘reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central […] anxiety prevents this gaze from actually seeing the people gazed at’ (1997: 78). My analysis is indebted to her work and Laura Mulvey’s foundational piece, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. 318 supposed to be both familiar with and comforted by the film’s white racial frame; we are supposed to identify with Costa in his ‘worldly encounter’ and the personal journey that ensues; we are supposed to sympathize with Daniel as he fights for justice for his people; and in so doing, we are supposed to change our attitude towards the indigenous Other, the one who is inherently and irrevocably different from us. This transformation on the part of the viewer is made possible by means of two character types that are both familiar and comforting to white spectators: the noble savage and the white saviour. THE POWER OF THE WHITE GAZE4 In the words of sociologist Steve Garner, ‘whiteness has no stable consensual meaning’, and thus any critical use of the term white requires an explanation (2007: 1). I support Garner’s assertions that whiteness is a racialized identity ‘whose precise meanings derive from national racial regimes’ and that ‘exists only in so far as other racialised identities, such as blackness, Asianness, etc., exist’ (Garner 2007: 2). Throughout this study I refer to the fictional characters Costa, Sebastián, María, other members of the film crew and the mayor of Cochabamba – and real-life filmmakers Bollaín and Laverty – as white, given the position of power that they enjoy within the societies that they inhabit as a result of their physical appearance, language, customs, etc. Film scholar Richard Dyer’s White (1997) also informs my analysis of También la lluvia’s white characters, specifically his understanding of the concept of embodiment, the role that both the physical and the spiritual play in visual representations of race. For Dyer, whitenesss is constituted in particular by three key elements in but not of the body: Christianity, race and imperialism. While people of colour such as Daniel and the extras in Sebastián’s film can be reduced to their physical bodies, ‘white people are something else that is realised in and yet not reducible to the corporeal’, an idea rooted in the Christian notion of incarnation (Dyer 1997: 14, emphasis added). In addition to Christianity and the physicality of race, for Dyer the final component of whiteness is the relationship between its embodiment and the physical world: ‘[t]he white spirit organises white flesh and in turn non-white flesh and other material matters: it has enterprise […] Imperialism displays both the character of enterprise in the white person, and its exhilaratingly expansive relation to the environment’ (Dyer 1997: 15, original emphasis). This final element of whiteness is especially pertinent to the racial framing of También la lluvia, given the recurrent emphasis on the white characters’ commitment to their filmmaking, rather than Daniel’s commitment to community activism. Thanks to promotional materials such as movie posters and DVD covers, the film’s white racial frame is established even before the audience views También la lluvia. Most movie posters feature a frontal view of white characters Costa (Tosar) and Sebastián (García Bernal), in one case facing each other and in others facing outward towards the camera. The most widespread image, which also appears on the cover of the Region 2 DVD issued in Spain, includes close-ups of the characters’ faces – Sebastián on the right, Costa on the left – with a panoramic shot of the Andes in the background. The spectator must look closely to decipher the white cloud in the centre of the frame, which is taken from the scene that depicts the fictional Taínos being burned at the stake for refusing to acknowledge the Spaniards’ God. In other words, the only visual portrayal of the many Bolivians who appear in the film is a diminutive image of them being burned alive. There is no trace of Daniel (Aduviri); even Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Figure 1: DVD covers from the German (left, Berlin: Piffl Medien) and Spanish (right, Madrid: Morena Films) editions of También la lluvia/Even the Rain (Bollaín, 2010). the film’s slogan excludes the indigenous protagonist in favour of prioritizing the perspective of the white characters: ‘[s]ome people want to change the world […] Few want to change themselves’. To date, I have found only one instance in which Daniel appears in any type of promotional materials: the DVD cover for the German edition of the film, titled Und Dann Der Regen/And Then the Rain, is divided into three equal sections with Costa at the top, Daniel in the middle and Sebastián at the bottom. The promotional materials thus make it clear that this film focuses on white characters and caters to white audiences, while Bolivians are relegated to the background. Media coverage of También la lluvia has conformed to a white racial frame as well. The photo chosen to accompany the New York Times review presents a medium close-up of Sebastián talking to Daniel in full costume, dressed as Hatuey (see Holden 2011). The image accentuates the visual differences between the two men: Daniel-as-Hatuey is shirtless, his face is painted and his hair and neck are elaborately adorned with beads and feathers; Sebastián wears a solid-coloured t-shirt with no accessories of any kind. The photo included in the Washington Post review similarly depicts Sebastián: he is wearing the aforementioned t-shirt and his face is in the foreground as a group of Bolivian extras, in full indigenous costume, look over his shoulder (see Jenkins 2011). These images provoke the viewer to discern and define the racial difference, represented visually, between Sebastián and the Other. Moreover, the photograph chosen to accompany the print edition of the El país review is, quite literally, a visual representation of the white gaze in action (see R. García 2010). The image is a point-of-view shot from the perspective of a Spanish soldier as he watches natives suspended from crosses that are surrounded by funeral pyres. As these examples demonstrate, the white racial frame is embedded not only in the film’s promotional materials but also in its media coverage. www.intellectbooks.com 319 The white racial frame capitalizes on the ‘white gaze’, which George Yancy defines as ‘that performance of distortional “seeing” that evolves out of and is inextricably linked to various raced and racist myths, white discursive practices, and centripetal processes of white systemic power and white solipsism’ (Yancy 2008: viii). In accordance with the philosophies of prominent critical race theorists such as Yancy, I adhere to the notion of race as a social construction rather than a biological reality. Be that as it may, physical traits such as skin colour, hair colour or texture, facial features and body shape have come to serve as racial signifiers (Wade 1997: 15), and scholars agree that race is experienced visually (Jacobson 1998; Alcoff 2006; Yancy 2008). That is, the eye of the beholder considers external markers before making judgements about the identity of the object of his or her gaze. Indeed it is the gaze – the repeated act of looking and labelling – that establishes race as a category of difference (Warren 2005: 98). The power of the white gaze, which grants the freedom to see without being seen (Sartre 1964–65: 13), is of particular interest to an analysis of También la lluvia, given that the audience sees the film’s indigenous characters through a double-lens of whiteness: first, via the gaze of real-life filmmakers Bollaín and Laverty, and second, via that of the fictional Costa and Sebastián. Throughout the film, white characters always control the gaze: primarily Costa and Sebastián but also María, the videographer who films local protestors on her own camera in the hopes of making a documentary about the water wars. María vigilantly records the indigenous citizens of Cochabamba as they dig wells and attend demonstrations, and the film champions her as the one who truly wants to lend voice to the campesinos. Nonetheless, as a white woman she still gazes upon them from a position of power and, in fact, engages in the somewhat popular western trend of primitivizing native peoples by photographing (or in her case, filming) them in black and white. From the movie’s opening scene, Costa and Sebastián – both successful white males – use their gaze, and the lens of white privilege through which they see Others, to assign meaning to the bodies of the non-white people with whom they come in contact. The opening scene is shot from the perspective of Sebastián, who sits comfortably in a white SUV as he observes locals bustling through the hectic streets of Cochabamba. Upon arrival at the casting, Sebastián is overwhelmed by the hundreds of indigenous Bolivians who have shown up to audition. He speaks the first words of the film when he asks his companions, interestingly enough, ‘[d]id you see?’ From the multitude, Sebastián must select a chosen few to audition, and in order to do so, he goes through the line, examining faces – or in Dyer’s terms, organizing non-white flesh – to find the ones who look most suitable. As the camera slowly pans across the line of those waiting to audition, the audience is encouraged to look and to scrutinize their physical features and traditional clothing. Shortly thereafter, Sebastián rebukes Costa for dismissing the ancestry of those who have come to audition, at the same time that he asserts the authority of his own gaze by exclaiming, ‘[h]ave you seen their faces? Please! They’re Quechas […] They’re indigenous people from the Andes’. Again, the white gaze is established as the locus of power from and through which identity can be defined, affirmed or dismissed. At the casting, none impresses Sebastián more than Daniel, an indigenous man who has waited for hours so that his daughter Belén (Milena Soliz) can audition for the film. Real-life actor Juan Carlos Aduviri, however, is not a cochabambino but rather an alteño who has admitted in interviews that he 320 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Figure 2: María and Sebastián in Cochabamba at the casting call for extras for their film (Madrid: Morena Films). considers himself more Aymara than Quechua. Film scholar Isabel Santaolalla has pointed out that, despite the film’s transcultural sensibilities, by choosing an alteño for the role of Daniel, Bollaín is complicit with the fictional Sebastián for yielding ‘more to artistic than to cultural priorities’: ‘Aduviri’s looks, rather than his ethnicity, made him in Bollaín’s eyes the ideal actor for this role, a responsibility that, as Aduviri himself confessed, led to certain misgivings’ (Santaolalla 2012: 206). When Daniel first appears on-screen, the viewer is invited to discern his difference from Sebastián and Costa: his dark skin, short stature and facial features bear little resemblance to the filmmakers who have just arrived in Cochabamba, whose complexion and physiognomy evince their European ancestry and whose hairstyle and clothing convey a preoccupation with western fashion. Several scenes later, the viewer is given the opportunity to scrutinize Daniel’s face as Sebastián shows Costa the audition tape. The scene opens with a straight cut to a close-up of Daniel’s face being streamed on a laptop. In this shot-within-a-shot, the viewer sees Costa and Sebastián from behind as the two men face the laptop centred between them. The camerawork of the clip that they are watching zooms from a close-up of Daniel’s face to an extreme close-up that lingers on his eyes and nose. Sebastián is especially taken by Daniel’s gaze and urges his partner to ‘[s]ee for yourself the look in his eyes […] Pay attention to it. It’s a piercing gaze […] He’s little, but he has a remarkable presence’. Unbeknownst to Costa, Sebastián had proceeded to record a make-up artist’s transformation of Daniel into Hatuey, which convinced him that the success of their movie would hinge upon this image of Daniel as an indigenous warrior. As Sebastián attempts to convince Costa that there can be no other Hatuey but Daniel, the clip on the laptop switches to a close-up of Daniel in hair and makeup. In a shot that echoes the intricate layers of the film itself, the viewer watches Costa and Sebastián watching a scene that moves from an over-the-shoulder extreme close-up of Daniel to a close-up of Daniel’s reflection in the stylist’s mirror. Over the course of the scene, the viewer sees Daniel as Sebastián does and identifies various aspects of his physical appearance – dark hair and eyes, strong nose, broad mouth – as racial signifiers. As a result, the viewer becomes complicit not only in the objectification of Daniel as the Other (Paszkiewicz 2012: 234) but also in the fabrication of an inherent difference that sets him apart from the filmmakers. www.intellectbooks.com 321 5. See Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘colonial mimicry’, which he identifies as ‘the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other’ (1984: 126). Figure 3: Costa (left) and Sebastián (right) watch Daniel’s interview as Sebastián marvels at the young man’s ‘piercing gaze’ and ‘remarkable presence’ (Madrid: Morena Films). Figure 4: A multi-layered shot: the viewer observes Costa and Sebastián and follows their gaze as they watch a close-up of Daniel’s reflection in a makeup artist’s mirror (Madrid: Morena Films). THE NOBLE SAVAGE Sebastián and Costa’s white gaze perceives Daniel-as-Hatuey’s body as the manifestation of physical difference, and in like fashion, the presumably white western spectator who sees Daniel on-screen is meant to perceive his features as ‘outer signs of an essential, immutable, inner moral-intellectual character’ (Jacobson 1998: 174). However, Daniel’s physical difference is combined with an internal sameness, for Daniel’s image also exudes the supposedly traditional Spanish traits of honour, bravery and virtue. Daniel’s indignation in the face of injustice and the passion with which he resists oppression – first at the casting and later in the water-war riots – liken him to Sebastián, whose conscience drove him to make a film about the conquest after reading Father Antonio de Montesinos’ famous sixteenth-century sermon condemning the Spanish encomienda system. Despite his physical likeness to his compatriots, Daniel’s bravery and noble character are depicted as standing in opposition to those around him. He is alike in such a way that the audience is drawn to the characteristics that he shares with the white filmmakers, but not quite, as he is still covered in dark skin and lives amongst poverty-stricken Quechuas who are repeatedly portrayed as an ‘undifferentiated mass’ (Garner 2007: 19).5 322 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Figure 5: Daniel informs Costa that he speaks English and has understood the producer’s incriminating phone conversation (Madrid: Morena Films). The racial trope of a depicting indigenous people as a submissive throng is exploited throughout the intercalated film being made by Sebastián and También la lluvia itself. In an early scene, María asks why they are filming in Bolivia, far from the Caribbean, and Costa argues that the region is ‘full of starving indigenous people and that means extras, thousands of extras’. The Quechas-as-Taínos in Sebastián’s film are portrayed as a homogenous horde of natives in traditional dress and makeup who only operate as a group, whether running through the forest, paying their gold tributes to the Spaniards or taking their children to the river. In similar fashion, indigenous characters are repeatedly depicted en masse in Bollaín’s film: waiting silently to audition, building community wells and gathering to discuss the water crisis. Under Sebastián’s direction, Hatuey alone emerges as a unique person, just as Daniel is the one character individuated from the masses in Bollaín’s film. Besides him, there are only two named characters of indigenous origin, his wife Teresa (Leónidas Chiri) and daughter Belén, and their significance exists only in relation to him, the exemplary Other whose social activism and commitment to his family make him a ‘model minority’ figure. Throughout the film, Daniel emerges as intelligent, industrious, even multilingual (he is portrayed as a stronger Spanish speaker than many of his compatriots and he speaks English after having worked in the United States for two years), and as such, he serves as the antithesis to the purportedly uncivilized community that he inhabits. As his character dissociates from the primitive, Daniel approaches whiteness and the admirable behaviours associated with it. In other words, he is ‘whitened into respectability’ as the moral characteristics that supposedly correspond with whiteness, such as intelligence, integrity and enterprise, are ascribed to him (Garner 2007: 87, 96; Dippie 1982: 24; Dyer 1997: 15). As Daniel becomes increasingly associated with the virtues of whiteness, he approximates what film scholars Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon call ‘the ideal white self’, a person (usually male) who is ‘powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm, and generous: a natural-born leader’ (2003: 34). He is the one who stands apart from the rest of his community, as evidenced by his organization of local riots against exploitation, and it is this ‘individual enterprise’ that makes him ‘implicitly superior’ and therefore able to approach the members of the film crew (Balibar 1991: 25). In similar fashion, Daniel approximates the figure of the messianic white self who is ‘noble and self-sacrificing on behalf of […] innocent victims who badly need rescue’ (Vera and Gordon 2003: 34), a www.intellectbooks.com 323 role that is emphasized visually in the scene in which Daniel-as-Hatuey burns on a cross. It is precisely his nobility and bravery that enable the white spectator to admire and identify with him. In this way, Daniel comes to embody the racialized character type that often serves as the counterpoint to an indigenous multitude: the noble savage. The role of noble savage, assigned to Daniel from the beginning of the film, was presaged in the opening scene when he first met Costa and dismissed him as cara blanquita (‘white face’), someone whose white privilege prevents him from understanding the perspective of the native Bolivians such as himself, who have walked long distances and waited for hours to audition. In a film in which white characters always control the power of the gaze, this is the one notable exception when an indigenous character has the opportunity to gaze upon and to censure the countenance of the filmmakers. In addition to functioning as a counterpoint to the mass of his indigenous compatriots, Daniel will also act as a sort of sidekick to Sebastián and Costa, who aids them on their journey to racial enlightenment. Vera and Gordon explain a reciprocal process through which the white man, when immersed in the native’s environment, can realize his potential in a way that he could not at home, due to the fact that white culture is considered ‘incomplete’ and that ‘exotic foreigners have more soul’ (Vera and Gordon 2003: 40). Daniel’s existence, therefore, is essential to enabling the privileged outsiders to find themselves and to reach their potential through their self-sacrifice on behalf of the oppressed (Vera and Gordon 2003: 34, 36). Daniel’s role as a noble savage is underscored in the scene-within-a-scene in which Sebastián attempts to replicate a factual account of Taíno women drowning their infants to spare them being mauled to death by the Spaniards’ dogs. Sebastián has ensured that the babies will never touch the water: as the Quechua women lower them to the river’s surface, the infants will be replaced with dolls to finish shooting the scene. Horrified by the mere thought of drowning their children, the mother-actors refuse to follow Sebastián’s instructions. Figure 6: Daniel, in full costume as Hatuey, mediates between Sebastián and the Cochabamban women who refuse to pretend to drown their children on camera (Madrid: Morena Films). 324 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Figure 7: The ‘cross scene’, the central sequence in Sebastián’s film (Madrid: Morena Films). Enter Daniel, who intervenes between the Quechua-speaking women and the film crew. The women come across as a mass of simple-minded beings incapable of understanding the basics of how a movie is made and unable to communicate in Spanish. Daniel, on the other hand, emerges as the heroic savage figure, physically akin but intellectually superior to the indigenous women, thanks to his ability to articulate their moral dilemma to the film crew. In this case, Daniel also comes across as morally superior to Sebastián when he chastizes the director, exclaiming that there are more important things than his movie. Daniel’s physical appearance in this scene – he is still in full costume as Hatuey – visually reinforces his dichotomous status as a noble savage, he who is alike but not quite, as does his ability to alternate between his native Quechua and the language of the colonized (the former of which, curiously, is neither translated into Spanish nor incorporated into the English subtitles). When the crew subsequently films the crosses scene, Daniel again is distinguished as the noble-savage figure. In this scene-within-a-scene, the Spanish soldiers prepare to burn thirteen Taínos at the stake – one for Jesus and one for each of his disciples – despite Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas’ plea for their salvation. As the commander asks who will play the role of Jesus Christ, a hard cut leads the viewer to a close-up of Hatuey’s face as a soldier detains him, thereby signalling Hatuey’s unique role as the leader of his people. Like Bollaín’s Daniel, Sebastián’s Hatuey is the only indigenous person with a real role and he is the only one who commands the attention of the Spaniards. After he shouts, ostensibly in Taíno, ‘I despise you. I despise your God. I despise your greed’ at his captors, the extras in the scene begin to chant the name Hatuey. The close-up of Daniel-as-Hatuey’s face as he burns on the cross fades to white, and the application of this underused transition to end the scene, in conjunction with the image of his sacrificial body, reinforces his status as a noble savage. THE WHITE SAVIOUR(S) Daniel’s role as a noble savage both complements and contrasts with the film’s ‘white saviour(s)’. Vera and Gordon call this figure the messianic white self, the redeemer of the weak, the great leader who saves blacks from slavery or oppression, rescues people of color from www.intellectbooks.com 325 poverty and disease, or leads Indians in battle for their dignity and survival. The messiah is marked by charisma, the extraordinary quality that legitimises his role as leader and that of the foreign population as followers. (Vera and Gordon 2003: 3) The cultural heft of the white saviour trope thus lies in its portrayal of positive images of whites as liberators rather than depictions of them as subjugators of other races (Vera and Gordon 2003: 34). White-saviour films have been especially popular in American cinema for the past twenty years, starting with Dangerous Minds (Smith, 1996) and culminating in recent blockbusters such as The Blindside (Hancock, 2009), The Help (Taylor, 2011), Million Dollar Arm (Gillespie, 2014) and McFarland, USA (Caro, 2015). In US films, the genre typically features impoverished, under-educated non-whites who are mentored, transformed and redeemed by a prosperous and/or powerful white character (Hughey 2010: 475). The white-saviour motif in Hollywood film has been studied at length, and yet scholarly work on the white messiah figure in Spanish films is non-existent. As stated previously, I recognize the contentious nature of using the word ‘white’ with respect to the filmmakers, both real and fictional. Even so, having been informed by the numerous and varied definitions put forth by critical race scholars, I interpret the filmmakers as ‘white’, given the embodiment of their privilege and the structural advantages from which they benefit within the social constructs of their respective nations. Over the course of También la lluvia, all three white filmmakers see themselves as saviour figures and all suffer from ‘the notion that all it takes is one white man to rescue or transform a foreign community’ (Vera and Gordon 2003: 40). Despite the fact that Vera and Gordon specifically refer to American films and white American culture, I maintain that their work on the white saviour can and should be applied to the white characters in También la lluvia. The first half of the film features the virtuous intentions of Sebastián, while the second half shifts focus to Costa’s heroic deeds, and María’s minor but significant role as a saviour figure should not be overlooked. As mentioned previously, the film praises her as an altruist who desires to capture the atrocities committed against Cochabambans and to tell their story to a larger audience. As she and Costa watch Daniel protest in front of Aguas de Bolivia, she begs Costa to let her shoot footage for a documentary about the mobilization of thousands of people from different parts of Cochabamba. When Costa rejects her idea, she insists, ‘if we don’t tell this story, we’re going to miss a great opportunity’. María, whose very name has messianic connotations, given that she shares a name with the Mother of God, believes herself to be integral to ‘help[ing] the Indians to overcome their cultural passivity and to stand up for their rights’ by means of her filmmaking (Vera and Gordon 2003: 40). In the first half of the film, Sebastián stands out as the messianic hero thanks to his association with Father Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas, both of whom fiercely criticized Spaniards’ inhumane treatment of indigenous people in the New World. Montesinos’ sermon, which inspired Sebastián to make a film about the Conquest, plays a significant role both in También la lluvia and in the fictional film-within-a-film. The scene in which Juan (Raúl Arévalo) delivers the sermon in character emphasizes the depth of Sebastián’s convictions to Bollaín’s audience: we witness his passionate direction of the scene and his mouthing along to the sermon’s text. It is clear that the sermon scene will be significant in Sebastián’s film as well. The audience knows that 326 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 6. In contrast to the $2 per day that the fictional Costa and Sebastián paid their extras, Bollaín paid $20 per day (Santaolalla 2012: 210). It is worth noting, however, that the salary for extras in Hollywood and New York at the time was $139 per day (Entertainment Partners 2009–10). Figure 8: Juan, in character as Father Antonio de Montesinos, delivers the priest’s famous sixteenth-century sermon condemning the encomienda system (Madrid: Morena Films). Figure 9: Sebastián’s passion on set is obvious as he directs the Montesinos sermon scene and mouths along to the text (Madrid: Morena Films). this sermon was Sebastián’s creative impetus and we see him reminding the cast that not only was Montesinos the ‘first voice of conscience’, he also refused to retract his sermon for the rest of his life. The fact that Sebastián sees himself as a saviour figure, continuing in the tradition of Montesinos and Las Casas, is made clear when the film crew visits the mayor of Cochabamba. Sebastián is convinced that his attitude towards the indigenous is altruistic – he is, of course, the one who came up with the idea of exposing Columbus’ cruelty to the Taíno people – and he believes that he has taken up the cause of the campesinos being exploited by the Bolivian government. His opinions seem to contrast sharply with those of the mayor, who claims, [g]iven their long history of exploitation, these Indians carry mistrust in their genes. It makes it very difficult to reason with them, especially when they are illiterate […] If we give them an inch, these Indians will haul us back to the Stone Age. Yet when Sebastián challenges the mayor, by asserting that someone who earns two dollars a day cannot afford a 300 per cent increase in utility costs, the politician exposes the filmmaker’s self-serving motives in his retort: ‘[h]ow interesting. That’s what they told me you are paying your extras’.6 Sebastián www.intellectbooks.com 327 continues to serve as the redemptive figure when a local warden, having been bribed by Costa, agrees to release Daniel but demands that he be returned the next day. Sebastián rejects the warden’s demands, claiming that Daniel could be beaten or tortured if forced to return. Eventually Sebastián yields to Costa after making it known that he does not want this on his conscience. Although not as humanitarian as his partner, Costa begins to consider himself capable of rescuing the indigenous Other. Costa’s critique of the state of poverty in which Daniel’s family lives (he calls their house a ‘shithole’) suggests that Daniel cannot adequately support his wife and daughter. Costa sees himself, on the other hand, as the one who can give them a better life, as evidenced by his offer to pay Daniel $10,000 to abandon his role in water-war riots until their film is complete and by his $2,000 bribe of the warden who holds Daniel in custody. At the same time that the scenes in Daniel’s home and in the local jail point to Costa’s self-appointment as rescuer, they also emphasize Daniel’s role as a noble savage. For example, as Costa disparages the house in which the Cochabamban family live, Daniel’s stoic response enrages Costa, who then accuses him of ‘playing the silent, dignified Indian’. Similarly, when Costa arranges Daniel’s release from jail, the producer’s hysteria contrasts starkly with Daniel’s forbearance and his sage reply that ‘water is life’. The scene in which Costa visits a defeated Sebastián in his hotel room is a pivotal point in the development of the white-saviour figure. The emphasis here is undoubtedly on Sebastián’s power to change hearts and minds by means of his film, rather than Daniel’s power to confront the challenges faced by his community. As Sebastián languishes in his bed, the two friends quote Montesinos’ famous sermon together and Costa reminds Sebastián of the many years he has wanted to tell the story of the famous friar, ‘one man against an empire’. Santaolalla observes that this, the scene of greatest intimacy between Sebastián and Costa, recalls Andrea Mantegna’s painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1480), in which Mary and John weep alongside the lifeless body of Jesus (Santaolalla 2012: 218). For Santaolalla, Mantegna’s work is invoked by Sebastián’s belief that he is sacrificing himself for a greater good and by the supine position of his body as Costa attempts to comfort him. If the scene connotes a connection between Sebastián and Christ, it also portrays him as ‘a child being soothed by the more experienced, manly, paternal figure’ (Santaolalla 2012: 218), and, from this point forward, Costa transforms into the film’s redemptive figure. This transformation builds upon the sacrifices made by Sebastián in his role as the white filmmaker attempting to save indigenous people by exposing their history of oppression and the sacrifices made by Daniel, the wise, noble savage risking his life to save his community. Costa emerges as the film’s true white-saviour figure in the final third of También la lluvia, when he plays an active role in saving the life of each member of Daniel’s family. Just as Daniel fights for his daughter, he puts himself in danger to protest the privatization of the water system on behalf of his people. As a respected community leader, Daniel is capable of motivating and inciting his peers to action, but he does not succeed in slowing the exponential increase in utility taxes or in preventing troops from seizing the wells that his community built as alternative water sources. Costa’s valiant endeavours, on the other hand, yield immediate results and he manages to upstage even Daniel’s greatest acts of courage. When Daniel risks his life leading a campesino rebellion, he is brutally beaten and taken to jail. In prison, Daniel’s battered body stands in stark contrast to the savvy Costa, who swoops in and frees Daniel by bribing the warden. 328 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Figure 10: An intimate scene between Costa and Sebastián in which the producer attempts to console his defeated friend (Madrid: Morena Films). Costa’s heroic deeds do not stop at rescuing Daniel; by the film’s end, he is integral in saving the lives of Daniel’s wife and daughter as well. As the film crew prepares to flee the increasing violence around the city, Teresa appears and begs the producer to help save her daughter, who was injured while playing with friends near the protests. Sobbing, Teresa pleads with Costa to find Belén, claiming that he is the only one who can help in this situation: ‘[m]y daughter could die. Please […] You can’t send someone else […] They aren’t letting anyone through, maybe there’s a chance they would let you […] You’re the only one […] Please, you’re a friend’. Despite Sebastián’s insistence that Costa evacuate with the rest of the crew, the Spaniard agrees to search for Belén, confessing to his friend that if anything happens to the child he will never forgive himself. Subsequent scenes show Costa driving through the war-torn streets of Cochabamba in the crew’s white SUV, secure in the power that his money and status will provide. When soldiers open fire on the vehicle, Costa saves Teresa from being shot in the head as bullets shatter the back windshield. Amidst the violence and chaos in the streets, he does, in fact, manage to find Belén and get her to the hospital, where the doctor informs him that they found her ‘just in time’. As indigenous females, Teresa and Belén function as what Lola Young calls ‘a double negation of that heroic self, being not-male, not-white’ (Young 2000: 273). The duality of their vulnerability allows Costa to ‘conceive of himself as fearless, active, independent, in control, virile’ (Young 2000: 273), and in typical whitesaviour fashion, he risks his own safety to ensure that of those he considers oppressed. También la lluvia comes to a close with an emotional scene between Costa and Daniel, in which the producer’s status as white saviour is affirmed. A teary-eyed Daniel expresses his gratitude by giving Costa a gift and declaring, ‘[y]ou saved my daughter’s life. I won’t forget that’. Furthermore, the scene suggests that not only is the indigenous indebted to the white man now but also that their non-reciprocal relationship will continue indefinitely since Costa has promised to help with the costs of Belén’s recovery. The ideological impact of this scene is twofold: first, it solidifies Costa’s role as the redemptive figure in the eyes of Daniel’s family and the audience. Second, saving Belén allows Costa, as a privileged white man, to absolve himself from the guilt of racism and to find consolation in the belief that he has sacrificed himself on behalf of someone from another race (Vera and Gordon 2003: 34). www.intellectbooks.com 329 Figure 11: Teresa begs Costa to help her find her injured daughter (Madrid: Morena Films). CONCLUSION También la lluvia is a film made by and for white westerners, and its adherence to the pattern of the white-saviour film in part explains its great success with United States and European audiences. With its underlying focus on the white European attempt at racial understanding, the movie is attractive and convincing to an audience that recognizes the representation of the social environment that they share with the filmmakers (Vera and Gordon 2003: 34), Bollaín and Laverty and the fictional Costa and Sebastián. Bollaín herself asserts that her film is, above all, a story about a producer and his journey towards personal maturity and commitment (R. García 2010). His experiences with Daniel’s family enable him to transcend his prejudices; in like fashion, we should leave the film enlightened about the brutality of colonization and confident in our abilities to thwart discrimination against the indigenous Other. Without question, También la lluvia denounces the savagery of colonization and the greed of multinational corporations, just as it illuminates some of the challenges faced by indigenous Bolivians in the twenty-first century. In light of the white racial frame that shapes the film, however, what purports to be a denunciation of racial oppression is, at closer examination, an example of ‘frenzied sentimentalism and “feel good” racial reconciliation’ (Hughey 2010: 488). Like countless Hollywood productions, También la lluvia relies on tropes such as the white saviour and the noble person of colour who assists the white man in realizing his full potential, tropes that have become so ubiquitous that they often go unnoticed. Reading the film through the lens of critical race studies offers spectators the opportunity to reflect on their own gaze as they view racialized bodies on-screen and to question racialized world-views espoused in Spanish-language cinematic production. REFERENCES Alcoff, L. M. (2006), Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, New York: Oxford University Press. Balibar, E. (1991), ‘Is there a neo-racism?’ (trans. Chris Turner), in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, New York: Verso, pp. 17–28. Bhabha, H. (1984),‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 28, pp. 125–33. 330 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas Bollaín, I. (1999), Flores de otro mundo, DVD, Spain: La Iguana and Alta Films. —— (2010), También la lluvia, DVD, Spain: Morena Films. Curry, R. R. (2000), White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Dippie, B. W. (1982), The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dyer, R. (1997), White, New York: Routledge. Earle, R. (2007), The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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(2011), ‘Discovering Columbus’s exploitation’, New York Times, 17 February, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/movies/18even.html?_ r=0. Accessed 3 February 2017. Hughey, M. W. (2010), ‘The White Savior film and reviewers’ reception’, Symbolic Interaction, 33:3, pp. 475–96. Jacobson, M. F. (1998), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenkins, M. (2011), ‘“Even the Rain”filmmakers explore Latin American politics across the centuries’, Washington Post, 19 February, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021803809_2. html. Accessed 3 February 2017. Kaplan, E. A. (1997), Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, New York: Routledge. Malik, K. (1996), The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, New York: New York University Press. Martín-Cabrera, L. (2002), ‘Postcolonial memories and racial violence in Flores de otro mundo’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 3:1, pp. 43–55. Mazza, J. and Sohnen. E. (2010), ‘On the other side of the fence: Changing dynamics of migration in the Americas’, Migration Policy Institute, 27 May, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/other-side-fence-changing-dynamics-migration-americas. Accessed 3 February 2017. Mulvey, L. (2009), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 14–26. O’Byrne, P. (2010), ‘Transcultural encounters in Icíar Bollaín’s Flores de otro mundo (1999): From racism toward acceptance of the female “Other”’, in P. O’Byrne, G. Carty and N. Thornton (eds), Transcultural Encounters amongst Women: Redrawing Boundaries in Hispanic and Lusophone Art, www.intellectbooks.com 331 Literature and Film, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 167–79. Paszkiewicz, K. (2012), ‘Del cine épico al cine social: El universo metafílmico en También la lluvia (2010) de Icíar Bollaín’, Lectora, 18, pp. 227–40. Rivera, A. (2011), ‘También la lluvia: La vida más allá del cine’, Cambio 16, 2043, 31 January, pp. 46–49. Santaolalla, I. (2005), Los ‘Otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo, Zaragoza: Prensas universitarias de Zaragoza. —— (2012), The Cinema of Icíar Bollaín, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1964–65), ‘Black Orpheus’ (trans. John MacCombie), The Massachusetts Review, 6:1, pp. 13–52. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003), Spanish National Cinema, New York: Routledge. Vera, H. and Gordon, A. M. (2003), Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wade, P. (1997), Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Warren, J. T. (2005), ‘Bodily excess and the desire for absence: Whiteness and the making of (raced) educational subjectivities’, in Bryant Keith Alexander, Gary L. Anderson and Bernardo P. Gallegos (eds), Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 83–104. Yancy, G. (2008), Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Young, L. (2000), ‘Imperial culture: The primitive, the savage and white civilization’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 267–86. SUGGESTED CITATION Smith, A. M. (2017), ‘Savages and saviours in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia/Even the Rain’, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14:3, pp. 315–32, doi: 10.1386/slac.14.3.315_1 CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Andrea Meador Smith is an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Shenandoah University. She completed a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Virginia, with a specialization in Latin American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current research and writing address representations of race and gender in South American literature and film. She has taught Spanish courses at all levels for the University of Virginia, Shenandoah University and Semester at Sea. Contact: Shenandoah University, 1460 University Drive, Winchester, VA 22601, USA. E-mail: asmith11@su.edu Andrea Meador Smith has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 332 Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas