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CINEMATIC BARCELONA: CATALAN IDENTITY IN A CULTURE OF DISPLACEMENT


As visualized by three filmmakers from outside Catalonia, Barcelona functions as the backdrop to geographic and emotional displacement: the city is a site of cultural (mis)understanaing; a space of clashes between tradition and a modernity identified with the tides of globalization; and a place where Catalan culture and nationalism coexist with and/or recede from the voluntary exile’s awareness. Examined through the lens of American filmmaker Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s Todo sobre mi madre (1999) and French cineaste Cedric Klapisch’s L’auberge espagnole (2002), Barcelona occupies an enormous visual terrain on the screen while staking a more narrowly-defined claim to the narrative thread of each film. These films depict Barcelona as a complex character and draft it into tales of individuals who are both seeking and rejecting the city as a guiding force in the assumption of a new identity forged outside their native terrain. The result, while unique in each cinematic incarnation, is that the visual space of the city acts as an emotional force, both locally, as it is intertwined with the displaced lives of the human characters, and globally, as international audiences internalize Barcelona as the face of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first- century migratory movements and the consequent dialectic between “old” and “new” Barcelona. By exploring the apparition of Barcelona in these three films as an outward expression of the changing dynamics among Catalonia, Spain and the world, this article examines the city’s perceived role in a global culture of displacement and voluntary exile as well as the notion of Catalan culture and identity as translated cinematically for international audiences. Although Barcelona inhabits a central visual and emotional role in each film, the cityscape ultimately does not counteract the lack of a particularly Catalan identity created for the displaced characters onscreen. While these films and characters succeed in internalizing Barcelona during their sojourn, they do not adopt a Catalan identity in the process.