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Cine de choque : image culture, the absence of the patriarch and violence in Alejandro Amenábar's "Abre los ojos" (1997)

This article is a key part of the author’s larger project on ‘crash aesthetics’, which explores whether there is a modern choque aesthetic in films by Spanish-speaking directors which feature car crashes, including Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu), Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem) and All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar). This particular article is the first on the subject and introduces an entirely new category of film, cine de choque, or ‘crash-shock-clash cinema’. It mobilises theories by Lacan (suture theory), Metz (the ‘filmic space’) and Baudry (the ‘continuity illusion) to demonstrate the mechanics of cine de choque in both form and content. It contains detailed close reading of the film as well as cultural and historical contexts, which establish the relationship between Hollywood-engineered image culture, physical violence and a Spanish patriarchal culture in crisis. It is argued that cine de choque is representative of a certain kind of Hispanic cinema in which the choque (‘crash’, ‘shock’ or ‘clash’) functions both as plot device and as a linguistic motif, which shapes and informs that aesthetic. For example, whilst Abre los ojos simultaneously respects and tests the limits of Christian Metz’s ‘filmic space’ with constant choques, of which the car accident is only one, there is a distinctive lull-choque-lull sequence to each instance in Abre los ojos, in which the lulls are just as important as the choques themselves. The choque aesthetic opens up meditations on image-based culture and, through a process akin to Freud’s secondary revision, to the absence of the patriarch whether this patriarch be in the form of a real father, professional figure of authority or a film director.