Eldorado Revisited: Spanish Film-makers in Reagan’s America

Abstract

In the early 80s, two well-known Spanish directors made independent films during their short stays in the United States. On the Line (Río Abajo, José Luis Borau, 1984) and Reborn (Renacer, Bigas Luna, 1981) focused on American society at the beginning of the Reagan era. 1 Both offer a cinematographical document on how the ideas, icons and symbols of that time were seen through foreign eyes. Borau and Bigas Luna's ambivalence toward American society translates into their films as a feeling of estrangement that is as fascinating as it is disconcerting. 2 And both films pan out the dark side of the American dream: while On the Line examines the cruel, illegal trafficking of Mexican immigrants, Reborn uses sharp irony to portray religious preachers. The substantial narrative material in these films is channelled through specific formal techniques and in this study I aim to highlight how the two films work in strikingly similar ways. On the Line and Reborn actually predate themes that are being taken up in current cultural and social research on trans-nationality, exile and diaspora, that is, conflicts coming out of cultural clashes and differing traditions from social groups that share the same space. 3 Along these lines, many modern film scholars examine how political, economic, cultural, or sociological conditions generate the values and symbols which go into forming social identity. The crux of the theoretical debate on different degrees of culturalidentity, especially in the last twenty years in Europe, has grown out of an ever-increasing number of directors, writers and artists who have emigrated to America, or even more so of second-generation immigrants who reflect a strong connection to both cultures in their work. One particularly illuminating aspect is that, in the two films,questions of social conflict form part of the narrative structure in similar ways. The aim was to reflect a moment of fundamental transformation in American society. After the liberalism of the 60s, the lost Vietnam War, and with the continual threat of the Cold War, there was a trend to return to what were considered traditional American values, culminating in the