from herria to hirria: locating dialogue in julio medem's "la pelota vasca"

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

From Herria to Hirria: Locating Dialogue in Julio Medem's "La pelota vasca"Author(s): Nathan RichardsonSource: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Vol. 11 (2007), pp. 113-119Published by: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20641851 .

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From Herria to Hirria:

Locating Dialogue in Julio

Medem's La pelota vasca

Nathan Richardson is Asso ciate Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State

University. His book Post

modern Paletos explores the representation and

production of rural/urban

relationships in contempo rary Spanish culture. He

has published numerous

articles on peninsular

nar

rative and film. His book, Different Spains: Imagin ing Place and Space in

Spanish Fiction and Film, is forthcoming.

Spanish Basque director Julio Mederns first feature-length work, 1992 s Vacas, explicitly addressed questions of

Basque identity. Vacas traced the interactions of two

Basque families from the trenches of the third Carlist uprising to the forest skirmishes of the Spanish Civil War. In 2003,

Mederns sixth film and first documentary, La pelota vasca,

brought the director back to Basque issues and Basque lands,

where he interviewed hundreds of politicians, academics, and

victims on the subject of the current Basque conflict.

Mederns explicit return to Basque issues in La pelota vasca invites audiences to return to the films that La pelota and Vacas bookend?encouraging them to see La ardilla roja, Tierra, and Los amantes del ctrculo polar as part of an ongoing five-film dialogue on Basque identity.1 The regular references

to Basque places, events, and people; the repetition of actors

in similar roles both within and among the films; and other

common motifs to the five suggest that Mederns interest in

the Basque question is constant. Vacas and La pelota vasca are

only the most explicit works in a Basque-focused whole; the

palindrome vacaslvasca works itself out, so to speak, over the

course of the five features.

If the reading of the five films together invites audiences

to understand Tierra, La ardilla roja, and Los amantes del ctr

culo polar as tied to the exploration of Basque identity, these

same three "basqued" films equally demand adjusted readings of Vacas and La pelota vasca. If the latter two focus on Basque issues, the other three manifest an obsessive and very particu lar exploration of questions of space and place. The action of

La ardilla roja begins under the sea, races across landscapes,

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 11, 2007



114 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

explores televisual forests and video-clipped

plateaus, reminding spectators all the while

of a broader expanse and a different compre hension of space taking place in skies above.

Tierra takes its audience out further still to

the immensity of space then back down into

the intensity of earth, reminding audiences,

again, of the non-places with their alternative

spatiality that puncture the immensities and

intensities being lived out below. Los amantes

deldrculo polar, for its part, draws attention

to crowded squares, empty homes, Basque forests, and Arctic Circles where threads

combine, criss-crossed again by the now

ubiquitous airplane. Trie five films viewed

together question Basque identity. At the

same time they remind that such knowledge is bound by the geography of its location.

How can we know who we are, Medem asks, if we do not understand where we are? As we

understand the where?the location of us, of

them, and of the others?as we understand

its shape and how it shapes us, questions and

the answers to them change. La pelota vasca premiered as a nearly

two-hour feature length documentary at

the San Sebastian Film Festival in the fall of

2003. A later three-hour version was shown on television. Finally, a seven-hour version

was made available on DVD. More than

merely differing in length, each possesses,

according to Medem, a different narrative

structure ("Memoria" 5). The analysis that

follows refers principally to the version

premiered in San Sebastian. The premier of Mederns film was controversial. Medem

had hoped to involve all interested parties in

his exploration of the Basque problem. The

two most extreme voices in the mix, ETA on the left and the Partido Popular on the

right, refused, however, to participate, as

did such notable intellectuals as Fernando

Savater and Jon Juaristi. Once the feature

length film was made and then vigorously

protested in the days leading up to its pre mier, three other participants, all political conservatives, requested to be removed from

longer versions.

Mederns concern from the start was

not explicitly place. As with most stories,

space and place by appearance are part of a

taken-for-granted reality. They provide set

ting. Medem himself reported that the work

that brought him to this documentary project had filled him with emotions that he princi

pally associated with ideas. He was interested, he wrote, in "las ideas y las personas" that

make the Basque conflict an inescapable part of everyday life in his homeland ("Memoria"

1). At the same time, Medem hinted at the

power of space and place on his thinking,

noting the need to abandon the geographi cal site whence such emotions arose ("Pero he de confesarme que alejarme de mi tierra

me supuso una liberacion; realmente habia

llegado a sentirme aplastado") ("Memoria"

1). The director's confrontation with ideas, executed from the now marginal space of

Madrid finally forced him, however, to return

home. There his goal was, again, explicitly concentrated on ideas. He wished, he wrote, to "abarcar el mayor n?mero posible de voces

diferentes," in a debate on the Basque prob lem ("Memoria" 2). At the same time, his own imagination of this debate belied spatial

thinking. He described the result as:

una polifonia humana en la que cada cual cantara a su aire. De alguna

manera lo opuesto al coro, o un an

tecoro de voces del que se pudieran distinguir los timbres de cada una.

("Memoria" 2)

Medem envisioned not merely a series of

interviews, but the production of a kind

of community of voices each sounding off,

with, and against all others.



Nathan Richardson 115

Medem s presentation of this antichoir

is noteworthy. It goes without saying that

converting one hundred fifty hours of mate

rial taken from over one hundred interviews

requires cuts. Rather than shying away from

the problem Medem decided to highlight such cutting, by turning his film into a kind

of game of verbal "pelota"?another spatial

image?comprised of repeated foreground ed cuts from speaker to speaker, whom he

refers to as pelotaris. Moving from theme

to theme?taking his audience across the

history of the Basque conflict, interviewing

politicians, musicians, professors, journal ists, law enforcement officers, and victims

on both sides of the conflict?he jumps from the thoughts of one, to the opinions of another and then to the emotions of yet another. While he pauses to identify each

"pelotari" by name and association to the

conflict, the same faces will occasionally

reappear unnamed, breaking up the "con

versations" of others more recently identi

fied. In so doing, Medem hopes to endow

the film with:

una intensidad ritmica, casi sin

pausa, que tiene que ver con ese

dinamismo opresivo con que se

desarrollan en el fronton los par

tidos de pelota vasca [...] creando

la sensation de que el debate de las ideas se est? disputando en el vacio

de un metaf?rico fronton en el que los pelotaris tienen la funcion de

empujar, casi golpear las opiniones hacia delante, para que las reciba el

siguiente. ("Memoria" 5)

Of further interest, particularly in a film

purporting to be about the creation of

dialogue?and hence, presumably focused

on informing its audience?is Mederns

decision to allow all pelotaris to express themselves in their own chosen language

sans subtitles. While the majority of the

interviewees speak in Castilian, others use

Basque, English, and even French to express themselves. The first casualty of Mederns

directorial and editing decisions, ironically, is the ideas of which he purports to take such

interest. First, the rapid-fire, foregrounded

splicing "challenges" all but the most in

formed to keep track of the information be

ing shared. While each speaker's ideas come

across as thoughtful and well reasoned, and while Mederns broad structure takes

viewers across a variety of logically ordered

issues, in the end the spectator is left more

with an awareness of the number, variety, and complexity of voices than with a clear

and organized inventory of complaints and

countercomplaints. The repeated return of

pelotaris from past sections, spliced into

newer dialogues, impresses on the specta tor the notion that no matter how many considered arguments are presented, this

dialogue?or game of pelotari?will never

end. Finally, the free use of unsubtitled

Basque, English, and French in a movie that

will most likely be seen by Castilian speakers ensures that at some point or another, nearly every spectator will be confronted by the

problem of incomprehension. What does it

mean when a wise Irish peacemaker shares

apparently important insight into such an

intractable problem but does so in a tongue few viewers can understand?

If Mederns film is about ideas, the

very notion of "idea" expands beyond

merely a verbalized intellectual argument. In the spirit of Mederns fictional films, the play with apparently straightforward story lines eventually invites spectators to pay more careful attention to the less

straightforward, often circular, spatial narrative being constructed by Mederns

cinematographic machine. In the wealth of

incidental background, spectators become



116 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

aware of the growing importance of place and spatiality to the film's development. For

example, every participant in the project is

filmed seated in the selfsame wooden chair.

The chair, initially meaningless, grows in

significance as the careful arguments of

pelotari after pelotari crash up against each

other in unexpected oppositions stripping one another of meaning. In the midst of

the babble, a single wooden chair endures.

The chair is set nearly always within natural

expanses?on mountain tops, along coast

lines, beaches, harbors, fields, and forests.

On a dozen or so occassions it sits in "pelota" courts, while on several others it is set within

expansive halls or at windows or porches that open onto gardens, forests, and hills.

Medem explained his desire to capture in

this arrangement:

la suma aleatoria de fondos (en

bosques, campos, montes, acanti

lados) que ayudan a retratar la geo

grafia vasca mas

primigenia, calada

de sentimientos tan antiguos como

inamovibles. ("Memoria" 2)

Mederns explanation recalls his use of the

Edenic Basque forest in Vacas or his turn to

an arctic locus amoenus in Los amantes deich

culo polar. Stripped of the nuance provided in his fictional films, however, the place

ment threatens to perpetuate myths rather

than problematize them. Medem opens his

film and then cuts up its earliest clips with

sweeping aerial shots of vast Basque land

scapes: snowcapped buttes, verdant rolling hills, dark forests, cloud-swept skies, rocky coastlines, and wintry fields. Jon Juaristi has identified such landscape representa tion as a typical?and egregious?form of nationalism, talking of "a mytho-poetic creation that inscribes itself in the aesthetic

of the sublime" (Space 318). Accompanied

by a soaring soundtrack that features Basque

folksinger Mikel Laboa, the Joven Orquesta de Euskal Herria and the massive choir, Orfe?n Donostiarra, this beginning seems

the quintessence of nationalistic mythmak

ing. To paraphrase Juaristi, such a scene

emphasizes the grandiosity and infinitude

of prairies, mountain ranges, deserts, and seas as key ingredients of an eternal character

that will endure?and therefore sustain the

nation?even if every last citizen were to

disappear (Space 318). While the decision to affix his subjects

in nature may appear to work at counterpur

poses to his proclaimed desire for rational

dialogue, the nature turn is not merely a

turn towards something. Medem has ex

plained that by moving his interviewees

outdoors, he hoped to distance them from

"esas localizaciones (de los alrededores),

parajes naturales en los que parece que toda

tension entre humanos est? fuera de lugar" ("Memoria" 2). He explains further,

Es decir, en lugar de entrar del todo en lo vasco, me dedique

a sacar

personas de sus lugares habituales,

sus casas o despachos, para traerlas,

una por una, hasta mi ... Es como

si no quisiera ver el problema en el escenario real donde ocurre, con

su marco de sufrimiento, espanto.

("Memoria" 2)

While getting his interviewees into the

mythic space of nature?a general topic of

all nationalisms?he, at least, moves them

from place to space. In so doing, he gets them out of those sites most heavily charged with

personal and political meaning. Medem,

then, is fully aware of the charged nature

and charging potential of geography.




Certainly, Medem invites his specta tors to think mythically. But this is because

he wants to make them think as nationalists.

Myth, not history, is the order of national

ist discourse. Reasoned knowledge, arising from so many sources and speaking all at

once, as Mederns production shows, be comes too much information, even noise.

Nationalism, or its deconstruction, cannot

work that way. Nationalisms?as Juaristi has

pointed out?do not have a historiography, but tell stories that occupy a mythic time

that is more spatial in nature than historical

(El buck 37). Nationalisms?hegemonic or

combative?occupy and produce space. Medem, rather than kicking against

the pricks, joins the contest on this front.

Space matters, especially when, as Yi-FuTuan

points out, we know so little about a subject, a point that Mederns film so ironically un

derscores (85). We know so little, Medem

suggests, not because of a lack of discourse

but because of its proliferation. This prolif eration has infected place: that of the virgin forest, of divided Navarra, of besieged Bilbao, of Guernika, and of the ancestral home, the Etxea or caserio. While Sabino Aranas

earliest statements separated the nationalist

struggle from a war for territory, the reality of a century of struggle has since bound them

inextricably together. Medem insists that we

take note. In the war of words, what remains

is a possibility represented by space. While the places in which each pelo

tari sits to speak move the spectator s atten

tion toward broader questions of Basque space, there do, however, remain several

very Basque places in the film. These places,

significantly, appear not in the interviews

themselves but in footage from films, news

reports, and documentaries with which

Medem punctuates and occasionally il

lustrates the commentary of his pelotaris. In addition to modern clips of the game of

pelota, Medem splices in old documentary

footage of other traditional Basque games and festivals?aizkolari competitions, tug of-wars, rowing, pulling, and other strength events?in addition to shots of traditional

Basque dances and processions. He in

cludes scenes from Orson Welless visit to

the Basque country in the 1955 television

series, Around the World with Orson Welles, and from feature-length films covering

Basque history, including Operation Ogro (1980), Yoyes (2000), and Mederns own Vacas (1992). Much like his sweeping vistas

of Basque lands, these clips explicitly refer to those activities and events most endemic to the forging of myths of Basque identity.

The use of the clips within the context

of another documentary, however, turns

the mythmaking potential of the clips on

themselves. The "real-life" events captured

by previous documentarians become foot

age for punctuating a new "real-life" in the

present film. "Real-life" is material packaged for emotional effect. The mythic behaviors

and events captured therein are highlighted as just part of a more elaborate construct.

The vehicles of their proliferation, the films

themselves, are myth machines. The use of

Vacas is particularly ironic, as Vacas itself, with its cow and camera visions, already

foregrounds the overdetermined representa tions of Basque identity. La pelota vasca is the

same; the sense of "place" that its represented activities and events capture and reproduce is

itself an information-burdened construct.

Medem awaits the conclusion of

the film to make more overt statements

regarding Basque place and space. This is

significant because in terms of the con

test of ideas, nothing has been resolved; the game of pelota continues for ninety

minutes, three hours, seven hours, or one

hundred fifty hours, and so on. The con

versation can never end. Communication



118 Arizona journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

breakdown will always threaten. But while

the dialogue implicitly continues, Medem

does resolve to give his last word to Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga, a fiction writer,

famed for his invention of Obaba, a Basque

space approximating firm emplacement but

always already set beyond the ties that would

bind. Juaristi, a fierce critic of nationalist

"place"-writing, has praised Atxaga s cre

ation, however, as:

an imaginary place without landscape [...] Its inhabitants are Basques; that

much seems clear, but with an un

steady and fluctuating ethnic iden

tity [...] The Basque landscape of

Atxaga is not [...] an eternal triumph of spring [...] And it is the reader,

more or less informed of what is oc

curring today in the Basque Country, who should decide what is referred to. (Space 328-29)

So, Atxaga, father of Obaba, sums up the

debates with words of hope grounded in

spatial knowledge:

Bueno, yo sueno con la ciudad vasca.

Ademas del juego de palabras me fa vorece porque hablando en la lengua vasca Euskal Herria es pueblo vasco

y Euskal Hirria seria la ciudad vasca, mo? Creo que la palabra ciudad en

cualquier diccionario de civilizacio nes tiene mejor eco, es decir que la

ciudad en principio no es de nadie

y es de todos, no hay un origen, nadie puede decir, "esta ciudad es mia porque yo estuve primero."

No, esta ciudad es de todos lo que le han llegado y de todos lo que la han construido y la van a construir.

En principio, ademas, una ciudad admite gente muy diversa. Eso lo hemos visto en todas las ciudades.

Y mi ideal seria que pas?ramos de

un espacio donde parece haber una

identidad primera u original, pues, a un espacio donde haya muchas

identidades, entre ellas, desde luego, aquella de la que yo participo.

While Atxaga speaks, Mederns camera sets

out on a soaring aerial journey across Basque

geography. This time, however, Mederns cam

era is a bit closer to the surface and quickly leads spectators not to sublime nature but to

landscapes of citizenship, to towns, and to cit

ies with their modern housing developments, their industry, and their highways?the

places inhabited by the rich heterogeneity of

Basques and maketos, of locals and foreign ers, of Spaniards, Latin Americans, Africans, Eastern Europeans, and any other who make

the seven provinces of Euskal Herria their

home.2 It should be noted, however, that

while Mederns camera moves closer to the

surface, it still glides somewhat safely above.

The hirria he shows his spectators is still very much abstract with little evidence of human

occupation or even history. While the hirria is

not mythically sublime, a la Euskal Herria, it

is not yet historical, historicized terrain either.

Distance from the intensity of the ideas at

hand remains.

Mederns final challenge to his specta tor's understanding of the role and words of

his pelotaris comes in one last revisit to each

interviewee of the previous two, three, or

seven hour match. This time, however, the

time for words has ended. As each subject sits now in silence, Mederns camera moves

quickly toward his or her head and then,

taking flight, travels over and beyond into

the surrounding natural spaces that have set the interviews. While the subjects, their

ideas, their opinions, and their experiences remain behind, bouncing from wall to wall

in the court ofpelotaris, space opens beyond them. The space of the Basque nation offers




infinitely more room for ideas, feelings, and

opinions; it may be ultimately what matters

most. The past, Mederns production has

illustrated, is a series of competing stories

punctuated by manufactured images. This

film itself is the latest in that tradition.

Dialogue, Medem insists, must go on and

will go on. Solutions, however, must take

into account space and place as much as

time?geography as much as history. Stories

of Carlist Wars, industrial revolution, and

dictatorial oppression continue and shape

struggles over frontiers, charge places with

meaning, and unfold within specific spaces. But as we babble on, endlessly repeating and contesting these stories, or attempting to historicize our way out of this mythed-in box, our cities, our coasts, and our moun

tains endure. What is their reality? From

the sky, what are they? From Europe, from

America, from Asia, even from Spain, what

do they look like? What is the community in which our endless words find themselves

and upon which they fall? The Basque nationalist poet Gabriel

Aresti once famously wrote:

Ni hilen naiz, nire arima galduko da, nire askazia galduko da, baina nire aitaren etxeak

iraunen du

zutik I shall die,

my soul will be lost,

my descendents will be lost; but the house of my father will endure on its feet.

Medem, from a privileged eye, flying now

within the plane that for so long he has fea

tured within his fictional films as a frequent

pestering reminder of alternative space/times

occurring at once within and far beyond our

own, looks down on the house of his father.

It may endure, he says, but what will it look

like after the battle is won? While on one

level, the ball continues back and forth from

pelotari to pelotari, on another, that ball is now in our court, the pelota vasca is ours.

Notes 1 According

to Medem s own account, Lucia

y elsexo, though filmed prior to La pelota should

probably be read as conceptually separate, since, as noted, the beginnings of La pelota rise from

Mederns move to Madrid and the writing of Los amantes del circulo polar (see Medem, "Me moria" 1).

2 The term "maketo" is a neologism of

nineteenth-century Basque nationalism. It was

used as a pejorative moniker for any non-Basque

living within the Basque countries. Though its

meaning has evolved somewhat, it remains a

familiar term today and still holds negative con notations. I hope it is obvious that in the context of this article I employ it with ironic intent.

Works Cited Aresti, Gabriel. "Nire aitaren etxea" (The House

of My Father). El portal de la poesia vasca:

basquepoetry.net. <http://www.basquepoetry.

net/poemak-e/0008.htm>. June 13, 2007.

Juaristi, Jon. El bucle melanc?lico: historias de nacionalistas vascos. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2000.

-. "The space of intrahistory: the con

struction and dissolution of nationalist

landscape." Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity. Eds. Brad Epps and Luis Fernandez Cifuentes.

Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005.

Medem, Julio. "Memoria del director: Un pajaro vuela dentro de una

garganta." La pelota vasca. DVD. Alicia Produce, S.L., 2003.

Tuan, Yi Fu. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1977.



from herria to hirria: locating dialogue in julio medem's "la pelota vasca"

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