© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Dropping the mask: theatricality and absorption in Sáenz de Heredia's Don Juan
Don Juan exists in the popular imagination as a potent icon of uncontained male sexual energy. Yet Sáenz de Heredia (the ‘Leni Riefenstahl of Franco's Spain‘) adapts the myth to present an epic tale of Christian redemption–but not before considerably more screen-time has been devoted to a revelling in the sexual misdemeanours of the film's charismatic hero. Using pamphlets from the period which present a Spanish Catholic form of spectatorship, this article explores viewing relations in Francoist cinema. An ideal spectatorship for Sáenz de Heredia's Don Juan (1950) is conceived in terms of a move from theatricality (referentiality to a scene outside the diegesis) to absorption (closeness in the image). Using publicity material for the film, the article explores how the film harnesses the star system to insert this modern form of idolatry within a history of beholding reserved for devotional painting. Cinema hijacks the glamour of the star system and turns it towards more pious goals. The film's packaging as a love story eases a generic transition from comedy of errors to melodrama. Drawing on Fried and Copjec, the article explores how the melodramatic mode is seen to permit the full absorption of the spectator into the field of the image.