Cannibals, Capitalists, and Quinqui Kids: The Transgressive Cinema of Eloy de la Iglesia

Eloy de la Iglesia used genre entertainment to take on the fascist ideologies that enshrined family, church, and state.

Cannibals, Capitalists, and Quinqui Kids: The Cinema of Eloy de la Iglesia
Photo: Severin Films

Spanish filmmakers inclined toward social commentary working in the waning years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the early 1970s often found genre films to be the perfect Trojan horse in which to smuggle their countercultural ideas past the censors. These conditions yielded challenging works like Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride, a gothic chiller as well as a devastating takedown of patriarchal privilege. And these repressive conditions applied twice as much for Eloy de la Iglesia, who, as a gay socialist, was doubly opposed to fascist ideologies that enshrined family, church, and state.

The title of de la Iglesia’s Cannibal Man is something of a misnomer (the Spanish-language title translates to Week of the Killer). The film’s central character, Marcos (Vicente Parra), isn’t a cannibal at all; he’s a lowly factory worker who’s recently been “synchronized” (as his glad-handing boss delights in informing him) to a machine that systematically purées hefty slabs of meat. In fact, the only cannibalism on hand here is the mere suggestion that the remains of Marcos’s victims are finding their way into the canned soup his workplace produces. Nevertheless, de la Iglesia does want to draw a metaphorical connection between the way the device chews up and spits out its product and the harsh working conditions in the plant where he works. (Think Georges Franju’s sanguinary documentary Blood of the Beasts.) Not for nothing is the film divided into segments according to the days of the work week.

The 1972 film, which was marketed in the U.S. as a Last House on the Left knockoff, opens with Néstor (Eusebio Poncela) spying on some young men playing soccer from the balcony of his high-rise apartment, before training his binoculars through the skylight of Marcos’s shanty. The high-and-low juxtaposition of their respective social situations is clearly revealed by the patch of Madrid cityscape that divides them. Throughout this sequence, de la Iglesia’s camera doubles for Néstor’s field glasses, and, indeed, the overt eroticization of men’s bodies is a thread that runs through much of de la Iglesia’s work. Over the course of the film, Néstor slowly insinuates himself into Marcos’s life, even as the latter steadily spirals out of control, piling up cadavers in the bedroom of his shack like so much kindling.

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The cadence of these murders is as regular as falling dominoes. Marcos’s spree begins with the accidental slaying of a cabdriver (Goyo Lebrero) who disapproves of Marcos’s backseat lovemaking. When his girlfriend (Emma Cohen) urges him to go to the police, he strangles her instead. From there, the killings escalate as various friends and relations stumble upon his secret, only to fall prey to his murderous impulses. Marcos has more than the obvious reasons for avoiding the police, which de la Iglesia slyly points out in a scene where Néstor and Marcos receive very different treatment at the hands of the militaristic Civil Guard (Spain’s oldest law enforcement agency), the difference being one of deference versus outright suspicion.

In the same scene, Néstor describes both himself and Marcos as “outcasts,” and this admission may be the reason that Néstor is the only one to discover Marcos’s secret who isn’t instantly killed. Or the rationale may lie elsewhere, as in the scene where Néstor takes Marcos to swim at his club. Here the line between the homosocial and the homoerotic becomes decidedly slippery, and it may be that Marcos’s rejection of disapproving lovers and family members takes on a deeper resonance, even if it’s a realization he can’t quite bring himself to make.

No One Heard the Scream, from 1973, tosses several different genres—giallo, black comedy, road movie—into its delirious witch’s brew. Kept woman Elisa (Carmen Sevilla) witnesses her next-door neighborhood, Miguel (Parra), dropping his wife’s body down an elevator shaft, then gets recruited at gunpoint into helping the man dispose of the body, an assignment that she accepts, it’s suggested, more out of boredom than out from fear of Miguel. The film then morphs into a thorny comedy of errors concerning the location of the dead wife’s body, playing like a distaff spin on The Trouble with Harry as Miguel and Elisa motor off to her summer house by the lake with the corpse tucked away in the trunk. Road accidents, inquisitive Civil Guards, and a second bothersome body all serve to ratchet up the seriocomic tension.

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Almost as soon as Miguel and Elisa arrive at her lake house, shirtless, motorcycle-riding Tony (Tony Isbert) turns up. Elisa passes him off as her nephew, but he’s quickly revealed as the third angle of a triangle. De la Iglesia ramps up the sexual tension during these scenes, paying as much attention to the potential bond between Miguel and Tony as that between Miguel and Elisa. But this being 1973, and still Franco’s Spain, these potentialities remain unexplored, instead focusing on the growing attraction between the kidnapper and his captive.

De la Iglesia lays bare his social commentary at a celebratory dinner. Elisa admits the truth about her relationship with Tony, and Miguel confesses to being a failed writer who married for money. Suitably disillusioned, he believes that humanity can be divided into two types: those who buy and those who sell. “Sincerity,” he declares, “is not a seller’s virtue.” This admission indicates that, going forward, such moments of honesty will not be required. A relationship between two sellers therefore will be founded on (and sustained by) lies and deception. No One Heard the Scream carries this notion forward to its unexpected sting-in-the-tail twist ending, which totally undermines Miguel as an active force, substituting instead a characters whose status we have been thoroughly deceived about.

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By the early ’80s, conditions had changed in Spain. Franco was long gone, democracy had arrived, and the socialists now held political sway. But there were still plenty of abuses of power to decry, only now de la Iglesia could do so in a more straightforward manner. The three films in The Quinqui Collection (1980’s Navajeros, 1983’s El Pico, and 1984’s El Pico 2) exhibit an almost documentary authenticity, even as they layer in other genre tropes, drawing on juvenile delinquent films, family melodramas, and prison flicks. Before the term quinqui came to apply more strictly to underage delinquents, it originally applied to social outcasts in general, providing a direct through line back to Marcos and Néstor in Cannibal Man.

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Navajeros’s portrait of disaffected kids running amok in the streets is distinctly reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, only without all the surrealist flourishes, and with lots more heroin shooting. Obstreperous and confoundingly frenetic, Navajeros (which translates as Knifers) unspools with the urgency of an exploitation film, akin to works like Over the Edge and The Warriors. Navajeros stars real-life street urchin José Luis Manzano, who will headline all three of the films in The Quinqui Collection. Manzano was in a relationship with de la Iglesia at the time, and over the next few years both would fall prey to the heroin-laced demimonde these films depict. It would also result in a 15-year break in de la Iglesia’s career.

Navajeros introduces its most overt social criticism in the form of an investigative reporter (José Sacristán) who gets a nice little speech about how both sides of the political aisle use the fear instilled in the general public by crime sprees to further their own agendas. Elsewhere, Navajeros makes its points in purely visual fashion, as in the crosscutting at the end of the film between the very graphic birth of El Jaro’s (Manzano) son and his equally graphic demise at the hands of a disgruntled property owner. This ending is as dismal as the one in El Pico 2, which suggests that, in the social stratification of the crime world, nothing ever really changes.

El Pico and El Pico 2 form one long narrative that tracks Paco (Manzano) from high school dropout to drug-dealing middle management. These films consistently place their characters within a family matrix, stylistically partaking more than a little in the florid melodramatic format along the way. Paco and his pal Urko (Javier Garcia) come from very different fathers: a Civil Guard commander and a left-wing Basque politician, respectively. The introduction of the political dimension is handled quite subtly, as there’s never any grandstanding or speechification, only doling out what’s necessary to move the plot forward.

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The world of the El Pico films is rife with collusion and collaboration. Drug dealers keep the Civil Guard informed of their rivals’ activities, while the police turn a blind eye toward their transactions. Throughout the two films, De la Iglesia even suggests that law enforcement supplies them with their product on occasion. The police, for their part, use to criminals to take down political agitators of the left-wing or separatist sort. The Civil Guard are notorious for the brutal interrogation tactics, their tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, and their general propensity to suppress anything that smacks of social change. Respectable lawyers will intimidate witnesses into compliance as long as the price is right.

Many of de la Iglesia’s ’80s films are also much more forthcoming in their depictions of homosexuality than his earlier ones. Though the street kids sometimes opportunistically victimize them (holding up a drag party in Navajeros, for instance), and bandy about the word “faggot” with complete abandon, it’s nevertheless made clear that they’re relatively tolerant—certainly more so than the Civil Guards and traditional Spanish society. This is made clear in the figure of the transexual Paco encounters when he’s sent to the Carabanchel prison. It’s a compassionate but not sentimental portrayal. De la Iglesia brings to it the same coolly distanced eye he levelled at the characters in all of the films under discussion here.

Cannibal Man, No One Heard the Scream, and Eloy de da Iglesia’s Quinqui Collection are now available on Blu-ray from Severin.

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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