Unsheltered: Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (Snow White) and Jesús Carrasco’s Intemperie (Out in the Open)

Abstract

These texts break down the subject-object divide with a focus on physical, sensorial, and emotional experience. They forge naturalistic narratives not based on deterministic identity discourses but rather seeking to engage characters and audience/readers in a direct affective relation with the landscapes and people they portray. Invoking the current financial crisis in Spain and new social movements, I argue that the specter of past suffering and privations in both texts serves as an examination of the underlying structures that have created them in Spanish society in the past and present, and which are perhaps now poised to regain prominence. Both the film and the novel call on us, metaphorically, to leave our own bubbles, our Oedipal ego-homes, to face the pain, scarcity, and potential solidarity outside.