Nostalgic Evocations: The Cinematic Experience of Costumbrist Films: (Audiovisual essay)

This paper concentrates on a particular approach to filmmaking, characteristically concerned with the accurate representation of the customs and cultural idiosyncrasies of a particular society or group of people, what will be referred to as costumbrism. Initially, the concept of costumbrism is defined and contextualized, referring to its emergence from the Spanish theatrical and literary tradition, and its translation into film discourse. Thereafter, following Jean-Pierre Meunier’s classification of the modes of filmic consciousness (fiction film, documentary and film-souvenir), the paper proposes the experiential structure of costumbrist cinema, characterized by the existent or non-existent recognition of the specific cultural representations. Furthermore, the film-souvenir mode of filmic identification is further examined through the prism of nostalgia, in relation to the evocative and constitutive activity of consciousness characteristic of this mode of filmic identification. The importance of places, the family, and the idea of returning are identified as common thematic cores in costumbrist films, the detailed depiction of which slowly fosters the re-awakening of different past moments in the viewer and the construction of nostalgic episodes. To conclude, a group of recent movies, Volver (Almodóvar, 2003), A Separation (Farhadi, 2011), Still Walking (Kore-eda, 2008) and Lazzaro Felice (Rohrwacher, 2018), provide the basis on which to outline the possible functions and affordances such costumbrist approaches may yield within the film’s narrative.