Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies

ISSN: 1470-1847 (Print) 1469-9524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjil20

Animals, Machines, and Postnational Identity in

Julio Medem's Vacas

Nathan E. Richardson

To cite this article: Nathan E. Richardson (2004) Animals, Machines, and Postnational Identity
in Julio Medem's Vacas , Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:2, 191-204, DOI:
10.1080/1470184042000317143

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1470184042000317143

Published online: 22 Jan 2007.

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Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies
Vol. 10, No. 2, December 2004, pp. 191±204

Animals, Machines, and Postnational

Identity in Julio Medem's Vacas
Nathan E. Richardson

Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to
be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. (Donna Haraway)

In Suso de Toro's 1997 novel, Calzados Lola, a protagonist attempts to dispose of the
cadaver of his would-be assassin by dumping the body into a local Galician rõÂa. As he
begins to roll the corpse overboard, the ring of a cell phone still attached to the dead
man pierces the night air. After a moment of hesitation, the protagonist decides to
ignore the call, rolling the body and phone into the sea. As the body and its mechanical
appendage sink to the ocean ¯oor, the hero's girlfriend ®nds herself questioning her
lover's stories and alibis for the ®rst time. For hours before this event, she had known
that he had lied, stolen, and killed; still, his innocence for her remained unimpeach-
able. But as he ignores the call of the machine, the guise of innocence dissolves to
reveal, if only momentarily, a liar, a thief, and a cold-blooded assassin. Destroying a
body was one thing. Silencing the information ¯ow that had given that body meaning
is quite another.
With this scene, a novel that had to this point af®rmed Galician identity becomes a
work calling into question the notion of identity itself. As Toro has illustrated in
novels such as Calzados Lola and Trece Campanadas (2002), identity politics todayÐ
whether local, national, or globalÐare cross-cut by a questioning of the most basic
notions of human subjectivity arising from the information and biotechnologies that
have become a part of everyday life in the modern, Western world. No longer the
province of esoteric theory, questions of unstable subjectivities come to rest with
common cell phone and stem cell users, e-mail and organ recipients, and, of course,
movie audiences. The masses in the cosmopolitan, globalizing West confront today
what many are calling the era of the posthuman, a phenomenon readily captured and
consumed in novels and ®lm both Hollywood and Spanish. Suso de Toro's work is all
the more interesting because of its move beyond the mere celebration of new
posthuman realitiesÐthe stuff of The Matrix (1999) or Abre los ojos (1998)Ðto an
exploration of the encounter between these new posthuman tensions and the often

Correspondence to: Nathan E. Richardson, Department of Romance Languages, Bowling Green State University,
203 Shatzel Hall, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA. Email: nrichar@bgnet.bgsu.edu

ISSN 1470±1847 print/ISSN 1469±9524 online/04/020191-14 ã 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1470184042000317143
192 N. E. Richardson
seemingly premodern ethnic longings of local populations within the emerging global
community. Toro asks what happens when citizens still employing vestiges of
premodern ideologies in an attempt to gain a foothold in modernity ®nd themselves
confronted midstream with the media, migration, and imagination of postmodernity?
What happens when Celtic legend meets Motorola on the Castellana in Madrid?
Notwithstanding the interest of Toro's novels, I would like to turn in the following
pages to a more subtle registration of posthuman nationalism within the Spanish state,
re¯ecting my suspicion that interactions between cyborg and local identities are often
not so consciously lived or quite so novel. Indeed, I want to explore below how
posthuman `cyborg citizenship' may in fact articulate more naturally with preexisting
conditions than Toro's works illustrates. Finally, I want to look at this interaction in
conditions where stakes are typically higher than in Galicia.
I ®nd such criteria met in Julio Medem's 1992 ®lm, Vacas. This ®lm about three
generations of neighboring families in a rural Basque valley, although at times
bordering on the bizarre in both form and content, would never be read initially as a
®lm about cyborg technologies or contemporary, posthuman possibilities. Set
between the Carlist war of 1875 and the Spanish civil war of 1936, it relates the
interactions of two rival families inhabiting a rural valley somewhere in Guipuzcoa.
The families embody many of the celebrated values of Basque identity: they are rural
clans centered around caserõÂos; their activities are overseen by strong matriarchs; their
patriarchs are champion aizkolari (woodsmen); and they ®ght always on the politically
proper side of the Basque cause (Carlists in 1875, Republican gudaris in 1936). In
terms of cinematography, Medem's camera con®rms the appearance of the ®lm as a
celebratory exploration of Basqueness, its lush images of a primeval countryside
reminiscent of rural ®lms by Manuel GutieÂrrez AragoÂn, Montxo ArmendaÂriz, and
Mario Camus. Despite this initial, and not misleading, description, Vacas is an
unusual ®lm that challenges audiences looking for easy con®rmation of traditional
Basque values, particularly those associated with nationalist politics. At the heart of
this confusion, though not its sole perpetrators, are the eponymous cows. Students of
the ®lm have been quick to point out the connection between the cows and the ®lm's
Basque subjects, particularly its female characters, vacas being an anagram of vasca.
From this apparently innocent and mostly unexamined observation, I want to re-
watch Medem's ®lm, as it were, seeing the metaphorical and metonymical vacas as
merely a starting point for a broader posthumanization of celebrated premodern
identities. While cows are hardly cell phones and not a single microchip is to be found
within the frames of Medem's ®lm, the cows of Vacas draw connections between
natural, primitive, mythic pasts and the technologies that have produced them, and
that, moreover, in the present posthuman/postnational moment seemingly threaten
them with obliteration. Cows are, in short, the pre-`human' origins of a contemporary
Basque posthuman identity, what I will call, borrowing from Donna Haraway (2000),
the Basque cyborg. Through the cows, I ®nd the ®gure of the cyborg at the heart of
Medem's ®lm. As in Haraway, I read the cyborg as challenging without discounting
the myths and histories that have comprised the Basque experience, and ®nally, as
offering the Basque spectator a prismÐif a rather distorting oneÐthrough which
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 193

agency, if not identity, to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of ethnic nationalism and
global anonymity might be found.

Posthumanism and Cyborg Citizenry

First, a word on posthumanism. Recently entering into the popular conscious if not
vernacular, posthumanism refers to a new mode of or outlook on (depending on who
is talking) human existence, describing the point where ¯esh-and-blood meets
information science and biotechnology to produce a new kind of being, a `metaman,
post-human, superhuman, robot, or cyborg' (Winner 2002, p. 27). This new ontology
is promoted by Internet groups urging science to use biotechnology to `play God', and
to discard human ¯esh in search of `boundless expression, self-transcendence,
dynamic optimism, intelligent technology, and spontaneous order' (More 1994, p. 1).
Meanwhile, conservative opposition, in popular presses, warns of `threats to mind,
body, and world', prophesying a bleak future devoid of humankind's moral and social
graces (Borgman 2002, p. 9; Fukuyama 2002, p. 99). Academics, rather than prophesy,
af®rm that posthumanism is already with us: Chris Hables Gray argues that `almost all
of us are cyborged in some way' (Hables Gray 2001, p. 1); Donna Haraway adds, `we
are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism ¼ we are
cyborgs' (Haraway 2000, p. 70).
In light of such often politically charged and opposed views, N. Katherine Hayles's
historical perspective on both the technological and cultural reality of posthumanism
is worth consideration. Hayles describes the technological heart of posthumanism as
based on increasingly re¯exive interactions between human and machine whereby
information moves from the creator and observer of an intelligent system into the
system itself, and then back again, thereby drawing the observer into what was
assumed to be an objecti®ed, limited order. In the era of the posthuman, the
objectifying observer has become subject to and subject of the once passive machine.
According to many information scientists, everything with which the creator/observer
exchanges information in this fashion becomes an extension of beingÐwhat Hayles
calls a dematerialized prosthetic. The logical conclusion to this breakdown of
modernist frontiers arrives as the body itself comes to be understood as `the original
prosthesis' (Hayles 1999, p. 3). Consequently, in the new posthuman era, modernist
distinctions between presence and absence as central to ontological issues dissolve,
replaced by questions of pattern and randomness. Access to information patterns
rather than possession of material space becomes the chief guarantor of existence. If
such theories prove to be fact, then classic boundaries between biology and virtuality
dissolve. Where the ¯esh ends and the machine begins is increasingly a question that
cannot be answered and, moreover, that may no longer need be asked. This is the new
posthuman beyond.
Or so it may seem to its true believers. Hayles, by grounding her study in history,
shows the posthumanist claims to be hardly as radical as they purport. Is not the
reduction of essence to informatics, she asks, yet another attempt of rational
consciousness to overcome the corruption of the ¯esh, to transcend the classic
194 N. E. Richardson
modernist mind±body dualism? If such is the case, then the posthuman project may be
as much humanÐif not humanistÐas it is post. Hayles calls for a more considered
theory of posthumanism, insisting on a recognition of the body as essential to any
theorization of subjectivityÐan inescapable shaper of human consciousness (1999,
p. 284). She argues that pattern and presence are not mutually exclusive. Through
such coexistence may arise `a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent
machines' that `replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate
and control nature' (1999, pp. 49, 288).
The insistence that posthuman existence can only be meaningful as it recognizes the
¯eshiness of human being recalls Donna Haraway's description of the cyborg in her
oft-cited `Cyborg manifesto'. CyborgsÐ`fabricated hybrids of machine and organ-
ism'Ðdo not eliminate humanity but offer it a new ontology and a new politics
(Haraway 2000, p. 70). Cyborg being undoes the supposedly natural dualities of
humanist thought: culture/nature, mind/body, civilized/primitive, male/female, etc.
(2000, p. 82). As a hybrid being, the cyborg no longer looks to essential natures, to
utopian pasts, to manifest destinies, or to natural communities (2000, p. 71). There is
no natural origin. There can be no disembodied transcendence. Hence, instead of
dividing in its search for such humanist illusions, the cyborg blurs boundaries and,
thus, uni®es: machine to human, but also human to animal, and animal to earth. The
cyborg, rather than leading to posthuman ¯ights from the ¯esh, brings spirit to earth
and yet not to earth as some ®nal Edenic home. For Haraway, the cyborg's ability to
collapse dualities, as the posthuman for Hayles, promises a way out of the violence of
humanism, providing new tools with which to radically rethink identity outside the
paradigms that wouldÐreturning to the focus of this articleÐalways ®nally pit
authentic BasquenessÐfor exampleÐagainst maketo, or a `true' Basque history
against `of®cial' Spanish histories.

Black on White/White on Black

In light of the posthuman cyborg's purported ability to blur boundaries I want to
begin analysis of Vacas by examining precisely its striking and seemingly irresolvable
dualisms. First and foremost, Vacas pits Basque myth against Basque history. In
support of a mythic reading of Basque culture, Medem's ®lm has been viewed as a
simple epic tale of Basque rural life, telling the story of two families, the Irigibels
and Mendiluces, neighbors and rivals inhabiting what Nuria Vidal has described as
`un mundo ancestral primitivo' (Vidal 1992, p. 8). Medem shoots this primitive
world in lush, earthy tones, drawing attention to the ®lm's setting in what Sara
Torres identi®es as `posiblemente el valle maÂs hermoso y virgen de toda Euskadi'
(Torres 1991, p. 95). The ®lm abounds, moreover, with mythic imagery, the forest
separating the two family caserõÂos reading as a kind of Garden of Eden where a Basque
Adam and Eve meet in the shadows of a mythic tree to form the ®rst Basque man.
Medem mixes poetic close-ups of native ¯ora and fauna with his glossy panoramic
shots, and ®nally, emplaces all in a tale displaying a number of cyclical properties akin
to myth.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 195

At the same time, Medem situates the epic of internal family strife between larger
political struggles with an external Other, the ®lm beginning with the Carlist war of
1875 and concluding in the Spanish civil war of 1936. Both settings actually mix myth
and history, as the Carlist crisis situates the story at what according to many is the
point of origin of Basque nationalist identity: the 1875 Carlist war that involved the
Spanish siege of Bilbao and led to the loss of Basque fueros in 1876, the events from
which sprang Sabino de Arana Goiri's nationalist movement (Heiberg 1989, pp. 45,
49; Juaristi 2000, pp. 168±170). Moreover, while the speci®c 1875 date inserts history,
the Carlist con¯ict has its own mythic meanings, described by the in¯uential
nineteenth-century French Basque writer, Joseph-AgustõÂn Chaho, as `a war of national
reaf®rmation and, thus, part of a long tradition' (Heiberg 1989, p. 48). Such
constructive tension between myth and history continues throughout the ®lm, as
speci®c dating of scenes (1875, 1905, 1915, 1936) and clear evidences of political,
economic, and social changes tint each episode in the color of history, while the
repetition of events and even of actors in different guises foregrounds archetypes that
draw a timeless intrahistory from beneath historical change.
The myth/history divide is only the ®rst of many dualisms around which the ®lm
will build: nature vs. culture, woman vs. man, heart vs. mind, barbarism vs.
civilization, Basque vs. Spaniard. As with the myth/history binary, Medem is more
interested in creating dialogue than resolving con¯icts. Here, some detail of the ®lm is
necessary to work towards my reading of posthumanist Basque identity. Even as
Medem invites historicization through reference to war, he uses con¯ict to narrate a
mythic struggle between the two neighbor families of the mountain valley, the Irigibels
and the Mendiluces. The scenes following the episode of the Carlist war feature the
sons of the Carlist heroes, who now ®nd themselves as rivals in aizkolari competitions,
as well as competing for the affections of the same girl, their respective sister and
neighbor. Medem's narration of this rivalry invokes Basque politics of the same era.
Appearing to spring from events in the Carlist trenches, the rivalry grows and reshapes
the valley ideologically through celebrated Basque festivals, in particular the aizkolari
competitions.1 By the arrival of the 1936 civil war, former allies now slaughter one
another. Basque nationalism, sprung from the trenches of Carlist defeat, nurtured in
the rural-focused cultural festivals of the 1910s and 1920s, and af®rmed in the loss to
Spanish fascism in the civil war, is soundly historicized for Basque spectators in these
episodes.
At the same time, Medem's cinematography keeps the historical development close
to the mythic earth: work in the virgin forests is gritty, sexual intercourse in this edenic
setting sinks into the moss and mulch, animal-like. As the families evolve in close
proximity to nature, so too their futuresÐand, in turn, their pastsÐintertwine. The
mixing of the blood and seed of the two families grows exponentially from episode to
episode. Midway through the ®lm the second-generation Mendiluz aizkolari engages
in sexual relations with his rival's sister, resulting in a son that will bridge the gap
between the competing families. However, the ®rst scene of the ®lmÐthe activity in
the Carlist trenches in which Irigibel gives his life and literally his blood to save his
neighborÐmakes the Mendiluz family a symbolic extension of the Irigibels.
196 N. E. Richardson
Moreover, tensions in the trenches just prior to the Irigibel sacri®ce suggest possible
literal connections between the families' progeny. Consequently, the son that joins the
families may be merely the ®rst acknowledged union. This same Mendiluz/Irigibel
product will, in time, fall in love with his Mendiluz half-sister. A second straight
generation of incest, which begins as the ®lm concludes, con®rms the spectator's
earliest suspicions about Mendiluz/Irigibel connections and in doing so converts these
interactions into mythic, timeless events. At the spatial, temporal, and symbolic heart
of this dynamicÐespecially in the one explicit scene of Mendiluz/Irigibel couplingÐ
stands a large, dead tree stump, `El agujero encendido', a bottomless opening to the
heart of the earth, bathed in blood, ¯ies, and earth, a mythic tree-of-life/tree-of-
knowledge-of-good-and-evil at the heart of the families' Adam/Eve, Cain/Abel
interactions. In its poetics, Medem's ®lm is an af®rmation of Arano Goiri's mythifying
declaration of Basqueness as `the moral union of individuals born from the same
trunk, who maintain among themselves relations elaborated by blood through time'
(Heiberg 1989, p. 51).
On top of the tensions between myth and history Medem adds the eponymous
vacas, or cows, into the mix. In an early review of the ®lm, Paul Julian Smith calls the
cows `mute witnesses to human absurdity' (Smith 1997, p. 12). For example, in the
®lm's ®rst episode, when Manuel Irigibel deserts the Carlist cause bathed in Mendiluz
blood, a cow stands as his lone accuser. Medem's camera frames the `mute witness',
moreover, as a kind of god, discovering with an all-seeing eye the erstwhile soldier's
cowardice. Fifty years later, when Manuel's son, Ignacio, enjoys a midnight
rendezvous with the daughter of his late rival and ironic savior, a cow again looks
on. At the ®lm's conclusion yet another cow stands by as an illegitimate Irigibel/
Mendiluz descendant escapes with his half-sister from the slaughter of civil war. All
three scenes foreground a strange and estranging vision of the Basque identity
explored in the ®lm, forcing the spectator to view related myths and histories from
unaccustomed angles.
Many ®lm viewers have rightly seen the cows, however, as much more than mere
witnesses: rather, in fact, as a strange metaphor for the Basque people themselves.
Indeed, from the ®lm's opening scene to its ®nal resolution, cows not only observe but
participate in the Irigibel/Mendiluz saga. Such participation, however, does begin with
their role as witnesses. If the cows are `mute' in this role, as Smith describes, they are
certainly not blind. On the contrary, Medem actually employs the cows within his
story as literal focalizers. Several scenes feature camera work that presents spectators
with what they understand as a cow's-eye view of human activity; the camera moves
spectators literally into and then out from the cow's eye. At times the journey results in
a reverse shot that gazes back at the human eye that brought the spectator in; more
often, however, the shot breaks expectations for reversal to carry spectators through
the ocular nerve and into cow consciousness as it were, out onto an-other side,
implicitly an alternative world of bovine imagination that renders all identities
`Other'. In fact, an early sequence suggests a never-resolved possibility that the entire
®lm beyond its initial Carlist war episode is the product of cows' vision. Through such
camera work, Medem repeatedly tears at any simple suture between ®lm text and
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 197

spectator: bovine vision replaces the patriarchal gaze described by apparatus theorists,
and, moreover, thanks to its occupation of multiple narrative levels, calls attention to
itself as such. Hence, in the language of apparatus theory, camera work problematizes
the production of the illusory subjectivity based on the manufacture of an ego-ideal
built upon identi®cation between camera, protagonist, and spectator. Thus, a ®lm that
would be about Basque identity is problematized by a meta-cinematic exploration of
the very notion of identity.
Still, as I will continue to repeat, problematizationÐor, rather, historicizationÐ
does not completely dissolve the suturingÐor mythologizingÐcapacity of the ®lm.
Suture works particularly at an ideological and an aesthetic level, constructing
spectators anxious to resolve the enigma of the Irigibel/Mendiluz rivalry and
its relation to Basque myth/history, and to understand the bovine imagination behind
the camera. Medem's suggestive music, lush cinematography, and presentation of
cows as stand-ins for human protagonists allow an alternative kind of suturing to
proceed.
Medem encourages this suturing of a distanced spectatorship mainly by drawing a
wealth of parallels between the cows in the ®lm and the two rival families, making it
impossible to see the cows (and `their' focalization of Medem's camera) as separate
from the humans who are themselves indivisibly sutured together in spite of their
prophesied rivalry. For example, in the ®rst scene following the escape of Manuel
Irigibel from the Carlist war, Manuel, now a venerable white-haired patriarch, paints
what appears to be a portrait of his three granddaughters with the family milk cow.
Six-year old Cristina, who will become with the grandfather and her soon-to-be-
conceived half-brother one of the ®lm's three protagonists, remarks to her sisters that
their grandfather is painting only the cow. When her sisters question her claim, the
grandfather reassures them: `Todo el mundo sabe que una vaca no se sujeta sola, y
mucho menos en un cuadro'. The spectator, enjoying a privileged camera angle that
includes grandfather, portrait, and models, sees, however, only the likeness of a cow on
the canvas. Cristina then shoos the cow away, encouraging her sisters to check the
progress of the painting. As the grandfather continues to paint, a shot/reverse-shot
sequence shows Cristina still posing, standing as though possessed of a secret
knowledge that while her grandfather paints only the cow (as she had insisted), at the
same time he paints her. Cristina and cow fuse in the minds of the spectator as they
already have with Medem's mind/camera. Later in the ®lm, a whole series of paintings
depicting Cristina and her half-brother as cows recon®rm this fusion.
Summarizing to this point, more than mere symbols of human interaction, the
cows become literally connected continuations, a kind of primitive prosthesis, of the
Basque and Spanish family body ®rst constructed through the ®lm's allegorical clues.
Through the cow(camera)-to-human link Medem problematizes the intra-valley
rivalry between the two families. On the one hand, by drawing symbolic connections
between humans and cows, he foregrounds the biological nature of Basque identity
explored in the ®lm. On the other hand, by using the same cows as focalizers of his
camera, Medem subverts the very notion of a human nature `out there in the primeval
forest' ready to be discovered, defeated, or defended.
198 N. E. Richardson
The Basque Cyborg
At this moment of fusion between cow and Basque, between animal and human, vaca
and vasca, a moment that seemingly couples the human to a pre-human nature of
animals and earth, theories of the posthuman may seem far away. Surprisingly, at this
point such theory, especially Haraway's thought on the cyborg, may be most helpful.
Haraway's manifesto is different from so much of posthumanist rhetoric in that,
rather than escaping into the rare®ed ether of cyberspace, it tugs posthumanists, like
spectators of a Medem forest scene, back into the blood and soil of biology. Haraway
explains that the notion of a cyborgÐhalf animal±half machineÐhistorically has
arisen in cultures at moments when boundaries between humans and animals have
been breached, when nothing, `language, tool use, social behavior, mental events ¼
convincingly settles the separation of human and animal' (Haraway 2000, p. 72).
Hence, it is not a sign or agent of transcendence but of the collapse of biology and
technology, of matter and spirit.
This is, in fact, precisely what happens in Vacas. Indeed, the posthuman cyborg that
will generate meaning from the multiple tensions of Medem's strange ®lm springs
literally from the human/cow fusion. At the very point in the ®lm where cow/human
coupling becomes indisputably evident, cows begin to cede their role to a variety of
technologies. The changing of the guard, moreover, occurs on the multiple narrative
levels whereon the cows and humans fused. That is, technology, like the cow, becomes
both another protagonist and focalizer. As protagonist, technology does exactly as the
cows, mixing with the various combinations of Irigibels and Mendiluces to become
literal prostheses of the Basque body. In its second role, technology replaces the cow as
the camera/focalizer of the ®lm. If cows initially spark interest in the technology of
Medem's camera, now technology itself descends to a narrative level to become the
new `cow' of the movie. The technology of the camera, once manipulated by the cow,
now enters the narrative itself, springing forth almost literallyÐas I will show belowÐ
from the cow itself to function as more than just a meta®ctional device; it functions
now as a `posthuman' prosthetic of the Basque body developed in the ®lm.
The changing of the guard commences when Ignacio IrigibelÐthe second
generationÐbegins bringing home his aizkolari winnings. Ignacio initially uses his
winnings to replace the family's native cow with a superior black-and-white, foreign-
bred version, a move that inserts a question of foreign-ness into this study of
Basqueness, highlighting another duality at the heart of Basque identity (Juaristi 2000,
p. 49). Ignacio returns from a later competition bringing a foreign automobile and a
tripod camera. The black-trim-on-white design of the automobile parallels the black
and white cow of the previous triumphal return as well as the very composition of the
valley inhabited by black-clad Mendiluces and white-clad Irigibels. The family
patriarch, Manuel, obsessed since his Carlist war days with staring into the eyes of
cows, literally sees into being the connection between cow and the new technology, as
he now rejects the cow's eye to stare instead into the eye of the tripod camera. Here,
Medem reproduces the defamiliarizing sequence of shots whereby the view of the
spectator itself travels into the camera view®nder to open out from the other end,
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 199

converting the camera into the ®lm's new focalizer. Medem's camera now stands for
itself, returning the spectator to an awareness of the self-conscious play of the ®lm
with its own devices. But again, by ®ltering this self-consciousness through the vaca/
vasco plot line, Medem makes it part of the suturing play of the ®lm. In other words, in
replacing the cow/camera-eye view with a camera/camera-eye view, he collapses
narrative levels; the camera is now both representation and representer, and, yet again,
another extension of the on-screen human subject with whose vision spectators
struggle to suture theirs.
In this subtle cyborg-ing of the Basque subject, signi®cantly, biology is still not lost.
Like the cow-camera vision, the camera-camera vision sustains the ®lm's focus on
nature, manifest in frequent sounds of bellowing, shots of falling excrement and ¯y-
infested eyes, and scenes of the birthing of a calf and the death of a cow. Through the
eye of the tripod camera, the biological component of a lush Basque wilderness comes
more sharply into focus, with extreme close-ups of a variety of ¯ora and fauna. As
easily as Basque identity ¯oats from Mendiluz to Irigibel, and then to cows, to cars,
and to cameras, strong ties to biology remain to ground its ¯ight.
In the latter part of the ®lm, as nature and technology unite, Medem embodies the
biology/technology, or human/cow/camera link, in the person of Peru, Cristina's
Mendiluz/Irigibel half-brother. The culmination of generations of rivalry, incest, and
blood mixing, Peru is in name a Mendiluz, though his sympathies and associations
draw him to the Irigibels. As possibly a third-generation product of rivalries and blood
mixing, Peru epitomizes the simultaneous stretching and collapsing of humanist
dualisms that information and biotechnology introduce to the posthuman subject.
Above all, Peru is symbolically, and following the ®lm's own special logic-by-montage,
almost literally, a cow/child, a vaca/vasco; the ultimate product of incest/rivalry, he is
the ultimate form of human/animal. Mise-en-sceÁne and montage link Peru's
conception and birth, respectively, to that of the black-and-white cow's calf so that
Peru and the calf become paradigmatic stand-ins for the other in the ®lm's syntax.
Peru is a cow/child.
Thanks again to montage and mise-en-sceÁne, Peru, the cow/child, soon becomes a
cow/child/camera (where animal and human divisions have collapsed, the cyborg
enters in). Inheriting his grandfather's obsession with the camera, Peru regularly
removes the tripod and dons the machine atop his head as if an extensionÐor
prosthetic, to use Hayles's preferred termÐof his body. In one of the ®lm's most
memorable mise-en-sceÁnes the multiple mixtures of identity (Mendiluz/Irigibel;
human/cow; human/camera) join in a single shot featuring the elder Manuel Irigibel,
the original Mendiluz/Irigibel: ®rst victim of the cow's gaze as well as director of that
gaze; his Irigibel granddaughter Cristina: the original vaca/vasca; the Mendiluz/Irigibel
boy/camera, Peru, wearing the camera over his head so that in the scene he is nothing
but a cyborg; and the all-seeing cow itself. With faces ®lling the screen they present an
ironic counterpoint to an earlier of®cial family portrait of the Irigibel family posed
before their caserõÂo. In opposition to the portrait of of®cial patriarchal power (in the
shot the champion aizkolari holds his axe threateningly over his wife) lording over a
well-organized family unit, the constantly moving combination of cow, humans, and
200 N. E. Richardson
machine emphasizes the heterogeneity, earthiness, and, ®nally, irreducible strangeness
of human and Basque being. As if to underline this difference, the grandfather insists
through the scene, `Eso es importante. Eso es importantõÂsimo. Nunca os olvideÂis de
eso.'

Patterns of Basqueness
If Medem's multiple mixing of cows and humans had precipitated an earlier
exploration of the biology of Basqueness, the introduction of the camera extends that
questioning into the realm of information, the second of the two technologies
inspiring posthuman thinking. The camera records information, which is then
transformed, or `embodied', through further technological processes into photo-
graphs. When Peru and his half-sister/neighbor, Cristina, are separated geographically
toward the end of the ®lm, information-based photographic bodies replace ¯esh-and-
blood presences to reaf®rm existence. Peru, the ultimate Basque cyborg, has physically
disappeared. But while he is physically absent, his information patterns return
regularly to sustain meaning in the old country. Photos function to extend being,
serving as what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called a `prosthetic memory' (Mirzoeff 1999, p.
82). Moreover, in Peru, a budding international photographer for an important
American paper, identity not only consists of information patterns, but of information
that ¯ows from an already impure source and now almost entirely disconnected in
material form from a Basque homeland. The cyborg child is the essence of impurity,
but also the essence of the ®lm's version of Basqueness in all its purity. On the one
hand, Peru is the epitome of `noise' and `pollution', a rejoicing `in the illegitimate
fusions of animal and machine' (Haraway 2000, p. 81). On the other hand, Peru, the
cyborg man/camera is the ®lm's `best machine ¼ made of sunshine ¼ all light and
clean'; from his North American location he is `nothing but signals, electromagnetic
waves, a section of a spectrum ¼ eminently portable, mobile ¼ ether, quintessence'
(Haraway 2000, p. 73). Both quotes from Haraway describe the cyborg, which, in all its
novel cleanness, continually confuses age-old boundaries.
Hence, by the time the story arrives at the Spanish civil war of 1936Ðmoving
forward historically but also effecting a mythic return to a violent, victimist encounter
with the Other that Juaristi claims has always de®ned Basque identity (2000, p. 35)Ð
that very identity has been at once pulled apart at the seams and collapsed to the point
of implosion, and this on both the levels of an ultimately conjoined content and
technique. The discourse of Basque identity that Medem has produced, mixing nature
and culture, mind and body, human and animal and technology, and suturing this up
with the visionÐand momentary subjectivityÐof the spectator, might be described in
terms that Paula Rabinowitz has used to discuss the possibilities for a posthuman
feminism: it is a discourse that circulates apart from human (i.e. Western, patriarchal)
knowledge, a Basque story that develops from an evasion of truth and a saturation in
fantasy, exaggeration, and lies (Rabinowitz 2000, p. 43). The battle scene, in which
Basque gudaris ®ght Basque Carlist requeteÂs and their Italian support, moves quickly
into the primeval forest with views of ancient tree trunks, sounds of the mythic jabalõÂ,
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 201

and shots of the original yellow milk cow from the Carlist campaign of 1875. In this
mythic skirmish (however historical in appearance), most of the local Basque ®ghters
are killed, Cristina loses consciousness, and Peru is rounded up to be placed before a
®ring squad. At the last moment Peru's Carlist uncle Juan, the Mendiluz rival of Peru's
Irigibel father, recognizes his nephew and rescues him from certain death. However,
when the guns go off, Peru, thinking he has been shot, falls to the earth alongside his
less fortunate fellow villagers, leading the spectator to believe momentarily that the
protagonist has indeed died. Finding himself still alive, Peru arises and walks away as if
in a trance, a kind of ghost of his former self. The human/cow/camera has now become
®guratively immaterial. He has been saved, and in a sense given a new life not because
of his presence on one side or the other of battle lines or because of his possession of a
foreign passport but because of genetic patterns that run in his blood and his access to
a Carlist uncle who shares and understands his code. And yet, he believes for a
moment that he has lost his camera in the ®ghting; symbolically, he is not pure
information technologyÐthe guise he acquired when living abroadÐeither. Medem
paints Peru here as both physically and symbolically absent; yet, arising from the forest
¯oor he is as biologically and spiritually present as ever.
In the ®nal scene of the ®lm, Peru mounts a horse, rescues his half-sister and
apparent future lover (also arising from her own deep sleep on the forest ¯oor), and
rides off in search of the French border. While on the one hand Peru and Cristina are
®nally escapingÐmoving out to a place where `no hay guerra' and doing so on a horse
(an animal which moments earlier had come head-to-head with the milk cow in a shot
symbolic of clashing Basque and Spanish cultures)Ðthey carry with them their
crisscrossed blood lines, which in the sexually charged interaction between the two,
promise to mix again, as well as the camera that has never physically left Peru's side
from his earliest childhood. And while they have rejected the cow for a horse, the
animal±human±technology link still holds. Finally, while there is not a war in France,
in a movie that has moved episodically through time, it is implicitly a matter of mere
minutes before Cristina and Peru become entangled in yet another de®ning con¯ictÐ
a war with clear ideological connections to the very con¯ict from which they ¯ee.
But, how will the con¯ict be this time? Between whom? Who will Cristina and Peru
be by then? What will have become of their Basqueness, living in France or the United
States or wherever their horse, automobile, or other, newer information or
biotechnologies may carry them? The last words the spectator hears as Cristina and
Peru ride off into the forest is Cristina af®rming arrival, `estamos llegando'. Without
Medem's ever-problematizing approach to ®lm, we might say here that the teleology
of Basque nationalist identity has ful®lled itself: Basque nationalism, with the triumph
of Francisco Franco and the subsequent repression, was fully formed as a historical
reality (Heiberg 1989, p. 103; Hooper 1995, p. 398; Juaristi 2000, pp. 294±362). That
Cristina's words accompany a shot carrying the spectator ever deeper into the hollow
trunk of the mythic treeÐthe `agujero encendido'Ðat the center of the Basque forest
suggests, however, the arrival on the part of the spectator at a view of Basque identity
in its fully romanticized, mythic sense. As we work our way out of the explicit con¯ict
of Basque civil war, the tension between myth and history surfaces one ®nal time.
202 N. E. Richardson
But cyborgs, as Haraway points out, do not arrive at a ®nal destination, just as they
do not spring from EdenÐor any primeval Basque mountain valley (Haraway 2000,
pp. 71, 83). Cyborg identity, like the Basque wilderness in the ®lm's opening shot, or
the Basque valley, in the ®lm's earliest scene, is already scarred. Cyborg arrival, then, is
not transcendence, nor is it a return to any paradise melancholically lost but, rather, to
its very opposite. Cyborg politics is not the perfect communication of monolithic
Basque nationalist discourseÐwhether mythic or historicalÐbut the very struggle
against perfect communication realized in Medem's defamiliarizing and stillÐdespite
my inevitably reductive readingÐvery untidy ®lm (Haraway 2000, p. 81). Cyborg
politics is not a recognition of the human escape from the worldÐor the Basque
escape from Spain, or the escape of Basque myth from Basque history (or vice versa)Ð
but of the Basque self as fully implicated in a world of inextricably intertwined myth
and history (Haraway 2000, p. 81). In sum, while Medem's ®lm on the one hand
problematizes Basque identity, pointing to the holes already so easily poked in
nationalist myths, it is, on the other hand, a celebration of a Basque past, but a
celebration outside the logic of dominant, Western humanist (or Spanish) discourse.
As Paula Rabinowitz has pointed out with the case of feminism, the presence of the
cyborg invites the exploration of a posthumanist history. Can the posthuman, that
supposed creature of the present, have a history, asks Rabinowitz? She reminds us that
such is the very question that Western patriarchy so often ®res at women though
typically couched so as to posit women as pre-historicalÐor, we might say, biological
and mythical (Rabinowitz 2000, p. 42). Does the posthuman have links to the
prehuman, or to the pre-humanist? Can it get us around the impasses of humanism?
Such questions are pertinent to a reading of Vacas as well. In essence, the very question
of history was asked by the Franco regime in the immediate aftermath of the closing
events depicted in Medem's ®lm: does the Basque, the Catalan, or the Galician have a
history? Can they speak? If not, wherein is their humanism? With Medem's study of
Basque identity, perhaps, indeed `estamos llegando', arriving at a sense of being that as
animal±human±machine `does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic
dualisms without end' (Haraway 2000, p. 83), or, speci®c to contemporary Basque
politics, a different kind of Basque state in which `everything is shared, negotiated,
contradicted, and sometimes opposed' (Castells 1999, p. 30), a less pristine Basque
land more adaptive and heterogeneous (de VentoÂs 1999, p. 40).
Gurutz JaÂuregui Bereciartu has argued that Basque nationalism as articulated
throughout the twentieth century showed no room for heterogeneity, `narrowly
de®ning Basqueness' with an `exclusionary concept of nationalism' that `displaced,
and still does today, the essential marrowÐthe Basque people themselves' (JaÂuregui
Bereciartu 1999, p. 46). Heiberg has called it `non-ecumenical' and `purist', an
ideology in which alternative options are both politically and morally unacceptable
(Heiberg 1989, p. 57). According to Haraway, `Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out
of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful in®del
heteroglossia' (Haraway 2000, p. 84). To conclude, Vacas does not boast any miracle
solution to the complex questions surrounding Basque nationalism or any other
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 203

nationalist movement today. Rather, Medem's ®lm, with its strange and estranging
combinations of images, techniques, and storylines hits uponÐperhaps even stumbles
uponÐthe very complexities of the issue. It illustrates why present political discourses
on either side of the independence and identity issue fail. It suggests through its story
and technique a different way of seeing Basque identity, an alternative approach to
seeing the Basque past, understanding the Basque present, and planning for a Basque
future. It does so by problematizing the humanism that infuses both pro-Basque and
pro-Spanish discourses. By infusing the Basque Eden with pre- and posthuman
patterns, Medem collapses dualisms and offers an alternative discourse. In his ®lm, to
turn in conclusion to the quote that led off this article, in the cyborg Basque `we can
learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man' (Haraway
2000, p. 81). Medem offers instead an alternative Basque, not the manly vasco of
traditional Western humanism and its nationalist offshoots, but a wildly mixed
Cristina/Peru/cow/camera, not a manly, dualing vasco, but a vasca, or, in a more
scrambled formÐalways plural, never patriarchalÐvacas.

Notes
[1] Heiberg argues that during the 1920s, Basque nationalism was most powerfully manifest and
promoted through athletic competitions, dance and music festivals, and other cultural arts
(1989, p. 76). She explains, further, that political nationalism preceded cultural nationalism in
the promotion of such events, and that such events were regularly promoted in a way so as to
provoke opposition between Basques and Anti-Basques, despite of®cial declarations of the
Basque community as `one great family tied by blood, culture, shared interests and destiny'
(1989, pp. 76±77).

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Filmography
Abre los ojos (Alejandro AmenaÂbar, 1998).
The Matrix (Andy Wochowski, Larry Wochowski, 1999).
Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992).