La Zona Fantasma: Back to the Drawing Board

Twenty years ago, while teaching a series of seminars in oral Spanish at Oxford University, I asked my students to perform the following exercise: after reading a newspaper article out loud to them in Spanish, I asked them to write a summary, in English, of what they had just heard. The purpose was to gauge their comprehension of a text in the language they were in the process of learning. Nowadays, however, it seems that all across Europe—and most especially in Spain—an extremely high percentage of secondary school students are having a difficult time comprehending short texts written in their own—not a foreign—language. If this is in fact true, we should not be too surprised if we start to observe a variety of other phenomena that demonstrate our rapid regression to the most primitive of mentalities.

Several years ago, a time when our world was already beginning to be dominated by the language of images, I began to notice how people around me, more and more, seemed to wildly misinterpret the syntax of the cinematographic narrative—the same syntax that, more than a century ago, the very earliest moviegoers had taken some time to get used to. Many of us know, for example, that early movie spectators grew frightened when they saw a train on the big screen advance toward them, thinking that the train might burst through the screen and run them over. They were equally befuddled when, very suddenly, the image of the train was replaced by that of a station or a landscape. In this sense, their reactions were echoed somewhat by the simpleminded peasant in Les Carabiniers, an early Godard film: Mesmerized by the movie screen that shows a nude woman taking her bath, the man stands up on tiptoe and actually tries to climb into the screen, thinking that, as in real life, a higher vantage point might enable him to get a better view of the woman’s body, which is blocked by the bathtub. And all of us know what it is like to go to the movies and end up next to an old woman who speaks out loud to the characters in the film, warning them of the mistakes they are about to make, or the dangers that lie in wait for them. “Don’t go in there, Peck, it’s a trap!” I once heard an old woman scream out to Gregory Peck while watching The Gunfighter or some other movie featuring the great American actor. And I still remember the horrified reaction of the author and devoted film aficionado Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as he watched a certain Spanish novelist do the same thing during the projection of a movie—shouting...