Community and identity in Basque cinema

Professor Marvin D'Lugo's research

Spanish and screen studies professor Marvin D'Lugo reviews a movie that begins with a funeral mass. Mikel's friends and community have come to mourn his death. The cause of death is unclear. Was it the police? Mikel's mother? Basque Terrorists? A suicide? Who owned Mikel's life?

In a series of flashbacks, we become acquainted with those attending the funeral and the events leading up to Mikel's death. Each person in attendance represents a community that is trying to shape and appropriate Mikel's identity for its own purpose:

Mikel's modern wife--she and Mikel are not getting along
Mikel's traditional Basque mother
A friend who recommends that Mikel see a psychiatrist, and who later betrays Mikel's terrorist political activity to the police
A female impersonator who helps Mikel acknowledge his homosexuality
Members of the Basque Autonomy Party, of which Mikel was a member until ousted because of his sexual orientation.
The local priest, representative of the religious community.

Filmaker Imanol Uribe placed La Muerte de Mikel (The Death of Mikel) (1983) in the Basque region of Spain. Like many European countries, Spain encompasses a number of distinctive ethnic groups and regions. Francisco Franco, dictator from 1939 to 1975, tried to suppress these regional distinctions with a strongly nationalist government. Upon his death, the Basque people began to assert their identity and went so far as to push for status as a separate country.

D'Lugo describes how Uribe, as one of several filmmakers involved in the emergence of Basque regional cinema, has used film to explore questions of community identity and affiliation. Uribe knows that movies can shape, sustain and legitimize community identity, and this was an initial goal of Basque cinema. In this tradition, and prior to La Muerte, he produced

Ez (1976), a documentary centered around resistance to nuclear reactors in the Basque regions
Il proceso de Burgos (The Burgos Trial) (1979), an examination of the 1970 court-martials of Basque militants under Franco's regime
La fuga de Segovia (Escape from the Segovia Prison)(1981), a dramatization of the escape of political prisoners from jail

With La Muerte, however, D'Lugo shows how Uribe's focus shifts from the political to the personal, from Basque regionalism to an inquiry into the validity of community identity. Uribe exposes the conflicting claims that different communities--familial, sexual, social, and political--can impose on the individual. He reveals the tension that often arises when an individual tries to reconcile identification with a community with personal needs. Mikel is a man affiliated with several communities--gay, traditional Basque, Spanish nationalist, European, Catholic--all with conflicting agendas. Each community wants to appropriate on its behalf not only Mikel's allegiance, but even his death. In D'Lugo's view, to claim (as some have) that La Muerte is a gay film or an affirmation of Basque regionalism, is to miss Uribe's point. In this film, Uribe is not affirming any one community but questioning the legitimacy of community itself.