A collection of original essays from leading scholars in the field exploring the contemporary debates, concerns and controversies ongoing in Spanish film industry, culture and scholarship. The essays reveal the far-reaching shifts that have occurred in the Spanish film scene, making essential reading for all interested in European cinema.
Providing an overview of Spanish and Portuguese cinema, this title contains 24 essays, each on a separate seminal film from the region, profiling work from the likes of Pedro Almodıvar and João Cesar Monteiro.
In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain's national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain's peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media culture created new national stereotypes and strengthened the nation's place in the global market and on the global stage. These essays consider a diverse array of texts, ranging from recent films by Almodóvar, Saura, Erice, Miró, Bigas Luna, Gutiérrez Aragón, and Eloy de la Iglesia to media coverage of the 1993 elections. Francoist cinema and other popular media are examined in light of strategies used to redefine Spain's cultural identity. The importance of the documentary, the appropriation of Hollywood film, and the significance of gender and sexuality in Spanish cinema are also discussed, as is the discourse of the Spanish media star--whether involving film celebrities like Rita Hayworth and Antonio Banderas or historical figures such as Cervantes. The volume concludes with an investigation of larger issues of government policy in relation to film and media, including a discussion of the financing of Spanish cinema and an exploration of the political dynamics of regional television and art museums. Drawing on a wide range of critical discourses, including feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory, political economy, cultural history, and museum studies, Refiguring Spain is the first comprehensive anthology on Spanish cinema in the English language. Contributors. Peter Besas, Marvin D'Lugo, Selma Reuben Holo, Dona M. Kercher, Marsha Kinder, Jaume Martí-Olivella, Richard Maxwell, Hilary L. Neroni, Paul Julian Smith, Roland B. Tolentino, Stephen Tropiano, Kathleen M. Vernon, Iñaki Zabaleta
Michel Chion is well known in contemporary film studies for his innovative investigations into aspects of cinema that scholars have traditionally overlooked. Following his work on sound in film in Audio-Vision and Film, a Sound Art, Words on Screen is Chion's survey of everything the seventh art gives us to read on screen. He analyzes titles, credits, and intertitles, but also less obvious forms of writing that appear on screen, from the tear-stained letter in a character's hand to reversed writing seen in mirrors. Through this examination, Chion delves into the multitude of roles that words on screen play: how they can generate narrative, be torn up or consumed but still remain in the viewer's consciousness, take on symbolic dimensions, and bear every possible relation to cinematic space. With his characteristic originality, Chion performs a poetic inventory of the possibilities of written text in the film image. Taking examples from hundreds of films spanning years and genres, from the silents to the present, he probes the ways that words on screen are used and their implications for film analysis and theory. In the process, he opens up and unearths the specific poetry of visual text in film. Exhaustively researched and illustrated with hundreds of examples, Words on Screen is a stunning demonstration of a creative scholar's ability to achieve a radically new understanding of cinema.
This volume of essays focuses on films of the so-called quinqui genre, films created during the 1970s–1980s depicting the lives of young criminals from the outskirts of Spanish cities, that arose/spread during the uncertain transitional period in a Spain moving from a dictatorship to a democracy. The quinqui films, produced and released on a shoestring budget, were nonetheless immensely popular, although never fully considered as part of the national film production in academic circles due to their “B” nature and low quality. These films encapsulate many of the concerns that Spaniards were facing (unemployment, class conflict and disparity, wild economic growth, increasing violence and crime activity, illegal drugs ravaging the youth, etc.) and consequently they had an impact on social, cultural, and emotional levels in the reborn country. In addition to recent interest in these films as cultural products, this book presents a thorough and multi-perspective analysis of the implications for film and society that these films reveal, clarifying both: the Spanish filmic panorama as well as the canon, and the socio-political situation in a country that was going through one of the most controversial and tumultuous times of its contemporary history.
"It is difficult to think of a better way of introducing students to the rich diversity of Hispanic civilization in the Golden Age and Enlightenment than through the pages of this book."—History
When filmmaker Carlos Saura was a young man, he desired to create a book about his native Spain that would transgress the propaganda imagery of the Franco regime. He strove to depict his country as seen through his camera when 0he set out on a journey through Andalusia and central Spain in his Fiat 600 in the late 1950s. The trip left a deep impression on his first documentary film, “Cuenca” (1958). Since his youth Saura has been fascinated not only by the process of photographing but also by its technology, as demonstrated by his museum-quality collection of hundreds of historical and self-made cameras. Torn between the two media at the beginning of his career, Saura eventually chose to become a 0filmmaker but has continued to take photographs. España años 50 offers a comprehensive insight into Saura’s photography with a focus on his black-and-white work of the 1950s: compelling images of landscapes, villages, bullfights 0and people of another era. Photographs of Saura’s diploma film project, “La Tarde de Domingo” (1957), are also present in the book, making it the definitive representation of his photographic oeuvre.
Medieval Spain is brilliantly recreated, in all its variety and richness, in this comprehensive survey. Likely to become the standard work in English, the book treats the entire Iberian Peninsula and all the people who inhabited it, from the coming of the Visigoths in the fifth century to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Integrating a wealth of information about the diverse peoples, institutions, religions, and customs that flourished in the states that are now Spain and Portugal, Joseph F. O'Callaghan focuses on the continuing attempts to impose political unity on the peninsula. O'Callaghan divides his story into five compact historical periods and discusses political, social, economic, and cultural developments in each period. By treating states together, he is able to put into proper perspective the relationships among them, their similarities and differences, and the continuity of development from one period to the next. He gives proper attention to Spain's contacts with the rest of the medieval world, but his main concern is with the events and institutions on the peninsula itself. Illustrations, genealogical charts, maps, and an extensive bibliography round out a book that will be welcomed by scholars and student of Spanish and Portuguese history and literature, as well as by medievalists, as the fullest account to date of Spanish history in the Middle Ages.