This work analyses Valle-Inclan's works, defines precisely what the term esperpento means, and what technique Valle-Inclan used to achieve his aesthetic. The second part examines the manner in which Valle-Inclan's esperpento blends with Bunuel's surrealistic films, particularly Un Chien andalou, L'age d'or and Tierra sin pan.
In recent decades, the Spanish 'fantastic' has been at the forefront of genre filmmaking. Films such as The Day of the Beast, the Rec trilogy, The Orphanage and Timecrimes have received widespread attention and popularity, arguably rescuing Spanish cinema from its semi-invisibility during the creativity-crushing Franco years. By turns daring, evocative, outrageous, and intense, this new cinema has given voice to a generation, both beholden to and yet breaking away from their historical and cultural roots. Beginning in the 1990s, films from directors such as Alex de la Iglesia, Alejandro Amenabar, and Jaume Balaguero reinvigorated Spanish cinema in the horror, science fiction and fantasy veins as their work proliferated and took centre stage at international festivals such as Sitges, Fantasia International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. Through an examination of key films and filmmakers, Shelagh Rowan-Legg here investigates the rise of this unique new wave of genre films from Spain, and how they have recycled, reshaped and renewed the stunning visual tropes, wild narratives and imaginative other worlds inherent to an increasingly influential cinematic field.Its emergence is part of a new trend of postnational cinema, led by the fantastic, which approaches the national boundaries of cinema with an exciting sense of fluidity.
This study explores the meaning and importance of flamenco in the works of two of the most important and influential figures in 20th-century Spanish culture, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and the film-maker Carlos Saura. Lorca and Saura shared a fascination for flamenco as a medium for the existential ideology of the marginalized and disenfranchised and this work evaluates the development of these themes through a close, contextual study of their works, which are linked explicitly by Saura's film adaptation of Lorca's Bodas de sangre and, more profoundly, by their use of flamenco to express ideas of sexual and political marginalization in pre- and post- Francoist Spain respectively. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the symbolism, visual style, characters, themes and performance system of flamenco is key to a greater understanding of the social, sexual, political and existential themes in the works of Lorca and Saura.
This book examines postmodern theology and how it relates to the cinematic style of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel. Ponder demonstrates how these filmmakers forefront religious issues in their use of mise en scène. He investigates both the technical qualities of film “flesh” and its theological features. The chapters show how art cinema uses sound, editing, lighting, and close-ups in ways that critique doctrine’s authoritarianism, as well as philosophy’s individualism, to suggest postmodern theologies that emphasize community. Through this book we learn how the cinematic style of modernist auteurs relates to postmodern theology and how the industry of art cinema constructs certain kinds of film-watching subjectivity.
Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions. Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal "father of the nation" and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.
Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century. Shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by André Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1929) one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. The Forgotten Ones (1950) and He (1952), made in Mexico, were followed, from 1960, in Spain and France, by the films for which he is best known: Viridiana (1961), Belle de jour (1966), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Gwynne Edwards analyses the films in the context of Buñuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values, and religion - suggesting that the film-maker experienced a degree of sexual inhibition surprising in a surrealist. GWYNNE EDWARDS is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Literary naturalism, within the Hispanic context, has traditionally been read as a graphic realist school or movement linked predominantly to late nineteenth century literary production. The essays in Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism—written by scholars from different generations, nationalities and ideological backgrounds—propose a major revisionist contribution to the study of Hispanic naturalism. Based on a theoretical proposal that re-semanticizes naturalismo as a diachronic counter-metanarrative phenomenon that transcends the chronological and geographic limitations imposed by traditional criticism on naturalism, the collection provides new readings of traditional naturalist fare as well as re-readings of works that have not been read, within the bounds of conventional criticism, as naturalist. Re-read within the proposed theoretical framework, its essays demonstrate the countless ways in which Hispanic naturalist texts–literary and more recently, filmic—continue to frankly engage the societal problematics that has impeded true social, political, economic and cultural progress from taking place in the Hispanic world from the turbulent fin-de-siècle period of the nineteenth century through the present day, globalized context. Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism is thus also an open invitation to the scholarly community to re-consider other socio-critical works within the Hispanic naturalist context that observe and reflection upon social issues that continue to plague Hispanic society today.
The Estoria de los godos is a paraphrase and summary of the Latin text DeRebus Hispaniae, or Historia Gothica, written by Archbishop don Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada and completed in 1243. The creation of the Estoria de los godos was prompted by a genuine desire to afford the less learned inhabitants of Castile the opportunity to know more about the history of their culture and civilization. It served as a model for historiographers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This etymological study of all the common names occurring in the text will serve to facilitate the reading comprehension of those interested in Spanish history who may have difficulty understanding and interpreting the language of the 13th century.
