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This book is a collection of essays that offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The films analysed span a period of some 40 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. The book offers a new lens to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The figure of the auteur jostles for attention alongside other features of film, ranging from genre, intertexuality and ethics, to filmic language and aesthetics. At the heart of this project lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs and younger generations of filmmakers have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The films discussed in the book encompass different genres, both popular and more select arthouse fare, and are made in different languages: English, Basque, Castilian, Catalan, and French. Regarded universally as a classic of Spanish arthouse cinema, El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive has attracted a wealth of critical attention which has focused on political, historical, psychological and formal aspects of Víctor Erice's co-authored film-text. Luis Bunuel's Cet obscur objet du désir/That Obscure Object of Desire, Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons' Ocana. Retrat Intermitent/Ocana. An Intermittent Portrait, Francisco Franco's El Dorado, Víctor Erice's El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun, and Julio Medem's Vacas/Cows are some films that are discussed.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. At the heart of this project lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs and younger generations of filmmakers have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The films discussed in the book encompass different genres (horror, thriller, melodrama, documentary), both popular and more select arthouse fare, and are made in different languages: English, Basque, Castilian, Catalan and French. The book focuses on locating how the different films treat wider issues of landscape (both rural and urban, abstract and concrete, filmic and theatrical) and memory in relation to the political shifts of Spain's history since the late 1970s.
– Flores de otro mundo/Flowers From Another World (1999), Te doy mis ojos/Take My Eyes (2003) and Mataharis (2007) – Bollaín’s directorial signature would come to be associated with two major trends in Spanish cinematic production. First, she formed part of a new wave of female directors who, for the first time in the mid-1990s, established a collective foothold and identity in the traditionally male
often tend to overlook one of the most powerful and salient methods for constructing meaning in cinema: namely, genre. Specifically, none of the texts are devoted to the study of post-1990 Spanish cinema or to an in-depth approach to the genres that populate Spanish cinematic production and reception today. The mobilisation and application of genre studies is absolutely central to understanding the aesthetic approaches used by