Spanish Cinema 1973-2010. Auterism, Politics, Landscape And Memory: Auteurism, politics, landscape and memory - Tapa blanda

This exciting collection of essays from leading film scholars pays attention to the specificities of the Spanish cultural, social, political and aesthetic panorama (its 'landscapes'), while also acknowledging the importance of shifting transnational contexts for studies of Spanish cinema. Theories of the auteur (developed and extended here) act as a guiding framework for the study of key films, many of which are being afforded scholarly treatments for the first time. This volume offers important observations on current trends, theories and revisionist approaches to Spanish cinema. Sarah Wright, Royal Holloway, University of London -- .

This collection of essays offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinema production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The seventeen key films analysed in the volume span a period of 35 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. They encompass different genres (horror, thriller, melodrama, social realism, documentary), both popular (Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and more select art house fare (En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia, El espíritu de la colmena/Spirit of the Beehive) and are made in different languages: English (as both first and second language), Basque, Castilian, Catalan and French. Offering an expanded understanding of 'national' cinemas that negotiates the global co-production networks that fund the production of contemporary films in Spain, the volume offers treatments of key works by Guillermo del Toro and Lucrecia Martel alongside an examination of the ways in which established auteurs (Almodóvar, José Garci, Carlos Saura) and younger generations of filmmakers (Cesc Gay, Alejandro Amenábar, Iciar Bollaín) have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state, wider issues of landscape, and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The result is a bold new study of the ways in which film has created new prisms (indeed one could argue stereotypes) that have determined how Spain is positioned in the global marketplace.