A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010

Description

A History of Spanish Film explores Spanish film from the beginnings of the industry to the present day by combining some of the most exciting work taking place in film studies with some of the most urgent questions that have preoccupied twentieth-century Spain. It addresses new questions in film studies, like 'prestige film' and 'middlebrow cinema', and places these in the context of a country defined by social mobility, including the 1920s industrial boom, the 1940s post-Civil War depression, and the mass movement into the middle classes from the 1960s onwards. Close textual analysis of some 42 films from 1910-2010 provides an especially useful avenue into the study of this cinema for the student. - Uniquely offers extensive close readings of 42 films, which are especially useful to students and teachers of Spanish cinema. - Analyses Spanish silent cinema and films of the Franco era as well as contemporary examples. - Interrogates film's relations with other media, including literature, pictorial art and television. - Explores both 'auteur' and 'popular' cinemas. - Establishes 'prestige' and the 'middlebrow' as crucial new terms in Spanish cinema studies. - Considers the transnationality of Spanish cinema throughout its century of existence. - Contemporary directors covered in this book include Almodovar, Bollain, Diaz Yanes and more.

Sally Faulkner is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (2004) and A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film of the 1960s (2006) and was awarded a Fellowship from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council for 2011.

A combination of painstaking research, theoretical awareness, critical apercu and elegant writing. -- Peter Evans, Emeritus Professor of Film, Queen Mary, University of London, UK There has been nothing quite like Sally Faulkner's A History of Spanish Film. This lengthy and ambitious volume combines a compelling general account of a vital national cinema with brilliant close analyses of individual titles. Moreover it skillfully places artistic and cultural questions within social and historical contexts. This book is required reading for both those who already know Spanish cinema and those who would like to discover it. -- Paul Julian Smith, Distinguished Professor, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, US This beautifully nuanced study gives the reader a series of intriguing new perspectives on the social crossovers produced by a cinema marked by class mobility and by realignments in taste in Spain. It concentrates on the active engagement of middle class culture -- bizarrely under-estimated in most books on Spanish film -- with fictions, markets and institutions. Sally Faulkner's indispensable history reveals a different continuity and disparate set of Spanish images to the ones we might have thought we knew. -- Chris Perriam, Professor of Hispanic Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK Faulkner's close textual analysis of a diverse array of films complements the books original and stimulating theoretical framework. A History of Spanish Film is a new and exciting contribution to intellectual discourses about class, modernity, and the production and reception of Spanish cinema. Students and scholars alike will find this work indispensable in their teaching and research. -- Tatjana Pavlovic, Associate Professor, 20th-Century Spanish Film and Literature, Tulane University, US Sally Faulkner's A History of Spanish Film is a moveable feast. Departing from the tendency to understand history as a rehearsal of grand ideologies and to view--and valorize--Spanish cinema in terms of denunciation and protest, subversion and experimentation, it charts the rise of the middle class and a corresponding 'middlebrow cinema'. Through an interlocking series of close, chronologically ordered readings of representative films in Spanish from before and after the Civil War, Faulkner's study grapples with complex questions of modernization, popular culture, education, entertainment, consumerism, class realignment, and social mobility --'upward,downward and stalled'-- in motion pictures. -- Brad Epps, Professor of Spanish, University of Cambridge, UK This book uses the concept of Spanish middlebrow cinema to explore the representation of class and social mobility across a century of Spanish cinema... The close textual analysis in combination with a nuanced reading of production, reception and changes in taste in Spain gives new insights into a range of films, including those that have already had acres written about them... A really interesting read. * Nobody Knows Anybody: A Spanish Cinema Blog * This is an attractive and balanced book that throws new insights into research. -- Javier Jurado, Universite Paris X/Carlos III Madrid * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 35.1 *