How does a totalitarian government influence the arts, and how do the arts respond? Spanish Film Under Franco raises these important questions, giving English speakers a starting point in their study of Spanish cinema. After a brief overview of Spanish film before Franco, the author proceeds to a discussion of censorship as practiced by the Franco regime. The response of directors to censorship—the “franquista aesthetic,” or “aesthetic of repression,” with its highly metaphorical, oblique style—is explored in the works of Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, and other important directors. Virginia Higginbotham combines historical perspective with detailed critical analysis and interpretation of many famous Franco-era films. She shows how directors managed to evade the censors and raise public awareness of issues relating to the Spanish Civil War and the repressions of the Franco regime. Film has always performed an educational function in Spain, reaching masses of poor and uneducated citizens. And sometimes, as this study also reveals, Spanish film has been ignored when the questions it raised became too painful or demanding. The author concludes with a look at post-Franco cinema and the directions it has taken. For anyone interested in modern Spanish film, this book will be essential reading.

Popular Spanish Film Under Franco is the first book of its kind to analyze cinematic comedy during the initial two decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Focusing on the intersection between popular culture and political populism, it breaks new theoretical ground in re-evaluating the policies of the regime and the tactics employed by those who sought to undermine it. Its cultural studies approach - combining Gramsci, de Certeau and Bakhtin - interrogates the ambiguous nature of subversion and challenges common assumptions concerning post-war Spanish film.

How Spanish directors have handled religious themes, with their highly-charged political implications, from the historical avant-garde to 2010

In the 1970s, especially after Franco's death in 1975, Spanish cinema was bursting at the seams. Numerous film directors broke free from the ancient taboos which had reigned under the dictatorship. They introduced characters who, through their bodies, transgress the traditional borders of social, cultural and sexual identities. Post- Franco cinema exhibits women, homosexuals, transsexuals, and delinquents in new and challenging ways.Under Franco rule, all of these dissident bodies were 'lost'. Here, they reflect new mythological figures, inhabiting an idealised body form (a prototypical body).

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Contemporary focus, right up to date with material from 1980s and 90s. Wide-ranging analyses of major directors, themes, genres and issues, including historical film, genre cinema, women in film and autonomies.

A key decade in world cinema, the 1960s was also a crucial era of change in Spain. A Cinema of Contradiction, the first book to focus in depth on this period in Spain, analyses six films that reflect and interpret these transformations. The coexistence of traditional and modern values and the timid acceptance of limited change by Franco's authoritarian regime are symptoms of the uneven modernity that characterises the period. Contradiction--the unavoidable effect of that unevenness--is the conceptual terrain explored by these six filmmakers. One of the most significant movements of Spanish film history, the 'New Spanish Cinema' art films explore contradictions in their subject matter, yet are themselves the contradictory products of the state's protection and promotion of films that were ideologically opposed to it. A Cinema of Contradiction argues for a new reading of the movement as a compromised yet nonetheless effective cinema of critique. It also demonstrates the possible contestatory value of popular films of the era, suggesting that they may similarly explore contradictions. This book therefore reveals the overlaps between art and popular film in the period, and argues that we should see these as complementary rather than opposing areas of cinematic activity in Spain.