The first book-length study of Reichardt's career and works

This is the first genre study of child-starred cinemas from Spain. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over 50 years of Spanish cinema and how the child-starred genres deploy the concept of childhood to retrospectively define the nation and its future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Spanish and Latin American cinema, this monograph examines commonalities in aesthetics, narratives and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina.

Although children have proliferated in Spain’s cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation as it emerged from almost four decades of repressive dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. In Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Sarah Thomas analyses the cinematic child within this complex historical conjuncture of a nation looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future. Examining films from several genres by four key directors of the Transition – Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán – Thomas explores how the child is represented as both subject and object, and self and other, and consistently cast in a position between categories or binary poles. She demonstrates how the cinematic child that materializes in this period is a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that points toward the impossibility of fully comprehending the historical past and the figure of the other, while inviting an ethical engagement with each.

Were it not for authoritarian state censorship, Cecilia Bartolomé’s name would figure alongside those of her contemporaries Agnès Varda and Claire Denis as a pioneering feminist filmmaker of the twentieth century. With this bold claim, this book seeks both to write the history of Bartolomé’s extant filmography, and speculate about censored and un-filmed work, thereby fashioning a new way of writing a feminist creative life in film. The first volume on this director to be written in English, The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé is also the first volume on the director published in any language for over twenty years. By focusing on Spanish-language cinema of the 1960s-90s, the period when feminism, like democracy, was re-born and seemingly consolidated in Spain, the study brings historical depth and transnational reach to current debates in the wake of #MeToo.

Film itself is an artifact of memory. A blend of all the other fine arts, film portrays and preserves human memory, someone's memory, faulty or not, dramatically or comically, in a documentary, feature film or short. Hollywood may dominate 80 percent of cinema production but it is not the only voice. World cinema is about those other voices. Drawn initially from presentations from a series of film conferences held at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this collection of essays covers multiple geographical, linguistic, and cultural areas worldwide, emphasizing the historical and cultural interpretation of films. Appendices list films focusing on memory and invite readers to explore the films and issues raised.

Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it is represented in both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kent's watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayona's award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Aster's genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Trier's visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, and—sometimes—healing.

The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music provides a significant contribution to the research and history of Spanish film music, exploring the interdependence and ways in which discourses of sound and vision are constructed dialogically in Spanish cinema, with contributions from leading international researchers from Spain, the USA, the UK, France and Germany. Offering a multifocal and multidisciplinary study between related areas such as music studies, film studies and Spanish cultural studies, this book is divided into four sections, covering the early years of Spanish cinema; the 1940s and 1950s in Spanish cinema—the first decades of the Franco dictatorship; the importance of Fraga Iribarne’s slogan, “Spain is different,” to promote Spain’s new openness to the world in the 1960s and 1970s; and Spanish cinema since the arrival of democracy in 1978, including discussion of contemporary Spanish cinema. The growing interest in Spanish cinema calls for the publication of studies about the role of music in its political and socio-cultural framework. This is therefore a valuable text for music and film scholars and professionals, university undergraduates and music conservatory students.