Can cinema reveal its audience's most subversive thinking? Do films have the potential to project their viewers' innermost thoughts making them apparent on the screen? This book argues that cinema has precisely this power, to unveil to the spectator their own hidden thoughts. It examines case studies from various cultures in conversation with Spain, a country whose enduring masterpieces in self-reflexive or meta-art provide insight into the special dynamic between viewer and screen. Framed around critical readings of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Diego Velázquez' Las meninas and Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, this book examines contemporary films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, Bigas Luna, Alejandro Amenábar, Lucrecia Martel, Krzysztof Kieslowski, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Jonze, Andrzej Zulawski, Fernando Pérez, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg to illustrate how self-reflexivity in film unbridles the mental repression of film spectators. It proposes cinema as an uncanny duplication of the workings of the brain – a doppelgänger to human thought.

A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity

As a depository of civic record and social history whose very name derives from the Greek word for town hall, the archive would seem to be a public entity, yet it is stocked with the personal, even intimate, artifacts of private lives. It is this inherent tension between public and private which inaugurates, for Derrida, an inquiry into the human impulse to preserve, through technology as well as tradition, both a historical and a psychic past. What emerges is a marvelous expansive work, engaging at once Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism in a profound reflection on the real, the unreal, and the virtual.

AlmodOvar is Spain's most successful and controversial director, representing a unique blend of art-house auteur and popular film-maker. His films, with their mix of Hollywood and European styles and of popular melodrama and comedy, have been attracting growing international audiences since the success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. A Spanish Labyrinth is a much needed, clear, and comprehensive introduction to the films of AlmodOvar, investigating the cultural and national contexts for his work, issues of gender, sexuality, stars, genre, visual style, music, and much more. It is the ideal companion to AlmodOvar for students of film and Hispanic Studies, as well as those generally interested in film and Spanish culture.

Women's Cinema in Contemporary Portugal brings together scholars from Portugal, UK and the USA, to discuss 14 women film directors in Portugal, focussing on their production in both feature film and documentary genres over the last half-century. It charts the specific cinematic visions that these women have brought to the re-emergence of Portuguese national cinema in the wake of the 1974 Revolution and African decolonisation, and to the growing internationalisation of Portugal's arguably 'minor' or 'small nation' cinema, with significant young women directors such as Leonor Teles achieving prominence abroad. The history of Portuguese women's cinema only begins systematically after the 1974 revolution and democratisation. This collection shows how female auteurs made their mark on Portugal's post-revolutionary conceptualisation of a differently 'national' cinema, through the ethnographic output of the late 1970s. It goes on to explore women's decisively gendered interventions in the cinematic memory practices that opened up around the masculine domain of the Colonial Wars in Africa. Feminist political issues such as Portugal's 30-year abortion campaign and LGBT status have become more visible since the 1990s, alongside preoccupations with global concerns relating to immigration, transit and minority status communities. The book also demonstrates how women have contributed to the evolution of soundscapes, the genre of essay cinema, film's relationship to the archive, and the adaptation of the written word. The result is a powerful, provocative and definitive challenge to the marginalisation of Portuguese female-directed film in terms of 'double minority'.