The first scholarly edition of Walter Scott's most complex historical narrative poem (1808)

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.

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.

This is the first collection in English to focus exclusively on the various forms of popular film produced in Spain and to acknowledge the variety, range and depth of Spanish cinema.Contributors from across Hispanic, media and cultural studies explore a range of genres, from the musicals of the 1930s and 1940s to contemporary horror movies, historical epics of the 1940s and 1950s and contemporary representations of the Spanish Civil War. The book includes reappraisals of key popular directors such as Luis Garcia Berlanga and Antonio Mercero as well as critical analyses of celebrated stars like Marisol. It provides innovative consideration of the promotion and reception of horror in the 1960s, recollections of cinema-going in Madrid, and reflections on successful recent works such as 'Abre los Ojos' and 'Solas'.The contributors offer a range of critical and methodological perspectives, opening up new ways of analysing Spanish popular film.