Hispanic Languages and Literatures: Film Studies

This book constitutes the first in-depth cultural analysis of a period generally held to be the golden age of film production in Spain. Its focus on the work of five directors between 1942 and 1964 seeks to dispel the myth that movie making of early Francoism consisted exclusively of propaganda exercises. Using Gramscian hegemony theory, the volume offers an original perspective on the comic possibilities of subverting State populism and maps a filmmaking tradition that persists, in the figure of Pedro Almodóvar, to the present day.

From the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel to the colourful melodramas of Pedro Almodóvar, Spain has produced a wealth of exciting and distinctive film-makers who have consistently provided a condoning or dissenting eye on Spanish history and culture. For modern cinema-goers, it has often been the sexually-charged and colourful nature of many contemporary Spanish films, which has made them popular world-wide and led directors and stars such as Almodóvar, Banderas and Penélope Cruz to be welcomed by Hollywood. Using original interview material with Spanish Cinema luminaries such as Carlos Saura, Julio Medem, Imanol Uribe and Elías Querejeta, Rob Stone charts a history of Spanish Cinema throughout the turbulent Francoist years and beyond. The book aims to provide a broad introduction to  Spanish Cinema.

Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). Pérez Melgosa analyzes the evolution of inter-American narratives in films from across the continent, highlights the social effects of the technologies used to produce these works, and explores the connections of cinema to successive shifts in hemispheric policy. As a result, Cinema and Inter-American Relations reveals the existence of a continued cinematic conversation between Anglo and Latin America about a cluster of shared allegories representing the continent and its cultures. Pérez Melgosa contends that cinema has become a virtual contact zone of the Americas, mediating in a variety of hemispheric political debates about the articulation of Anglo, Latin American, and Latino identities. Cinema and Inter-American Relations brings sustained attention to ongoing calls for a transnational focus on the disciplines of film studies, American studies, and Latin American studies and engages with current theories of the transmission of affect to delineate a new cartography of how to understand the Americas in relation to cinema.

Still the most comprehensive analysis of the subject to have appeared in English, Magical Reelsnbsp;charts the development of Latin American film industries in a world increasingly dominated by the advanced technology and massive distribution budgets of the North American mainstream. John King sets up a historical framework to unfold the overlapping histories of cinema in the continent: the itinerant film-makers of the silent era who projected their films in cafes and village halls, the inventive use of vernacular music and local comedy in early sound pictures, the "golden age" of 1940s Mexican cinema, and the "new cinema"—oppositional cinema made "with an idea in the head and a camera in the hand"—of the late 1950s and beyond. A country-by-country account of this new wave allows detailed discussion of, for instance, Peronist cinema in Argentina, 1960s' revolutionary film-making in Cuba, state-sponsored cinema in 1970s' Brazil and Venezuela, and the struggle for democratization in Chile in the 1980s. A new chapter written for this edition examines Latin American cinema of the 1990s, raising issues such as globalization, new cinema audiences, film funding and distribution.