Description
Book SynopsisSally Faulkner is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of
Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (2004) and A
Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film of the 1960s (2006) and was awarded a Fellowship from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council for 2011.
Trade ReviewA combination of painstaking research, theoretical awareness, critical aperçu and elegant writing. -- Peter Evans, Emeritus Professor of Film, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
There has been nothing quite like Sally Faulkner’s
A History of Spanish Film. This lengthy and ambitious volume combines a compelling general account of a vital national cinema with brilliant close analyses of individual titles. Moreover it skillfully places artistic and cultural questions within social and historical contexts. This book is required reading for both those who already know Spanish cinema and those who would like to discover it. -- Paul Julian Smith, Distinguished Professor, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, US
This beautifully nuanced study gives the reader a series of intriguing new perspectives on the social crossovers produced by a cinema marked by class mobility and by realignments in taste in Spain. It concentrates on the active engagement of middle class culture -- bizarrely under-estimated in most books on Spanish film -- with fictions, markets and institutions. Sally Faulkner's indispensable history reveals a different continuity and disparate set of Spanish images to the ones we might have thought we knew. -- Chris Perriam, Professor of Hispanic Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK
Faulkner's close textual analysis of a diverse array of films complements the books original and stimulating theoretical framework.
A History of Spanish Film is a new and exciting contribution to intellectual discourses about class, modernity, and the production and reception of Spanish cinema. Students and scholars alike will find this work indispensable in their teaching and research. -- Tatjana Pavlovic, Associate Professor, 20th-Century Spanish Film and Literature, Tulane University, US
Sally Faulkner's
A History of Spanish Film is a moveable feast. Departing from the tendency to understand history as a rehearsal of grand ideologies and to view--and valorize--Spanish cinema in terms of denunciation and protest, subversion and experimentation, it charts the rise of the middle class and a corresponding 'middlebrow cinema'. Through an interlocking series of close, chronologically ordered readings of representative films in Spanish from before and after the Civil War, Faulkner's study grapples with complex questions of modernization, popular culture, education, entertainment, consumerism, class realignment, and social
mobility --'upward,downward and stalled'-- in
motion pictures. -- Brad Epps, Professor of Spanish, University of Cambridge, UK
This book uses the concept of Spanish middlebrow cinema to explore the representation of class and social mobility across a century of Spanish cinema... The close textual analysis in combination with a nuanced reading of production, reception and changes in taste in Spain gives new insights into a range of films, including those that have already had acres written about them... A really interesting read. * Nobody Knows Anybody: A Spanish Cinema Blog *
This is an attractive and balanced book that throws new insights into research. -- Javier Jurado, Université Paris X/Carlos III Madrid * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 35.1 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations Textual Note Introduction: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 Chapter 1. Questions of Class and Questions of Art in Early Cinema Blood and Sand Chapter 2. Social Mobility and Cinema of the 1940s and 1950s: Consolation and Condemnation Chapter 3. Charting Upward Social Mobility: 1960s Films about the Middle Classes and the Middlebrow Chapter 4. The ‘Third Way’ and the Spanish Middlebrow Film in the 1970s Chapter 5. Miró Films and Middlebrow Cinema in the1980s Chapter 6: Middlebrow Cinema of the 1990s: From Miró to Cine social Chapter 7. From cine social to Heritage Cinema in Films of the 2000s Abbreviations and glossary Bibliography Index
