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183 pages

English

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Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium provides a new approach to the study of contemporary Spanish cinema between 2000 and 2015, by analysing films that represent both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture side by side. The two film cultures are represented by Goya-winning films and the biggest box-office successes. By analysing the chronological trajectory of the country’s most important films over this period, Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium examines contemporary Spain’s national identity, culture and film industry.

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	15 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789380071
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,4050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover images: (top) Alberto Rodríguez’s La isla minima. © 2014, Antena
3 Films, S.L.U., Sacromonte Films, S.L., Atípica Films, S.L. and
(bottom) Emilio Martínez-Lázaro’s Ocho apellidos vascos . © 2013,
Lazona Films, S.L., KowalskiFilms, S.L., Snow Films, A.I.E.
Production manager: Naomi Curston
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-006-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-008-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-007-1
Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Best Spanish Films of the New Millennium
Chapter 1: 2000–04
Chapter 2: 2005–09
Chapter 3: 2010–15
Chapter 4: The Winners and Beyond
Appendices
Filmography: Goya and Box-Office Winners, 2000–15
References
About the Author
Index
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to McDaniel College for funding my sabbatical research that gave me the opportunity to work on this book. Class discussions with my students in my course on el cine español del nuevo milenio helped shape my analysis. I appreciate the software help from my colleague Mohamed Esa and from Anita Thiernan in Academic Support. I would also like to express my appreciation to my wife, Isabel Valiela, for her support throughout this project.
Some of the ideas expressed in this book were published in the following publications and appear here with permission (the translations to English are my own):
“The Spanish Golden Age Revisited: Agustín Díaz Yañez’s Alatriste (2006) and Antonio del Real’s La conjura del Escorial (2008).” The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies , vol. 8, Fall 2010, pp. 113–28.
“ Pa negre ( Pan negro ): Bildungsroman/bildungsfilm de memoria histórica.” La nueva literatura hispánica , vol. 16, 2012, pp. 397–416.
“Un viaje por el tardofranquismo: Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados. ” Crítica Hispánica , vol. 38, no. 1, 2016, pp. 157–72.
“ Blancanieves : A Film Adaptation of ‘Snow White’ with a Spanish Twist.” Marvels & Tales , vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, pp. 328–53.
Special appreciation goes to the following, who provided permission for stills and/or the images that illustrate this book:
El Bola , courtesy of EGEDA
La comunidad , courtesy of EGEDA
Mar adentro , courtesy of EGEDA
La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón , courtesy of EGEDA
Torrente 3 , courtesy of EGEDA
Te doy mis ojos, courtesy of EGEDA
Blancanieves , courtesy of Arcadia Motion Pictures
Camino , courtesy of Mediaproducción S.L.U. y Películas Pendelton S.A.
Celda 211 , courtesy of Vaca Films
La isla mínima , courtesy of Atípica Films, SacromonteFilms, Atresmedia Cine
La soledad , courtesy of Jaime Rosales
Los lunes al sol , courtesy of Mediaproducción S.L.U.
No habrá paz para los malvados, courtesy of LaZona Films
Ocho apellidos catalanes, courtesy of LaZona Films
Ocho apellidos vascos, courtesy of LaZona Films
Pa negre , courtesy of Massa D’Or Produccions
Truman , courtesy of Imposible Films
Volver , courtesy of El Deseo D.A., S.L.U.
Introduction

The Best Spanish Films of the New Millennium
“A nd the winner is…”: Each year, national film academies around the world celebrate their country’s best films, and both those in the film industry and audiences at home eagerly await the results. 1 In Spain, the Academy (Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de España) has celebrated its Goya Awards since 1987. And yet, the winner for each year could also be seen from another perspective: the film that is the biggest box-office success of the year. This study analyzes the films that Spanish society deems the most important in the new millennium—the winners in these two categories from 2000 to 2015—in order to examine questions of national identity in relation to the Spanish cinematic industry. The list of winners in each category is in Appendix 1. 2
National identity is a complicated question, and with regard to Spain, perhaps even more so. Benedict Anderson portrays a nation as an “imagined political community” of people who perceive themselves as part of the group in question (6) (Juan F. Egea notes that Anderson’s book deals with the creation of nations and does not mention film, so “film must help in the refashioning (or reimagining) of a community” [12].) Then what about Spain? It is a country with four co-official languages—Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician—and different regional cultures; the notion of “nation” or “country” is often blurred, as in “the Basque Country,” or “the Catalan Countries.” During the Franco regime, the languages and cultures of the traditional historical regions of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia were suppressed. The transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy allowed for a new flourishing of these languages and cultures, but today some Catalans would like to secede from Spain, an issue that has both cultural and legal ramifications. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas believe, “it is increasingly difficult to talk confidently any more of a singular Spanish identity as such, as Spain becomes both globalized and internally fragmented through processes of political devolution” ( Contemporary 5). Although the Spanish language dominates the film industry, movies are made in each of Spain’s languages, and in 2010, for the first time, a movie in a language other than Spanish, the Catalan Pa negre ( Black Bread , 2010), won the Goya for Best Film. This film and others in the regional languages are examples of “micro-regionalism” (Kinder, Blood Cinema 388 ff.) and how “Nationally specific cinema […] is not bound to the homogenizing myths of nationalism and national identity” (Crofts 388).
Spanish society has wrestled with the question of identity for decades. During the Franco regime, in order to attract foreign visitors, the Ministry of Tourism invented the slogan, “Spain is Different.” The regime wanted to create a vision of Spain as an exotic destination based on controversial markers of Spanish identity: bullfighting, flamenco, and Carmen . With Franco’s death and the transition to democracy, Spaniards tried to overcome this legacy, and one of the elements of this effort was creating a new vision of Spain in which it is fully European. This phenomenon was captured in the cover story of the influential weekly, Cambio 16 , on October 26, 1987, which showed a map of Europe with Spain missing, and the headline, “Where Is Spain?” For film, as both a manifestation of culture and as an industry, this vision has an impact on its cinematic productions, as Spanish film is increasingly transnational.
Another question would be “what is Spanish”? or “what is Spanishness?” Cristina Sánchez-Conejero states that Spanishness “emerges as an openly plural concept in post-Franco Spain—ethnically, religiously, and even linguistically” (4). But the term “Spanishness” itself is complicated. Valeria Camporesi states that in Spanish cinema, there are two terms regarding “Spanishness”—“españolada,” which is a “synonym of folklore, picturesqueness, local color, a peculiar interpretation (well or poorly done) of national culture and customs,” and on the other hand, “españolidad,” as “synonymous of national culture, Spanish cultural identity” (30).
According to Núria Triana-Toribio, “Spanishness” is “a term which refers to the essential features of Spanish identity, and as such, it is a fiction, a fantasy” but it is a term that “cannot be avoided” and appears in “two different forms as españolada (generally negative) and españolidad (usually complimentary)” ( Spanish National Cinema 6–7), with the former being “comedies and musicals set in Andalusia” (62) that therefore play on stereotypes of what is Spanish. Nevertheless, humorous takes on these stereotypes resulted in Spain’s biggest box-office hit ever, Ocho apellidos vascos ( Spanish Affair , 2014).
One of the categories that Stephen Crofts uses in his analysis of nation-state cinemas is “national-cultural specificity” (39), and writing about Danish cinema, Mette Hjort states that recognizable national locations, language, and national actors “that mirror the material culture of Danes, qualify as being about Denmark,” but he believes that the thematization of nation requires “flagging” or “foregrounding” of these elements, which can occur through choice of shots, dialog, acting styles, etc. (108, 111). The same can be applied to Spanish cinema, and our close textual readings of the films include these elements throughout, but there are instances where they are absent. Regarding Spanish national identity or “Spanishness” in cinema, Robert Sklar states:
It takes several forms. One involves the ways that a film may communicate or register the distinctive qualities of a place or a culture; what intonations, gestures, sights, manners, social relations mark a way of living that speaks specifically of Spain
but perhaps this “Spanishness” is “too subtle or complicated or fraught to be addressed in the contemporary transnational cinema context; maybe the marketplace is not interested in what makes Spain, Spain” (xvi).
Focusing on Catalan cinema, Joan M. Minguet Batllori delineates the following criteria for a “national cinema”: the language of the country; having screen adaptations of the country’s literary works; the presence of historical and sociological motifs of the country;