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This book offers a radically new account of the rich and varied culture of contemporary Spain. It focuses on three intellectuals who chronicle contemporary life (including journalist Francisco Umbral); three filmmakers who engage with the many nationalisms of the Spanish state (Victor Erice,Bigas Luna, and Julio Medem); and three crucial topics that are expressed in many media (the replaying of history, the rise and fall of the city, and the practice of everyday life). Ranging from the ethnographic photography of Cristina Garcia Rodero to the high tech architecture of SantiagoCalatrava and from the hyperrealist painting of Antonio Lopez to the neo-flamenco dance of Joaquin Cortes, this book is also the first to draw on theorists of the intellectual field, the production of space, and the arts of bricolage (Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau). Refutingthe charge that contemporary Spanish culture is trivial or superficial, this book argues that it is fully engaged in the aesthetic and historical project of modernity.
Isolated by the repressions and censorship of Franco's regime, Spanish cinema developed distinctive style and content from the 1930s to the 1970s, largely without reference to its international counterparts. Through a series of close readings of films made in the Republican period under Franco and more recently under socialism, contributors here seek to present a clearer picture of Spanish national cinema.
This interdisciplinary collection explores four distinct perspectives about the mask, as object of use for protection, identity, and disguise. In part I, contributors address human identities within collective social performance, with chapters on performativity and the far right and masked identities in political resistance and communication. Part II focuses on the mask as a signifying object with strong representational challenges, exploring representations in festivals, literature, and film. Part III investigates the ambiguous use of the mask as a protective and concealing element, delving into visual culture and digital social media contexts. Finally, Part VI draws on the work of Levinas and Deleuze to investigate a philosophical view of the mask that addresses memory and ethics within intersubjective relationships. Questioning the contemporary world, using communication, sociology, visual culture, and philosophical theory, the volume provides a pedagogical and formative perspective on the mask.
Encourages a deep reading of a selection of essential Spanish films.
Focusing on Spanish culture and society in the second half of the twentieth century, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies traverses a variety of disciplines: literature, film studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and history, to examine crucial moments of cultural transition. Beginning with an analysis of the period of autarky—Spain's economic, cultural, and ideological isolation under Francisco Franco's regime— Pavlović then explores the tumultuous passage to capitalism in the late 1950s and 1960s. She follows this by revisiting the complex political situation following Franco's death and points out the difficulties in Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy. Combining a strong theoretical background with a detailed study of marginalized texts (La fiel infantería), genres (the Spanish comedy known as the comedia sexy celtibérica), and film directors (Jesús Franco), Pavlović reveals the construction of Spanish national identity through years of cultural tensions.
Students and film scholars will appreciate this unique volume.
This volume offers a detailed chronological account of the history of Spanish cinema.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century a considerable number of Spanish films were involved in the task of essaying the nation, that is, of attempting to make it or make it over, of trying to reshape a national identity inexorably dictated by General Francisco Franco up to his death. The book explores four major issues in this regard: 1) the filmic negotiations of the borders of the nation, focusing particularly on the debated and controversial development of Basque cinema vis- -vis the films produced in the rest of Spain; 2) the persistence of the old obsession with violence, thought of as an inescapable native trait, in a large amount of post-dictatorial films; 3) the newfound insati...
Daniel Canogar's photographs and photographic installations have long dwelt on issues of immersion and realism, of corporeal images and sensations, of light instrumentalized to reveal figments and traces of visual matter. His consistent use of photography undermines and transcends simple questions of photographic realism through play and variable scales, obsessive pseudo-repetition, and disconcerting projection procedures and surfaces. The Zero Gravity opus contains Departure, a forest of manipulable fiber optic cables that obliges spectators to blaze their own image trails; Pulse of Darkness projects an endless wall-to-wall loop of photographed bones; and Leap of Faith adopts a panoramic cylindrical structure as an ethereal white surface charged with dozens of floating bodies. Daniel Canogar was born in 1964 in Madrid, where he continues to live and work. He studied visual communications and received a Master's in photography from New York University and the International Center for Photography.