Spanish visual culture
Cinema, television, internet
By Paul Julian Smith
Delivery Exc. North and South America
Delivery to North and South America
Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerDelivery Exc. North and South America
Delivery to North and South America
Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerBook Information
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 978-0-7190-7536-0
- Pages: 192
- Price: £15.99
- Published Date: November 2006
Description
This book is the first to explore three visual media in contemporary Spain: cinema, television and the internet. It also examines cultural products in each of these media in terms of three vital themes: emotion, location and nostalgia.
The first two chapters focus on emotion. They analyze the 'emotional imperative' in a recent Almodóvar feature film and in Spanish television's top-rated period drama, and investigate the politics of affect in TV drama in the last decade. The next pair of chapters deal with location. They use cultural geography to re-read contradictory accounts of the movida (the post-Franco cultural boom) and examine an attempt to anchor a US-derived genre (the youth movie) in the urban landscape of Madrid. The fifth and sixth chapters introduce the theme of location into nostalgia. They treat the unique cases of a successful Spanish heritage movie and a contemporary Spanish thriller remade in Hollywood. The peunultimate chapter investigates electronic artists and the virtual universe, and the book ends with a look at the implications of Hispano-Mexican co-productions and the interconnectedness of economic and aesthetic cultural forms.
Contents
Introduction: Three media, three themes
1 The emotional imperative: Almodóvar's Hable con ella (Talk to Her) and Televisión Española's Cuéntame cómo pasó ("Tell Me How It Happened")
2 Family plots: The politics of affect in television drama of the millennium
3 The movida relocated: press, chronicle, novel
4 Towards the Spanish youthmovie: Historias del Kronen
5 Spanish heritage, spanish cinema: The strange case of Juana la Loca
6 High anxiety: Amenábar's Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes)/Crowe and Cruise's Vanilla Sky
7 Virtual Spain: Manuel Castells and Spanish web art
8 Transatlantic traffic in recent Hispano-Mexican films
Author
Paul Julian Smith is Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge