Module Overview

This module introduces students to Spanish national cinema through a director-based perspective, in which auteur theory will act as an overarching theme running through the course in order to open dialogue between Spanish canonical film authors and the history of film, styles and movements reflected in their work, the constrictions, pressures and liberties of the film industries where they worked, and the constrictions and pressures imposed by the ideological, socio-economic, political and cultural structures during their time as directors. The module aims to reveal Spanish cinema’s principal aesthetic and thematic preoccupations and challenges and how “Spanishness” is embraced, criticised, questioned or denied vis-à-vis the development of the film medium, the hegemony of Hollywood cinema and the influences from other European national cinemas.

The module will explore Spanish cinema through representative films by major Spanish film auteurs such as Luis Buñuel, J.A. Bardem, García Berlanga, Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, Pedro Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, Julio Medem, Icíar Bollaín and Alejandro Amenábar. In combination with auteurist frameworks, the course will focus on theories of pastiche and parody, transnational cinema, modernism and postmodernism in film, and history and memory on film. The course will enable students to decipher motifs and themes that repeat in the work of the filmmakers studied, while offering them a broader range of analytical tools through which Spanish national cinema can be debated and questioned.  The module will  include study and analysis of determining factors outside the auteurist perspective such as mechanisms of production and distribution, the censorship and state’s policies for film production and development, representations of gender and sexual identities, artistic and technical collaborations, the ideological use of stars, the political implications of international co-productions, the effects of modernity and modernism in art, and psychological processes and interpretations of narrating and fictionalising memory through the medium of film.

Through film analysis, guided and independent reading, and discussion of different articles and texts, the course will allow students to read films both as stylistic expressions of the personality, intellectual claims, or genius of their director, and as cultural products of the historical, ideological, cultural, industrial, institutional, and socioeconomic contexts that revealed or muffled their voices within the cinema industry. Students will be encouraged to question concepts of national, cultural, political and sexual identities, seeking to explore human, moral, spiritual, historical and political change and conflict.