Module Information

This module will prepare students to understand modern Spanish cinema in its context and to recognize it as part of a cultural production that tries to respond to new tendencies in Spanish society, such as developments in thinking about identity, gender and neopostmodernity. This module will teach students to analyse films both from immanent and transcendent standpoints. During the module, short films and written text will be used to develop an overview of artistic representations of Spain in the last 20 years.

This module substitutes for SP2/350020 Seeing Spain through Spanish Cinema - cycle module 2007-9. Divided into four different topics, this module explores the most recent cinematic tendencies of Spanish cinema and seeks to understand these tendencies in relationship to the current cultural and socio-political situation of Spain. The first topic explores the concept of identity as espanolidad, which has been under discussion in Spain in the last two decades. The key texts studied will allow students to identify the ironic portrayal of a Spanish hero and the evaluation of Spanish stereotypes in the context of an intertextual pastiche. The second topic will allow students to discuss Spanish cinema as one which puts forward theses, but without resolving them, and to assess it as part of a cultural expression that uses ambiguity to raise wider cultural questions. The third topic covers the representation of women in recent cinema. Students will compare key films representative of Franco's regime's propagandist use of cinema, as in La gran familia, with modern representations of women, such as Princesas. The last topic will address Almodovar's cinema and the trend towards neo-posmodernity in his latest films.