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This chapter considers the subject of this book: the work of a contemporary Spanish film director, Daniel Calparsoro, in auteurist terms. This study of Calparsoro discusses not only Calparsoro's films but also the Spanish cinema of today and the ways in which it is studied, written about and presented. It aims to make explicit some of the ways in which certain films and production processes are implicitly deemed more desirable, more worthy of attention by academics, critics and audiences. It offers an overall presentation of Calparsoro and his total corpus of work to date in relation to trends and traditions within Spanish cinema, serving to problematise these. Thus Calparsoro is discussed against the background of specific developments in Spanish cinema since 1995, how both the film industry and critics perceived these developments, and how perceptions changed after Spanish cinema arguably fell into crisis from 2002. Calparsoro's style makes the critics uncomfortable, suggesting that, regardless of his own putative roots in an earlier Spanish cinema, his deviation from the increasing convergence of Spanish cine social and slick commercialism has irritated the critics, indicating in turn that their expectations, if not his, have changed.

This chapter examines Basque cinema in relation to Spanish cinema, arguing that it lies neither inside nor outside the Spanish border and instead rests on that very border. It shows that Basque cinema is the frontier itself by drawing a detailed map of that borderline terrain, its accidental and diverse topography, and its disputed zones of inclusion and exclusion. The chapter first considers the historical antecedents of Basque cinema and its rebirth in the years between 1979 and 1986 before turning to examples of Basque films that eschewed ideology as well as films that had the general tendency towards southbound travels. It then discusses the recurring appearance of the civil guard and the national police in Basque cinema, along with the emergence of a frontier-like condition of Basque movies that makes them extraordinarily useful in legitimizing the notion of a national or Post-National Spanish cinema. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the film Euskal pilota/La pelota vasca as a rigorous and definitive confirmation of the frontier quality of Basque cinema.

A key decade in world cinema, the 1960s was also a crucial era of change in Spain. This book analyses six films that reflect and interpret some of the political, social, economic and cultural transformations of this period: La gran familia (The Great Family, Palacios 1962), La ciudad no es para mí (The City's Not For Me, Lazaga 1965), Los farsantes (Frauds, Camus 1963), La tía Tula (Aunt Tula, Picazo 1964), Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta, Patino 1965) and La caza (The Hunt, Saura 1965). The coexistence of traditional and modern values following rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and the timid acceptance of limited change by Franco's authoritarian regime, are symptoms of the uneven modernity that scholars argue characterises Spain of the modern era. Contradiction – the unavoidable effect of that unevenness – is the conceptual terrain explored by the six filmmakers discussed here, whose work ranges across experiences of family and gender roles, rural and urban life, provincial and cosmopolitan mentalities, religious belief and ceremony, and youth and ageing.

As the first chapter of this book demonstrates, moviegoers mainly knew Geraldine Chaplin in the 1960s as the daughter of cinema’s most famous silent clown. Nevertheless, the expansive, transnational character of her career is already in evidence in the international assortment of films she made during that decade (in Italy, Britain, and France.). The transnational quality of her persona is also important to an understanding to the work discussed in this chapter, the films she made with Spanish auteur Carlos Saura between 1967 and 1979. In these films with Saura, who was also Chaplin’s partner during this period, Chaplin creatively intervenes in the politics and cinema of Spain during the final years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose repressive cruelties are dealt with both explicitly and implicitly in Saura’s films. Chaplin’s performances in Saura’s films, the chapter argues, creatively intervene in traditional understandings of womanhood in Franco’s Spain, all the while demonstrating a fervent commitment to use performance as a vehicle for liberation.

This chapter provides conclusion for the book. Calparsoro's work brings into prominence some of the assumptions that undergird the framework of this work, and above all the concept of the auteur itself. In addition, Calparsoro's cinema is violent, this being the characteristic for which it is probably most noted. Unequal power relations always carry the possibility of violence; and much of the violence that occurs within Calparsoro's work reflects this. The violence of urban youth has formed a regular part of social realist cinema in Europe, while with his move to genre cinema Calparsoro has so far picked on specific genres that tend to violence. Violence is obviously inherent in the war film; and an ever-present possibility with horror, lurking beneath the surface of Ausentes until manifesting itself at the film's climax. When Calparsoro turns to war and horror genres the critique of violence is more muted. By the time the director immerses himself into genre film he has to some extent already been pigeonholed as the violent enfant terrible of Spanish cinema and critics are able to pigeonhole the violence of the films in exactly the same way: they make use of an auteurist conceptualisation to dismiss more detailed consideration of the representation of violence in Spanish cinema.

This book explores Spanish cinema in the post-national period in relation to four topoi: borders, violence, travels, and mothers. More specifically, it considers the negotiation of the borders of the nation; the persistence of the old obsession with violence; the newfound insatiable appetite for travelling; and the vindication of the mother as a benign emblem of the land and its people. It argues that there is a narrative in Spanish cinema, taken as a broad collective discourse, that ties the four filmic iterations together and proposes a nation whose specificity must be precisely its impurity — difference as essence — a hybrid nation located at the temporal and spatial crossroads between past and present, tradition and novelty, inside and outside, on and beyond. Focusing on the period from 1975 to the end of the century, the book shows how a number of Spanish fims have been involved in the task of helping to reshape a national identity previously dictated by General Francisco Franco.

This chapter examines the theme of travel in Spanish films, with particular emphasis on how Spanish cinema emerged as a venue for offering trips and destinations. It considers the itineraries of choice in this burgeoning tripping enterprise in Spanish cinema, such as the domestic ‘inter-autonomic’ trip between the different geographical and cultural territories of Spain; the Western outing, or ‘inning,’ mainly sold as a return to Europe and the West after so many years of absence; the African visit, with the distant traveller often showing up at home in a sort of reversed, stationary voyage; and the Transatlantic journey to and from Latin America. In order to theorize all these cinematic odysseys of sorts, the chapter looks at the old and historically Spanish practice of ‘transhumance’ and shows that this travelling philosophy permeates Spanish cinematic voyages in the post-modern and post-national periods.

This chapter focuses on the television–cinema relationship in Spain. After a brief reconstruction of the industrial relationships which have drastically influenced the history of Spanish cinema at least since the late 1960s, attention is drawn to some major cases that illustrate the extent to which the existing interchanges between the two media did work as a creative driving force. At the very heart of this intersection, one finds the film-makers, who would come back and forth from television to cinema, and vice versa, asserting themselves as good professionals in the two media, and their programmes and films. To what extent it is possible to devise some kind of contamination between low-high (art and cinema) and low-low (television and, when times are ripe, videogames) culture at both levels is the central issue to be addressed, along with questions regarding the representation of television along the way.

This chapter explores the relationship between performance and identity in ‘Spanish heritage films’, a type of national cinema that operates from within intermedial, intertextual, and transnational networks. It discusses the particular cases of El perro del hortelano/The Dog in the Manger (Pilar Miró, 1997) and Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2006), and describes their domestic popularity and international failure. It argues that these successes and failures ultimately produce a national cultural discourse that (despite the adoption of foreign cinematic aesthetics) fails to be legible to foreign audiences familiar with those very aesthetics. In studying the foreign-influenced performance style of the actors of these two films, the chapter tracks their attempts to reach local and foreign audiences. The history of these particular acting styles—and in spite of the transnational aesthetics that guide these films—are haunted by earlier performances and roles that ultimately provide a national opportunity for Spanish audiences to experience history, cinema, and mourning.

This chapter examines the theme of violence in Spanish films, focusing on the larger cultural context of its pervasiveness in the national cinema. It first considers the trajectory of Rafael Azcona, a screenwriter whose concept of the nation is aptly encapsulated by the Spanish serial imagery of violent and violated eyes. By drawing on the oeuvre of Azcona, the chapter highlights the maze of domestic cruelties and fierce squabbles endemic to Spanish cinema up to the present. It also analyzes Agustí Villaronga's 1986 film Tras el cristal (In a Glass Cage), and particularly the way it strikes at and through the eye as an embodiment of the endogamous character of Spanish violence. Two instances of ocular violence are thus revealed: the one perpetrated against the eye, which is compulsive in Spanish culture, and the one unleashed by its own unmerciful gaze. The chapter describes the eye as an accusing witness and voyeur of the cruelty as well as the subject and object of a brutality that returns incessantly against itself.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the periods, genres and key theoretical issues discussed in the book, paying special attention to the political importance of the destape films of the 1970s and the films of the transition more widely. The chapter provides a close analysis of two important erotic comedies. These are used as illustrative examples of the issues discussed throughout the book and of the evolution of eroticism in Spanish cinema since the abolition of censorship until now: Juan Bosch’s Cuarenta años sin sexo/Forty years without sex (1978) and the recent Kiki, el amor se hace/Quickie, Love is So (2016), directed by Paco León.

This chapter considers the impact of the Spanish television programme Cine de barrio on popular discourses surrounding national film and performance styles. First airing in 1995, Cine de barrio pairs the viewing of a classic national film (generally made sometime between 1950 and the late 70s, after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco) with a talk show segment between a host and an invited guest. By linking discourses on cultural and historical memory with the subsequent revival of classic national cinema brought about by Cine de barrio, the chapter explores the relationship between actors, their films and their audiences; the affective response produced in this encounter, it argues, generates a nostalgia for classic national cinema that also influences contemporary Spanish film. The chapter also addresses the links between the seemingly disparate Spanish films of the 70s and the comedic box office blowouts of the 2010s, as well as arguing for a sustained reflection on nostalgia, memory, and their connections to acting and performance.

This chapter explores the erotic allure of the kiss in 1920s Spanish films, paying special attention to discussions about the cinematic kiss in the Spanish specialised press at the time. It reveals an obsessive fascination with the technological mediation of the Hollywood kiss on the one hand, and, on the other, a highly racialised discourse about Japan’s prohibition on kissing, used by the Spanish printed media to present a comparatively modern image of 1920s Spain.

This chapter explores what the author calls ‘the middlebrow erotic’ in Spanish cinema. It argues that after the abolition of censorship in 1977, eroticism in Spanish film ‘extended beyond subject matter and became the very grammar by which a new film language was constructed’. In turn, that new language was used to express the new freedoms afforded by democracy. The author illustrates this theory with a fresh reading of an important film of this period, Eloy de la Iglesia’s El diputado/Confessions of a Congressman (1978), demonstrating how the erotic is used to didactically explain previously forbidden political and sexual tendencies and, indeed, how these go hand in hand with each other.

This chapter examines the fortunes of the maternal figure as an explicit or indirect representation of the nation — the mother of the land — in post-National Spanish cinema. It shows how the maternal emblem as image of the nation has been transformed from years of indignities during most of Spain's modern cultural history, courtesy of Spanish films that began to embark on an unprecedented defense of the mother in competition with the previous icons of victimization and malaise, and to push for the rebirth of the mother nation at the end of the millennium more generally. The chapter investigates this revival and transformation of the mother into a powerful protean figure by discussing a series of movies from the 1980s onwards. It analyzes one such film, Pedro Almodóvar's Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother), and its use of the medical trope as a model of the best measures to manufacture the national.