All About Spanish Cinema

3 units

This course surveys major themes in recent Peninsular Cinema. While the main focus will be on films from the past decade, we will spend a few weeks studying the most important trends since the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the course, such issues as representation of the war, resistance to Francoism, nationalism, globalization, immigration, and youth culture will be addressed; the construction of memory and the representations of violence will be underlying themes. In addition to situating the films in a historical, cultural, and political context, we will study different theoretical approaches to film and visual culture stemming from psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial studies, as the course also aims to provide students with the necessary tools to analyze and write about film. We will view works by Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar, Montxo Armendáriz, Iciar Bollaín, Victor Erice, Fernando León de Aranoa, Alex de la Iglesia, Julio Medem, Basilio Martín Patiño, and Carlos Saura, among others. The course will be divided into 10 different sections. These sections delineate a progression of literary, historical and theoretical issues that will allow us to develop critical positions in relation to films discussed in class as well to cultural developments in twentieth-century Spain. Requirements include active seminar participation, a presentation, and a final paper.