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This book focuses on some of the best known and most important
books, feature films, and television series in contemporary Span,
and addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic
studies and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and
genre and transitivity.
Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an
extraordinary wealth of television drama. Drawing on both national
practices of production and reception and international theories of
textual analysis this book offers the first study of contemporary
quality TV drama in two countries where television has displaced
cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative.
As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once
reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen.
Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an
extraordinary wealth of television drama. Drawing on both national
practices of production and reception and international theories of
textual analysis this book offers the first study of contemporary
quality TV drama in two countries where television has displaced
cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative.
As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once
reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen.
Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie
directed by Alfonso Cuaron and co-written by him and his brother
Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on
to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native
Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time.
Its teenage protagonists Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna went on
to be major stars of global cinema. Yet on its release the film was
vilified by established Mexican critics as a coarse comedy and
'Penthouse fantasy' of youthful lust for an older woman. Paul
Julian Smith's lucid study of the film argues that Y Tu Mama
Tambien not only addresses with playful seriousness such major
issues as gender, race, class, and space, which are yet more urgent
now than they were on its release; but that the film's apparently
casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style, one which
brings together popular genre film and auteurist experiment. Smith
suggests Y Tu Mama Tambien remains an example for world cinema of
how a very local film can connect with a global audience that is
ignorant of such niceties. Combining production and distribution
history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives,
with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuaron's
film as an enduring masterpiece that hides in plain sight as an
ephemeral teen movie.
This pioneering book is the first to argue that cinema and
television in Spain only make sense when considered together as
twin vehicles for screen fiction. The Spanish audiovisual sector is
now one of the most successful in the world, with feature films
achieving wider distribution in foreign markets than nations with
better known cinematic traditions and newly innovative TV formats,
already dominant at home, now widely exported. Beyond the
industrial context, which has seen close convergence of the two
media, this book also examines the textual evidence for crossover
between cinema and television at the level of narrative and form.
The book, which is of interest to both Hispanic and media studies,
gives new readings of some well-known texts and discovers new or
forgotten ones. For example it compares Almodovar's classic feature
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios ('Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown') with his production company El Deseo's first
venture into TV production, the 2006 series also known as Mujeres
('Women'). It also reclaims the lost history of female flat share
comedy on Spanish TV from the 1960s to the present day. It examines
a wide range of prize winning workplace drama on TV, from police
shows, to hospital and legal series. Amenabar's Mar adentro ('The
Sea Inside') an Oscar-winning film on the theme of euthanasia, is
contrasted with its antecedent, an episode of national network
Tele5's top-rated drama Periodistas. The book also traces the
attempt to establish a Latin American genre, the telenovela, in the
very different context of Spanish scheduling. Finally it proposes
two new terms: 'Auteur TV' charts the careers of creators who have
established distinctive profiles in television over decades;
'sitcom cinema' charts, conversely, the incursion of television
aesthetics and economics into the film comedies that have proved
amongst the most popular features at the Spanish box office in the
last decade.
Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish
film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and
vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of
innovation in the production of "transmedia" works that bridge
narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an
engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing
genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and
political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the
work of key figures like Pedro Almodovar, comparing media
depictions of Spain's economic woes, or giving long-overdue
critical attention to quality television series, Smith's book is a
consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.
Gender representation in Mexico's contemporary audio-visual
landscape This book focusses on gender and the audio-visual
landscape of Mexico since 2010, examining popular culture as
expressed in the still distinct but rapidly converging media forms
of cinema, television, and streaming platforms. It tracks how
changes in producers and genres coincide with changes in gender
representations and engages with depictions of feminism, women's
sexuality, masculinity, and teen homosexuality. It aims to move
beyond the art, auteur or specialist film that is vaunted by film
festivals but little seen by Mexicans at home, focussing instead on
a wider world of media content and practices available in Mexico
itself. Close attention is also paid to the social media footprint
of the productions studied and the way it is used for promotion and
engagement with the target audience. The book proposes a new
approach to audio-visual studies, combining textual analysis with
field surveys and the useof industrial sources perhaps unfamiliar
to scholars in Anglo-American Hispanism and Latin American media
studies in the UK and USA
Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish
film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and
vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of
innovation in the production of "transmedia" works that bridge
narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an
engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing
genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and
political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the
work of key figures like Pedro Almodovar, comparing media
depictions of Spain's economic woes, or giving long-overdue
critical attention to quality television series, Smith's book is a
consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.
Multiplatform Media in Mexico is the first book to treat the
exciting, interconnected fields of cinema, television, and internet
in Mexico over the last decade, fields that combine to be called
multiplatform media. Combining industrial analysis of a major
audiovisual field at a time of growth and change with close
readings of significant texts on all screens, acclaimed author Paul
Julian Smith deftly details these new audiovisual trends. The book
includes perspectives on local reporting on the ground, as covered
in the chapter documenting media response to the 2017 earthquake.
And, for the first time in this field, the book draws throughout on
star studies, tracing the distinct profiles of actors who migrate
from one medium to another. As a whole, Smith's analyses illustrate
the key movements in screen media in one of the world's largest
media and cultural producing nations. These perspectives connect to
and enrich scholarship across Latin American, North American, and
global cases.
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 Almodovar 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. --
.
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 Almodovar 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. --
.
A new guide to Spain's most popular and dynamic medium, which
celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2006. Any follower of
Spanish cinema who turns to television finds that the locally
produced programs most appreciated by both audiences and critics
are as creative and original as any feature film. This book, the
first of its kind, gives close readings of TV programmes broadcast
from the 1970s to the present day. They embrace drama, comedy, and
talk/reality shows and are currently available on DVD. It also
treats the obsessive theme of television in Almodovar, Spain's most
celebrated film director, arguing for a re-reading of his work in
the light of TV studies. In addition to analysing particular
programmes, this book examines TV channels, production companies,
governments, and the role of the press, academy, and audience. PAUL
JULIAN SMITH is Professor of Spanish at the University of
Cambridge.
In the last decade, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has grown from
critical darling of the
film circuit scene to mainstream success. Frequently comic, often
deadly serious, always
visually glorious, his recent films range from the Academy
Award-winning drama "Talk to
Her" to the 2011 horror film "The Skin I Live In." Though they are
ambitious and varied in style,
each is a distinctive innovation on the themes that have defined
his work.
" Desire Unlimited "is the classic film-by-film assessment of
Almodovar's oeuvre,
now updated to include his most recent work. Still the only study
of its kind in English,
it vigorously confirms its original argument that beneath
Almodovar's genius for
comedy and visual pleasure lies a filmmaker whose work deserves to
be taken with the
utmost seriousness.
"From the Hardcover edition."
Explores the rich and varied LGBT cinema and television of Mexico
since the new millennium. Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since
2000 provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent
audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico
since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author
Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship
between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year
2000 because of the political shift that happened within the
government-the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted
out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial
and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was
known at the time as simply ""the change"" (""el cambio"") at the
start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and
acknowledgment of the LGBT community. Divided into five chapters,
Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and
production processes in the Mexican film and television industry.
It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico
that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter
looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed
youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay
series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected
features and shorts by Mexico's sole internationally distributed
art house director, Julian Hernandez. The third chapter explores
the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth
chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or
trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the
rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico's
dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the
telenovela. The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series,
Queer Mexico is a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in
media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of
Latin America.
The Theatre of Garcia Lorca offers radical new readings of his
major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies,
psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It
provides fascinating historical accounts of productions in
different times and places, from New York in the 1930s to Madrid in
the 1980s. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as
Gregorio Maranon, Langston Hughes, Andre Gide, and Lluis Pasqual,
enabling us to see his theatre in a new light. In addition, the
book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which
returns to Freud's early clinical texts. Examining the complex and
productive intersection of history and fantasy that is
characteristic both of Garcia Lorca's theatre and of the cult to
which it has given rise, this study offers a thorough reassessment
of Lorca's work.
The Theatre of García Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Marañón, Langston Hughes, André Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theater in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud's early clinical texts.
This is the first book to analyze Spanish and Spanish-American
literature in light of several theories of sexuality advanced since
Freud. Bringing into discussion such writers as Fuentes, Neruda,
Garcia Lorca, Galdos, and St. Teresa of Avila, Smith draws on
critical approaches derived from Marx, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes,
and French theoretical feminism (Kristeva and Irigaray). He argues
that in spite of the variety of texts and theories treated, there
are three broad areas of coherence or coincidence: the status of
women in a male culture; the possibility of resistance to
authority; and the role of the body as protagonist in that
resistance.
This book, the first study of its kind to adopt a
post-structuralist viewpoint, offers new readings of the major
texts of the Spanish Renaissance, or Golden Age. Beginning with a
comparison of Renaissance and modern theories of discourse, the
main substance of the book appeals to terms borrowed from Jacques
Derrida for the analysis of the three most important genres of the
period: lyric poetry, picaresque narrative, and drama. Authors
discussed include Gongora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderon, and
Cervantes, the popularity of Don Quijote being attributed to its
(apparent) repression of characteristics common to other Golden Age
texts. In the conclusion it is suggested that Spain itself is the
place of marginality, the supplement to a Europe which cannot admit
it but dare not exclude it. Writing in the Margin is addressed to
all specialists in Spanish literature and in the comparative
literature of the Renaissance. There are translations of the
Spanish quotations.
This book is the first to explore the interaction of three media in
contemporary Spain. Focusing on some of the best known and most
important books, feature films, and television series in the
country (including novelist Antonio Munoz Molina, director Pedro
Almodovar, and the Spanish version of telenovela Ugly Betty), it
addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic studies
and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and genre
and transitivity. Much of the material is very recent and thus as
yet unstudied. The book also focuses on the representation of
gender, sexuality, and transnationalism in these texts. Drawing on
approaches from both the humanities and social sciences it combines
close readings of key texts with the analysis of production
processes, media institutions, audiences, and reception.
Over the last decade, visibility and sexuality have become a major
theme in Spanish and Cuban cinema, literature and art. Vision
Machines explores this development in the light of contemporary
history and recent theoretical accounts of sight by writers
including Paul Virilio, Gianni Vattimo and Teresa de Lauretis. The
very visible women of Almodovar's cinema are Paul Julian Smith's
first subject. He shows how, in his early Dark Habits, lesbianizes
the look, putting women's pleasure at the centre of the frame, and
then examines Almodovar's recent film, Kika, where the conflict
between cinema and video is played out in the bodies of women:
good, bad and ugly. Moving the focus to Cuba, Smith discussed the
reception in Europe and North America of Nestor Almendro's
remarkable documentary on gays in Cuba, Improper Conduct, and
traces the trial of visibility to which effeminate men were
exposed. He compares Amendor's work with the autobiography of exile
novelist Reinaldo Arenas, which revels in graphic sex, and also
looks at the first Cuban film with a gay theme, Gutierrez Alea's
Strawberry and Chocolate. Smith returns to Spain to consider the
response of artists and intellectuals to the public invisibility of
AIDS in a country with one of the highest rates of HIV transmission
in the Eurpean Union. Drawing on Anglo-American debates on the
representation of AIDS, he concentrates on the one major
intervention by Spanish scholars and artists, Love and Rage, and on
the only figure in any medium to address AIDS in his aesthetic
practice, the conceptual artist and video-maker Pepe Espaliu. He
concludes with a fascinating account of Julio Medem's pathbreaking
film from 1993, The Red Squirrel, which has opened up a new
approach to two formerly taboo subjects: Basque nationalism and
female sexuality.
Entiendes? is literally translated as Do you understand? Do you get
it? But those who do get it will also hear within this question a
subtler meaning: Are you queer? Are you one of us? The issues of
gay and lesbian identity represented by this question are explored
for the first time in the context of Spanish and Hispanic
literature in this groundbreaking anthology.
Combining intimate knowledge of Spanish-speaking cultures with
contemporary queer theory, these essays address texts that share
both a common language and a concern with lesbian, gay, and
bisexual identities. Using a variety of approaches, the
contributors tease the homoerotic messages out of a wide range of
works, from chronicles of colonization in the Caribbean to recent
Puerto Rican writing, from the work of Cervantes to that of the
most outrageous contemporary Latina performance artists. This
volume offers a methodology for examining work by authors and
artists whose sexuality is not so much open as an open secret,
respecting, for example, the biographical privacy of writers like
Gabriela Mistral while responding to the voices that speak in their
writing. Contributing to an archeology of queer discourses,
Entiendes? also includes important studies of terminology and
encoded homosexuality in Argentine literature and Caribbean
journalism of the late nineteenth century.
Whether considering homosexual panic in the stories of Borges,
performances by Latino AIDS activists in Los Angeles, queer lives
in turn-of-the-century Havana and Buenos Aires, or the mapping of
homosexual geographies of 1930s New York in Lorca's Ode to Walt
Whitman, Entiendes? is certain to stir interest at the crossroads
of sexual and national identities while proving to be an invaluable
resource.
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