Composed of three sections, Historical Recuperation, Sexual Reinscription, and Marketing Transfiguration: Money/Politics/Regionalism, Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation is a collection of essays that examine the ways in which Spanish cinema has both defined and constructed a national identity in the latter half of the twentieth century under a transformative climate of repression, democratization, social liberation, and globalism. […]
Indecent Exposures: Buñuel, Saura, Erice and Almodóvar by Gwynne Edwards examines the unique influence and residual legacy of the Spanish Civil War on the films of four notable Spanish directors: Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, and Pedro Almodóvar. Edwards examines three Luis Buñuel films, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, and Tristana in order to characterize […]
Ingeniously constructed as parallel metafilms – one, Ray X’s (Rubén Ochandiano) behind the scenes documentary that illustrates the intersection (and disjunction) between reality and fiction; the other, Mateo’s (Lluís Homar) reconstruction of a doomed film project made 14 years earlier that reflects the role of the filmmaker as archaeologist and conjurer – Pedro Almodóvar’s wry, […]
From the Saul Bass-inspired opening credit sequence of peeling, layered billboard posters, Pedro Almodóvar evokes the densely layered cinema of Alfred Hitchchock to create a reverent, yet continuously inventive, exquisitely realized, and brilliantly modulated comic melodrama in Bad Education. Ostensibly a story about a filmmaker (Fele Martinez) suffering from a creative block (who, as the […]
A dashing former matador named Diego Montes (Nacho Martínez), prematurely retired after a career-ending injury, rehearses the principal tenets of the art of the kill at a converted classroom on his estate to a group of aspiring bullfighters, including an unlikely, hypersensitive student named Angel Giménez (Antonio Banderas). The training lecture then cuts to the […]
An early episode in Dark Habits showing a group of cloistered nuns’ giddy excitement over the declaration by Mother Superior Julia (Julieta Serrano) that a wayward lounge singer named Yolanda Bell (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) has sought refuge in the convent after her lover’s accidental drug overdose encapsulates the subversive, sardonic humor of Pedro Almodóvar: “Very […]