A Companion to Spanish Cinema * Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television

Abstract

In the last three to four years, publisher Wiley-Blackwell has commissioned and published a staggering number of lavishly produced ‘companions’ – major collections that provide a comprehensive introduction to key areas of study, including established national cinemas and canonical auteurs. The serial context that frames the publication of A Companion to Spanish Cinema should not detract from its status as a true event in the field of Spanish cinema studies in the English language. This volume, expertly compiled by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović, reads as a ‘who's who’ in the field of Spanish film studies; more to the point, it provides a reliable guide to key critical topics in the history of Spanish cinema – from its beginnings to the contemporary moment – and an authoritative intervention from multiple perspectives. For a volume involving a team of thirty scholars, and therefore a very diverse range of voices and approaches, the collection is remarkably cohesive. The study of Spanish cinema got off to a relatively late start in Anglo-US film studies when compared to the attention garnered by other major European film-producing nations since the 1960s. Spurred by the interest generated by a few filmmakers (Luis Buñuel, Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Saura) the field of Spanish cinema studies quickly caught up in the 1990s, during which time Marsha Kinder's pioneering Blood Cinema1 helped to articulate the critical master narrative of Spanish national cinema, with the long Francoist dictatorship as the key event. There has since been a shift in focus towards the study of the forms of popular cinema, its stars and genres. Scholarship on contemporary cinema has moreover taken a turn towards the exploration of ‘popular auteurs’ such as Alejandro Amenábar and Alex de la Iglesia. The tradition of realism in Spanish filmmaking has also received considerable attention through the focus on gender, sexuality and ethnicity, sustained by discrete case studies and an overwhelming focus on contemporary cinema (the attention given to the films of Icíar Bollaín is a case in point). In parallel to this body of work, historiographic studies in Spain have emphasized survey approaches by decades and movements with particular attention to social, industrial and policy contexts; see, for example, the work of Julio Pérez Perucha or Roman Gubern and, in English, Bernard Bentley's encyclopaedic A Companion to Spanish Cinema (not to be confused with the present collection).2 This is, of course, a very broad characterization of the main lines of research. In this respect, the collection by Labanyi and Pavlović is exemplary in the way it effortlessly integrates the scholarly modes of viewing and writing about Spanish cinema mentioned above, which too often have failed to engage in dialogue with each other, partly due to the different institutional contexts in which the research has been produced.