SN3118 Seducing the Nation: Spanish Film 1940s to 80s

2018-9 Terms 1- 2

Convenor: Sarah Wright

Assessment:

Coursework essays worth 30% and 60% respectively of the final mark for the course and one in-class assessment worth 10% of the final mark. 
First Essay: 2,000-2,500 words
Second Essay: 2,500-3,000 words.

Overview:

In this course students will study films from the Franco regime in Spain and into the Transition to Democracy. The films selected will in different ways either express or subvert the ideology and iconography of Francoism. The films will offer a combination of commercial and art-house cinema. We will explore issues such as the representation of gender, family, nationhood and religion, issues of censorship, ideology, iconography and the dynamics of spectatorship. A reading of the films in this course will be conducted through the use of key texts from film theory, as critical tools. The films to be studied are as follows:

Muerte de un ciclista (1955), Juan Antonio Bardem; ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! (1952), Luis Berlanga; Viridiana (1961), Luis Buñuel; El espíritu de la colmena (1973) by Víctor Erice; Carmen (1983) by Carlos Saura; Matador (1986), by Pedro Almodóvar. 

Key Bibliography:

Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill, any edition).

Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Recommended Further Reading

Pam Cook (ed), The Cinema Book, (London: British Film Institite, 1985).

Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies, (London: Routledge, 1996).

John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

John Hopewell, Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema After Franco, London: British Film Institute, 1986.

Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Rob Stone, Spanish Cinema, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002.

Nuria Triana Toribio, Spanish National Cinema, London: Routledge, 2003.