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 polit...
This book offers a new perspective via visual culture of the reimagining of history for contemporary Spanish media audiences. It gives close readings of major recent texts in a number of media (theater, cinema, television, and streaming) which have yet to receive scholarly attention and are closely connected to each other. And it stresses the intermediality of the visual by calling attention to connections between those media and others such a...
Paul Julian Smith's study of Alfonso Cuarón's sensual 2001 road movie argues that Y Tu Mamá También not only addresses major issues of gender, race, class, and space, but that the film's apparently casual aesthetic masks a sophisticated audiovisual style. Combining production and distribution history, based on unexplored material held in Mexico City archives, with close textual analysis, Smith makes an argument for Cuarón's film as an enduring...
This study, the first to apply a poststructuralist viewpoint to literature of the Spanish Golden Age, offers new insights into major texts. Beginning with a comparison of Renaissance and modern theories of discourse, the book examines lyric poetry, picaresque narrative, and drama by Gongora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderon, and Cervantes.
This book offers a radically new account of the rich and varied culture of contemporary Spain. It focuses on three intellectuals who chronicle contemporary life (including journalist Francisco Umbral), three filmmakers who engage with the many nationalisms of the Spanish state (Victor Erice, Bigas Luna, and Julio Medem), and three crucial topics that are expressed in many media (the replaying of history, the rise and fall of the city, and the ...
Over the last decade, visibility and sexuality have become a major theme in Spanish and Cuban cinema, literature and art. This book explores this development in the light of contemporary history and recent theoretical accounts of sight by writers, including Paul Virilio and Teresa de Lauretis.
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 ...
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 Almodóvar feature film and in Spanish television's top-rated period drama, and investigate the politics of affect in ...
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 o...
This pioneering volume argues that cinema and television in Spain only make sense when considered together as twin vehicles for the screen fiction that has come to dominate the twenty-first century. Offering comparative readings of films such as Pedro Almodovar's classic "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" with his production company's first foray into television production--a 2006 series called "Women--"alongside prize-winning workpla...
This pioneering volume argues that cinema and television in Spain only make sense when considered together as twin vehicles for the screen fiction that has come to dominate the twenty-first century. Offering comparative readings of films such as Pedro Almodovar's classic "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" with his production company's first foray into television production--a 2006 series called "Women--"alongside prize-winning workpla...
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 treate...
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 In...
