Spain. Cinema, Fascism, Religiosity

During the last decade of the 20th century spectators inside and beyond the borders of Spain saw new ways to experiment with film and to represent the memories and survival strategies of fascism.  After a century of constrained and wildly repressed and resisted ways to figure sex, gender, love, and the family, filmmakers like Almodóvar… Continue reading Unit 12. Re-membering Fascism. Survival, Horror, Fantasy, Nationalism.

This week we dwelled in melodrama as the frame through which artists deploy high style and feeling to tell a story, especially in film.  On Tuesday we discussed Oliete-Aldea’s introductory essay on questions of transnationalism and genre, and we focused on the negotiation of melodrama, tragedy, and poetry to prepare for our discussion of the… Continue reading Unit 11. Transnational Melodrama and the Reinvention of Spain. Place, Love, Kinship, and Religiosity

This week we dwelled in the concepts of the Gothic (architectural, Medieval, literary) and Bromance as two key filmic narratives of transnational fascist, masculinist tales.  We explored how these two concepts shape an interplay of fascism and religiosity in post-Franco Spain. For this blogspot, consider these three question: One, how does a critique of the… Continue reading Unit 10. Gothic, Bromance, and Other Transnational Fascist Love Stories

The 80s marked an era of rupture with the forty years of fascism and the nostalgic embracement of Church-State imperial politics, and a subversion of the highly documented National that underscored the slow release of democracy–a state still not fully achieved in the Peninsula.  This week we discussed the contribution of religious institutions, gender unalignment,… Continue reading Unit 9. Global (Out)Bursts. Religious Institutions, Melodrama, and the Release of Democracy

Last week we discussed various correspondences between the concepts of Transition (la transición) and disenchantment (desengaño), and how they related to the (apparent) end of Spanish exceptionalism and the emergence of a new kind of violence in 20th-century Spain.   In an effort to learn about the roles these concepts played in the unfolding of… Continue reading Unit 8. Exceptionalism and Violence

The death of the Generalísimo on 20 October, 1975 marked the (in principle) end of fascism and the state of exception in Spain, as well as the beginning of new sociocultural waves such as ‘the Madrid Scene’ (la movida madrileña), ‘the Transition’ (la transición), the period of disenchantment (desengaño, already experienced in Spain during the… Continue reading Unit 7. Transition and Disenchantment

Franco’s fascist dictatorship has been characterized as a singular, exceptional kind of regime, especially when compared to that of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. During this first week of March we explored the nexus of death, humor, and liberalism in the crucial years of Franco’s fascist regime, and we sought to learn the… Continue reading Unit 6. Death and Liberalism Within Fascism

This week we discussed the intertwining of Realism and Neorealism in Buñuel’s Viridiana, and how Surrealism played an important role as well in the film’s iconographic representation of faith. Considering this discusion and your reading of the film, ask what you consider would be a most important question to pose about the film, and propose… Continue reading Unit 5. Iconographies of Faith. Realism and Neorealism

This week we discussed several concepts that are critical for anyone trying to read Spain’s decade of the 50s: autarky, paper-maché cinema, the national-popular, and humor. For this week blogpost, write a reflection on how you see populism, politics, humor, and autarky (economic independence) relate to the development and repression of historical memory, and how… Continue reading Unit 4. Borders of Belief: National, Transnational.

The advent of fascism in Spain during the second half of the 30s became an emblem of a historical lockdown, a kind of revival of the deadly battles between Catholics and Protestants during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).  This week, we sought to understand the advent of fascism as the result of a series of… Continue reading Unit 3. War and Music, Rituals of Life and Death