Spain. Cinema, Fascism, and Religiosity

On Monday, our last day of classes, we watched our last film of the semester. The question for this blogpost, our tenth and last, is the core question for this semester, and one that informs our wrapping up the semester: how does Juan Carlos Medina’s film Painless (2012) encompass the correspondences of Spain, cinema, fascism,… Continue reading May 3. Wrapping up Spain, Cinema, Fascism, and Religiosity

This week in the semester we sought to understand the ways in which cinema deploys re-memberance, horror, and fantasy as strategies (not merely as plots or narratives) of survival of fascism. How did Spanish cinema and literature represent the survival of repression, persecution, prosecution, execution, life, and death in the multiple temporalities film can hold. … Continue reading 26-28 April. Re-membering fascism: survival, horror, fantasy, nationalism

This week we sought to understand ways in which escaping fascism and reinventing religiosity lead to new ways to imagine sex, love, and kinship, and how Spain’s cinema of the last decade of the 20th century represented such new ways.  During the last decade of the 20th century spectators inside and beyond the borders of… Continue reading 19-21 April. Escaping Fascism, Reinventing Religiosity, Rewriting Love and Kinship

This short week we worked with the concept of transnational melodrama, and the ways in which artists deploy matters of fascism and religiosity (belief, ritual, suffering economics, etc) both onstage and backstage to compose filmic stories. Melodrama is the frame through which artists have deployed high style and feeling to tell a story, especially in… Continue reading 12 April. Sex, Lies, and Transnational Melodrama

Wednesday of this week we sought to understand and read competently Gothic and Bromance as filmic narratives, and to tease out their relation with transnational fascist tales.  To connect them to better see what role these and other signs play in the interplay of fascism and religiosity in Spain. How does a critique of the… Continue reading 5-7 April. 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 imperial politics, and a subversion of the highly documented National.  This week we considered how religious institutions (more particularly, convents and nunneries) and melodrama contributed to the representation of fascism and religiosity in Spanish cinema, and we… Continue reading 29-31 March. Global (Out)Bursts. Religious Institutions, Melodrama, and the Release of Democracy

Last week we discussed various angles of the concept of ‘transition,’ related to ‘La Transición,’ or period following the death of dictator Francisco Franco on November 20, 1975. With Pavlovic we gathered many different aspects of this period, and its relation to disenchantment as a cultural and historical phenomenon. We then discussed how it all… Continue reading 15-17 March. Transition and Disenchantment

This week we dwelled in the correspondences between the periods of Transition (la transición) and disenchantment (desengaño), with the (apparent) end of Spanish exceptionalism and the emergence of a new kind of violence, and what they meant for Spain in the 20th century.  We also learned about the roles these concepts played in the unfolding… Continue reading 22-24 March. Exceptionalism and Violence

This week we discussed the concept of Italian Neorealism in film, and how various correspondences of Realism, that key legacy of the 19th century in Spanish cultural history, and Neorealism (which Pavlovic names “Neorealisms” in plural) play in 20th-century Spanish film and history. Italian Neorealism influenced the filmic and cultural production of many nations /… Continue reading 1-3 March. Iconographies of Faith. Realism and Neorealism

This week we sought to understand the corresponding ways in which nostalgia, autarky, and historical memory were deployed during the first decade of Francos’ fascist regime, and how these were represented by virtue of a national-transnational experiment on cinematic pastiche. The 50s showed an increasing interest on various dimensions of national / transnational referentiality (cultural,… Continue reading 22-24 Febr. Borders of Belief: National, Transnational