Filmspanism explores the geopolitics of knowledge involved in academic approaches to Spanish cinema. This companion rethinks the role of disciplinarity, institutionality, and nationality in the study of film by taking into account a rather specific set of contentious issues, intellectual traditions, discursive servitudes, and invested scholarship. To that end, the book explores the topics of art cinema, popular culture, film genre, and transnationalism, always with Spanish cinema as its concrete object of study. An insightful contribution to the study of Spanish cinema, this discussion will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in Hispanic Studies and Film Studies.
In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s—a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature—exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games. At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.
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