Spanish Cinema

Far overshadowed by the cultural dynamism of its neighbors and constrained by its own slow industrial underdevelopment, Spain was not a propitious site for the development of a strong film industry or culture. When Spanish artists and businessmen did begin to engage in film-related activities, during the first decades of the 20th century, it was initially at the impetus of foreign entrepreneurs and the mediation of French or US artistic models. Not unexpectedly, the Spanish cinema that thrived in the years leading up to the Civil War (1936–1939) was a popular mass medium shaped in imitation of French and US models. After the calamitous Civil War, the Franco dictatorship’s censorship system helped maintain the impression, now debunked, that the film industry benignly functioned as the propagandistic arm of the state. It may be for that reason that no serious efforts at film history in Spain were attempted until the mid-1960s with the publication of Fernando Méndez-Leite’s wordy anecdotal history Historia del cine español (1965). Though something of an opposition cinema had begun to appear since the 1950s (Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga), it was not until the 1970s that we see the emergence of serious film scholarship by Spaniards. The Viridiana scandal of 1961 triggered interest in resistance cinema by foreign critics. The much heralded New Spanish Cinema of the mid-1960s, which brought Carlos Saura to international note through his third film, La caza (The Hunt, 1965), however, appeared to many as mere window dressing, the effort of the regime to suggest artistic freedom while little opposition at home was possible. Still, during the decade from the release of The Hunt an increasing number of opposition films, often disguised as allegorical narratives, won international praise at film festivals and suggested the birth of a growing film culture. Since the 1980s, the Spanish industry has gone through phases of growth with increased popular and artistic success at home and abroad. The meteoric rise of Pedro Almodóvar came to embody a new Spanish mentality reflected in the sexually liberated cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, Spanish film has diversified into new thematic areas—regional cinema, intensified gender representation, multiculturalism occasioned by the intensification of immigration to Spain from Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Yet such growth in substance and the advent of new overseas markets, principally in Latin America, has coincided with the marked decrease of Spanish film’s domestic youth market especially. Since the 2000s, Spanish cinema has increasingly been displaced by television and the accessibility of films on the Internet. Recent scholarship, in fact, has shifted to include substantive studies of television and audiovisual links to Latin America.