Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema

The acute processes of globalisation at the turn of the century have generated an increased interest in exploring the interactions between the so-called global cultural products or trends and their specific local manifestations. Even though cross-cultural connections are becoming more patent in filmic productions in the last decades, cinema per se has always been characterized by its hybrid, transnational, border-crossing nature. From its own inception, Spanish film production was soon tied to the Hollywood film industry for its subsistence, but other film traditions such as those in the Soviet Union, France, Germany and, in particular, Italy also determined either directly or indirectly the development of Spanish cinema.

Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema reaches beyond the limits of the film text and analyses and contextualizes the impact of global film trends and genres on Spanish cinema in order to study how they helped articulate specific national challenges from the conflict between liberalism and tradition in the first decades of the 20th century to the management of the contemporary financial crisis. This collection provides the first comprehensive picture of the complex national and supranational forces that have shaped Spanish films, revealing the tensions and the intricate dialogue between cross-cultural aesthetic and narrative models on the one hand, and indigenous traditions on the other, as well as the political and historical contingencies these different expressions responded to.

Elena Oliete-Aldea is Lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her work has been published in scholarly journals like Studies in Popular Culture, Culture Unbound, Studies inSpanish and Latin American Cinemas. She is co-editor of Culture and Society in the Age of Globalisation (2005) and author of Hybrid Heritage on Screen, the Raj Revival in the Thatcher Era (2015).

Beatriz Oria is Lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, where she teaches Film Analysis. She has published articles in scholarly journals like The Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Journal of Popular Culture or Journal of Popular Romance Studies. She is the co-editor of Intimate ExplorationsReadings Across Disciplines (2009) and the author of Talking Dirty on ’Sex and the City’: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship (2014).

Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and in varied Spanish books and scholarly journals.