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Just after the eightieth anniversary of death of Antonio Machado, we turn our attention to two films whose speeches gravitate a deep immersion in his work and his personality. Directed by Arturo RuizCastillo between the summer of 1952 and the spring of 1953, La laguna negra emerges as transposition of a romance of the Sevillian poet, while the post-war account Dos caminos seem to be nourished by a dense allegorical invocation of Machadian thought. Scarcely known and barely considered by historiography film, both films make up an unmistakable biology with an unusual semantic density that needs to be vindicated urgently.

Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002) is a key cineaste if one wants to understand the evolution of Spanish cinema and its place in the history of European and World cinemas today. Since the 1950s, Bardem contested official nationalist cinema with often hermetic and symbolic narratives that spoke about Francoism’s cultural backwardness, its rigid religious and moral values, and its strict repression against those who lost the Civil War. With major critical and commercial successes as Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a cyclist (1955), Calle Mayor/Main Street (1956), Bardem achieved world recognition as an auteur, and started a career characterised by a clear fetish, hybridised transnational aestheticism. His cinema’s promiscuous relationship with Italian Neorealim and the conventions of the Hollywood genre film would eventually favour a hybrid cinema, which influenced the representation and the expression of identity within the national environment of Francoism. Due in part to the implications of European co-productions and in part to Bardem’s prolific use of intertextuality and obsessive focus on the “other cinemas” as an aesthetic and cultural starting point that both suited his political vision of nationhood and his vision of cinema as an industry, the national character or Spanishness of his films was gradually compromised. Using Mark Betz research on European co-productions during the 1950s and 1960s, this article also explores how the use of foreign actors and intra-national dubbing bespoke a political and aesthetic detachment, and how commercial and marketing strategies might have ended up suffocating identity and political detachment. I argue that while the Francoist’s enforced policy of dubbing foreign films into neutral Castilian Spanish helped nationalise foreign cinema and avoid international cultural and political intoxications, the use of foreign actors to represent Spanish roles in the films of Bardem contributed to a cancellation of the nationalistic purposes of such policies. Bardem’s cinema, although maintaining a detached position vis-à-vis Francoist official national narratives and aesthetics, was able to communicate Spanishness from the perspective of dissidence as long as his films were read as art cinema that contested other national cinema. On the other hand, the increasing tendency of co-productions with the purpose of counteracting or levelling up with the hegemony of Hollywood in Europe proved that the imbricate hybridised internalisation not only cancelled national discourses but also the identity of films, and as a consequence, of the director.

This paper examines Susi Gonzalvo’s Zhao (2008) within the context of increasing international adoption during the 1990s and the start of the new millennium, specifically in Spain. Taking into account the film’s use of a non-linear narrative, flashback sequences and textual media, this article argues that the film represents the struggle experienced by transnational adoptees to resolve their feelings of belonging and non-belonging as they navigate a complex cultural terrain. The article also contrasts the representation of the protagonist in Gonzalvo’s film with the representation of young Chinese adopted girls in David Gózman Rollán’s documentary Generación Mei Ming (2014).

In this, the first full-length treatment of the child in Spanish cinema, Sarah Wright explores the ways that the cinematic child comes to represent ‘prosthetic memory’. The central theme of the child and the monster is used to examine the relationship of the self to the past, and to cinema. Concentrating on films from the 1950s to the present day, the book explores religious films, musicals, ‘art-house horror’, science-fiction, social realism and fantasy. It includes reference to Erice’s The Spirit of The Beehive, del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Mañas’s El Bola and the Marisol films. The book also draws on a century of filmmaking in Spain and intersects with recent revelations concerning the horrors of the Spanish past. The child is a potent motif for the loss of historical memory and for its recuperation through cinema. This book is suitable for scholars and undergraduates working in the areas of Spanish cinema, Spanish cultural studies and cinema studies.

This dossier compiles studies on the cinematic production of Spain—and, to a lesser extent, Portugal—that deal with the conditions created by the economic crisis and the resulting austerity measures in both countries. In addition to a comprehensive study that offers a typology of the abundant filmography on the subject, the dossier is made up of four articles centered on case studies of feature-length and short films both fictional and documentary.

This exploratory and descriptive study analyses Víctor Erice’s film Cerrar los ojos with regard to three key concepts of the author’s work: childhood, memory and cinephilia. The method chosen is audiovisual text analysis framed within qualitative research, and interpretative content analysis. The results confirm Cerrar los ojos as an autofiction that creates a dialogue between the life and work of its author through lost identity, nostalgia for childhood and cinema as redemption.

Hay un instante en Volveréis (2024) donde el personaje de Fernando Trueba, citando a Cavell, afirma que el cine nos hace mejores. La siguiente propuesta parte de esa admiración hacia el séptimo arte que manifiesta Jonás en toda su obra, y propone como objetivo investigar mediante la metodología del análisis fílmico la autoconciencia cinematográfica del cineasta. Con dicha idea en mente, el siguiente artículo académico se centrará, dualmente, en los conceptos de intertextualidad y metaficción que se dan entre personajes enamorados, actos y actores que crea Trueba en el corpus de sus ocho películas. Asimismo, cuenta con el fin de analizar las diferentes capas que teje el cineasta donde la ficción diegética y la realidad extradiegética se fusionan junto a las relaciones amorosas de sus personajes, y así dar paso a reflexiones sobre cuestiones como la nostalgia, las crisis existenciales (y creativas) o el estado actual del séptimo arte.

New readings of 20th-century literary cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory.New readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. In her survey of the history of Spanish cinema in the dictatorship and democratic periods, the author argues thatstudies of adaptations must simultaneously address questions of 'text' - formal issues central to the study of film and literature - and 'context' - ideological concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. She examines threethemes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish culture - the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural and the urban, and the representation of gender - and considers the related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic expression and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study concludes with an analysis of the formal question of the narrator in film and literature, through an assessment of Buñuel's previously unacknowledged stylistic debt to Galdós as manifested in his adaptations of Nazarín and Tristana. SALLY FAULKNER is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter.

Penélope Cruz is one of the most internationally acclaimed Spanish performers. However, despite her successful career, she is also one of the celebrities subject to most controversy on social media and the most frequent target of hate speech. Although she does not manage her own profile on X (previously Twitter), her name and criticism of her are constant on this platform. The objective of this study is to detect possible hate speech, as well as to categorise it by its intensity and typology. The study analyses the unrestricted comments on X containing the name Penélope Cruz posted during the period between January and June 2023. The methodology utilised is that of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the comments registered (N = 6,620). One of the chief results is the fact that the majority of the comments classified as hate speech refer to ideological issues (70.9%) and/or are misogynistic (8.9%), among which are the specific allusions to her acting skills and her physical characteristics. The results coincide with other studies in which hate messages directed at actresses are related to their physical appearance. However, they differ in that in this case the main type of hatred is not misogyny, but ideological hatred. The actor is not only accused of being a “communist” and a “hypocrite” for her lifestyle, but also for having used her body to succeed in her profession. Both her physique and intellectual capacity are also subject to hate speech. Most of these messages are based on conjecture, prejudice, and stereotypes.

New readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. In her survey of the history of Spanish cinema in the dictatorship and democratic periods, the author argues that studies of adaptations must simultaneously address questions of 'text' - formal issues central to the study of film and literature - and 'context' - ideological concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. She examines three themes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish culture - the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural and the urban, and the representation of gender - and considers the related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic expression and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study concludes with an analysis of the formal question of the narrator in film and literature, through an assessment of Buñuel's previously unacknowledged stylistic debt to Galdós as manifested in his adaptations of Nazarín/ and Tristana. SALLY FAULKNER is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter.