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Reviewed by:
  • Hispanismo y cine
  • Ana Vivancos
Hispanismo y cine. Vervuert Iberoamericana, 2007. Edited by Javier Herrera y Cristina Martínez-Carazo.

This five-hundred pages volume represents a willful effort to bring to Spanish-language readers the wide scope of the foreign scholarship involved in Spanish Film Studies. Its outstanding richness lies in the variety of its articles, which point in many different directions, and offer a complex and nuanced exploration of the wide variety of themes and theoretical approaches that are part of the vast scope of a field of study that has been underrepresented in the Spanish publishing world. As its editors affirm in their introduction, part of its contribution is its purpose to finally publish in Spanish a number of articles that had previously been published in English in academic journals, conferences and monographs. In that sense, its will to offer a complex picture of the present state of the field guarantees its placement in the historiography of Spanish film studies.

The book can also boast the presence of some of the most remarkable representatives of the field's scholarship, whom are present through examples of their most memorable work: Jo Labanyi, Marvin D'Lugo, Peter William Evans, Paul Julian Smith, Jaume Martí Olivella and Kathleen Vernon are names whose works on film we are happy to see finally translated into Spanish, while other lesser-known authors contribute with articles of remarkable insight, as are Alejandro Yarza's study of kitsch in Sáenz de Heredia's Raza or Julia Tuñón's detailed analysis of the Spanish audiences' reception of the Mexican film Enamorada (1946).

The editors have opted for an organization that allows room for the presence of the different approaches that have shaped the field of film studies along the four decades of its history. The articles are grouped under sections that are representative of existing trends: Studies of the Representation of the Nation, Auteur Theory, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies (Cine y Pluralidad). In its smooth reading, the only stumbling block is its longest section, "Cine de [End Page 268] Autor," where some works sport a tendency to adscribe an excessive importance to the auteurs' biographical detail—an approach that has been proved quite ineffective in Film Studies—and which, in this case, tends to mar the interest of the reading. But this overview volume has more to offer than its mere scope. Part of the attractiveness of the book resides in the originality of some of its authors' proposals. Some of them include comparative studies that work with the visual aspects of cinema and painting, as in Javier Herrera's "Del estrabismo y la ceguera en el arte español: de Picasso a Buñuel" or Cristina Martínez-Carazo's "Te doy mis ojos: la pintura como subtexto." Another remarkable comparative work is Paul-Julian Smith's study of Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven and Almodóvar's La mala educación, which makes good the effort of applying Queer methodologies to Film Studies.

Hispanismo y Cine also explores topics long ignored, as Spanish popular genres. One of the most remarkable is Ann-Marie Jolivet's study on the very Spanish "cine con niño" genre ("Pablito Calvo-Marcelino, el niño y lo fílmico en las películas de Ladislao Vajda." This article—as well as others—strive to provide a more general view and, at the same time, to introduce topics that involve social, political and racial matters, and point towards new possibilities of exploration, like the "africanist" movies of the Francoist era (Susan Martín-Márquez, "De Cristo negro a Cristo hueco," or Jean-Claude Seguin's review of aspects of the representation of Basque terrorism in film.

A work as ambitious as this is, in its intention to represent a big part of the work being done contemporarily, can fall in the dangers of redundancy. In a large number of studies, a lot of importance is being attached to films' narrative values, when other aspects, as industrial and technical aspects of Spanish films or Star Studies, have little or no representation. But their absence maybe just a symptom of the actual state of affairs...

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