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Reviewed by:
  • Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television
  • Matthew J. Marr
Paul Julian Smith. Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television. Liverpool UP, 2009. 200 pages.

Cultural biases, as Paul Julian Smith avers in his latest book, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television (Liverpool UP, 2009), hardly favor the viability of homegrown Spanish television as a topic of scholarly inquiry. Popularly in Spain, as well as within the strictures of academic criticism both nationally and abroad, fiction produced for domestic television audiences suffers from a prestige deficit, often finding itself labeled—precipitously, Smith asserts—as pedestrian, derivative, and excessively lowbrow. This is especially true when Spanish television programming is viewed in relation to cinema, its more celebrated audiovisual next of kin. Perhaps, as the author proposes from the outset of this fascinating volume, the demarcation of a division between these two media in the contemporary Spanish context is facile and reductive. In one of his most lucidly thesis-bound books to date, Paul Julian Smith argues through a series of splendidly chosen specimen texts that in Spain the “televisual” and cinematic [End Page 100] co-exist in a reciprocal relationship. His study compellingly demonstrates how film’s privileged position in the annals of criticism (not to mention in Spanish culture’s own projected self-image) is inseparable from television, namely by virtue of an intriguing convergence of narrative, aesthetic, and institutional forms.

While explicitly motivated by an interest in elevating the position of Spanish television studies as an academic discipline (“this book is intended to help undermine a prejudice that remains strong in the academy and beyond [15]”), Smith’s study strives to fashion an even-handedly bilateral vision of the media referenced in his title, noting that “it is only by charting the conflictive but necessary cohabitation of cinema and television that we can truly understand the two media in both their specificity and their mutual constitution” (15). In this sense, the author follows a line of analysis advanced in his own previous work (as with, most recently, Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodóvar). This latest project, however, is anything but redundant. In keeping with the spirit of much of Smith’s critical oeuvre, Spanish Screen Fiction ventures into uncharted territory with respect to texts examined and the rich set of methodologies it employs. At once as first-rate cultural historian, and then again as a commentator incomparably attuned to the pulse of the contemporary, Smith here crafts a pleasing equilibrium between historical recuperation (a key task for a field without a consolidated canon or established narrative of origin) and keen attention to recent production—selecting, on both counts, texts whose discursive and formal exceptionality challenges assumptions regarding the quality and originality of what he frames as the unduly maligned televisual sensibility.

Despite its moderate length, Spanish Screen Fiction offers a persuasively comprehensive line-up of case studies. In the wake of a brief, schematic introduction, Chapter One (“City Girls I: Almodóvar’s Women on Film and Television”) examines the imprint of the Almodovarian sensibility on Mujeres, a short-lived series from 2006 created by two young protégées of the latter’s production company, El Deseo. Never hesitant to analyze a case of failure, Smith places Mujeres front and center as an unsuccessful incursion of the cinematic into the space of the televisual. Chapter Two (“City Girls II: Television’s Urban Women, Pre- and Post-Almodóvar”) continues in this same discursive direction, proposing a “genealogy” (60) of what the author dubs the “City Girls” genre. Specifically, the chapter proceeds by way of close readings of Jaime de Armiñán’s Chicas en la ciudad (a 1961 “Ur-text for Spanish city girls on state-controlled Televisión Española” [38]), La mujer de tu vida (an early-1990s series of made-for-TV movies boasting Oscar-winning director Fernando Trueba as executive producer), and Con dos tacones (a “female flat-share sitcom” [54] reflecting, in 2006, the progressive politics of “TVE’s new [PSOE] paymasters and executives” [61]).

In “Crime Scenes: Police Drama on Television” (Chapter Three), the author compares the intimately localist register of El comisario (Tele 5, 1999-present...

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