BCLA3014: Spain As Seen Through Its Movies: 1980s to Today

The main goal of this course is to provide students with a general understanding of Spain, taking into consideration its recent past, but focusing mainly on some of the most relevant and controversial issues of the current situation. The use of movies as a vehicular tool allows not only for the introduction of the cultural factor, but also the very Spanish perspective(s) that helps explain how the country sees and understands itself. The course will address the following general questions: a) what it means to speak of a "national cinema;" b) how cinema constructs and/or contests of his or her story; c) cinema's impact on shifting notions of what constitutes the human condition; d) how the formal qualities of cinematic narrative shape on-screen stories; e) where and how issues of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity surface in cinematic articulations of the relationship between national identity, global trends, and personal history. There are five sections or blocks to this course. The first block will cover the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship, indispensable to understand the last 40 years of democracy in Spain. The second block is almost a monography to the figure of Pedro Almodóvar, his time, and the ‘España’ his movies depict. The third focuses on the genre of horror, very rich in the recent Spanish production and quite ‘imitated’ by Hollywood. These last two blocks serve as a good opportunity to reflect about the political/national/identity aspects of the cinema industry. In an attempt to reverse the perspective, the last two blocks approach current Spanish issues with an important impact in the society as a whole and its citizens as individuals. The fourth block discusses Spanish politics and its most recent developments. And the fifth one is a gender approach to the demographics of the country.

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