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Death of a Cyclist by 
Pan's Labyrinth by 
A Companion to Luis Bunuel by
A Companion to Luis Buñuel presents a collection ofcritical readings by many of the foremost film scholars thatexamines and reassesses myriad facets of world-renowned filmmakerLuis Buñuel?s life, works, and cinematic themes. A collection of critical readings that examine and reassess thecontroversial filmmaker?s life, works, and cinematicthemes Features readings from several of the most highly-regardedexperts on the cinema of Buñuel Includes a multidisciplinary range of approaches from expertsin film studies, Hispanic studies, Surrealism, and theoreticalconcepts such as those of Gilles Deleuze Presents a previously unpublished interview with LuisBuñuel?s son, Juan Luis Buñuel
A Companion to Spanish Cinema by 
Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation by
In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s--a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature--exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games. At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.
The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing by
Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, who began his career under the censorship of Franco's regime, has forged an international reputation for his unique cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions. In films such as Carmen and El Dorado, where reality and fantasy are deliberately fused together, Saura reveals the illusions of Franco's mythologized Spain--a chaste, Catholic, and heroic Spain of the Golden Age--that tend to isolate Spaniards from the rest of Europe, from each other, and from their own individuality. In this first English-language book on Saura, Marvin D'Lugo looks at the social and artistic forces behind this film auteur's highly personal cinema. Tracing Saura's career over three decades, D'Lugo discusses each work from Hooligans (1959), a realist film about a Madrid street-gang member trying to become a bullfighter, to The Dark Night (1989), a film dealing with the persecution of the religious reformer St. John of the Cross in the late sixteenth century. Throughout he argues that Saura's cinematic style results from a highly original response to the political and historical constraints of Spanish culture. D'Lugo shows how in order to explore the complex cultural politics of "Spanishness" as it was institutionalized under Franco, Saura frames his narrations through the eyes of characters who question the forces that shape personal and collective identity. Moving beyond the limits of traditional auteur studies, this book addresses the relationship between the filmmaker and the cultural ideology that historically has thwarted and manipulated the expressions of individuality in Spanish society.
Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture by 
Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema by 
Guillermo Del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art by
A critical exploration of one of the most exciting, original and influential figures to emerge in contemporary film, Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art is a major contribution to the analysis of Guillermo del Toro's cinematic output. It offers an in-depth discussion of del Toro's oeuvre and investigates key ideas, recurrent motifs and subtle links between his movies. The book explores the sources that del Toro draws upon and transforms in the creation of his rich and complex body of work. These include the literary, artistic and cinematic influences on films such as Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, Cronos and Mimic, and the director's engagement with comic book culture in his two Hellboy films, Blade II and Pacific Rim. As well as offering extensive close textual analysis, the authors also consider del Toro's considerable impact on wider popular culture, including a discussion of his role as producer, ambassador for 'geek' culture and figurehead in new international cinema.
Latin Hitchcock: How Almodóvar, Amenábar, De la Iglesia, Del Toro and Campanella Became Notorious by
This study explores how five major Spanish and Latino directors modeled their early careers on Hitchcock and his film aesthetics.
Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí: Forbidden Pleasures and Connected Lives by
Lorca, Bunuel and Dali were, in their respective fields of poetry and theatre, cinema, and painting, three of the most imaginative creative artists of the twentieth century; their impact was felt far beyond the boundaries of their native Spain. But if individually they have been examined by many, their connected lives have rarely been considered. It is these, the ties that bind them, that constitute the subject of this illuminating book. They were born within six years of each other and, as Gwynne Edwards reveals, their childhood circumstances were very similar. Each was affected by a narrow-minded society and an intolerant religious background which equated sex with sin and led all three to experience sexual problems of different kinds: Lorca the guilt and anguish associated with his homosexuality; Bunuel feelings of sexual inhibition; and, Dali virtual impotence. Having met during the 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, they developed intense personal relationships and channelled their respective obsessions into the cultural forms then prevalent in Europe, in particular Surrealism.Rooted in emotional turmoil, their work - from Lorca's dramatic characters in search of sexual fulfilment, to Bunuel's frustrated men and women, and Dali's potent images of shame and guilt - is highly autobiographical. Their left-wing outrage directed at bourgeois values and the Catholic Church was strongly felt, and in the case of Lorca in particular, was sharpened by the catastrophic Civil War of 1936-9, during the first months of which he was murdered by Franco's fascists. The war hastened Bunuel's departure to France and Mexico and Dali's to New York. Edwards describes how, for the rest of his life, Bunuel clung to his left-wing ideals and made outstanding films, while the increasingly eccentric and money-obsessed Dali embraced Fascism and the Catholic Church, and saw his art go into rapid decline.
Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939 by
The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939 investigates Buñuel's commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935-36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism. Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director's life is scant and relies on Buñuel's own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel's accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel's "Red Years" that abounds in new information.
Magical Realism by 
A Search for Belonging: The Mexican Cinema of Luis Buñuel by
This book focuses on nine of Luis Buñuel's films made in Mexico in order to show that a concerted focus on space can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. The interdisciplinary approach of this book unites the two substrands of his work: the independent movies and the studio potboilers.
Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th - 21st Century by 
Spanish Popular Cinema by 
The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón by
This is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the three best known Mexican born directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón. Deborah Shaw examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films with a focus on both the texts and the production contexts in which they were made. These include studies on del Toro's Cronos/ Chronos, El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army; Iñárritu's Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel; and Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja/ Love in the Time of Hysteria, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men.The Three Amigos will be of interest to all those who study Hispanic and Spanish Cinema in particular, and World and contemporary cinema in general.
The Two Cines con Niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955–2010) by
This is the first genre study of child-starred cinemas from Spain. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of Spanish cinema and how the child-starred genres deploy the concept of childhood to retrospectively define the nation and its future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Spanish and Latin American cinema, this monograph examines commonalities in aesthetics, narratives and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina.