Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain

Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of innovation in the production of “transmedia” works that bridge narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the work of key figures like Pedro Almodóvar, comparing media depictions of Spain’s economic woes, or giving long-overdue critical attention to quality television series, Smith’s book is a consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Film, Television, Transmedia PART I: FILM Chapter 1. Spanish Cinema of the 1980s Chapter 2. Madrid de Cine: Spanish Film Screenings Chapter 3. Almodóvar’s Self-fashioning: The Economics and Aesthetics of Post-Auteurism PART II: TELEVISION Chapter 4. Media Migration and Cultural Proximity: A Specimen Season of Television Drama Chapter 5. LGBT TV Catalonia Chapter 6. Televisual Properties: The Construction Bubble in Three TV Series PART III: (RE)TURN TO TRANSMEDIA Chapter 7. Towards Transmedia: Past and Present of Cinema and Television in Spain Chapter 8. A New Paradigm for the Spanish Audiovisual Sector?: Popular Cinema/Quality Television Chapter 9. Crisis Fictions: Novel, Cinema, TV Conclusion: The Audiovisual Field in Contemporary Spain Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Paul Julian Smith is a specialist in film and television in Spain and Mexico. He is Distinguished Professor in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Program in the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and he was for twenty years Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of seventeen books.

Review :
“This book, divided into three parts and nine chapters, sets out to explore the issue of ‘transmedia’ in Spanish visual culture (mostly cinema and television) by analysing an impressively wide range of case studies with admirable concision and clarity… Importantly, the book also analyses and engages with academic and journalistic discussions of these texts, industry screenings, blogs, websites, fan media and stars… Spanish Lessons may well mark the (re)connection of academic discourses on Spanish cinema with television and other forms of media.” • Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies “There is no one, to my knowledge, who brings the same level of expertise to the study of contemporary Spanish-language visual culture. This book is an exciting new contribution that effortlessly combines the insights of the industry insider, the journalist and the film reviewer with the scholarly range of the academic.” • Jo Evans, University College London