Núria Triana-Toribio

Film cultures in Spain's transition: the “Other” transition in the film magazine Nuevo Fotogramas (1968–1978)

In the story of the fight for democratic freedom and the drive to bring Europe and the world closer to Francoist Spain, Nuevo Fotogramas (NF) deserves a central position. Fuelled by the spirit of May 1968, the long-running Barcelona-based magazine Fotogramas became NF in 1968 and set out to define the pro-democracy struggle in contrast from the Madrid-based film cultures. It also set out to engage with European cultural production as if censorship and being closed off from European modernity were simply temporary situations. NF helps us to write the transition differently, by debunking the myth of its having been a process led solely by the film-makers and critics who engaged in direct confrontation. Explaining the different approach that NF had to documenting and taking part in the cultural industries of the transition helps us to locate resistance in the “trivial” and “female” world of consumption rather than exclusively in the production sector, more often associated with visible and well-documented acts of opposition. Three aspects of the magazine contribute to this reconfiguration of inherited ideas about the transition, particularly the ethos of the publication, the writers who collaborated in it and what seems to be more “marginalia”: its letter section, “El consultorio de Mr. Belvedere”, and its advertisements.

“Esto no es un juego, es acción mutante”: the provocations of álex de la iglesia

Speaking at the Manchester Spanish Film Festival in 2000, Álex de la Iglesia professed that he was not really a film director. “I’m more of a barman”, he claimed, “I just make cocktails” (de la Iglesia 2000). His films, he implied, were simply an elaborate montage of quotations from other directors, genres and film-styles, a self-assessment well borne out by Acción mutante (1993), the de la Iglesia’s team’s first feature film, which promiscuously mixes science fiction and comedy, film noir and western, Almodóvar and Ridley Scott. Were such a claim, and its associated renunciation of auteur status, to issue from an American independent director, or even a relatively self-conscious Hollywood director, would it even raise an eyebrow, so eloquently does it express postmodern orthodoxy? And does it make any difference when it comes from a modern Spanish director? As a bravura cut-andpaste job, a frenetic exercise in filmic intertextuality, Acción mutante is highly accomplished but it would be a mistake to praise or criticize it on the grounds of its postmodern sensibilities alone without taking into account the intervention it made in a specifically Spanish filmic context where, in the words of the title song, “Esto no es un juego, es acción mutante”.

Santiago Segura: Just When You Thought That Spanish Masculinities were getting better?

AbstractThis article looks at Santiago Seguras star status created by the cultural products in which he takes part. These have produced a phenomenon in the Spanish cultural industry that has only recently started to find an interested academic audience. This article seeks to locate this phenomenon in its cultural context, and to concentrate on aspects relevant to the type of masculinity Segura evokes as well as its links with earlier and contemporary discourses of masculinity in Spanish popular cinema. Finally it is argued that these discourses may not be exclusive to the Segura phenomenon but comparable to the masculinities constructed in other Spanish films which are not normally among those targeted by critics.