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The Spanish Fantastic
Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci-fi
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Book Presentation:
In recent decades, the Spanish 'fantastic' has been at the forefront of genre filmmaking. Films such as The Day of the Beast, the Rec trilogy, The Orphanage and Timecrimes have received widespread attention and popularity, arguably rescuing Spanish cinema from its semi-invisibility during the creativity-crushing Franco years. By turns daring, evocative, outrageous, and intense, this new cinema has given voice to a generation, both beholden to and yet breaking away from their historical and cultural roots. Beginning in the 1990s, films from directors such as Alex de la Iglesia, Alejandro Amenabar, and Jaume Balaguero reinvigorated Spanish cinema in the horror, science fiction and fantasy veins as their work proliferated and took centre stage at international festivals such as Sitges, Fantasia International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. Through an examination of key films and filmmakers, Shelagh Rowan-Legg here investigates the rise of this unique new wave of genre films from Spain, and how they have recycled, reshaped and renewed the stunning visual tropes, wild narratives and imaginative other worlds inherent to an increasingly influential cinematic field.Its emergence is part of a new trend of postnational cinema, led by the fantastic, which approaches the national boundaries of cinema with an exciting sense of fluidity.
About the Author:
Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer, filmmaker, and script consultant. She is the Executive Director of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a programmer for FrightFest, and a contributing editor for ScreenAnarchy. Her award-winning short films have screened at festivals around the world. She has a PhD in Spanish fantastic film from King's College London.Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. She is the author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).Julian Ross is a University Lecturer at the Centre for the Arts in Society.