Global Genres, Local Films

The acute processes of globalisation at the turn of the century have generated an increased interest in exploring the interactions between the so-called global cultural products or trends and their specific local manifestations. Even though cross-cultural connections are becoming more patent in filmic productions in the last decades, cinema per se has always been characterized by its hybrid, transnational, border-crossing nature. From its own inception, Spanish film production was soon tied to the Hollywood film industry for its subsistence, but other film traditions such as those in the Soviet Union, France, Germany and, in particular, Italy also determined either directly or indirectly the development of Spanish cinema. Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema reaches beyond the limits of the film text and analyses and contextualizes the impact of global film trends and genres on Spanish cinema in order to study how they helped articulate specific national challenges from the conflict between liberalism and tradition in the first decades of the 20th century to the management of the contemporary financial crisis. This collection provides the first comprehensive picture of the complex national and supranational forces that have shaped Spanish films, revealing the tensions and the intricate dialogue between cross-cultural aesthetic and narrative models on the one hand, and indigenous traditions on the other, as well as the political and historical contingencies these different expressions responded to.

Elena Oliete-Aldea is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. In 2009, she completed her PhD thesis on cinematographic representations of national identity in contemporary British cinema. Her research centers on film and cultural studies, currently focusing on globalization and transnational cinema; she has participated in international conferences as well as research projects on film studies and published in several national and international journals.

Beatriz Oria is Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, where she teaches Film Analysis. Her primary areas of interest include film, television and cultural studies and her current research focuses on globalization and comedy. She has published articles on Sex and the City, Woody Allen and romantic comedy in journals like the International Journal of the Humanities, the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. She is the co-editor of Intimate Explorations: Readings Across Disciplines (2009).

Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He has written on film genre theory, on representations of immigration and Mexican American culture, and on the work of John Sayles and Carlos Saura. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Cinemas, and varied Spanish scholarly journals. He is co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (2016).