Spanish Meta-Art and Contemporary Cinema - by Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera (Paperback)

About the Book

"Structured by critical comparisons to Spain's masterworks in meta-art - Don Quixote, Las meninas, and Un chien andalou-, this book is about the power of cinema to conjure up thoughts within the viewer otherwise repressed in their socio-cultural environment"--

Book Synopsis

Can cinema reveal its audience's most subversive thinking? Do films have the potential to project their viewers' innermost thoughts making them apparent on the screen? This bookargues that cinema has precisely this power, to unveil to the spectator their own hidden thoughts. It examines case studies from various cultures in conversation with Spain, a country whose enduring masterpieces in self-reflexive or meta-art provide insight into the special dynamic between viewer and screen.

Framed around critical readings of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Diego Velázquez' Las meninas and Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, this book examines contemporary films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, Bigas Luna, Alejandro Amenábar, Lucrecia Martel, Krzysztof Kieslowski, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Jonze, Andrzej Zulawski, Fernando Pérez, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg to illustrate how self-reflexivity in film unbridles the mental repression of film spectators. It proposes cinema as an uncanny duplication of the workings of the brain - a doppelgänger to human thought.

Review Quotes

Spanish Meta-Art and Contemporary Cinemaambitiously maps cinematic spectatorship through the intermedial cultural histories of Spanish art. Rodríguez-Romaguera's readings richly explore self-reflexive artistic and film traditions through metaphors of veiled vision, trauma, spectrality, or dreaming. This book makes a significant contribution to film aesthetics and a compelling case for revisiting Spanish classic visual art and literature in dialogue with international cinema.
Belén Vidal, Reader in Film Studies, King's College London, UK, and author of Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (2012)

Through the development of concepts such as the veiled screen, Rodriguez provides a fascinating reappraisal of visual theory and a reconsideration of the relationship between art, ideology, and the unconscious. The book's thorough and compelling intermedial analyses of film against works of meta-art demonstrate the possibilities of comparative reading and thinking.
Jacqueline Sheean, Assistant Professor, Department of World Languages and Cultures, University of Utah, USA

About the Author

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguera is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University-Northridge, USA. He is a narrative filmmaker and film scholar from San Juan, Puerto Rico.