Behind the Spanish Lens: Spanish Cinema Under Fascism and Democracy [Hardcover]

Peter Besas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1985 | ISBN-10: 0912869062 | ISBN-13: 978-0912869063 | Edition: Presumed First Edition

Since the death of Generalisimo Francisco Franco, Spanish culture has undergone significant change. And in Spain, as everywhere, social changes are portrayed most dramatically in the movies. Peter Besas's Behind the Spanish Lens : Spanish Cinema under Fascism and Democracy traces the work of those culturally powerful filmmakers who struggled through the years of Fascist rule and found new voices and a worldwide audience under the Socialist government that followed Franco's death.

Through his personal access to those filmmakers, Peter Besas has been able to recreate the political context and the cultural roots of this distinctive national cinema. Interviews with more than twenty of Spain's most renowned directors include stories of hidden film reels and surreptitious research, of lost scenes and banned movies, of vague and constantly changing government guidelines, of personal attacks and the assassination of the Minister of Culture twenty-three months before the death of the Generalisimo.

Behind the Spanish Lens is the first book-length treatment of Spanish film in English and is the only volume to treat the history of the art, from the first Spanish screening to the filmmaking trends that are evident today. The book includes over fifty stills from the most significant of those films, plot descriptions, and filmographies. And equally important, Peter Besas has deftly traced the varied relationship between the developing art and the political realities of a volatile nation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The recent Behind the Spanish Lens by Variety's Madrid bureau chief Peter Besas places the spattering of U.S. releases from Spain and the Spanish Film Weeks of recent years in proper perspective. Detailed and data-rich, this book raises any English-language discussion of Spanish film from a level of speculative ignorance to firm historical ground...[It's] the first complete English-language history of a major national cinema." -- Film Comment, June 1986

From the Inside Flap

On a December morning in 1973, 180 pounds of plastic explosives were detonated under the street as an official car passed in front of the American Embassy in Madrid. In the car were a driver, a bodyguard, and Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the Minister of Culture and named successor to Generalisimo Francisco Franco. The unchallenged continuity of Fascist rule in Spain was shattered by that blast, which began a demarcation line, not only of a new, accentuated politics, but also of a new era in Spanish films.

Carrero Blanco's dual position as minister over the arts and heir apparent to Franco's government illustrates, for Peter Besas, the impossibility of separating Spanish films from their social and political context. More than a history of films, his book is the cultural portrait of a nation. Behind the Spanish Lens traces the development of a bold national cinema as it reflects the lives of Spaniards living under a 40-year Fascist rule and the uncertainty of the years that followed.

In the first post-Franco decade, audiences around the world came to recognize and revere the poignancy and beauty of Spanish works by such filmmakers as Carlos Saura, Jose Luis Borau, Victor Erice, and Jose Luis Garci. Behind the Spanish Lens will help filmgoers to understand the cultural heritage of the haunting images of those films.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Arden Press Inc.; Presumed First Edition edition (1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0912869062
• ISBN-13: 978-0912869063
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #714,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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