Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2006

With reference to Calabuch (1956) the present article assesses Berlanga's familiar critique of Francoist authoritarianism and seeks to locate this dissidence within the context of a defence of the national and cultural difference of the Catalan and Valencian periphery. This concern is proposed as a neglected feature of his oeuvre.

This article attempts to steer a path between the predominant body of criticism that tends to focus on personal psychologizing readings of the cinema of Luis Buuel and a more recent perspective that has considered the less-studied Mexican films with a view to determining their place within notions of national cinema. Through a reading of El ngel exterminador alongside Viridiana, Miles argues that Silvia Pinal functions as a figure of liminality, expressing the ambiguities of border crossing inherent in Buuel's destabilizing transnational cinema. The latter part of the article considers more recent cinematic examples, including the work of Lynch and Von Trier, to illustrate the legacy of the works considered.

This article explores the way (homo)sexuality is constructed and constrained by the geographical spaces in which machismo operates in the film No se lo Digas a Nadie (Don't Tell Anyone), as well as the process of migration from such societies experienced by queer subjects. It demonstrates that gay individuals brought up in hetero-repressive societies are forced to keep their homosexual tendencies in secret in order to maintain the basis of heteronormative order. Sexually regulatory spaces in Latino societies represented by the protagonist's parental home, the family hacienda, the university, his bachelor flat(s) function as controlling entities that impose a macho behaviour on queer male subjects in order to guarantee their acceptance within heteropatriarchy. Some queer subjects will eventually leave such sexually repressive sites and migrate to new places where their sexual orientation does not contravene patriarchal order. However this process of sexual liberation is truncated if the site of arrival is still controlled, even at a micro-social level, by heteronormativity.

Long regarded as central to the development of art cinema in Spain, the Nuevo Cine Espaol/New Spanish Cinema movement of the 1960s is currently being reconsidered in the light of recent scholarship. These interviews contribute to this reassessment by bringing to our attention the experiences of two directors who were peripheral to the movement as a whole. Antxn Eceiza, author of the Neorealist El prximo otoo/Next Autumn (1963) and formally eclectic De cuerpo presente/Present in Body (1965), reveals these anti-Francoist directors' contradictory experiences of accepting subsidies from the state and representing Spain at foreign film festivals. Julio Diamante, whose Los que no fuimos a la guerra/Those of Us Who Didn't Go to War (1962) is a comic allegory of the Spanish Civil War, explains why he rejected comedy in favour of Neorealism and offers his view of student radicalism in 1950s Madrid, and the production contexts of his 1960s work.

Los Otros: Etnicidad y raza en el cine espaol contemporneo, Isabel Santaolalla (2006) Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 284 pp., ISBN 8477337535 (pbk), 20

A Companion to Luis Buuel, Gwynne Edwards (2006) Woodbridge: Tamesis, x + 186 pp., ISBN 185566108X (hbk), 45.00