Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2008

This essay explores the ways in which director Segundo de Chomn's films represent a crucial moment of proto-surrealist sensibility in the development of Spanish cinema. Specifically, I show how three of his experimental works El hotel elctrico, Le scarabe d'or, and Une excursion incohrente, in their self-reflexive anxiety regarding modernity, through their cultivation of a nihilist order, and in their blurring of interior consciousness and the exterior world, defy the category of primitive cinema with which they have often been labelled, and stand as a model of radical modernity in early European film. Furthermore, this essay suggests that these films form a previously unrecognised genetic map of Luis Buuel and Salvador Dal's Un chien andalou, through their development of a distinctive visual landscape, and more importantly, through their use of film tricks as a means to underscore the pervasive early-twentieth-century fear of unbridled technology.

In present essay I examine the image of the crowd in Vicente Blasco Ibaez's 1916 film adaptation of his novel Sangre y arena (1908) and how the writer's foray into the art of filmmaking constitutes an attempt to harness the popular appeal of film as an instrument of democracy. I explore the cinematisation of the novel's critique of the myths of fame and celebrity that sustained the bullfighter as a popular hero, and how film and novel eventually reveal him to be a product of the degenerate desires of a crowd of fans. I offer a detailed analysis of how Blasco uses the visualisation of the crowd on-screen to make the case that he does so not only to underscore his moralising message, but also as a mechanism to force the potentially unruly crowd of spectators, gathered in the cinema, to confront and reject a negative image of itself.

The philosophical and aesthetic questions explored in Nemesio M. Sobrevila's 1929 film El sexto sentido are also central to the film criticism of Walter Benjamin. This essay looks at three closely interrelated concepts which interested both men in their work: the representation of filmic space, the emergence of film as a crisis of representation, and the sociopolitical implications of the separation of the image from its referent through editing (the cut).

Two popular Argentine films noirs display original attitudes regarding gender. Carlos Hugo Christensen's Si muero antes de despertar/If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952) adapts a short story by US noir writer Cornell Woolrich in a way that questions Woolrich's celebration of the tough male. Mario Soffici's Rosaura a las diez/Rosaura at Ten O'Clock (1958) is a self-conscious reprise of the femme fatale that traces the reiterative scripting of woman by the film's protagonist, her transformation into a destabilising menace, and the expunging of the threat through further writing. The representation of the feminine in these films is remarkable for the time when they were made.

The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia, Peter Buse, Nria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis (2007)

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 210 pp., ISBN 978-0719071362 (hbk), 50

Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet, Paul Julian Smith (2006)

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 192 pp., ISBN 071907536x (pbk), EAN 97807190 75360, 14.99