A combination of painstaking research, theoretical awareness, critical apercu and elegant writing. -- Peter Evans, Emeritus Professor of Film, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
There has been nothing quite like Sally Faulkner's A History of Spanish Film. This lengthy and ambitious volume combines a compelling general account of a vital national cinema with brilliant close analyses of individual titles. Moreover it skillfully places artistic and cultural questions within social and historical contexts. This book is required reading for both those who already know Spanish cinema and those who would like to discover it. -- Paul Julian Smith, Distinguished Professor, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, US
This beautifully nuanced study gives the reader a series of intriguing new perspectives on the social crossovers produced by a cinema marked by class mobility and by realignments in taste in Spain. It concentrates on the active engagement of middle class culture -- bizarrely under-estimated in most books on Spanish film -- with fictions, markets and institutions. Sally Faulkner's indispensable history reveals a different continuity and disparate set of Spanish images to the ones we might have thought we knew. -- Chris Perriam, Professor of Hispanic Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK
Faulkner's close textual analysis of a diverse array of films complements the books original and stimulating theoretical framework. A History of Spanish Film is a new and exciting contribution to intellectual discourses about class, modernity, and the production and reception of Spanish cinema. Students and scholars alike will find this work indispensable in their teaching and research. -- Tatjana Pavlovic, Associate Professor, 20th-Century Spanish Film and Literature, Tulane University, US
Sally Faulkner's A History of Spanish Film is a moveable feast. Departing from the tendency to understand history as a rehearsal of grand ideologies and to view--and valorize--Spanish cinema in terms of denunciation and protest, subversion and experimentation, it charts the rise of the middle class and a corresponding 'middlebrow cinema'. Through an interlocking series of close, chronologically ordered readings of representative films in Spanish from before and after the Civil War, Faulkner's study grapples with complex questions of modernization, popular culture, education, entertainment, consumerism, class realignment, and social mobility --'upward,downward and stalled'-- in motion pictures. -- Brad Epps, Professor of Spanish, University of Cambridge, UK
This book uses the concept of Spanish middlebrow cinema to explore the representation of class and social mobility across a century of Spanish cinema... The close textual analysis in combination with a nuanced reading of production, reception and changes in taste in Spain gives new insights into a range of films, including those that have already had acres written about them... A really interesting read. * Nobody Knows Anybody: A Spanish Cinema Blog *
This is an attractive and balanced book that throws new insights into research. -- Javier Jurado, Universite Paris X/Carlos III Madrid * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 35.1 *
