Inhabiting the In-Between

Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition

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by Sarah Thomas

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Spain

Keywords

Spain, children, sociology

Publishing date

2019

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Collection

Toronto Iberic

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 256 pages
6 ½ x 9 ¼ inches (16.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4875-0488-5

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Book Presentation:
Although children have proliferated in Spain’s cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation as it emerged from almost four decades of repressive dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. In Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Sarah Thomas analyses the cinematic child within this complex historical conjuncture of a nation looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future.

Examining films from several genres by four key directors of the Transition – Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán – Thomas explores how the child is represented as both subject and object, and self and other, and consistently cast in a position between categories or binary poles. She demonstrates how the cinematic child that materializes in this period is a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that points toward the impossibility of fully comprehending the historical past and the figure of the other, while inviting an ethical engagement with each.

About the Author:
Sarah Thomas is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and the William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Brown University.

See the publisher website: University of Toronto Press