Ebook: The Two cines con niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in Over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955-2010)

A genre studies approach to child-starred Spanish cinema

This is the first genre study of child-starred cinemas from Spain. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of Spanish cinema and how the child-starred genres deploy the concept of childhood to retrospectively define the nation and its future.

From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Spanish and Latin American cinema, this monograph examines commonalities in aesthetics, narratives and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina.

Key Features

• Establishes ‘nuevo cine con niño’ as a crucial new term in Spanish cinema studies
• Pulls the focus from historical memory and trauma to genre and biopolitics in Spanish cultural studies
• Proposes new readings of critically-acclaimed films by international auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar and Guillermo de Toro, alongside talented regional filmmakers like Arantxa Lazkano and Agustí Villaronga and popular cinema
• Uniquely offers extensive close readings of 26 images from 14 films