Professor Núria Triana-Toribio from the Department of Hispanic Studies will give her KIASH Inaugural Lecture, ‘Spanish Film Cultures’ on Friday 13 March at 6pm in Grimond lecture Theatre 2.
No film comes about without a film culture to sustain it. Film cultures are the institutions, legislation, working practices and cultural actors that encourage some kinds of film and prove fallow ground for others. In Spain during the long transition to democracy from Franco’s dictatorship (1968-1978) a new film culture was built that distanced itself from the old. However, the transition in film, like the transition in politics, was more easily imagined than achieved. Elements of the old film culture persisted, even among the progressives, while film historians, signed up to the project of the new film culture, have been reluctant to acknowledge these vestigial traces, which have become the ‘bad objects’ of Spanish film studies. But as Ezra Pound once said, ‘you can’t know an era merely by knowing its best’. This lecture will consider the development of Spain’s dominant film culture since 1968 by examining one such ‘bad object’, the popular film magazine Nuevo Fotogramas, long considered too frivolous to have played any serious part in the transition, in spite of the cosmopolitan outlook of its writers and editors.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Grimond Foyer. All are welcome, further details can be found on the School of European Culture and Languages’ events page at: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events