Making sense of genre: the`quality thriller´as a vehicle to revise a controversial past in spanish recent cinema

Camporesi, Valeria and Fernandez-Meneses, Jara (2018) Making sense of genre: the`quality thriller´as a vehicle to revise a controversial past in spanish recent cinema. Studies in European Cinema, 15 (2-3), 198-214. (doi:10.1080/17411548.2018.1442696).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This article explores three recent Spanish films Grupo 7 (Group 7, 2012), La isla mínima (Marshland, 2014) and El hombre de las mil caras (Smoke and Mirrors, 2016) that can be classified as ‘quality thriller’ as they share a ‘filmmaker-auteur’ nature, good production values and an effort to obey the rules of the genre. Their production is an illustrative example of commercial productions, which are giving a special visibility to a new version of the cinematographic authorship, a phenomenon which is described here as ‘the auteurism of commerce’. Besides, as the analysis of their narratives and forms shows, the way in which these films participate in the cultural upheaval which spread through Spain since 2011 is also especially remarkable as they take a stance embracing a revisionist approach to the history of Spanish democracy. All this considered, they represent a poignant case to explore the way in which mainstream fiction films dialogue with the challenges with which democracy is confronted in twenty-first-century Europe.

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