ABSTRACT
The most recent (and most extensive) study of the cinema of the transition is included in a volume with a signifi cant title: Historia(s) del cine español: la nueva memoria (Castro de Paz, Pérez Perucha and Zunzunegui 2006, 178-253). Pablo Pérez Rubio and Javier Hernández Ruiz call attention to the many paradoxes of production in the period they take to be 19731983. Although the authors claim not to be “obsessed” with periodization (Pérez Rubio and Hernández Ruiz 2006, 242n5), they offer a certain justifi cation for dating the start of the transition, in the cinematic sector at least, to before the death of Franco. Thus the 1970s were characterized by an increasing extension of what could be said on fi lm, giving rise to an unprecedented originality and variety (Pérez Rubio and Hernández Ruiz 2006, 180). And in the last years of the dictatorship, a political opposition was already emerging into the public sphere, taking advantage of offi cial “instability” and internal Francoist confl ict between reformists and the bunker, to “make its voice heard” in varied forms of cultural production, albeit barely tolerated by the more reactionary sectors (ibid., 181).
