ABSTRACT
While lacking a formal state apparatus through which to authenticate its nationhood, Catalan cinema is marked by a pattern of conceptualizations-shared cultural-historical traditions and textual coherencies across a significant body of different filmic texts over time-that in other contexts would lead us to consider it as a national cinema. At its root, the problematic status of Catalan cinema derives from the disjunction between Catalonia as a historically-rooted cultural community and the imposed constructions of political authority of the Spanish state that over centuries have sought to subsume all regional differences under the rubric of Castilianized, Spanish culture. The volume of production of Catalan cinema in this period is prodigious and includes, among other notable achievements, the production, beginning in 1977, of Noticiari de Barcelona, the first Catalan-spoken movie newsreels in nearly four decades.
