ABSTRACT

This chapter starts by assessing the place of literature in the academic approach to Spanish film. It then shifts into an interrogation of art cinema as a mode of filmmaking within the country’s film production. It concludes with a reflection on the relations between poetry and film. Disciplinary as well as hermeneutic considerations govern the logic of such a progression. The itinerary that takes us from the general idea of literature to the more specific genre of poetry also chronicles the search for a reputable object of academic study within Filmspanism. In that critical itinerary, this chapter uses Victor Erice’s El sol del membrillo (1992) and José Luis Guerin’s Tren de sombras (1997) as rest stops. Both films provide the concrete textual examples for the discussion of Spanish art cinema in the era of spectacular, neoliberal reproducibility as well as for the exploration of the category of poetic film.