Spanish 797CC - ST-Catalan Cinema

The goal of this class is to give visibility to a film production that is generally assimilated by, and shoehorned into, Spanish film production. If there is a commonsense understanding of what a national cinema is, what about a stateless national cinema? Catalan cinema is often relegated to a footnote or a compulsory chapter in books on Spanish cinema, even though Spanish cinema would be inconceivable without Catalan film production. Just as early feminist theory called for a "countercinema," early radical Latin American theory for an "imperfect cinema," and Hamid Naficy for an "accented cinema," so Catalan cinema cries out for a reevaluation of cinematic models and protocols. Is Catalan cinema an imperfect, minoritarian, colonized, accented countercinema? Does it have its own idiosyncrasies? This class aims at answering these and other questions by offering an overview of the history of Catalan cinema from the pioneering days to the present. Particular emphasis will be given to "auteurs" such as Joaquin Jorda, Ventura Pons, Bigas Luna, Pere Portabella, and Isabel Coixet; the avant-gardist Escola de Barcelona, that provoked belligerent rejections like no other film movement; the clandestine production during the Franco dictatorship (Helena Lumbreras and her Class Cinema Collective, or Pere Portabella's early works); the creative documentary of the Pompeu Fabra; and the new generation of women filmmakers (Neus Ballus, Carla Simon, Elena Marti, among others).