Spanish Meta-Art and Contemporary Cinema

Can cinema reveal its audience's most subversive thinking? Do films have the potential to project their viewers' innermost thoughts making them apparent on the screen? This bookargues that cinema has precisely this power, to unveil to the spectator their own hidden thoughts. It examines case studies from various cultures in conversation with Spain, a country whose enduring masterpieces in self-reflexive or meta-art provide insight into the special dynamic between viewer and screen.
Framed around critical readings of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Diego Velázquez' Las meninas and Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, this book examines contemporary films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, Bigas Luna, Alejandro Amenábar, Lucrecia Martel, Krzysztof Kieslowski, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Jonze, Andrzej Zulawski, Fernando Pérez, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg to illustrate how self-reflexivity in film unbridles the mental repression of film spectators. It proposes cinema as an uncanny duplication of the workings of the brain - a doppelgänger to human thought.

Guillermo Rodríguez-Romaguerais Assistant Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University-Northridge, USA. He is a narrative filmmaker and film scholar from San Juan, Puerto Rico. His films explore gender, sexuality, and Latinx identity through the horror and thriller genres, and his academic work has been published in Studies in European Cinema, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of Americaandthe Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies.

Dedication List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: The Veiled Screen 1. The Blinded Spectator: The Defiance of Reconstituted Sight 2. The Conscious Spectator: An Intermedial Contemplation of Las meninas 3. The Spectral Spectator: The Visor Effect in Film 4. The Crystallized Spectator: The Spectator's Double in the Cinematic Abyss 5. The Self-Reflexive Spectator: The Quixotic in Horror 6. The Delusional Spectator: Meta-Film as Virtual Oneiric Simulation Conclusion: The Screen Unveiled Notes Bibliography