The Two cines con niño

Abstract

The Two cines con niño is the first genre study of Spanish-language child-starred cinemas. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of cinema from Spain and how the child-starred genres use the concept of childhood to define the nation’s past, present, and future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Latin American cinema, this monograph examines dialogism in aesthetics, narratives, and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina. In-depth inquiry within its pages examines films by Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio del Amo, Montxo Armendáriz, Benjamín Ávila, Juan Antonio Bayona, José Luis Cuerda, Guillermo del Toro, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Arantxa Lazkano, Luis Lucía, Paula Markovtich, Javier Ruiz Caldera, Carlos Saura, Imanol Uribe, Ladislao Vajda, Agustí Villaronga, and Andrés Wood.

Orphans at play in Cría cuervos (1976) and Estiu 1993 (2017): Reconsidering the playspace

“…Despite this process of transition, from one nuclear family structure to another, the question of the girls' status as orphans remains noteworthy, in that they display a desire for destruction of sorts -or as Hogan might put it, a resistance to the stifling ventriloquism of the traditional hegemonic structure of the nuclear family. 27 The decisions of the two directors to depict both orphanhood and girlhood can be aligned with the potential 'to complicate linear or teleological national histories'. 28 By presenting female orphan child protagonists who demonstrate murderous (Cría cuervos) and destructive desires (Estiu 1993), these films also break with conventions of the nuevo cine con niño films, which, Kinder and Hogan have argued, 29 include the male orphan figure who represents traumatic childhoods during the Spanish Civil War and under the regime.…”