Spanish Cult Cinema, volume 2, 1965-1969

Black & White Pages

In this, the second volume of Spanish Cult Cinema, we take a voyage back to the second half of the 1960s, a period when Spanish cinema was developing in tandem with wider social changes occurring in the country. It was a time when there was still an onus on filmmakers to strike a conservative, consensual tone, when taking too confrontational an approach ran the risk of having your work seized or heavily censored by the authorities. But at the same time there was an increasing awareness that the foreign markets offered a massive opportunity to find new audiences… if you were to make the right kinds of films. So, on the one hand, you had directors like Carlos Saura, Francisco Rovira Beleta, and Luis García Berlanga, whose challenging, dramatic work continued to gain appreciation on the international festival circuit. On the other, a burgeoning interest in genre films, especially those which could be sold abroad, such as westerns and spy films.

This was a period marked by the output of filmmakers whose work has been little examined in English language surveys of European cinema. People like Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, Julio Buchs, Eugenio Martín, José María Forqué and Rafael Romero Marchent, who often took their cues from international box office successes but had their own novel approach and qualities. For every The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there was a The Ugly Ones or A Bullet for Sandoval. For every Goldfinger, a They Came to Rob Las Vegas. Unexpected genres appeared and disappeared – war films, prohibition era gangster movies – or started becoming established prior to fl ourishing in the following decade (horror films, as epitomised by the work of Paul Naschy).

Including over 150 detailed and illustrated reviews as well as historical and topical overviews, Spanish Cult Cinema, Volume 2 continues examining a previously unexplored area of cinema history, making it an essential purchase for both afficionados of cult films and those with an interest in the subject of Spanish cinema.