Survey of Twentieth Century Spanish Art and Film

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Tutors: Professor Carmen Fracchia (art), Dr Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez (film)
• Assessment: a group or individual presentation plus 1500-word individual log (30%), 1500-word critical review of a book/article (30%) and 2500-word essay (40%)

In this module we introduce you to the main trends in twentieth-century Spanish art and film, and provide a grounding in visual analysis.

In the art component we focus on a selection of paintings, sculptures, prints and artefacts produced during the twentieth century. We will study these within the context of the European Avant-garde (Cubism, Surrealism and Abstraction), and will introduce you to relevant recent developments in art history and theory, and to technical issues such as: form, space, composition, colour, physical structure, modelling, casting, construction and installation. Issues covered will include: ‘primitivism', the influence of photographic media and mass production.

In the film component we place a series of key texts in their historical and cultural context. You will become familiar with basic technical and theoretical issues in film study such as editing, sound, framing, camerawork, lighting, mise-en-scène, costume, genre, self-referentiality and intertextuality, the construction of a national (or regional) cinema and of popular censorship, the star system, spectatorship and gender.

Visual texts include paintings, sculptures, prints and artefacts by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Antoni Tapiès, Grupo Crónica and Eduardo Chillida.

The module will be taught in Spanish, with texts and films in the target language.