Library of Rassegna iberistica

Series | Library of Rassegna iberistica
Edited book | Places. What Places?
Chapter | La construcción cinematográfica del espacio en la alegoría política

La construcción cinematográfica del espacio en la alegoría política

Alicia en la España de las maravillas

Abstract

The film Alice in Spanish Wonderland / Alicia en la España de las maravillas, directed by Jordi Feliu in 1978, was saluted by international critics as the first open questioning of Franco’s dictatorship on screen. The film was well received in the festival circuit before being dubbed into Catalan in the early 1980s. Yet, it soon fell into relative oblivion due to its demanding visual language and political content. Like other political allegories of Spain’s Transición, this film makes a complex use of cinematic space. Visual rhetoric of space includes instances of realistic, symbolic, and allegorical compositions. Intertextual allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books further compound the construction of spaces in the film. The film makes use of four main strategies for the composition of space: discontinuity, incongruity, over-signification, and symbolism. Furthermore, the film’s powerful Catalan subtext generates a particularly complex set of hybrid spaces in which Spanishness and Catalanness are ambiguously expressed.


Open access

Submitted: April 14, 2020 | Published July 9, 2020 | Language: es

Keywords Catalan cinemaSurrealismSpace in filmCountry imageSpanish cinema


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