During the years since his death, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's best-known twentieth-century poet and playwright, has generally been considered a writer of tragedy. Three of his major plays are fatalistic stories of suffering and death, and his poetry is filled with dread. Yet most of Lorca's dramatic production consists of comedies and farces. Throughout his poetry and prose, as well as in his most somber plays, runs an undercurrent of humor--dark irony and satire--that is in no way contradictory to his tragic view of life. On the contrary, as Virginia Higginbotham demonstrates, through...

How does a totalitarian government influence the arts, and how do the arts respond? Spanish Film Under Franco raises these important questions, giving English speakers a starting point in their study of Spanish cinema.

After a brief overview of Spanish film before Franco, the author proceeds to a discussion of censorship as practiced by the Franco regime. The response of directors to censorship--the "franquista aesthetic," or "aesthetic of repression," with its highly metaphorical, oblique style--is explored in the works of Luis Bunuel, Carlos Saura, Juan...