This book is the first to explore three visual media in contemporary
Spain: cinema, television and the internet. It also examines cultural
products in each of these media in terms of three vital themes: emotion,
location and nostalgia.
The first two chapters focus on emotion. They analyze the 'emotional
imperative' in a recent Almodóvar feature film and in Spanish
television's top-rated period drama, and investigate the politics of
affect in TV drama in the last decade. The next pair of chapters deal
with location. They use cultural geography to re-read contradictory
accounts of the movida (the post-Franco cultural boom) and examine an
attempt to anchor a US-derived genre (the youth movie) in the urban
landscape of Madrid. The fifth and sixth chapters introduce the theme of
location into nostalgia. They treat the unique cases of a successful
Spanish heritage movie and a contemporary Spanish thriller remade in
Hollywood. The peunultimate chapter investigates electronic artists and
the virtual universe, and the book ends with a look at the implications
of Hispano-Mexican co-productions and the interconnectedness of economic
and aesthetic cultural forms.