Antonio Terrón Barroso – Aston University, United Kingdom
Keywords
Spanishness, Spanish transnational cinema, Spanish national identity, audience studies.
Abstract
This paper will explore the linguistic representation and reception of Spanishness through anonymously written reviews published online in French and English in two film rating websites with open access: allocine.fr and imdb.com. All the reviews compiled and analysed for this work will be based on the nineteen transnational films co-produced by Spain together with the UK and/or the USA between 2005 and 2015 that included at least one Spanish character, actor or actress: Sahara (2005), The backwoods (2006), The Kovak box (2006), Cargo (2006), Goal 2: Living the dream (2007), Manolete (2007), Savage Grace (2007), Little Ashes (2008), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Cracks (2008), Transsiberian (2009), My life in ruins (2009), Triage (2009), You will meet a talk dark stranger (2010), Mr Nice (2010), Midnight in Paris (2011), There be dragons (2013), The Gunman (2015) and In the heart of the sea (2015). More precisely, the analysis that will be carried out on the corpus of film reviews specifically compiled for this work will focus on the construction of the Spanish identity though the most common semantic fields used to describe three specific elements: Spanish males, Spanish females and Spain as a territory. Special attention will be paid to possible similarities and differences that the two national audiences included in the study—France and the United Kingdom—may present in the particular way(s) they receive and process the same images of Spanishness depicted in the films reviewed. The possible connections that the results of this study could have with classic stereotypes and clichés about Spain and Spaniards will be also explored together with the role that the Spanish government may have played in promoting them. Sixteen out the nineteen films reviewed in the corpus of this study (84,2%) received in total more than eleven million euros in funds from the Spanish state. This figure has been calculated with the information on public funds provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports in its database of classified movies available at http://www.mecd.gob.es/cultura/areas/cine/mc/catalogodecine/inicio.html. Last date accessed: 30/09/2019.
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