6533b7d3fe1ef96bd12600b0

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Cinema, popular entertainment, literature and television

subject

description

In an excellent methodological essay, Rick Altman (1996) has argued that the notion that cinema has a stable identity across time is, at best, an illusion. Specifically, its identity has become diffuse at moments when it has entered into circuits of transformative exchange and competition with other forms of leisure activity. Altman focused on the age of the nickelodeon (exhibition at fairgrounds or amusement parks, early cinema theaters) and on the sound revolution (producing forms such as “radio with images” and filmed theater), proposing a “crisis model” of historiography in which what we call cinema includes heterogeneous, unstable scenarios that have emerged at crisis points in its history. Spanish cinema – like cinema elsewhere – has existed within a relational economy of leisure, entertainment, and representation that makes it difficult to consider it as a separate entity. Research is still needed into the relationship of cinema to the broad range of cultural and entertainment practices with which it forms a continuum, and into the ways in which this relationship has changed at certain critical junctures; in Spain such research has not been attempted to date. Such a study would have to consider cinema-going in relation to the full range of leisure activities available in any given period: the forms of entertainment open to different social classes; family circles and their domestic economy, which made certain cultural practices accessible to some of their members rather than others; and the social, sexual, or gender constituencies for particular forms of cultural consumption. Who goes to see what with whom may depend on the day of the week; for example,