Cinema and Social Trauma after Terrorist Attacks: the Spectatorship Perception. Approaching to the Spanish Case

If we consider the cinema as a communicative process, it is pertinent to examine the meanings that its audiences attribute to films in their sociocultural context. This article presents a qualitative study focused on the Spanish audience, with respect to the treatment given in films to the trauma and social fear arising after the New York, Madrid and London attacks. On one hand, it describes their reading of the Anglo-Saxon films that allude allegorically to those attacks and to their social consequences. On the other hand, it examines their assessment of the role that should be fulfilled by fictional cinema when it deals with the 3/11 tragedy