Photography, production, design and editing

The formal features that have made Spanish cinema what it is and the technical processes behind them (camerawork, production design, editing) have passed through the same stages of trial and error, hurdles, crises, and conflicts as has been the case with other national cinemas. The notion of the exceptionalism of Spanish cinema is not supported by evidence, unless by “anomaly” we just mean “cultural specificity.” Cultural specificities there have been, as there are today: the highly idiosyncratic set designs of popular adaptations (of zarzuelas, of literary texts) in the 1920s; the enforced experimentation of the Civil War; the claustrophobic atmosphere of the postwar years; the prolongation of the studio age perhaps longer than in any other country; and the modest impact of lightweight cameras and direct sound in the modernizing phase that began in the late 1950s. But are these cultural specificities any greater than those represented by 1920s German expressionism and Soviet montage, 1930s French poetic realism, the New York underground, or the cyclical recurrence of genres in Japan? A good case can be made for giving Spanish cinema back its normality; that is, its unsurprising singularity