Postmodern attempts: The film image in late 1960s and early 1970s Spanish literature and film

The purpose of this research was to identify and analyze the presence of the Hollywood film image within four Spanish texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to demonstrate that the use of this intertextual technique—which led to metafiction—was a sign of a developing postmodern discourse in Spain. Postmodern cultural production was in its early stages in the sixties, particularly in narrative and poetry. The New Spanish Novel, whose crucial year was 1962, and the novísimos\u27 poetry, first seen in Pere Gimferrer\u27s Arde el mar in 1966, marked the beginning of postmodernism for Spanish writers. During the ten years leading up to the transition to democracy, the global aesthetic developed also within essay and film. By the late sixties and early seventies, literature and cinema in Spain shared many of the concerns held and techniques practiced by artists throughout the West. Despite the censorship policies imposed by the Franco dictatorship, Spain quickly developed a postmodern discourse that was equal to those in democratic Western nations. The Hollywood film image appears in many texts belonging to this developing postmodern period in Spain. This intertextuality—used by a number of artists who had lived through the post-civil war years as children—contributed the elements of time, motion and innovation to the framing element, making it dynamic and thereby qualifying it as postmodern. It is my contention that these three elements are proof of the postmodern: they revisit the past without irony, they break with modernism by having a plurality of narrative lines, and they blur the line which divided high and popular art. These are central postmodern concerns. This dissertation analyzes texts from four different genres—narrative, cinema, poetry and essay—all available to the public in the late 1960s and early 1970s