This public lecture is now available as: MP3 (please listen to the file below).

The new world order based on the globalisation of the economy and the interconnectedness of markets has rendered almost obsolete many notions associated with the sovereign, independent nation-state, while posing new demands on mechanisms of national self-presentation and representation to the global market. Notions related to public diplomacy and nation branding, unequivocally related to the production and perception of national images, are fast becoming a new form of symbolic capital. The creative industries, and the film industry in particular, play a central role in forging and disseminating images that speak for and about the nation. The case of Spain is particularly interesting for a study of national image due to the unusual confluence of five factors: rapid and successful rebranding in the 1980s and 1990s, strong cultural industries, strong tourist market, rapid social transformation and uneven international profile. In this presentation I would like to consider the different meanings of the term "country image" in the Spanish context and suggest that the image of Spain encoded and disseminated by today's Spanish cinema is closely related to a deliberate attempt by filmmakers to explain a reconstituted Spain to domestic and international audiences. Creating visual images and establishing a symbolic image, projecting images on the screen and projecting a national image abroad, contesting old stereotypes and yet injecting new life into many of them, contributing to normalise a country that once was "different" and yet capitalising on its undiminished queerness - all these are operations that define and explain the image of Spain as portrayed in contemporary Spanish films.

 

Alfredo Martinez-Exposito is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Head of the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on Spanish gay literature and cinematic representations of the male body. He is also interested in critical approaches to the geopolitics of the Spanish language. He is currently researching the contribution of the national film industry to the domestic and international promotion of a renewed image of Spain. He is past President of the Association for Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2008 he received the Spanish Order of Civil Merit for his contribution to the study of Spanish language and culture in Australia.