Cinema of Spain

The art of motion-picture making within Spain or by Spanish filmmakers abroad is collectively known as Spanish Cinema.
Only a small portion of box office sales in Spain are generated by domestic films. The different Spanish governments have therefore implemented measures aimed at supporting local film production and the movie theaters, which currently include the assurance of funding from the main television broadcasters. Nowadays, the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) is the State agency in charge of regulating the allocation of public funds to the domestic film industry.
The first Spanish film exhibition took place on 5 May 1895, in Barcelona. Exhibitions of Lumière films were screened in Madrid, Málaga and Barcelona in May and December 1896, respectively.
The matter of which Spanish film came first is in dispute. The first was either Salida de la misa de doce de la Iglesia del Pilar de Zaragoza –Exit of the Twelve O'Clock Mass from the Church of El Pilar of Zaragoza– (Eduardo Jimeno Peromarta), Plaza del puerto en Barcelona –Plaza of the Port of Barcelona– (Alexandre Promio) or Llegada de un tren de Teruel a Segorbe –Arrival of a Train from Teruel in Segorbe– (anonymous). It is also possible that the first film was Riña en un café (Fructuós Gelabert). These films were all released in 1897.
The first Spanish film director to achieve great success internationally was Segundo de Chomón, who worked in France and Italy but made several famous fantasy films in Spain, such as El hotel eléctrico (1908).
In 1914, Barcelona was the center of the nation's film industry. The españoladas (historical Spanish epics) predominated until the 1960s. Prominent among these were the films of Florián Rey, starring Imperio Argentina, and the first version of Nobleza Baturra (Juan Vila Vilamala, 1925). Historical dramas such as Vida de Cristóbal Colón y su Descubrimiento de América –The Life of Christopher Columbus and His Discovery of America– (Gérard Bourgeois, 1917), adaptations of newspaper serials such as Los misterios de Barcelona –The Mysteries of Barcelona– (starring Joan Maria Codina, 1916), and of stage plays such as Don Juan Tenorio (Ricardo de Baños [es], 1922) and zarzuelas (comedic operettas), were also produced. Even the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Jacinto Benavente, who said that "in film they pay me the scraps," would shoot film versions of his theatrical works.
In 1928, Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Luis Buñuel founded the first cine-club, in Madrid. By that point, Madrid was already the primary center of the industry; forty-four of the fifty-eight films released up until that point had been produced there.
The rural drama La aldea maldita –The Cursed Village– (Florian Rey, 1929) was a hit in Paris, where, at the same time, Buñuel and Salvador Dalí premiered Un chien andalou. Un chien andalou has become one of the most well-known avant-garde films of that era.
By 1931, the introduction of foreign sound films had hurt the Spanish film industry to the point where only a single title was released that year.
In 1935, Manuel Casanova founded the Compañía Industrial Film Española S.A. (Cifesa) and introduced sound to Spanish film-making. Cifesa would grow to become the biggest production company to ever exist in Spain. Sometimes criticized as an instrument of the right wing, it nevertheless supported young filmmakers such as Buñuel and his pseudo-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933). In 1933 it was responsible for filming seventeen motion pictures and in 1934, twenty-one. The most notable success was Paloma Fair (Benito Perojo, 1935). They were also responsible for Don Quijote de la Mancha (Rafael Gil, 1947), the most elaborate version of the Cervantes classic up to that time. By 1935 production had risen to thirty-seven films.
The Civil War devastated the silent film era: only ten per cent of all silent films made before 1936 survived the war. Films were also destroyed for their celluloid content and made into goods.
Around 1936, both sides of the Civil War began to use cinema as a means of propaganda. A typical example of this is España 1936 (Buñuel, 1937), which also contains much rare newsreel footage. The pro-Franco side founded the National Department of Cinematography, causing many actors to go into exile.
The new regime then began to impose censorship and the obligatory dubbing to Spanish to all films released. Highlights in this era are El difunto es un vivo (Ignacio F. Iquino, 1941), Traces of Light (Rafael Gil, 1941), Madness for Love (Juan de Orduña, 1948), Last Stand in the Philippines (Antonio Román, 1945), Raza (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia with screenplay by Franco himself, 1942), and The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville, 1944). Cifesa produced Ella, él y sus millones (de Orduña, 1944) as well as Fedra (Manuel Mur Oti, 1956).
A policy of autarky tried to keep foreign currency in the country and establish a domestic film industry. If the distributors wanted licences to import and dub foreign films (audiences preferred American films), they would have to acquire them from producers of local films. The number of licences depended on the merits (artistic, moral, cultural, political) acknowledged by the government to each local film. The American distributors of the MPAA tried to open the market removing the local producers. To that end, they embargoed Spain since May 1951. The embargo goes into 1952 due to complications with American studios outside MPAA and reorganizations within the Spanish government. Spanish producers, lacking the income from the dubbing licences and with an uncertain future, greatly diminished their production as well. An agreement between Spain and the United States was finally reached.
On the other hand, Miracle of Marcelino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955) is the first Spanish film to obtain worldwide recognition from critics and public, winning the Silver Bear award at the 5th Berlin International Film Festival. This film would trigger a trend of child actors, such as Joselito, Marisol, Rocío Dúrcal or Pili y Mili starring in popular musical films.
In 1951, the regime instituted the Ministry of Information and Tourism to safeguard and develop the Spanish brand, the social imagery and the public image under the slogan "Spain is different" which was launched in the 1920s and then internationally spread in the 1960s. Its main purpose was to promote the Spanish tourist industry and a massive inflow of people who came from all the Europe towards the Andalusia, looking for what they saw in the Spanish films: sun and sea, comfortable transports and hotels, good ethnic cuisine, passion and adventure, and the so called españoladas (bulls, castanets, flamenco, Gitano culture and folklore). Fog and Sun (José María Forqué, 1951) was the first movies belonging to the genre of the "touristic cinema". It was followed by Veraneo en España (Miguel Iglesias, 1958) and by Spain Again (Jaime Camino, 1969).
Musical films The Last Torch Song (de Orduña, 1957) and The Violet Seller (Luis César Amadori, 1958), both starring Sara Montiel, were huge international commercial successes, making Montiel the first worldwide famous film star –and the highest paid– of Spanish cinema.
In the 1950s, the influence of neorealism became evident in the works of a number of rather young film directors, such as Furrows (José Antonio Nieves Conde, 1951), Reckless (Nieves Conde, 1951), We're All Necessary (Nieves Conde, 1956), Pride (Mur Oti, 1955), Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955), Calle Mayor (Bardem, 1956), El pisito (Marco Ferreri, 1959), El cochecito (Ferreri, 1960), Welcome Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953), or Plácido (García Berlanga, 1961), ranged from melodrama to esperpento or black comedy, but all of them showed a strong social criticism, unexpected under a political censorship, like the one featured by Franco`s regime. From the amorality and selfishness of the upper middle class or the ridiculousness and mediocrity of the small town people to the hopelessness of the impoverished working class, every social stratum of the contemporary Spain was shown up.
Luis Buñuel in turn returned to Spain to film the shocking Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970).
A 1954 report by Eduardo Moya from the Ministry of Trade remarked that the Spanish cinema industry had to become competitive at home and abroad. Co-productions with France and Italy could bring the equipment and skills needed.
Numerous co-productions with France and, most of all, Italy along the 1950s–1970s invigorated Spanish cinema both industrially and artistically. Actually the just mentioned Buñuel's movies were co-productions: Viridiana (1961) was Spanish-Mexican, and Tristana (1970) Spanish-French-Italian. Also, the hundreds of Spaghetti-westerns and sword and sandal films shot in southern Spain by mixed Spanish-Italian teams were co-productions.
Under the Spanish-American agreements, part of the foreign profits locked in Spain since the war were invested in runaway productions to be distributed abroad. Several American epic-scale superproductions or blockbusters were shot in Spain, produced either by Samuel Bronston, such as King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961), El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961), 55 Days at Peking (Ray, 1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Mann, 1964), and Circus World (Henry Hathaway, 1964); or by others, such as Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen, 1956), The Pride and the Passion (Stanley Kramer, 1957), Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959), Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Doctor Zhivago (Lean, 1965), The Trojan Women (Michael Cacoyannis, 1971). These movies employed many Spanish technical professionals, and as a byproduct caused that some film stars, like Ava Gardner and Orson Welles lived in Spain for years. Actually Welles, with Mr. Arkadin (1955), in fact a French-Spanish-Swiss co-production, was one of the first American filmmakers to devise Spain as location for his shootings, and he did it again for Chimes at Midnight (1966), this time a Spanish-Swiss co-production.
Warner Bros., an American studio had opened its local headquarters in Spain in the early 1970s under the name of Warner Española S.A. Warner Española, alongside releasing Warner Bros. films (as well as films by Disney theatrically in the late 1980s-90s) is also involved in distribution of Spanish films such as Ensalada Baudelaire (1978), Adios Pequeña (1986) and most of 1990s Pedro Almodóvar's films such as High Heels (1991), Kika (1993), and Live Flesh (1997).
Many international actors starred in Spanish films: Italians Vittorio de Sica, Vittorio Gassman and Rossano Brazzi with Mexican María Félix in The Black Crown (Luis Saslavsky, 1951); Italian couple Raf Vallone and Elena Varzi in The Eyes Leave a Trace (Sáenz de Heredia, 1952), Mexican Arturo de Córdova in The Red Fish (Nieves Conde, 1955), Americans Betsy Blair in Calle Mayor (Bardem, 1956); Edmund Gwenn in Calabuch (García Berlanga, 1956), or Richard Basehart in Miracles of Thursday (García Berlanga, 1957) among many others. All the foreign actors were dubbed into Spanish. Mexican actor Gael García Bernal has also recently received international notoriety in films by Spanish directors.
In 1962, José María García Escudero [es] became the Director General of Cinematography and Theatre, propelling forward state efforts and the Official Cinema School, from which emerged the majority of new directors, generally from the political left and those opposed to the Franco government. Among these were Mario Camus, Miguel Picazo, Francisco Regueiro, Manuel Summers, and, above all, Carlos Saura. Apart from this line of directors, Fernando Fernán Gómez made El extraño viaje (1964) and Life Goes On (1965), Víctor Erice The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and Jaime de Armiñan My Dearest Senorita (1971).
From the so-called Escuela de Barcelona, originally more experimentalist and cosmopolitan, come Jacinto Esteva, Pere Portabella, Joaquin Jordan, Vicente Aranda, Jaime Camino, and Gonzalo Suárez, who made their master works in the 1980s.
In the Basque country the directors Fernando Larruquert, Nestor Basterretxea, José María Zabalza and the producer Elías Querejeta stood out.
The 1968–1980 period saw the golden age of Spanish B-Movie horror, underpinning the term fantaterror to convey the set of films blending supernatural and horror themes that originated as an answer to European and American exploitation titles.
In the 1960s (and 1970s), a new sort of españolada different from the previous one brought the formulation of an "Iberian" model of masculininity associated to casticismo [es], represented by a male star system consisting of the likes of José Luis López Vázquez, Alfredo Landa, Andrés Pajares, and Fernando Esteso. A new wave of popular and reactionary mainstream comedy films came to be collectively known as landismo [es] –after Alfredo Landa, a recurring appearance in many of those films playing foreign-women-preying "Latin lover" types–, which was a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s.
With the end of dictatorship in the mid 1970s, censorship was greatly loosened and cultural works were permitted in other languages spoken in Spain besides Spanish, resulting in the founding of the Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe or the Institut del Cinema Català [ca], among others. Also with the end of censorship and repression, a commercial cinema –of low quality and minimal cost– with a high erotic content and gratuitous nudity –mostly feminine– appeared, which was called cine de destape [es] and which lasted until the early 1980s.
In the context of the Transition, the so-called cine quinqui –of which Eloy de la Iglesia and José Antonio de la Loma [es] were prominent representatives–, particularly popular from 1977 to 1987, approached taboo issues from a sensationalist angle, criminalizing the lumpenproletariat. These films (whose lead performers sometimes were delinquent themselves) also ended up contributing to the promotion of an imaginary of symbolic violence associated to the naturalization of the punitive and non-rehabilitating function of the prison system. In the view of Germán Labrador Méndez [es], many of the quinqui films underpinned a true allegory of the Transition, conveying "the mythical domestication of the non-consensual socio-political forces embodied by the quinquis, as children of the working class and, above all, as young people".
During the democracy, a whole new series of directors base their films either on controversial topics or on revising the country's history. Jaime Chávarri, Víctor Erice, José Luis Garci, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Eloy de la Iglesia, Pilar Miró and Pedro Olea were some of these who directed great films. Montxo Armendáriz or Juanma Bajo Ulloa's "new Basque cinema" has also been outstanding; another prominent Basque director is Julio Médem.
The Spanish cinema, however, depends on the great hits of the so-called comedia madrileña by Fernando Colomo or Fernando Trueba, the sophisticated melodramas by Pedro Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia and Santiago Segura's black humour or Alejandro Amenábar's works, in such a manner that, according to producer José Antonio Félez [es], "fifty per cent of total box office revenues comes from five titles, and between eight and ten films give eighty per cent of the total" during the year 2004.
Foreign films often dominate box offices in Spain, with average monthly receipts of €35–50 million, making Spain the tenth largest country in the world for international theatrical release, with a total gross of USD 193,304,925 in 2020, thus giving Spain a worldwide market share of 1.8%.
The San Sebastian International Film Festival is a major film festival supervised by the FIAPF. It was started in 1953, and it takes place in San Sebastián every year. Alfred Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, Steven Spielberg, Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor are some of the stars that have participated in this festival, the most important in Spain.
The Sitges Film Festival, now known as the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, was started in 1967. It is considered one of the best cinematographic contests in Europe, and is the best in the specialty of science fiction film.
There are several other film festivals with important prizes for the industry such as the Valladolid International Film Festival, and the Seville European Film Festival from September to November, –Autumn has become the season par excellence for the debut of Spanish films in the domestic commercial circuit–. Meanwhile the Málaga Film Festival, focused on Spanish and Ibero-American films, is generally held in early Spring.
The Goya Awards are the main film awards in Spain. They were established in 1987, a year after the founding of the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain, and recognize excellence in many aspects of Spanish motion picture making such as acting, directing and screenwriting. The first ceremony took place on 16 March 1987 at the Lope de Vega Theatre, Madrid. The ceremony continues to take place annually around the end of January, and awards are given to films produced during the previous year. The award itself is a small bronze bust of Francisco de Goya created by the sculptor José Luis Fernández.
In 2013, the Feroz Awards were established by the Asociación de Informadores Cinematográficos de España, an association of entertainment journalists and critics.
Awards recognising the excellence in the regional cinema (and/or wider audiovisual industry) include the Mestre Mateo Awards (from Galicia; presented by the Academia Galega do Audiovisual [gl]), the Gaudí Awards (from Catalonia; presented by the Catalan Film Academy), the Lola Gaos Awards (from the Valencian Community, presented by the Acadèmia Valenciana de l'Audiovisual) or the Carmen Awards (from Andalusia, presented by the Academia de Cine de Andalucía).
A large part of the funding of Spanish-produced films is covered in advance of the theatrical window by pre-sales to public (RTVE) or private (Atresmedia or Mediaset) broadcasters, subsidies (from ICAA, from regional or provincial administrations, or from tax rebates) and from pre-sales to streaming platforms. Pre-sales may cover up to a 60–70% of the budget of a film with an average budget of €2.5 million. This system, which favours the attempt to approach the break-even point before the first window of theatrical exhibition, has received criticism from within the industry because it might discourage the pursuit of "commercial success". The AIE (agrupación de interés económico; transl. 'economic interest grouping') legal form is used as a tax vehicle to take advantage of rebates.
The ten highest-grossing Spanish films of all time (1965–2023) by domestic box office gross revenue are listed as follows: