At the end of the Spring 2024 semester, I submitted what is still my favorite paper I’ve written for film school: “Música, Memoria, Moving Image in Spain”. I think part of what I appreciated so much about Madrid native Professor Bernardo Antonio-González’s film class was his consistent focus on pop culture, music, architecture, and history as tools just as important to understanding movies as film form and aesthetics. This paper gave me the first chance I’d really had in film school to explore this importance. I chose to talk about music and sound as a motif in Spanish cinema in addition to the actual memory recall that a specifically curated song can have in incorporating a sense of memory recall in a Spanish audience, aligning audiences subjectively with the characters in the film, reacting to the same songs across space and time.
I take the understanding of these songs and pop cultural references is another form of a cultural film language in and of itself just like camera placement, angle, and formal choices.
