At the outset of his book Australian National Cinema, Tom O'Regan readily confesses that his object, Australian cinema, is a “messy affair” (2). Arguably, O'Regan's pithy appraisal can be generalized for any theoretical attempt to define the concept “national cinema” or any critical enterprise to explore a particular case of the phenomenon, the Spanish one certainly included. There are too many films, film topics, and film motifs; too many directors, actors, producers, and technicians; too many genres; too many contexts, influences, and intertexts; too many overlapping or even contradictory identities, among filmmakers and within each one of them, among individual spectators or particular audiences and within each one of them as well. It is indeed a messy affair, yet, as Susan Hayward points out commenting on O'Regan's words, a “fruitful” one (91).

Of course, the prolific “national” extrafilmic historical reality against which all these films are played and played out is even messier. As I write these lines in the fall of 2015, two of those extrafilmic events, one collective and of the highest national relevance, and another of a more individual and anecdotic character, can illustrate my point. I am alluding to the Catalan autonomous elections of September 27, 2015, and to some startling declarations made by Fernando Trueba, one of the most important and recognizable Spanish film directors, a few days before. In the Catalan elections, billed as a de facto plebiscite on independence from Spain by some of the contending political parties and alliances, the two clear secessionist options (Junts pel Sí and CUP) obtained 47.8 percent of the total ballots cast. Those results have enormous historical, political, social, and cultural consequences, one of them, within the context of this book's discourse, the possible fragmentation, severance, or even superannuation of its object of study, Spanish national cinema, at least as it is presented here. In the wake of the Catalan elections, the Basque nationalist and independentist parties have reiterated once more their claim for a referendum on independence of their own, endangering further the integrity or survival of the multilayered concept of Spanish national cinema developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty–first.