There is an intentional ambiguity in the title that encapsulates the gist of this study on Spanish cinema. The term “essays” refers to that epitome of vaguely defined discursive genres under whose rubric the book's chapters are to be considered, irrespective of their faithful compliance with the usual critical protocols of academic scholarship. Nonetheless, “essays” also alludes to an action performed by the object under examination: Spanish cinema. Intentionally or not, a considerable number of Spanish films have been involved in the task of essaying the nation, that is, of attempting to make it, venturing it, seeking it, trying it, testing it, assaying it, or rehearsing it, to invoke the synonyms of the verb “essay” that fit the bill most exactly. For more than forty years, Spanish cinema has set up shop and taken upon itself the task of helping to reshape a national identity relentlessly dictated by General Francisco Franco up to 1975. The book explores four major issues in this regard: (1) the negotiation of the borders of the nation; (2) the persistence of the old obsession with violence, thought of by so many as an inescapable native trait; (3) the newfound insatiable appetite for traveling; (4) and the vindication of the mother qua a benign emblem of the land and its people, a figure refurbished and recovered after such a long time of national darkness, monstrous literary and cinematic foremothers, orphanhood, and subjection to the ordeals suffered by those forced to become defenseless wards of an authoritarian stepfather state.

Some of these issues have already been considered in the growing field of Spanish film studies, but often only partially or fragmentarily, in too many cases devoid of proper cultural and historical contextualization, usually merely in analysis of individual movies and authors or in passing in historical surveys, and almost always in isolation, without furnishing the fabric of their intimate mutual relations. My intent is to show that there is a narrative in Spanish cinema, taken as a broad collective discourse that ties those four threads together and proposes a nation whose specificity must be precisely its impurity—difference as essence—a hybrid nation located at the temporal and spatial crossroads between past and present, tradition and novelty, inside and outside, on and beyond.