The Spanish Prisoner
Yannis Tzioumakis
Abstract
David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner is a fine example of American independent cinema in transition. Made by a playwright-turned-filmmaker with a distinctive approach to questions of narrative and visual style at a time (the late 1990s) when the boundaries between what was considered independent filmmaking and what mainstream cinema had been, arguably, eroding, The Spanish Prisoner achieved critical and commercial success. It also demonstrated that a place still existed for filmmakers with highly unusual takes on the art of cinema, like David Mamet. Nodding to such crowd-pleasing classics as Hit ... More
David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner is a fine example of American independent cinema in transition. Made by a playwright-turned-filmmaker with a distinctive approach to questions of narrative and visual style at a time (the late 1990s) when the boundaries between what was considered independent filmmaking and what mainstream cinema had been, arguably, eroding, The Spanish Prisoner achieved critical and commercial success. It also demonstrated that a place still existed for filmmakers with highly unusual takes on the art of cinema, like David Mamet. Nodding to such crowd-pleasing classics as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, The Spanish Prisoner is a particularly idiosyncratic film that betrays its origin outside the Hollywood mainstream. Featuring a heavily convoluted narrative that is the product of an unreliable narration; an excessive, often anti-classical, visual style that draws attention to itself; and belonging to the generic category of the ‘con game film’, which actively challenges the spectator to comprehend the unfolding of the narrative, The Spanish Prisoner is a film that bridges genre filmmaking with personal visual style, independent film production with niche distribution and mainstream subject matter with unconventional filmic techniques. This book discusses The Spanish Prisoner as an example of contemporary American independent cinema while also using it as a vehicle to explore several key ideas in film studies, especially in terms of aesthetics, narrative, style and genre.
Keywords:
American independent cinema,
Indie film,
David Mamet,
The Spanish Prisoner,
Narrative,
Visual style,
genre,
Con game film
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748633685 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2012 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633685.001.0001 |
