The Harder They Fell: The Economic Crisis in Film.

Abstract

Introduction
Marc Agües and Jordi Revert

Dicussion
Raúl de Arriba, Isadora Guardia, José Antonio Hurtado and Max Lemcke

Conclusion. Reality Engines
Jordi Revert

The global economic crisis officially started on September 15th of 2008 with the fall of Lehman Brothers and it opened a period of recession where we still deeply find ourselves. Day after day we live the consequences of this recession period, which finds its most important precedentin the Great Depression that stroke North American society and the world after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Cinema had already carried out various approaches and strategies to develop its own account of that episode, which came from comedy or musicals as genres from which to be critical, as it did from stark portrayal via John Steinbeck or documentary. Decades later, modes of representation have evolved to offer, in the new crisis, new ways of representing what seems to be a repetition of history, in a harder and more virulent version that takes place in a world where there is no longer an alternative to established capitalism. In this context, there are voices that analyze the new depression from a documentary and/or didactic perspective, authors who veil their analysis of the situation and fictions that take the crisis as a basis for the individual’s particular story. It is the cinema of the crisis that has always existed in one form or another, but now it takes on a visibility and a dimension that we intend to bring up to discussion.