Issue 15 of Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales brings together contributions from a variety of authors from around the world who invite us to reflect on cinema from its historical, narrative, and technological dimensions.

In “The Automobile in Spanish Developmental Cinema,” Nathaniel McBride examines the representation of cars as a symbol of progress and empowerment, but also of privilege and domination.His historical approach is combined with an ecofeminist reading that links this violence to historical traumas and political struggle. For his part, in “The Unreliable Narrative of The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999),” José Antonio Planes uses a narratological perspective to unravel the inconsistencies between the visual representation and the underlying meanings of the film. The third video essay, “Heroism in Violent Times: Amat Escalante” by Alejandro Jiménez Arrazquito and Mónica Medina Cuevas, examines the bloody relationship between violence and heroism in the filmography of this prolific Spanish-Mexican director. Finally, Oznur Turgut investigates cinematic space through the perspective of X-rays in “Cineradiographic Vision,” an original theoretical and formal approach through the analysis of the documentary film Phases of Matter (Deniz Tortum, 2020). The section dedicated to student work includes a project carried out at the Carlos III University of Madrid by Claudia Pérez, Avelino Rodríguez, and María Viana on Palestinian female directors.
Our traditional section “From the Archive” covers the anecdotal first Goya Awards ceremony, held in Madrid in March 1987. The editors of the magazine have rescued some of the videos hosted on the YouTube channel of the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to discover how time has settled the image of that first attempt at public legitimization of Spanish cinema.

Finally, the “Screen Stars Dictionary” section features the extensive monograph “Aging Stars – Fading to Dust or Shining as Stardust?”, curated by Barbara Zecchi with contributions from Vicente Rodríguez, Lindsay Nelson, Flavia Soubiran, Jaap Kooijman, Daniel O’Brien, and Celia Sainz Delgado.

This issue marks the beginning of a new phase for this project, starting with a change in editorial coordination. The new team, continuing with Ana Mejón and joined by Asier Gil Vázquez and Rubén Romero Santos, members of the Instituto Universitario del Cine Español at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, would like to thank Manuel Palacio for his support and for launching this initiative as director in 2018, and Vicente Rodríguez for his invaluable work as co-editor of the magazine since its beggining.