Cinephiles without Films: Culture, Censorship and Alternative Forms of Film Consumption in Spain and the GDR around 1960

The chapter focuses on the specialised film cultures that emerged around film clubs, magazines or film schools in the dictatorial regimes of Francoist Spain and the German Democratic Republic during the first half of the 1960s. It offers a contrastive analysis that shows the potentialities of approaching New Cinema History as History of Film Culture. Both film cultures were flawed in its core, as critics and spectators redefined cinema as cultural practice based on titles rarely seen and frantically (sometimes wrongly) imagined. But they were also very rich: written and oral testimonies illustrate the anxieties, dreams and hopes that characterised the lives of cinema-goers under a dictatorship.