This seminar is designed to provide an overview of significant movements, traditions, and periods in Spanish and Latin American cinema by focusing the way specific films break with or stand against prevailing artistic and ideological imperatives. Each week is dedicated to one movement or period, one feature film, and a cluster of shorts and clips from relevant works. We begin by examining early Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón and his departure from the “Cinema of Attractions” practiced by filmmakers such as George Méliès. We continue by interrogating the 1931 film Limite by Brazilian filmmaker Mario Peixoto and the way it breaks from European avant-garde cinema and the work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel. The seminar moves on to explore the technological innovations of Spanish filmmaker Val de Omar and his non-narrative opposition to the hegemony of narrative cinema in Francoist Spain. Returning to Latin America, we review the Brazilian udigrudi (underground) movement and the work of Ze Mojica (Coffin Joe) and the challenge to the ideas of Cinema Novo in Brazil. Moving back to Spain, the seminar looks at the metacinematic work Arrebato(1980) by Iván Zulueta and its break from politically engaged New Spanish Cinema (NCE) that flourished in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship. We will review how the Ukamau Group and the narrative elements in Bolivian Filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés’s Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor) stand in opposition to the documentary imperative promoted by New Latin American filmmakers such as Carlos Álvarez, Fernando Birri, Octavio Getino, and Fernando Solanas. In the wake of the Tlatelolco crisis in Mexico, we explore the rise of provocative filmmakers such as Rafael Corkidi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Juan Moctezuma who provide a paracinematic alternative to the state sponsored New Mexican Cinema of Casals, Ripstein, and Hermosillo. Returning to the Iberian Peninsula, the seminar evaluates the Barcelona School and the works of Pere Portabella and Jacinto Esteva including Esteva’s manifesto film Dante no es unicamente severo (1967). We end the seminar by exploring the rise of narcocinema in Mexico in relation to the longstanding Mexican genre of border cinema. The course is taught in English and students from Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature are welcome. A reading knowledge of Spanish is helpful, but not absolutely necessary