Explores the centrality of performance to Spain and the Spanish people by tracing the personal and national history of politics and performance in the context of contemporary Spanish cinema in the early twenty-first century.

A camp lipsynched routine by three air stewards distracts unsuspecting passengers from the fact that their plane is to make a crash landing. Performance functions as a diversion from unsavoury realities. In this way, Pedro Almodóvar's 2013 film I'm So Excited adopts a strategy of subversive anti-establishment censor-evading filmmaking practices under Franco. Contemporary cinematic performance in Spain intersects with politics to provide a platform for views and voices that do not conform to the dominant political narrative. An essential text for scholars, students and aficionados of Spanish cinema, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance is the first single-authored monograph to focus on performance in this context. The book analyses interactions between performance and politics in technical and conceptual terms considering, for example, performance styles, the narrative role of performance and political interventions by actors such as Javier Bardem and Juan Diego Botto. Ultimately, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance posits performance, within the specific context of contemporary Spanish cinema, as a politically-potent device and proposes that it is precisely for this reason that the arts have borne the brunt of aggressive austerity measures enforced by Spain's conservative government in recent years.

"Noble’s detailed attention in her nuanced filmic analysis is admirable, as is her holistic approach to performance ... It is precisely through this nuanced examination of seemingly disparate material that this book provides an original and significant contribution paving the way for further work in this direction." - Studies in European Cinema