Published on April 10, 2026
Josep Maria Caparrós, emeritus professor of Contemporary History and Cinema at the University of Barcelona, views films as testimonies of both yesterday’s and today’s society. This perspective is the foundation of his latest book, “The Past as Present: 50 Historical Genre Films,” which examines the period from the American Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall through various cinematic titles, including “The Patriot” (2000) and “Good Bye, Lenin!” (2003). The book, published , is part of the “Essential Filmographies” collection, directed Sánchez Navarro, a professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia.
Caparrós emphasizes the multifaceted nature of cinema. He advocates for film as a collection of visual documents that can transform into historical testimonies. “When films evoke the past, they do so from the present in which they were conceived, just as viewers experience the films about the past in the present. Moreover, when they portray the present, they soon become part of the past,” he explains. The cinematic creations discussed in the book serve as a mirror of their time, reflecting the individuals involved and the society in which they were born.
Josep Maria Caparrós Lera has been a professor at the University of Barcelona since 1982 and is the driving force behind the course “Contemporary History and Cinema,” which he established in the 1995-1996 academic year. His textbook, “100 Films on Contemporary History” (Alianza, three editions), has influenced similar courses in other Spanish universities, such as those in the Basque Country and Granada, as well as in Latin American institutions in Santiago de Chile and Santo Domingo. Currently, two of his main collaborators, Magí Crusells and Francesc Sánchez Barba, teach this course.
A disciple of Miquel Porter, the first film professor at the University of Barcelona, Caparrós founded the Film-History Research Center in 1983. This center has spawned a collection of published books of the University of Barcelona, totaling twenty titles. Additionally, since 1991, he has been the editor of a specialized journal, “Filmhistoria,” at the university. Over the years, he has supervised twenty doctoral theses and published more than forty books on cinema. As a member of both the Academy of Cinematic Arts and Sciences of Spain and the Catalan Film Academy, he also belongs to the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI, Munich).
In 2012, the English magazine “Sight & Sound” invited him to select the ten greatest films of all time. Subsequently, the magazine “Caimán Cuadernos de Cine” requested his expertise to identify the top ten films in Spanish cinema. Additionally, Caparrós has been the curator of three exhibitions on the seventh art and, in September 2014, organized the IV International Congress on History and Cinema: “Historical Memory and Documentary Film” at the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Barcelona, with the proceedings published in a book la Universitat de Barcelona.
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