Teaching Representations of Resistance and Repression in Popular Spanish Film

This essay presents a brief analysis of three popular Spanish films released between 2001 and 2012 that are set in the immediate post Civil War period and first decades of the Franco dictatorship. Specifically, it considers three films which aim to reconstruct and represent the experience of the men, women, and children who fought Francoism or who endured repression after the end of the Spanish Civil War: Silencio roto (Armendáriz 2001), El laberinto del fauno (Del Toro 2004), and 30 años de oscuridad (Martín 2012). This essay explores the way in which tropes of politics, history, resistance, and repression are represented in each film, and how filmmakers using popular cinematic forms have appropriated the Spanish Civil War and Franco period settings to comment on contemporary political and social issues in Spain. Most of the recent Spanish cinematic productions (fictional and documentary) that depict the Spanish Civil War and Franco period have focused on the moral vindication of the vanquished. The three films considered here aim to reconstruct the particular experience or memories of the Spanish maquis and topos, and the civilians who supported them in their struggles. Each of the films discussed has sought to play a role in the recasting of collective identity in Spain, and affords important insights into the social processes and experiences of the time in which they were created. In a world where the visual immediacy of cinematic images increasingly works to displace traditional historiography, these representations have become ever more important and merit discussion. This essay takes into account that these cinematic representations are subjective and mediated depictions of events, participants, and circumstances of the Civil War and Franco period, and suggests pedagogical approaches to discussing each film in order to enable students (and other viewers) to grasp how to distinguish between history and the historicizing effect of its representations.

Home-grown fiction programmes in the late-Franco period and the first transition: Shaping a democratic culture (1970–1976)

This work reviews the role of Spanish-produced fiction in the shaping of a democratic culture in Spain. To this end, it studies in-depth a selection of domestic fiction programmes aired in the years leading up to the death of the dictator General Franco and the outset of the transition to democracy (1970–1976). Spanish television professionals during this period used fictional accounts to initiate themselves in a type of production that had scarcely had a presence in its rudimentary audio-visual market. But they also used fiction to bypass censorship and broadcast messages aimed at promoting a democratic culture. This research analyses the content and formal characteristics of 11 fiction series produced by Televisión Española that, besides being hugely popular, stood out for the ideological richness of their messages. These programmes proved to be important cultural pieces in laying the groundwork for the transition to democracy by acting as channels to instil values of freedom, consumption or gender equality and criticism of the Franco regime. This analysis concludes by showing how in 1976, the fledgling stages of the transition saw the advent of formally democratic programming that, however, had been fuelled, among others, by contents aired in previous years.

La aldea perdida, de Palacio Valdés, alegato anti-industrialista

In Palacio Valdés’ La aldea perdida (1903) it can be found a good sampling of the major anti-industrialist issues of the moment. In fact, the novel is linked to the fin de siècle anti-industrialism and also to the distrust towards the industrial world of Spanish Social Catholicism. However, its strong antiindustrialist component was diminished in the film adaptation done by Sáenz de Heredia in 1948, during the early Franco period: in these years the official agrarian rhetoric was combined with an openly industrial orientation of practical politics.

Anne Frank in the ultra-Catholic Franco period

This paper examines Spaniards’ responses to the Americanised construction of Anne Frank and her diary. In addition to analysing the context in which the first translation into Castilian Spanish was published, consideration is given to the transformative moves that the original text and the Broadway and Hollywood rewritings of the diary underwent when they were made available in Spain in the second half of the 1950s. Special attention is paid to the discursive reconfiguration of the mythicised view built around the figure of Anne Frank in the United States and to its challenge and exploitation in the ultra-Catholic years of Franco’s regime. In that sense, one of the major driving forces behind this paper is answering the question of whether or not the reception of this text in Francoist Spain was affected by the fact that its author was an adolescent, a Jew, and a woman.

Torero during the Franco Regime

During the Franco regime between 1939 and 1975, when Spain was under the grip of an official national-catholic ideology whose keystones were the army and church, the torero was used as a vector for Francoist ideology. Courageous, full of national pride and a stout Christian, the torero seemed to incarnate all the virtues of the Spanish, elevated in the Francoist model into the glorified image of the “soldier-monk”. Little research has so far been conducted into parallels drawn between the torero and the “soldier-monk”. Drawing on the analysis of media documents from the Franco period, this paper sets out to address the following question. How does the correlation between the torero and the “soldier-monk” fit with the sad-faced, austere knight-like figure of the matador Manolete (1917-1947) during the 1940s? Within the bullring, spectators (aficionados) and toreros share in intense emotions and a boundless sense of religious devotion that bind them to life while passing close to death.

Democratic credentials and the ‘other(s)’ in the discourse of the Spanish Partido Popular, 1977–2015

In this paper we argue that aspects of the discourse of the governing party in Spain at the time of writing, the Partido Popular, and its predecessor (1976–1989), Alianza Popular, reveal a marked continuity in its self-presentation and its representation of its adversaries, spanning the entire period from its origins in the immediate post-Franco period of the late 1970s to the present. We conclude that the type of construction we describe can be found in the discourse of many of the party’s most prominent figures, that it is central to the entire historical trajectory of AP/PP, and in some cases is in the process of becoming if anything more explicit.

La restauración de templos en el periodo de posguerra y la asunción de criterios de vanguardia = The restoration of temples in the postwar period and the assumption of vanguard criteria

La Ley sobre protección del Tesoro Artístico Nacional, redactada en 1933, durante la segunda República, permaneció vigente durante todo el periodo franquista, lo que lleva a plantarnos su vigencia y aplicación efectiva. En este trabajo nos centramos sobre los criterios aplicados a la reparación de los bienes pertenecientes a la Iglesia Católica, dentro del nuevo contexto sociopolítico de la posguerra. Abstract The Law on the Protection of the National Artistic Treasure, written in 1933, during the Second Republic, remained effective throughout the Franco period, leading to plant us their operation and application. In this paper we focus on the criteria applied to the repair of property belonging to the Catholic Church, in the new political context of the postwar period.