Politics and Political Alterity in the Spanish NO-DOs of 1968 (original) (raw)
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Communication & Society, 2019
The films produced during the political transition to democracy in Spain continue to capture the interest of film analysts and historians. However, beyond the realm of fiction films, there are still many areas that have received little attention, such as the attempts to develop newsreels for cinemas once the monopoly of the Francoist No-Do newsreels had ended. This study focuses on the Noticiari de Barcelona newsreel series produced between 1977 and 1980, specifically analysing its content and its discourse. The importance of this newsreel series lies in three main factors: because it constituted one of the first steps towards the development of a Catalan film industry after the end of the dictatorship (in the midst of a debate in Spain over the need to establish autonomous film industries for each of the country’s different regions); because of the attempt it constituted to establish a local audiovisual news product in clear opposition to the No-Do newsreels; and because of its adoption of some of the themes, discursive strategies and objectives attributed to many of the independent political films of the period. All of these factors determined the content and discourse of the newsreels, and gave them an orientation that was more persuasive than strictly informative. Keywords Newsreels, audiovisual information, persuasion, Institut de Cinema Català, independent cinema.
The Spanish Remember: Movie Audience during the Dictatorship of Franco, 1943-1975.
One of the aspects of the social influence of film is the new relationship that the audience establishes with the information and with current affairs in general . Some countries collected field studies, statistics, and questionnaires from the early days of filmmaking, which show film's predominant position as a means of communication in certain periods. This, however, is not the case in Spain. In order to verify this aspect in Spain, researchers have to resort to a wide range of indirect sources: industrial rates, charity taxes, general and feature press articles, and so on. These sources provide abundant information, although fragmented and not always reliable. Since 1968, Spain has had the records of the Estudio General de Medios (General Study of Means), created for advertisers, information neither precise nor of the necessary scope to qualify as a definite source during Franco's regime [2].
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2014
In the story of the fight for democratic freedom and the drive to bring Europe and the world closer to Francoist Spain, Nuevo Fotogramas deserves a central position. Fuelled by the spirit of May 1968, the long-running Barcelona-based magazine Fotogramas became Nuevo Fotogramas (NF) in 1968 and set out to define the pro-democracy struggle differently from the Madrid-based film cultures. It also set out to engage with European cultural production as if censorship and being closed off from European modernity were simply temporary situations. NF helps us to write the transition differently, by debunking the myth of its having been a process led solely by the filmmakers and critics who engaged in direct confrontation. Explaining the different approach that NF had to documenting and taking part in the cultural industries of the transition helps us to locate resistance in the “trivial” and “female” world of consumption rather than exclusively in the production sector, more associated with visible and well-documented acts of opposition. Three aspects of the magazine contribute to this reconfiguration of inherited ideas about the transition, particularly the ethos of the publication, the writers who collaborated in it, and what seems to be more “marginalia”: its letter section, “El consultorio de Mr. Belvedere,” and its advertisements.
Ideology and Film in the Spain of General Francisco Franco
published in: ÖT KONTINENS, 2/2013, ELTE, BUDAPEST, 2015. 323-336. Ideología y cine en la España del general Francisco Franco. (https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/20584/%C3%96TKONTINENS\_2013-2\_Wittman\_pdfa.pdf?sequence=4)
The development of the political documentary in Spain has been conditioned by a historical trajectory that has ultimately resulted in the near absence of a consolidated tradition of activism in non-fiction filmmaking. However, and in spite of all of the obstacles, the genre has been continuously reinvented under adverse conditions to shape a counternarrative capable of questioning the Establishment. The aim of the discussion here is to analyse the current state of this type of documentary in Spain, to define the relationship such documentaries develop with their viewers, to identify their channels of distribution and to understand their place in relation to international political documentaries.
Intervening in the Present: Catalan Cinema's Radical Years (1968-1978)
Film Quarterly, 2019
Courtesy of loans from the Filmoteca de Catalunya, an immensely diverse film corpus was bookended by two sym- bolic dates: 1968, a year of political changes around the globe, though less so in Spain at that time; and 1978, a year that marked the first democratic elections after Francisco Fran- co’s death in 1975 and the adoption of a new constitution that granted Catalonia a new statute of autonomy and the autho- rization to speak its language, after nearly a half-century of censorship. The adjective “radical” in the series title stands in opposi- tion to what is now called the “Cultura de la Transición” (Cul- ture of Transition, or CT). For years, the Spanish Transición (transition to democracy) has been presented to the world as a smooth and successful process that became a model for other countries. However, the price paid to ensure the future stabil- ity of the Spanish state was the so-called Pact of Forgetting or Pact of Silence —the tacit agreement between political elites, after the dictator’s death, that guaranteed that the “old wounds” would not be opened, ensuring a lack of account- ability for the crimes of the war and the regime. The films of Catalan cinema’s radical era articulate a strong collective voice against such an accommodation.
Destabilizing Spanish National Cinema: Surcos/Furrows (1951) as a 'Film of National Interest'
Transnational Screens, 2023
Under Francoist Spain, the National Interest awards became the state strategy to determine the films which best mirrored the national spirit, as understood by the dictatorship. However, the flaws of this logic were evident when Surcos/Furrows managed to win in 1951. In this essay, I argue that José Antonio Nieves Condes' film destabilized the concept of national cinema on two different fronts: formally and politically. First, Furrows presents a mix of aesthetics, genres and ideological discourses that is irreconcilable with the rigid mode of cinema proposed by the Francoist state. The interwoven discursive confluence in the film problematizes the narrow criteria set by the National Interest awards, something that can be seen in Furrows' conservative but dissident ideology and its foreign cinematic influences. Second, the award reveals the internal tensions within the state-as it was the state film institute itself that heralded a film that undercut the nationalist discourses favored by Franco's regime.