Noticiari de Barcelona (1977-1980): The Institutionalisation of Protest in the Cinema of Spain’s Transition to Democracy. Communication & Society, 32 (original) (raw)
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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].
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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.
Cinema Serving the Nation. Spanish feature films from 1939 to 1975
Cinema deserves a great deal of attention from those who study the creation of the nation and its identity in the 20th century, since it has been the most powerful tool for cultural dissemination and homogenization during that century. In this particular case, the films produced between 1939 and 1975 -Francoist regime- were controlled by a dictatorial and authoritarian regime through censorship, repression and funding. Nonetheless, we have not studied films stemmed from power, that is, the propaganda, but the national images that were screened. After watching more than four hundred and fifty films, we have concluded that in the feature films under study, there is an unquestionable nationalist discourse, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the film. This discourse is focused on six main subjects: the origins and splendour of Spain, the defensive wars, the expansionist Spain, the Catholic Spain, the romantic-folkloric Spain and the modern Spain. We will develop these different images, studying which ones were directly promoted by the regime with the purpose of being legitimated and which of them were made up of a way of understanding Spain that had already permeated society. We will also see to what extent the discourse is affected by the changes occurred during the regime, if new national images have been created and what is to be done with the previous ones. This conference took place in Cañada Blanch Center (London School of Economics and Politics) in 2017
Studies in European Cinema, 2012
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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.
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Las formas fílmicas y las prácticas cinematográficas del llamado “cine primitivo” están marcadas —desde su origen como un ámbito académico (Congreso de Brigthon, 1978)— por su estudio y análisis como parte del proceso de institucionalización de un nuevo campo cultural. Ahora bien, dos décadas después de aquella histórica fecha no hemos sido capaces de unir en un solo relato las dos grandes tramas que conforman la transformación de los cines primitivos en el sistema institucional del cine. Nos falta así un modelo que unifique la doble perspectiva que se aplica generalmente a la invención y definición de los media: el análisis historiográfico del «surgimiento tecnológico de la novedad y el estudio sociológico de la «construcción social del medio». Este problema epistemológico es explorado en este trabajo a través del análisis de un caso excéntrico: la percepción cultural del cinema en Madrid, entre 1903 y 1913, a partir de la disparidad, en la prensa de la época, entre el artefacto y la maravilla del «cinematógrafo» y el local y el espectáculo del «ciné».
Noticias Construidas: Acontecimientos y Rituales de la Vida Política
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This text invites a reflection on early cinema, focusing on the model which gave rise to actuality film, the precursor of newsreels. Actuality film is understood not only as film which tries to document reality but as a model which purports to capture that which was, or would become, an event. The text also addresses the difference between "attraction" and "news", to conclude that news arises from a series of constructions designed to transform social impact factors, such as those elements which have shaped the chronicling of events or elements of political propaganda in a given event.
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.