Football, cinema and Spanish nationalism: decoding the Francoist film Campeones (1943) (original) (raw)

2020, Sport, Film and National Culture (Routledge, ed. Seán Crosson)

This chapter focuses on the unique interplay of football, fascism and conflicting national identities in Spain, in an attempt to better understand how the problems and specters of the past, exemplified in the Francoist sports film "Campeones" (Ramón Torrado, 1943), are prevalent today and still shape many contemporary public discourses about national identity. Shot only three years after the end of the Spanish Civil War and released during World War II, the film became the foundation stone of a genuinely Spanish football film genre, a sports-themed blend of populism and repression that this chapter contextualizes within larger debates on national identity (Loureiro 2003; Quiroga 2013) and sports culture (Verdú 1980; Simón 2012) in order to find out to what extent the Francoist football film contributed to the dictatorship's propaganda as a whole. That is, how did "Campeones" and similar subsequent movies sell the - fabricated - image of a strong and unified nation under one banner (¡Una, Grande y Libre!) instead of the multi-layered reality of conflicting nationalisms and regional identities (Payne 1991) within the country? In order to trace the historical implications of "Campeones" from its original release until today, the chapter addresses the movie in four complementary ways. To begin with, I undertake a textual analysis of the film's audiovisual and storytelling structure, focused on certain scenes that exemplify how national identity is constructed and negotiated through mise-en-scène. This is followed by an evaluation of how the movie was reviewed upon its release in 1943 by both mainstream and specialized press (newspapers as well as film and sports magazines), to better grasp how relevant social, class and gender issues of the time were experienced by audiences. Third, I propose a brief account of the evolution of other Francoist "fútbol" films in the 1950s after "Camepones", parallel to the political and social mutations of the regime from a Falangist to a National-Catholic agenda, which nevertheless enforced strategies of cultural assimilation. Finally, the chapter ends with a closing hypothesis that relates those previous layers with the current states of affairs in Spain, offering a critical reading of the 2010 World Cup triumph as a missed opportunity that, instead of celebrating the mixed and heterogeneous nature of the country (a plural team with players from different regions like Andalusia, Catalonia, Canarias or the Basque Country), indulged in the very same centralist and negationist prejudices spread by "Campeones" and other Francoist football films 60 years before, thus fueling the revival of divisive nationalism(s) in this day and age.