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This book is a collection of essays that offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The films analysed span a period of some 40 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. The book offers a new lens to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The figure of the auteur jostles for attention alongside other features of film, ranging from genre, intertexuality and ethics, to filmic language and aesthetics. At the heart of this project lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs and younger generations of filmmakers have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The films discussed in the book encompass different genres, both popular and more select arthouse fare, and are made in different languages: English, Basque, Castilian, Catalan, and French. Regarded universally as a classic of Spanish arthouse cinema, El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive has attracted a wealth of critical attention which has focused on political, historical, psychological and formal aspects of Víctor Erice's co-authored film-text. Luis Bunuel's Cet obscur objet du désir/That Obscure Object of Desire, Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons' Ocana. Retrat Intermitent/Ocana. An Intermittent Portrait, Francisco Franco's El Dorado, Víctor Erice's El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun, and Julio Medem's Vacas/Cows are some films that are discussed.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spain has experienced a cycle of exhumations of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and has rediscovered that the largest mass grave of the state is the monument that glorifies the Franco regime: the Valley of the Fallen. Building work in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid, was begun in 1940 and was not completed until 1958. This article analyses for the first time the regimes wish, from the start of the works, for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen to outdo the monument of El Escorial. At the same time the regime sought to create a new location to sanctify the dictatorship through the vast transfer to its crypts of the remains of the dead of the opposing sides of the war.
This collection of essays offers a new lens through which to examine Spain’s cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The films analysed in the volume span a period of some 40 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. Two 1970s films by Víctor Erice and Luis Buñuel (El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit
What is the relationship between culture, the State and democratisation during and after the Franco regime? The various sections of this book have responded to this question in different ways and reveal, both individually and collectively, how, in a radically divided society, one of the few things almost everyone in Spain is in agreement about is the civilising force of art and knowledge. In this final chapter, my aim is to unpick the ideological stakes at play in competing definitions of culture, as well as to establish genealogies to
the subject of most of her films (Evans, 2004). Marisol was the darling of the Franco regime. She was the incarnation of simpatía, the smiling orphan who, like a Spanish Pollyanna, brought together feuding family members or danced her way through brightly coloured (with Eastmancolor) fantasy worlds.3 In the late 1960s she innocently sipped pink champagne with Francoist Dalí on his Mae West Lips sofa as part of a publicity tour for one of her musical extravaganzas. But in 1976 after the end of the dictatorship she sensationally posed nude in the magazine Interviú. A
. The return in October 2019 of the former ETA activist Alfonso Etxegarai and his wife Kristiane Etxaluz from São Tomé and Príncipe, the two-island African nation 140 miles off the coast of Gabon where they were expelled to in 1985, perfectly brings back this period when extradition to Spain of Basque militants was not exactly favoured by the French authorities. 5 The desire to secure French co-operation against ETA had been an early preoccupation of every Spanish government since the end of the Franco regime. During
from the old entrenched institutions of the Franco regime to the new forms of democracy. This transformation was occurring not only in the main core of political and economic power but also in leftist groups which, in turn, had to adapt to the new circumstances and were likewise not free of corruption. Another important example of literary adaptation to film is Eduard Mendoza
alongside a more nuanced understanding of how this both shaped and reflected their interests. During the nascent democratic period, a number of canonical cultural texts – most eminently the documentary film Canciones para después de una guerra ( Songs for after a War ) (Basilio Martín Patino, 1976) and Carmen Martín Gaite’s 1978 novel El cuarto de atrás ( The Back Room ) – resurrected the popular culture ostensibly patented by the Franco regime in the 1940s and 1950s. As Stephanie Sieburth notes, ‘ El cuarto de atrás teaches us that the effects of role-play through
advance a conclusion by means of a non-sequitur: the Franco regime did not police cultural production as harshly as common wisdom dictates, and it was not therefore as bad as we have often been led to believe. Treglown inherits from those he critiques a blindness to the ramifications of the fact that, as Steven Lukes notes, ‘[p]ower is a capacity, not the exercise of that capacity (it may never be, and never need to be, exercised); and you can be powerful by satisfying and advancing others’ interests.’ 3 Filtering this insight through Foucault
the 1980s only 15 per cent worked on the land ( 2002 ). The social cost of migration was nothing short of disastrous: as Eduardo Sevilla-Guzmán has shown, the Franco regime failed to take sufficient measures to help ailing village communities sustain themselves, and many were left crippled, with the regions of Extremadura, Andalusia and, most crucially, Castile most affected ( 1976 : 118). Indeed, it was in Castile that