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Negotiating modernity through the past: costume films of the early Franco period

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14701840701776389

1470-1847

Jo Labanyi,

Spanish Culture and Identity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] My thanks to Enrique Cerezo of Video Mercury Films S.A. for granting permission to print the stills and poster that accompany this article. [2] This love of Hollywood movies is attested in the interviews made in Madrid and Valencia from 1999 to 2004, for the collaborative research project ‘An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which I directed. Even the most politically aware opponents of the Franco regime, while dismissive of Spanish film production of the 1940s and 1950s, suspend all critical judgement when talking about Hollywood movies. The project is interested in how the escapism afforded by cinema of the period could take on a positive political role under conditions of political repression and material hardship. I would argue that this is true for the consumption of domestically produced as well as foreign movies, in so far as their lack of realism afforded a glimpse of a world where things could be otherwise. This is particularly true of films set in earlier historical periods, as I hope will be clear from this essay. [3] Expected to succeed Franco in the latter's last years, Carrero Blanco would be assassinated by the Basque separatist group ETA in a spectacular car-bomb attack in 1973. [4] This essay follows from an earlier article (Labanyi Citation2004) that discusses the use of costume in Spanish historical films from 1942 to 1950 set in the eighteenth century through the War of Independence (1808–1814), a period whose representation allows costume to be used as a vehicle for working through the politically loaded issue of French influence in Spain. [5] The use of a Jesuit's text in Pequeñeces was a brilliant ploy, legitimizing depiction of the most blatantly immoral female behaviour. Two other controversial costume films, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia's El escándalo (1943) and Rafael Gil's La fe (1947), similarly evaded censorship by basing themselves on novels by nineteenth-century writers who were above political reproach, the conservative Alarcón and the innocuous liberal Palacio Valdés respectively. Amazingly, for a film about adultery, El escándalo was awarded the top rating (‘De interés nacional’) by the Falangist-controlled Sindicato del Espectáculo. As shown by the study of film magazines undertaken for my current project ‘Film Magazines, Fashion and Photography in 1940s and 1950s Spain’, funded by the British Academy, the moral Puritanism that characterized the Franco regime became all-pervasive only after 1945 with the downgrading of the Falange and consequent political ascension of the Church. La fe, unlike El escándalo made four years earlier, was greeted by Church protests, which did not succeed in getting the film banned, however. [6] Fernández Colorado (in Pérez Perucha Citation1997, p. 253) reports that Cifesa hired José María Pemán (a member of the Academia Real de la Lengua, and a key figure in the Francoist establishment who had headed the Comité de Depuración that, at the Civil War's end, had purged pro-Republican teachers and intellectuals) to ‘clean up’ the original script, which was found unacceptable by the censors because it could be seen to allude sympathetically to the anti-Franco resistance fighters. We may note that a significant contingent of resistance fighters operated precisely in the Sierra Morena where this film—like Estrella de Sierra Morena—is set. See Javier Corcuera's documentary film La guerrilla de la memoria (2002), whose interviewees include ‘Comandante Ríos’, the political alias of José Murillo, who led the Agrupación Guerrillera de Sierra Morena. The DVD includes moving footage of the Gijón Film Festival where, after the film's first screening, the resistance fighters interviewed—including ‘Comandate Ríos’—climbed to the stage unfurling a banner with the words ‘Guerrilleros, sí; bandoleros, no’. [7] Estrella's father is wrongly called ‘Corregidor’, a position which, as previously mentioned, was replaced by that of Provincial Governor in 1833, six years before the film's setting in 1839. [8] The large number of folklóricas set in the nineteenth century can in some ways be seen as a Spanish version of the Hollywood Western genre, their battles between the military and the bandits, who pose a threat to settled society, being the equivalent of the clashes between cowboys and Indians that marked the US frontier. Estrella de Sierra Morena is a classic example. If, in the Western, audience sympathies are split between the cowboys and the Indians, in the folklórica the sympathies are explicitly with the bandits, regardless of the politics of the Franco regime. [9] The aleluya is an early version of the strip cartoon, which mostly told edifying tales, often in the form of crimes and their consequent punishment. A product of modernity inasmuch as it was mass-produced in print, the aleluya nevertheless catered to a semi-literate or illiterate public, which, if it could not read the captions, could follow the story through the pictures. Cinema, of course, fulfilled the same function in countries that, like Spain at the time, still had low levels of literacy, as the self-reflexive nature of this scene reminds us. [10] The sympathetic depiction of Emilia's suicide, including her absolution by the priest, is extraordinary given the Catholic Church's refusal of religious burial to suicides, especially considering the fact that the film was made at a time when the Church was the major ideological force in the regime.