Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The petrified tears of General Franco: kitsch and fascism in José Luis Sáenz De Heredia's Raza

2004; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1463620032000173778

1469-9818

Alejandro Yarza,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Among the most notable are filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Bigas Luna, Ventura Pons, and Jaime Chávarri and visual artists such as Ocaña, Pérez Villalta, Ceesepe, Nazario, Mariscal, and Costus. See the introduction to Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar, 15–34. In the "Nazi Myth," Phillip Lacoue‐Labarth and Jean Luc Nancy see Nazism's defining trait to be its ability to use the mobilizing power of myth to transform fantasy into political reality. As they write, Nazism "… proposed its own movement, and its own state, as the effective realization of a myth, or as living myth" (304). The original version of the film was lost until the mid 1990s when a copy of it was found at the UFA laboratory in East Berlin. As Gubern writes: "Sáenz de Heredia ofrecía la garantía política de ser primo hermano de José Antonio Primo de Rivera y ex‐combatiente en el bando franquista como alférez de artillería. Pero además ofrecía la garantía profesional de haberse formado en la anteguerra en la productora Filmófono, a la órdenes de Luis Buñuel, el más prestigioso director del cine republicano (quien además le liberó en 1936 del cautiverio en unos locales de la UGT madrileña, lo que le permitió alcanzar el bando franquista)" (97). In January of 1942, Manuel Aznar, Franco's press secretary at the time and also a historical and literary consultant for the project wittingly said he expected the film Raza to accomplish the following goals: "Tengo la esperanza cierta de que con la película Raza el cine iniciará victoriosamente una tarea gigantesca: la de expresar ante el mundo las razones históricas, religiosas, morales y sociales de la Gran Cruzada libertadora que se inició entre vítores el 18 de Julio de 1936 y terminó entre laureles y clamores el primero de abril de 1939" (Ferran Alberich 55). In order to accomplish this, during the early '40s, as Román Gubern has noted, two kinds of War films were being produced in Spain. One kind was what he calls "cine de cruzada," a series of films dealing directly with the Spanish Civil War; the other were militaristic films that, although exalting army life and war in general, were not set specifically during the Civil War. The "cine de cruzada" constitutes, then, its own genre. The other films Gubern groups together with Raza include Frente de Madrid/Carmen fra i rossi (Edgard Neville, 1939), El crucero Baleares (Enrique Del Campo, 1940), Escuadrilla (Antonio Román, 1941), Porque te vi llorar (Juan de Orduña, 1941), Rojo y negro (Carlos Arévalo, 1942), and Boda en el infierno (Antonio Román, 1942). Gubern also includes in the series L'Assedio dell'Alcazar/Sin novedad en el Alcázar (Augusto Gennina, 1940), an Italian film that was the result of the film cooperation agreements between Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain (82–83). The "cine de cruzada" ended abruptly at the end of 1942 due to the changes that occurred in the international political context (Gubern 83). The "cine de cruzada" seems to have had real problems maintaining its political aim of producing films ideologically attuned to the new, Francoist Spain. One of the problems was, as Gubern has pointed out, that these films extensively borrow both narrative and visual strategies belonging to melodrama and romantic comedy (89). This was apparently one of the main reasons behind the decision to retire El crucero Baleares from commercial distribution. The film was considered too frivolous for conveying the epic tragedy of the Francoist battleship sunk in 1938 by an enemy's torpedo. In fact, Fernández Cuenca described it as "vulgar comedieta de amores con inadecuadas situaciones sainetescas" (qtd. in Gubern 89). Gubern also observes that two of the other releases of 1941 belonging to this series, Escuadrilla and Porque te vi llorar suffered immensely from poor quality and excessive melodramatic baggage. As Gubern has pointed out, Raza is influenced by the compositional style of Soviet cinema, for example, particularly in the scenes at the harbor and on board of the battleship, and in Jaime's execution sequence on the beach (99). This is not surprising since Soviet cinema was well known in Spain, and widely exhibited during the '30s. Moreover, as Gubern also points out, it was highly regarded both by filmmakers on the left as well as on the right. In fact, it was considered in all political quarters as the best model for creating a specific national cinema. So, as Marsha Kinder lucidly points out, the dialectical way of thinking behind Soviet montage, for example, is completely lost in Raza: "… in contrast to the dialectic interrogation of Eisenstein's montage, here [in Raza] the superimpositions and cross‐dissolves help to construct a monolithic space in which images from the past, present, and future, and footage from newsreels and fiction, and fates of individuals and collectives are all united in a single diegetic space, creating a seamless idealized historical narrative that supposedly tells the universal truth of any people who refuse to perish … when provoked by communism" (457). Eco writes: "This is why I would like to define Kitsch in structural terms, as a styleme that has been abstracted from its original context and inserted into a context whose general structure does not possess the same characters of homogeneity and necessity as the original's, while the result is proposed as a freshly created work capable of stimulating new experiences" (201). See Berlin 91–174. The beauty of death as something worthy to die for – a notion perfectly expressed by the slogan of "Viva la muerte" popularized by the Spanish legionnaires or "novios de la muerte," as they used to call themselves. In this context of glamorizing politically beautiful deaths, Franco's famous phrase "qué duro es morir," which he uttered during his prolonged agony, becomes highly ironic. As José proudly confesses, one day he almost got arrested when he was caught attempting to carve in one of the Alcázar's walls the name of his first real warden, who, as he explains to Luis, was not the king Alfonso VI but El Cid. Clearly, this action is also meant to suggest Franco's own historical justification for usurping for himself, as Spain's new "Caudillo," the King's right: "Yo quise grabarlo allí [at the Alcázar] en aquella piedra; pero salió el capitán de servicio y me echó. A poco me arresta. ¡No supo comprenderme!" (73). As Eco writes: "… one stimulus supports another by means of accumulation and repetition, since each individual stimulus corroded by lyrical use, might need extra help to achieve the desire effect" (182). For a reading of Raza: anecdotario del guión de una película as Franco's personal sublimation, see both Gubern's Raza: un ensueño del general Franco and Gonzalo Herralde's documentary Raza: el espíritu de Franco. In Blood Cinema, Marsha Kinder writes: "Only in Spain was Fascist ideology subordinated to and rewritten as traditional Catholic doctrine. Hence, Spain was the context that could take the greatest advantage of melodrama's drive to reinvest the secular world of the family with (what Brooks calls) "the moral occult" – to create a "domain of operative spiritual values" that would replace the "Traditional Sacred" that was lost during the Enlightenment" (72). For Eisner, this false "Stimmung" becomes the style typical of Nazi costume period films (202). She describes it as an "exaggeratedly sophisticated chiaroscuro," an "affected sfumato which blurs the outlines, [and] becomes characteristic of what is known as the reactionary 'Ufastil' in the late 'twenties'" (202). Japanese fascist aesthetics ideals were distilled in what Tansman calls "fascist moments," which are, as he writes, "images of self‐obliteration evoked through the beauty of violence in the name of an idealized Japan anchored in ancient myth and transcending the strictures of time. They conjure wholeness in images of perceptual blending where the individual merges with a higher totality" (16).