Framing Spain: Cinema, painting and national identity under Franco, 1939--1950.
Item
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Title
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Framing Spain: Cinema, painting and national identity under Franco, 1939--1950.
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Identifier
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AAI3103098
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identifier
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3103098
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Creator
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Dapena, Gerard.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rose-Carol Washton Long
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cinema | Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of five films made in Spain during the 1940s, the first decade of General Francisco Franco's prolonged dictatorship. Framing Spain examines the ways in which the visual arts were invoked in Spanish post-Civil War cinema to symbolize the nation and possibly generate and foster identification with and consensus for Franco's political and cultural agenda. By engaging in complex interpretations and representations of Spanish art, these films constructed varied paradigms of "Spanishness" and formulated discourses about tradition, nationalism, gender, and class. At the same time, these works questioned and redrew boundaries between popular cinema and art cinema, high and low culture. Although these motion pictures often promoted conservative views of Spanish identity and history, they should not be seen as airtight vessels of Francoist ideology. Rather, they are sites of ideological struggle; texts riven by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic claims that mediated a traumatized social domain.;Juan de Orduna's Locura de amor (1948), a historical film, recreates tableaux vivants based on nineteenth-century history paintings to dramatize a momentous chapter of Spain's past that mirrored and resonated with concerns of the early Post-Civil War era. Benito Perojo's Goyescas (1942) is a musical set in the early nineteenth century that capitalizes on the polyvalent readings of Goya's art in order to make a probing commentary on the antagonisms within Spanish society. Anchored within the religious practices of Andalusian Catholicism, Luis Marquina's Malvaloca (1942) discreetly evokes Julio Romero de Torres' iconic images of Andalusian women to image a community torn between sorrow, guilt, and spiritual rapture. Mixing comedy and suspense, Edgar Neville's Domingo de carnival (1945) invokes the grotesque carnival paintings of Jose Gutierrez Solana to formulate a national-popular cinema centered on Madrid's popular classes. Finally, Carlos Serrano de Osma's Embrujo (1947) is a musical that employs avant-garde film techniques for a surrealist treatment of flamenco that recalls Federico Garcia Lorca's theories linking Spanish deep song (cante jondo) to the tapping of the unconscious.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
