Film censorship in Franco's Spain: the transforming power of dubbing

ABSTRACT

Since the invention of cinema, the prominence and significance of the moving image have never been underestimated by the powers-that-be, especially, though not exclusively, in totalitarian states, where foreign films and their translations are, and have been, ideologically controlled in order to avoid any conflict with the socio-cultural values predicated by the rulers of the hosting community. This paper focuses on the dubbing into Spanish of the classical film The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), in which glamorous Ava Gardner plays the role of a voluptuous Spanish flamenco dancer that becomes an international film star in the USA. Hollywood's appropriation and subsequent representation and internationalisation of Spanish mores and customs, embodied in the film by Ava Gardner and her Spanish family, was diametrically at odds with the values and virtues advocated by the Francoist regime (1939–1975), making this film a battleground for ideological manipulation and forcing the unleashing of a creative remediation process aimed at shrouding any criticism of Spanish interests or customs and cementing traditional values cherished by the regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Dubbing
• audiovisual translation
• censorship
• manipulation
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jorge Díaz Cintas is a professor of translation and founder director of the Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS), University College London. Author of numerous articles, special issues and books on audiovisual translation, he was the president of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (2002–2010) and is now one of its directors. He is the chief editor of New Trends in Translation Studies, and a member of the research group TransMedia and of the EU LIND (Language Industry) Expert Group. He is the recipient of the Jan Ivarsson Award (2014) and the Xènia Martínez Award (2015) for invaluable services to the field of audiovisual translation.

ORCID

Jorge Díaz-Cintas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1058-5757

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Programa Proyectos I+D Excelencia), proyect PlutiTAV [grant number FFI2016-74853-P, 2017–2019].