Spanish Cinema during the Final Year of the Civil War: The Republicans' Last Documentaries and Francoist Triumphalism

Abstract

Cinema played an important role as a vehicle for propaganda during the Spanish Civil War. The films produced by the Republicans and the Nationalists had two things in common: first, a desire to assert their side's legitimacy and the legality of their actions in defence of the country; and second, a desire to pour scorn on the enemy. Examples of the latter abound in the language used: Republican productions branded the military rebels as ‘fascists’, ‘traitors without honour’, ‘ferocious beasts’, while the Nationalist films called the Republicans ‘reds’, ‘Marxist swine’, or ‘ragmen of the Popular Front’.

Notes

¹At the beginning of September 1936, the Generalitat de Catalunya Propaganda Commissariat created a cinema division called Laya Films—a reference to the Pre-Roman Layetania, a Catalonian territory inhabited at the time by the tribe of layetanos. Laya Films’ most important achievements were the production of a regular series of newsreels and documentaries, and in 1938 it collaborated in the logistics of the film L'Espoir, shot by André Malraux on locations near Barcelona. See Magí Crusells and Josep-Maria Caparrós, Cinema en temps de guerra, exili i repressió (Barcelona: Memorial Democrátic de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 2010), 20–28.

² ‘The criticism made of the Russian films is that the subject matter is extremely limited, reduced to scenes of the Revolution and Communist propaganda, and the depiction of the brutality of the previous regime. However, those who make this objection forget the enormous significance of the experience of the Russian people, the magnitude of their achievement, which must, of necessity, have marked their artists forever’ (Domènec Guansé, ‘Les estrenes. El carnet del partit’, Meridià, 19, 20 May 1938, p. 7.

³ Anon., ‘Una gran première de Tierra española en Barcelona’, Boletín Film Popular, 2 (May 1938), 4.

⁴ Alfonso del Amo, ‘Fragmentos seleccionados de la Guerra Civil española’, Nickel Odeon, 19 (2000), 161–74 (p. 173).

⁵ Anon., ‘El antitanquista García Moreno en Madrid’, La Vanguardia, 24 January 1939, p. 3.

⁶ Anon., ‘Augusto García Viñolas’, Hoja Oficial del Lunes de Sevilla, 3 October 1938, p. 4.

⁷Article nine of the order on 2 November 1938, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 5 November.

⁸For more information about the DNC, see Rafael R. Tranche and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, El pasado es el destino. Propaganda y cine del bando nacional en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca, 2011), 519.

⁹ Marta Bizcarrondo, ‘Cuando España era un desfile: el Noticiario Español’, in Catálogo general del cine de la Guerra Civil, ed. Alfonso del Amo, in collaboration with M^a Luisa Ibáñez (Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 1996), 73–90 (p. 80).

¹⁰ Tizor, ‘Quinientos millones de espectadores contemplan semanalmente en la pantalla mundial escenas de nuestra campaña’, Falange Española (Burgos) (August 1938), 1.

¹¹ España. Ministerio de Cultura. Archivo General de la Administración. Memoria de las actividades desarrolladas por el Departamento de Cinematografia [undated, but probably March 1939]. Sección Cultura, Archivador 273.

¹² Tomàs Delclòs, ‘Ramón Biadiu, documentalista de Laya Films’, L'Avenç, 11 (1978), 40–41 (p. 41).

¹³España. Ministerio de Cultura. Archivo General de la Administración. Documento de la Dirección General de Seguridad del Ministerio de la Gobernación al Excmo. Sr. Subsecretario de Prensa y Propaganda del Ministerio de la Gobernación, dated 2 de diciembre de 1939. Sección Cultura, Archivador 273.