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Abstract
Amanecer en puerta oscura (José María Forqué, 1957) is a Spanish Western starring Francisco Rabal which depicts banditry from the nineteenth century and which won the Berlin Silver Bear. In the climactic scenes of the film, the statue of Jesús el Rico (a crucifix carried on high by encapuchados during the Easter celebrations) raises its hand to choose which one of three prisoners to pardon in a re-enactment of the Parable of the Good Thief. This article will examine documents from the censorship files under the Franco dictatorship and reviews of the film to explore the representations of wrongdoing in the film and the intersections of spectatorial relations with ethics.
Notes
* I would like to thank Laura Gómez-Vaquero for her help in locating censorship and press files in connection with the film, and Valeria Camporesi for sending me her article on the cine de bandoleros. I am also very grateful to the anonymous readers of this text and to Alison Sinclair and Samuel Llano whose illuminating comments have undoubtedly improved its content. I would also like to thank Sofia Mason for editorial assistance.
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), 148 (translation of Cinéma 1: l’image-mouvement [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983]).
2 In a well-known example, a profession of love in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) was dubbed to become a prayer (see Jo Labanyi, ‘Censorship or the Fear of Mass Culture’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi [Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995], 207–14 [p. 210]). I have written elsewhere of the musings of Catholic ideologues on the perceived dangerous and seductive power of cinema and the ‘redirection’ of the erotics of the gaze towards more pious ends in the film Don Juan by Sáenz de Heredia (1950); see Sarah Wright, ‘Dropping the Mask: Theatricality and Absorption in Sáenz de Heredia's Don Juan (1950)’, Screen, 46:4 (2005), 415–31. Jean-Luc Nancy has written interestingly of the ‘ambivalence’ of the image, which might be denounced as superficial or illusory, or celebrated as powerful and attributed the status of truth; see The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham U. P., 2005).
3 From a press release held on file at the Filmoteca Española, Madrid.
4 José Antonio Gómez Marín, Bandolerismo, santidad y otros temas españoles (Madrid: Miguel Castellote, 1972). For a discussion of the mythologies which surrounded ‘El Tempranillo’ built up by writers both Spanish and foreign, see Emilio Soler Pascual, Bandoleros: mito y realidad en el romanticismo español (Madrid: Síntesis, 2006), 221–34. López de Abiada and Rodríguez Martín trace the ‘bandido justicero y generoso’ to the sixteenth century in Spain and specifically to Andalusia (the Sierra Morena) (see José López de Abiada & José Antonio Rodríguez Martín, ‘Calas en el fenómeno del bandolerismo andaluz de la literatura y la historiografía’, Iberoamericana, 6:22 [2006], 181–92 [p. 107]). In the nineteenth century the bandit was idealized by the foreign Romantic writers (such as Prosper Mérimée). ‘There really were bandoleros’, writes Mitchell, ‘but what made them legends in their own time […] [were] the great masses of rural oppressed who were disinclined to rebel themselves but who were eager to sing the exploits of those who did’ (Timothy Mitchell, Passional Culture: Emotion, Religion and Society in Southern Spain [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990], 74). Mitchell notes that these poor peasants were not looking for a change in the world order, but to make case-by-case adjustments of this one. Many ended up repenting and mending their ways, as Gómez Marín notes (Bandolerismo, 29). Others were executed. Furthermore, the romance de ciegos (semi-oral tales told by blind men) which often told the tales of bandits, habitually began their verse with an invocation to the Virgin and always ended with a moral (Mitchell, Passional Culture, 135). In his seminal study of the romances de ciego (Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel [Madrid: Fundamentos, 1995]), Julio Caro Baroja emphasizes their religious character and the storylines that emerge as a consequence. Amanecer en puerta oscura's religiosity is merely in keeping with the origins of banditry folklore, therefore.
5 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser & Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62.
6 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’.
7 Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks (London: Continuum, 2001), 122.
8 Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas, 92.
9 ‘Chorizo Western o Western español’, <http://www.cinebit.com/articulo/chorizo-western-o-western-espanol> (accessed 20 September 2015); Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993); ‘Natividad Zaro, Directora de Atenea Films’ (2011), <http://literaturavillalba.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/natividad-zaro-casanova-v-directora-de.html> (accessed 22 August 2013).
10 Alasdair King, ‘Fault Lines: Deleuze, Cinema and the Ethical Landscape’, in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi & Mattias Frey (New York/London: Routledge, 2013), 57–75 (p. 59).
11 Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Tomlinson & Habberjam, 149.
12 In the late nineteenth century the Spanish had, in the form of one Valeriano Weyler i Nicolau, instituted in Cuba what are now recognized by most as the first concentration camps (or ‘campos de reconcentración’ as they were known) during the ‘Third War of Independence’ (1895–1898) in order to separate the Cuban rebels from the civilians (William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought [Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997]). The Spanish invention of the concentration camp was copied by the Americans in the Philippines in 1899 and by the British in South Africa in 1900 (Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Camp and the “Nomos” of the Modern’, in Violence, Identity and Self Determination, ed. Hent de Vries & Samuel Weber [Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1997], 106–18; Stowell Kessler, ‘The Black Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902: Shifting the Paradigm from Sole Martyrdom to Mutual Suffering’, Historia, 1:44 [1999], 110–47). Although these were not death camps, they arguably anticipated the Holocaust. Alfredo González-Ruibal, in ‘The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936–52)’, in Archaeologies of Internment, ed. Adrian Myers & Gabriel Moshenska (New York/London: Springer, 2011), 53–74, points out the relationship between a commanding tier which had been trained in Morocco and which imported ‘colonial tactics to Spain: raids, plunder, rapes, mass killing of civilians, and aerial bombings were all common in Morocco’ (64) and the testing of concentration camps in the colonies in the late nineteenth century. The dehumanization of the enemy was common to both, he maintains. As González-Ruibal's research shows, between 1936 and 1952, hundreds of internment camps were established by General Franco all over Spain, whether purpose-built or else housed in old buildings and spaces: ‘no less than half a million people passed through the camps and many thousands died in them due to ill-treatment, hunger, disease, and executions. The Franco regime produced a complex typology of camps, articulated with other spaces of punishment, which was fundamental in disciplining its subjects and reconstructing the nation along totalitarian lines’ (63).
13 Florentino Soria, José María Forqué (Murcia: Filmoteca Regional de Murcia, 1990), 50.
14 See ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–39, ed. Andrew Higson & Richard Maltby (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1999) on the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony.
15 José Enrique Monterde, ‘Un modelo de reapropriación nacional: el cine histórico’, in Cine, nación y nacionalidades en España, ed. Nancy Berthier & Jean-Claude Seguin (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2007), 89–98. See also Valeria Camporesi, ‘Mitos nacionales en contextos internacionales: los bandoleros en el cine del franquismo’, in La historia que el cine nos cuenta: el mundo de la posguerra 1945–1995, ed. María Antonia Paz Rebollo & José Montero Díaz (Madrid: Tempo, 1997), 119–28.
16 Valeria Camporesi, Para grandes y chicos: un cine para los españoles 1940–1990 (Madrid: Ediciones Turfan, 1994), 41. Camporesi cites a pejorative reference to the ‘pandereta’ (the cliché-ridden version of Spanishness first cited by Machado in Campos de Castilla) of the Spanish-style Western from 1934, but also discovers a more positive description from 1935: ‘en la historia, mezclada de leyenda y con sabor de romance, del bandolerismo andaluz, se hallarían magníficos ejemplares de “españolada” más viva de color y mucho más sugestiva que la americanada del gangsterismo yanqui’ (42).
17 Camporesi, Para grandes y chicos, 42.
18 Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 63.
19 From the unpaginated film script (author's copy).
20 Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema, 63.
21 Camporesi, Para grandes y chicos, 44.
22 Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema, 64.
23 Juan Antonio Bardem, quoted by Virginia Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1988), 28.
24 Carlos F. Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo: cine español 1951–1961 (València: Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana, 1993), 187; cited in Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema, 64.
25 On the romances de ciegos, see Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel (Madrid: Istmo, 1990), and Romances de ciego, recopilación & estudio preliminar de Julio Caro Baroja (Madrid: Taurus, 1996).
26 Soria, José María Forqué, 48.
27 Jesús Pérez Núñez, José María Forqué: la lucha del hombre por la supervivencia (Bilbao: Festival Internacional de Cine de Bilbao, 1995), 26.
28 Soria, José María Forqué, 54.
29 Soria, José María Forqué, 51.
30 Soria, José María Forqué, 50.
31 Eugenio Montés, quoted in Soria, José María Forqué, 50.
32 Although Rabal would later become known for his left-wing views, at this point in his career he had made pro-Franco films, including Murió hace quince años (Rafael Gil, 1954) in which he played a man who returns to Spain as a Russian spy (he had been evacuated to the USSR during the Civil War) but repents and comes to see the error of his ideologies.
33 Fernando Gabriel Martin, ‘Rabal y su imagen publicitario’, in Francisco Rabal, ed. Joaquín T. Cánovas (Murcia: Filmoteca Regional de Murcia, 1992), 130–36, (p. 132).
34 Gabriel Martín, ‘Rabal y su imagen publicitario’, 132.
35 M. J. C., ‘Capitol: Amanecer en puerta oscura’, El Mundo, 11 September 1957, n.p; José de Paco, ‘Claroscuro: los inicios de un actor’, in Francisco Rabal, ed. Cánovas, 85–90 (p. 88).
36 Manuel Hidalgo, Francisco Rabal: un caso bastante excepcional (Valladolid: Semana de Cine, 1985), 47.
37 We might compare this character with Juan Portela, who maintains he became a bandit after his novia marries someone else, which springs him into serial wrongdoings (see the article by Alison Sinclair, ‘The Ambiguities of Retribution’, in this volume).
38 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 3.
39 G. Bolín, ‘Proyección de las películas Amanecer en puerta oscura y La Bella Maggie’, ABC, 11 September 1957, p. 67.
40 Julio Pérez Perucha, ‘Paradoja de la estrella sin universo’, in Francisco Rabal, ed. Cánovas, 70–77 (p. 76).
41 Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, ‘Deconstructing Paco Rabal: Masculinity, Myth and Meaning’, in The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, ed. Phil Powrie, Ann Davies & Bruce Babington (London: Wallflower, 2004), 54–65 (p. 54).
42 King, ‘Fault Lines’, 59.
43 King, ‘Fault Lines’, 59.
44 Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Tomlinson & Habberjam, 87.
45 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘ “Your Country Needs You”: A Case-Study in Political Iconography’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 1–22 (p. 12); Aby Warburg, ‘Dürer und die italienische Antike’, in Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed, Dieter Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1980), 125–30.
46 Robert Buch, The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetic of Violence in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 2010), 21.
47 Agustín Sánchez Vidal, ‘Amanecer en puerta oscura’, in Antología crítica del cine español 1906–1995, ed. Julio Pérez Perucha (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), 415. See Matthew 27:38; Mark 15:27–28, 32; Luke 23:33; John 19:19.
48 Luis Fernández Colorado, ‘La duquesa de Benamejí’, in Antología crítica del cine español 1906-1995, ed. Pérez Perucha, 252–54.
49 Carmen Moreno-Nuño, ‘Criminalizing Maquis: Configurations of Anti-Francoist Guerrilla Fighters As Bandoleros and Bandits in Cultural Discourse’, in Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist ‘Guerrilla’, ed. Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones & Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Hispanic Issues On Line, 10 (2012), <https://cla.umn.edu/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/hiol_10_04_morenonuno_criminalizing_maquis.pdf.pdf> (accessed 20 April 2017).
50 See Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999); José López de Abiada, ‘El bandolero, personaje “menor”: textos, pretextos, contextos’, Iberoamericana, 8:31 (2008), 107–28; José López de Abiada, Cartas de España (Madrid: Aguilar, 1988); Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós, Alrededor del delito y de la pena (Madrid: Vida de Rodríguez Serra, 1904); Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós & Luis Ardila, El bandolerismo andaluz (Madrid: Publicaciones de Policía Española, 1934); Francisco Aguado Sánchez, El maquis en España: su historia, 2 vols (Madrid: Librería Editorial San Martín, 1975–1976).
51 Secundino Serrano, Maquis: historia de la guerrilla antifranquista (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2001), 15; quoted in Moreno-Nuño, ‘Criminalizing Maquis’, 7.
52 Antonio Vallejo Nájera, La locura y la guerra: psicopatología de la guerra española (Valladolid: Santarén, 1939); Michael Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945: Constitutional Theory, Eugenics, and the Nation’, in Alternative Discourses in Early Twentieth-century Spain: Intellectuals, Dissent and Sub-cultures of Mind and Body, ed. Alison Sinclair & Richard Cleminson, BSS, LXXXI:6 (2004), 823–48.
53 Moreno-Nuño, ‘Criminalizing Maquis’, 9.
54 Moreno-Nuño, ‘Criminalizing Maquis’, 9.
55 Julius Ruiz, Franco's Justice: Repression in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 118.
56 Ruiz, Franco's Justice, 118.
57 In a letter from Natividad Zaro to the Director General for Cinema dated 25 September 1956, for example, Zaro writes that that progressive nationalization of the mines had put an end to the exploitation that was rife in the nineteenth century and goes so far as to note that ‘es innecesario recordarle a personas de tantos conocimientos como V.E. hasta que punto algunos de los fundadores del Movimiento Nacional se ocuparon de la cuestión’ (Censorship file AGA 36/4770).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.