Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

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1. Identity: the
   building blocks of
   2. Literature
   and philosophy
   3. Art and
   architecture
   4. Performing
   arts
   5. Cinema
   and fashion
   6. Media and
   communications
   7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
   the details of

storyline, censors famously confused filmgoers with a

laughable story of incest in the African bush. In practice the

insistence that all films be in Castilian fed audiences with

superior, albeit dubbed, American pictures, effectively

stunting Spain’s own film industry.

Towing the line: films in the early Franco era

With no rulebook to consult, directors became self-

censoring in the early Franco years.Their work tended to

fall within repetitive categories that strayed little from the

party line. Most of the films that made it to the screen had

a melodramatic edge, their stories placed within some

exaggerated historical setting along traditionalespañolada

lines. Stories of religious fortitude (so-calledcine de

sacerdotes) and adaptations of 19thcentury literature were

made in large numbers, served up alongside musicals and

cine cruzada, pseudo-historical efforts supposed to leave

audiences with a warm glow about Franco’s recent victory.

The most famous piece ofcine cruzada,Raza(1941), was

adapted from a novel by the Generalísimo himself. It

featured a fictional soldier fighting his way heroically

through the Civil War. Rafael Gil was a popular director

across these often interwoven genres. HisReina santa

(1947) plugged away at a pious past, whileEl Clavo(1944)

successfully adapted a 19thcentury novel by Pedro de

Alarcón. Gil continued making films right into the 1980s.

However, the most successful regime-friendly Spanish film

of the period wasMarcelino, Pan y Vino(1955). Made by

Hungarian director Ladislao Vajda, it’s the soothing fable of

an orphan with a recurring religious vision. As in many such

films of the day, a child played the lead role.Marcelino, Pan

y Vinoeven won a couple of awards at the Cannes Film

Festival. It’s a rare, lasting success from the period – most

films made with official sanction in the 1940s and 50s have

since been critically dismissed.

“GOD AND
COUNTRY ARE AN
UNBEATABLE TEAM;
THEY BREAK ALL
RECORDS FOR
OPPRESSION AND
BLOODSHED.”
Luis Buñuel

Spanish cinema critic
and Communist Party
member Juan Piqueras
Martínez was one of the
Civil War’s first victims,
arrested and shot on 28th
July 1936 less than two
weeks after the conflict
began.