Preliminary Programme

The documentary film Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens, 1937) looked forward to make from besieged Madrid a symbol that shocked consciences. The images of Spanish Earth talked to the world and, specifically to Madrid people, about bravery and sacrifice at the fight for freedom, but, paradoxically, Spanish Earth was only released for six weeks between July and October of 1938. The audience did not pay to watch Iven´s movie. The Spanish Civil War was the Golden Age of the ideological documentary film -313 registered productions- but, according to Data Base on films released in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (5612 recordings), created with the information published in Entertainments section in the newspaper Abc, the theatres barely showed documentary films: a 94% of fiction movies, a 4% of documentary films and a 1,3% newsreels. In theory, there was a new cinema for a new audience. However the audience never saw these productions. At the beginning, this was attributed to the fact that people were saturated of war images but the success of war fiction movies in the same conditions ruined this theory. This paper shows how Spanish Earth was a failure of audience in Madrid not for the war theme is about but for the narrative limitations that never contacted to the audience. (Show less)

The Franco system/policy ended when General Franco’s died in 1975.This regime was the inheritor and at the same time was the consequence of the triumph of the National side at the Spanish Civil war.
If Spaniards had any image of this struggle was the one that during the former 36 years, the conquerors (therefore Franco´s regime) had broadcasted. First and above all through cinema, and further on through tv. Perhaps better the image they had was often the image of the old films that everyone can watch nowadays in tv.
But the arrival of democracy to Spain came accompanied by the freedom of speech. Mass media could offer more views about the Civil War, apart from the one that was presented to Spaniards during Franco’s dictatorship.
The most important way or the one that was most interested into expressing a vision of the Civil War to the society was the cinema.
Spanish cinema told Spaniards this conflict (that took place in Spain from 1936 until 1939) during Spanish Transition and years later (1975-2005) from very different points of view.
These vary depending on the different aspects from which one speaks about the war: the fight at the battlefield, the rearguard, the ideological confrontation of the “two Spains”, etc....
These points of view are different according to who are the responsible of the cinematographic production, furthermore, it depends on the time or depends on the social and/or political context in which the film is recorded into this period of the last 30 years of the history of Spain. That is to say, the audiovisual representation of the Spanish Civil War is not the same, for example, in 1980, or in 1990 or in 2000.
That is the reason why in this paper. I am going to cover through analysis of the most outstanding tittles that treat about the Spanish Civil War that were showed for the first time in Spain in the last 30 years, like the Spanish cinema built an image of the Spanish conflict.
I try to show how film presented the war from a variety of perspectives/points of view and interests.
The goal of this work is not to show the mistakes or narrative falsenesses about such a controversial incident.
I am above all interested into expose the different views of the war in relation to the social and political and/or political context, as well as with the moment in which it took place and the film displayed. (Show less)

Wars have always been a kind of exceptional informative importance events. The photographic representation of these conflicts was possible since mid 19th Century: The very well known War photography series were made for a certain report or individually, throughout the 19th Century, from the Mexican-American War (1846-1847), the Crimea War (1854-1856), and the American Secession War (1861-65). In the Spanish case, the first War to be photographed was the Second Carlist War (1872-1876). Photography developed a very important role because of its capacity to document these conflicts in a time when photography was understood as an unquestionable Media.

The images from the Second Carlist War are barely known in the Spanish History of Photography. This is a consequence of the fact that, apart from isolated initiatives such as the collection on Bilbao’s siege kept on the Royal Palace in Madrid, they are personal assignments, which in many cases are kept by the veterans’ descendants. This Communication intends to approach to the study of these preserved photographs: the image collections, the assignments which gave them birth, the authors as far as possible, and over all the revealed image of the conflict. This will allow us to search for the beginnings of the photographic reports in a modern sense as well as how this kind of representations influenced on the modern conception of War in today’s World. (Show less)

During the first years of the Cold War, the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack in the territory of the USA caused a climate of collective psychosis in the American society that was reflected implicitly in the fantastic cinema of the time.
Phenomena as Rosenbergs Case (the American couple executed before the accusation to pass to the Russians the secrets of A-Bomb), or the activities of Nazis to restore the IV Reich, created the myth on the fifth columns in the Congress at Washington. At the beginning of the 50s, the North American magazines showed articles of the type "Build your own antinuclear refuge in the backyard". The famous Witch-Hunting of Senator McCarthy to prevent a conspiracy of the Communists in the American institutions constitutes one more a clearer image of a society that was believed threatened and lived under a sensation of distressing uncertainty. The Cinema of the 50s reflected this social psychosis through the Science-Fiction genre. From the skies that generation only could hope a rain of missiles... or an extraterrestrial invasion.
This paper try to offer an approach to the feedback between a historical phenomenon and a cinematographic genre, where the Soviet soldiers used to adopt the form of aliens, the Red Army appeared as an intergalactic fleet of destruction and secret agents, Nazi or KGB activists, operated in the corridors of the White House under the form of fifth columns of mutants… with their little and ring fingers fused. (Show less)