The Cold War: Not Gilded, Not Golden, Just an Age
Barbara Burns speaks to Jackie Stirling, whose book Rebranding Dictatorship: Franco, Golden Age Drama and Film in the Cold War is published this month in Legenda’s Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series.
BB. Your book takes us to the Spanish cinema during the Franco regime, focusing on film adaptations of Golden Age plays produced between 1947 and 1954. Which tropes of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works suited themselves to Franco’s new nationalist narrative?
(photograph © Fatimah Namdar)
JS. Spanish Golden Age drama corresponds with the height of Spain’s imperial might, and refers to a flowering of early modern dramatic art spearheaded by Lope de Vega who pioneered the ‘comedia nueva’ or new play. This groundbreaking approach combined comedy and tragedy, the popular and the classical; an immensely successful development both commercially and artistically.
During the twentieth century and the tumultuous conflict in Spain between democratic and far-right authoritarian forces, this rich cultural legacy was appropriated by both factions, and not least by Franco’s military dictatorship (1939-1975). Unsurprisingly, given the mass appeal of film during the early period of the Franco regime and before the availability of television, four film adaptations of Golden Age drama were authorized between 1946 and 1954, all of which popularized the dominant nationalist narrative.
Intriguingly, the projection of Franco’s Spain in these films is far from monolithic. The tropes of Golden Age drama, claimed and reshaped by Francoist rhetoric, change during this period as the escalation of the Cold War and international rehabilitation prompted the regime to transform the national brand. Just to take one example, the Golden Age dramatic trope of the alcalde or local mayor was particularly useful to the Franco regime in the mid-1940s immediately after the defeat of Fascism in Europe, when the legitimization of Franco’s dictatorship was a key concern.
Román’s adaptation of Lope’s Fuenteovejuna is in many respects an allegory of the Nationalist insurrection at the start of the Civil War in 1936. At the heart of this Francoist co-option of Lope’s narrative, a strident justification of an unlawful coup d’état, is the vindication of the figure of the alcalde, glorified in Spanish fascist terms as populist leader and providential saviour of his people: a thinly veiled Franco avatar. This invocation of the Nationalist crusade chimed with the dictator’s own Messianic rhetoric at the end of 1946, just as Spain was barred from the United Nations. By the 1950s, the Golden Age trope of the trickster would be harnessed to overhaul the regime’s brand image.
BB. As the Cold War took hold and Franco sought a strategic alliance with his historic enemy the United States, what role did the films in your study have in ‘rebranding dictatorship’, as your title suggests?
JS. The two principal adaptations that contributed to rebranding Franco’s Spain as the Cold War precipitated its international rehabilitation are José Luis Sáenz de Heredia’s Don Juan (1950), and Florián Rey’s La moza de cántaro (1954). Two variations of the Golden Age motif of the trickster are in play here: the archetypal model, Don Juan himself, and a stock comic plot device of the romantic comedies, the young heroine’s manipulation of disguise.
Perhaps of the adaptations I consider, Rey’s version of Lope’s romantic comedy La moza de cántaro is the least familiar to non-Spaniards, and yet it was the breakthrough production in terms of my approach to all four. While I was working at the Spanish film archive, the Filmoteca Española, the excellent librarian Margarita Lobo found that there was a 1953 NO-DO (Noticiario Documental) newsreel item on Rey’s adaptation. Equivalent of Pathé News, NO-DO newsreels were screened before every commercial film in Spain, disseminating Francoist propaganda through national and international news items.
The discovery begged a number of questions. In the first place, why was there a newsreel feature on this relatively minor Spanish film? La moza de cántaro marks a precedent in the early 1950s in that it stars a minor Hollywood actor, Peter Damon, who could barely speak Spanish. Interestingly, Damon is a key feature of the newsreel item on the adaptation, repeatedly shot opposite his co-star, the Spanish musical star Paquita Rico. Why the focus on this particular casting? The question sent me back through NO-DO newsreels of the early 1950s to piece together Damon’s commodification as Spanish celebrity and Rico’s as European transnational star. Damon, the face of an emerging phenomenon, Hollywood in Madrid, and Rico, the lynchpin of Spanish soft power at successive Cannes Film Festivals, constituted a pairing emblematic of Spain’s transformed relationship with Western democracies in the context of Soviet expansion.
The film was made in the run-up to the signing of the Pactos de Madrid between the US and Spain in September 1953; the military and economic accords that would revolutionize the relationship between the two countries. Indeed, the adaptation was a product of this extraordinary entente with America, and kickstarted a trend in contemporary Spanish cinema – the integration of the new ‘amigo americano’ in nationalist narrative.
BB. Probably the film title in your book that is most recognisable to non-specialist readers is Don Juan. In what ways does the director Sáenz de Heredia adapt the Don Juan legend to resonate with the regime’s ideological objectives?
JS. Sáenz de Heredia’s Don Juan was the Spanish entry at the Venice Film Festival of 1950 and played a key role in Spanish cultural diplomacy. Why was this film so important to the regime, and how does it function as soft power? Once I started looking into it, I discovered that, like La moza de cántaro, Don Juan brings together very surprising co-stars: the Portuguese leading man Antonio Vilar and French Hollywood actress Annabella. I was intrigued. Why was Annabella in Franco’s Spain at all between 1949 and 1950? Here was a star, ex-wife of Hollywood matinée idol Tyrone Power, who was closely associated with the American war effort in the early 1940s and who had played in the New York première of No Exit in 1946, the dramatic masterpiece of a leading intellectual figure of the French Resistance, Jean Paul Sartre. Why on earth would she choose to work with one of the foremost Francoist propagandists, Sáenz de Heredia? And why, by the same token, would he choose to work with her, indeed, to write a part specifically for her in his update of the Don Juan narrative for the big screen?
Once more I went rushing to the archives: contemporary NO-DO newsreels, official film press, and censorship files to begin to answer these questions. Annabella’s star image in Spain played a vital role in bilateral relations with France after the re-opening of the Pyrenean border in 1948; her integration into the Don Juan story allowed Sáenz de Heredia to reforge the mythology for the new era of consumer diplomacy and mass tourism – the economic miracle that would transform the regime’s international image after the U.S. military bases were built on Spanish soil.
BB. How did you become drawn to Spanish Golden Age drama?
JS. My mother was Spanish, and I grew up listening to recordings of Zarzuelas (operettas), Manuel de Falla’s classical masterpieces, and popular coplas. I enjoyed my mother’s citations from Miguel de Cervantes’s literary masterpieces, including Don Quijote de la Mancha, which she had learnt by heart as a child. I had always followed London productions of Golden Age drama, but my interest in these plays was consolidated when I come across a Spanish edition of Calderón de la Barca’s La dama duende in a public library, a play that fascinated me.
It was sufficient incentive for me to apply to do an M.A. at King’s College, London University, where I had the immense good fortune of working with emeritus professor and specialist in Spanish Golden Age theatre, the late Jack William Sage. I had always been interested in film and had some practical knowledge of it, in part through my work for BBC Training and Development. I combined both loves, film and Spanish Golden Age drama, when I started this project on early Franco-era adaptations with the eminent film scholar and Hispanist, Professor Peter Evans at Queen Mary, University of London, where I taught film for a number of years.
BB. What has the experience of archival research for this project been like?
JS. It has been challenging to take account of the high volume of records I have considered, but also rewarding to see how these archival findings have dovetailed – official film press often tying in with newsreel items and details in ministerial censorship files. The archival research has allowed me to reframe these films in terms of the Cold War and a key moment of transition in the Franco regime’s relationship with the USA.
On a separate note, this work has taken me to Spain in the 1950s and to an extraordinary moment when the Hollywood and European stars began to arrive – Ava Gardner, Annabella, Elizabeth Taylor, Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth, to name but a few. These were independent, professional and of course immensely glamorous women, many of them famous divorcees, who confounded every repressive norm of femininity in Franco’s Spain. They must have been thrilling and subversive role models.
BB. How are these cinematic products of political crisis and transition regarded in the world of film studies today? Is it fair to dismiss them as Francoist propaganda and kitsch, or in what respects do they merit analysis from twenty-first-century critical perspectives?
JS. These adaptations of Spanish Golden Age drama have not been considered closely as a corpus before now, and certainly not as products of political crisis and transition in the context of the Cold War. They have been categorized in studies of Spanish film as a subset of the historical epic genre of the late 40s and consequently associated with a Francoist kitsch aesthetic. This inattention to the visual idiom of these films has always struck me as surprising, given the wealth of commentary on film form in the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and the visual nature of the medium itself. Indeed, film form in early Francoist adaptations of Golden Age drama has proved a very rich field of investigation, not least because of those points of tension between the visual image and the reactionary narrative.
While Román’s Fuenteovejuna may be in many respects an example of Francoist kitsch, the other contemporary Spanish adaptations of Golden Age drama are not so easily categorized. Twenty-first-century critical perspectives can provide an insight into the ambivalence of the imagery in many of these films, for example the camp in Rey’s La moza de cántaro – how might the gender ambiguity of cross dressing have spoken to marginalized and prohibited communities in Franco’s Spain? By the same token, these critical frameworks and not least postcolonial theory are instrumental to identifying some of the more reactionary currents in films including Don Juan.
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