Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article considers what were the innovators elements on the civil war in fiction films during the Transition. While several scholars argue that these films only recovered silent memories, this study aims to show how they dismounted part of Franco's version of the war. To this end, films and their discourse are analyzed using sequences, characters, dialogues that help create new images about the conflict and attack certain pillars of the official version disseminated both in the history books and movies during the francoist period. This study, which takes an historical approach, resorts to film analysis and relies on cases of censorship and classification, reviews published in newspapers, declarations of directors. What appears is that fiction films, despite censorship, began building an unorthodox image of war, in clear disagreement with various points of the dominant discourse. Thus, especially in filmic narratives proposing a broad chronological framework, the socio- economic interests that had motivated the war are largely denounced, the war was presented as a class struggle, nationalist violence was shown as obeying a desire for annihilation of the other. Far from being inconsequential films, certain stories are clearly presented as a rereading of the conflict.

We intend in this paper to review the discourse of the Democratic Transition in Spain through the evolution of film censorship these years. We will focus specially in the judicial processes that "Cuenca’s crime" ("El crimen de Cuenca", Pilar Miró, 1981) and "Rocío" (Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1983) suffered then. We will make a brief account of the last years of an institution that biased reception of movies for the Spanish public for at least 40 years. We will stress that its formal disappearance matched similar legislation in other countries of democratic Europe. We are going to try the limits of freedom of speech during the Transition years through the study of the press at that time and what was published concerning the polemic exhibition of both films. Using the analysis of the media discourse from different ideological angles we think we have contributed to put into perspective the hopes, conflicts and resistances that the political changes of late 70s and early 80s. These came into birth with much more difficulty than it has usually been accepted. Finally, in coherence with this interdisciplinary effort of gaining perspective, we find it important to show the socio-economic changes of those years in a supranational scale: the emergence of economic neoliberalism, the establishment of the affluent society and the appearance of the consensual society as a consequence of the previous factors.

In 2014, journalist Mark Simpson proposed the term “Spornosexual” a concept to identify an emerging trend in the representation of the male body, applicable to advertising, magazine spreads, different types of TV programming (including reality shows) and film. For Simpson, the concept is an evolution of the 1990s “Metrosexual” and shows representations indebted to the world of sports and (gay) pornography and is characterized for the centrality of an ostentatiously manufactured body. Traditional conceptions of virility and representations of the male body tended to steer clear of passivity. Susan Bordo has described the process through which such narcissistic images of the male body become acceptable in mainstream representation. A generation of young male actors both in Spain and in Hollywood represents this new trend. The text argues the case of Mario Casas. How he is a representative of a new approach to the body and a new personal relationship to the body. It illustrates how this new approach engages with two demographics that are often ignored by mainstream critics: teenage girls and gay male audiences. It also illustrates how Casas negotiates the conflict between the model of masculinity implicit in the perspective of critics and his new adopted persona. The main section of the article focuses on Casas 2009 ransformation from teen icon to spornosexual star, particularly in the film Tres metros sobre el cielo.

The study on male characters in the Spanish cinema remains low. In these times when much of the research focuses on the investigation of characters and television stories looking for a new audiovisual masculinity, it is appropriate to look back and press the moment the breakdown of patriarchal conventions occurs in buil­ding male characters. This article comes to the stage of the Spanish democratic Transition, when the female character is released and begins a transformation, as many studies have already shown, in a visible manner. However, male characters in the Spanish cinema of the twentieth century 70-80 emerge with a change of skin, showing the contradictions and fears, and especially the need of a metamorphosis, parallel to the social and political evolution that the country was suffering. Men also in some Spanish films of the moment denote a comprehensive crisis in a turning point between the breakdown of the old regime, the patriarchy, and look to the future of the “new man” who must take and implement, not with little effort and disorientation, new freedoms, new women and new democracy.

The text offers a tour through different representations of male characters in American generalist television that are beyond the classical representation of the male characters that were depicted as traditionally strong characters, courageous and machos. Considering how American television fiction has a maximum expan­sion –not only in the US but, also for its strong presence in all Western television, in Spain– we could see the impact that these representations can make in the public in order to build new identitarian points of referen­ce of the masculine, masculinity and virility.

The article aims to describe, analyze and interpret the agreements signed by the Catalan Government with its neighboring territories and states in order to legalize the broadcasting of its regional television, TVC, in those areas, where it had lacked a legal basis since its birth in the eighties. Cases in which negotiations have taken place but no agreement has been reached are also considered. The article is based on the results of qualitative research combining documentary analysis and interviews and it includes the results of previous research carried out by the authors. The research is exploratory in nature and deals with an under-resear­ched topic —broadcasting outside the boundaries of a specific Autonomous Community— with the aim of creating original knowledge. The text shows how the agreements are the result of a Catalan desire to legalize TVC’s broadcasts throughout the Catalan-speaking territories. It also shows how these agreements make ex­plicit the political and cultural conflicts between regions with a common cultural heritage. The article moves beyond description to provide interpretive elements which allow us to understand the origin and nature of these agreements and the conflicts caused by the negotiations.

During the political transition, the law adapted in order to authorize progressively softcore and hardcore movies. Jesus Franco’s erotic work played a key role in his films. From 'The Awful Dr. Orlof' to his last film, the director explored different aspects: the ‘destape’, the 'S' rated and 'X' rated films. The difficulties of making films of this type prompted Jesus Franco to leave Spain to shoot 'Necronomicon' (1967). He reached the fullness of his creation through softcore films interpreted by his muse Soledad Miranda. The strength of the director’s voyeurism converted these hardcore movies into female hardcores with or without the actress and in the subsequent years. The evolution of the law will bring about a double phenomenon: the double versions and the ‘soft to hard’ films, i.e. movies which had already been shot and to which pornographic elements were added. Such manipulations which Jesus Franco accepted or even assumed responsibility of are not only circumstantial insofar as the whole cinematographic work of the director is a form of constant manipulation. With the pornographic film, the director completed his career though the total ‘visibility’ of his films does not really correspond to voyeurism and it is no wonder that that the ‘X’ films which were shot in Spain were his partner and actress Linda Romay’s making . Even if the evolution of Spain during the transition didn’t equate that of the director’s creation, it remains that the former, having to adapt laws to the cinema, contributed to alter Jesus Franco’s trajectory.

This article deals with the representations of Spanish transition to democracy shown by television in Spain from 1995 to nowadays. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it analyses the recycling as well as the re-creating of scenes and figures which already belong to History although they are still present in collective memory. The analysis of a few fictional and informative programmes will enable us to sketch out a cartography of the representations of the transition on television. We will see how they get organized around TV formats and genres (series and mini-series, biopics and political thrillers), how they are related to other previous programmes or, on the contrary, how they attempt to deconstruct the television myth of the transition built up with its innumerable television representations. We will also wonder to which extent such a myth, drawn up from the amazing archives collection of TV pictures of the transition, comes to hide historical reality rather than disclose it. All these mechanisms are far from concerning only the small screen and its specific schedule and modes of production, creation and broadcasting. They enable us to perceive the persistence of conflicting memories, of taboo subjects and the lack of a consensual, dispassionate collective imagination over this period, more than 40 years after the beginning of this process. The pictures from (or about) the past, if they do not bring great revelations to us about the past, turn out to be meaningful about the present and its complicated relationship with recent History.

In quinqui films converge a vindication of freedom, formalized as a cry of rebellion and a mystification of its protagonists, those young offenders elevated to the status of new héroes, protagonists of a desperate struggle, between social survival and outright rebellion. This reflects a fascination with the lumpen, for an otherness that does not find its place in the new ideological and social formation but also an hipervisibilización of the body as an instrument of liberation that challenges gender identities, especially male. If, in the social discourse of the transition , there is only exacerbated identity, spectacularized violence, body is also flaunted, overexposed.