Wounds, remains, transformations: towards the definition of some stylization models in the Spanish postwar filmmaking (1939-1962).

Recent and controversial approaches to the Spanish filmmaking of the 40s and 50s over the last century show the increasingly interest for the historical and formal study of a period of our cinema that still remains as reviled and scarcely known as it is fascinating. Traditionally, the thorough study of the preserved films was considered, in its first decade, pure emanation of Franco’s regime, and for that account unworthy of thorough studies; whereas in the second one some works, linked to a so-called “regenerationism” –superficially linked to the Italian neorrealism– barely received any credit at all. These film studies, conducted since the turn of the last century by several historians both in Spain and abroad and based on new analytical and historiographical perspectives have described a novel landscape in which the research lines do not fail to enrich and multiply.

It can be established, then, the fact that we are faced with a cinema both unequal and filled with works with an undeniable aesthetic and cultural stature; the fact that the weary and critic Manichaeism that ruled back then can no longer be held (the italianizing “communist” dissidence and Franco costumbrismo); and the fact that, well, there are no isolated nor exceptional interesting films but trends, schools of thought and “generations” that, from the very end of the war, strived to maintain a cultural work both difficult and commendable which had already given its first, scarce and delicious film results during the tragically short republican period.

In this context, the issue No 20 of L’Atalante is looking for papers able to continue the rigorous reflection about the simultaneously comic, melancholic, abrupt, dense and devastated Spanish postwar filmmaking and able to continue the research about the texts analysis, as well as their literary sources (i.e. the undeniable popular stamp that arrives from the hand of Wenceslao Fernández Flórez); the research about the importance of the plastic and performing traditions –that manage to survive despite it all– coming from the silent films and the republican period and about its complex rubbing with the narrative and visual mechanisms of the prevailing “International Model”; the research about the existence of hybrid films, result of undreamed-of mixtures of apparently contradictory elements…

Likewise, we think that those papers that deal with the film –and historical– transformations of the period under analysis are also important. Thus, for instance, some stylization models born in the 40s (such as the one we propose to call “raving-obsessive”, closely related to the war wound and whose features are vivid in films were a masculine look wounded by the loss of its object of desire prevails, perfectly illustrated in La sirena negra [The Black Mermaid] [C. Serrano de Osma, 1947] or in Vida en sombras [Shaded Life] [L. Llobet-Gràcia, 1948]), practically disappear in the next decade, in which, however, a progressive tension of the expository eye towards the costumbrista materials (barely preserved in the 40s) emerged –especially thanks to Edgar Neville’s exemplary filmmaking–, and resulted in a modern, grotesque and caricatured model, perfectly represented in Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s works.

Acceptance of articles for the section Notebook: 1-22 July 2014

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