Middlebrow Cinema

5 REHEARSING FOR DEMOCRACY IN DICTATORSHIP SPAIN Middlebrow period drama 1970–77 Sally Faulkner The unusual political and cultural contexts of the dying days of the Franco dictatorship in Spain gave rise to now long-admired arthouse hits, like Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena / Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (1975), as well as the more recently acclaimed cult popular genre, horror, examples of which include Narciso Ibáez Serrador’s La Residencia / Finishing School (1969) and Len Klimovsky’s La noche de Walpurgis / The Werewolf’s Shadow (1970). A cycle of middlebrow period dramas released in these years, which both responded to recent class changes and looked forward to what we now know to be the democratic change that lay ahead, has, in contrast, received little atten- tion. Unlike the arthouse and cult horror alternatives, this cycle of seven period dramas had little significant international exposure. Even though foreign export was one of the producers’ aims, and the films contained a number of transna- tional features – including foreign co-producers, actors and creative personnel, or addressing modernity in their plots through the disruption of domestic concerns by the arrival of cosmopolitan characters – they had limited success in this area. Instead, these period dramas, which adapted to film the work of canonical yet liberal nineteenth-century Spanish novelists, Benito Pérez Galds, Leopoldo Alas and Juan Valera, were largely enjoyed by national audiences and worked through a number of national concerns which, I will argue, turn around questions of the middlebrow. By naming these period dramas ‘middlebrow’, this chapter makes two interlinked arguments. First, the rise of the middle classes over the 1960s in Spain reconfigured the 1970s cinema audience to include a newly numerous middlebrow sector. While the key preoccupation of the industry in these years was state censorship, a group of producers, including José Luis Dibildos, José Frade and Emiliano Piedra, were also mindful of the existence of this new sector. The reconfiguration took place in the last few years before audiences shifted definitively to domestic TV viewership.1 The appearance in TV series of the late 1970s and early 1980s of precisely the same Rehearsing for democracy in dictatorship Spain 89 novels that were adapted as period dramas to film in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests a shift of this audience to the small screen (for example, Fortunata y Jacinta was adapted to film by Angelino Fons in 1970, and to TV by Mario Camus in 1980). The second argument deploys textual analysis to propose that, far from the accusation of nostalgia often censoriously levelled at period drama, these films were focused not only on the equivocal present, but also on the uncertain future. The chapter will argue that, considered as a group, the cycle of films promotes both social justice and a politics of reconciliation that were essential for the hoped-for future restoration of democracy. Out of context, such causes may appear simply loosely liberal – there are certainly no specific scenes that promote universal suffrage, civic participation or representative decision-taking. Reconciliation also drove cultural initiatives under the dictatorship itself, like the ‘25 Years of Peace’ events of 1964. However, given the context of the emergence of the films in the dying days of dictatorship, their liberal promotion of justice and reconciliation – as well as a more qualified promotion of equality – may be interpreted as rehearsing for democracy. I choose the verb ‘rehearse’ and the gerund form here advisedly. If, from today’s perspective, we know that the rehearsal of ideas in the early 1970s would be shortly followed by a final performance, there was no such sense of inevitability in the period. Indeed, Spain’s twentieth century reminds us of the historical rehearsals that never led to a final performance, like the efforts to modernize under the dictatorship in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘Rehearsing for Modernity’ is the title of Eva Woods’ brilliant analysis of these efforts and their scathing critique in Luis García Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Míster Marshall! / Welcome Mr Marshall (1952) – a film that significantly stages a rehearsal that is followed by no final performance (2008). Twenty years on, in the very different context of the early 1970s, I nonetheless echo this analysis in my own chapter title. The ‘dying days’ captures the contemporary sense of a match between the evi- dent deterioration of the physical body of the elderly Franco and that of the body politic of Francoism, subject to attack, especially from the 1960s onwards, by trade unions, students, grassroots ‘movimiento vecinal’ (neighbourhood movements) and Christian groups, and, increasingly in the 1970s, by Basque terrorists. It cannot be stressed often enough, however, that dictatorship was not a process of transforma- tion from early brutality to eventual softening. While the 1960s has been dubbed a decade of ‘dictablanda’ (soft dictatorship) and ‘apertura’ (opening up), when the opening up of markets following the 1959 Development Plan was followed by a tentative opening up in the cultural sphere, the period 1969–75 was characterized by a return to hardline repression. (This period is reviewed in Manuel Huerga’s portrayal of imprisonment and execution in the 2012 biopic Salvador Puig Antich, discussed by Belén Vidal in this volume.) These conflicting circumstances gave rise to a highly politicized art cinema. Spirit of the Beehive and Raise Ravens, for example, nuance their critique of the military and patriarchal origins of the regime by stressing the burden of dictatorship on the young, and on women, as the country inched towards a post-Franco future. But film historians have increasingly questioned the valorization of what might be termed this ‘cinema of charisma’, to the exclusion of other trends. Exemplary of this revision is the reappraisal 90 Sally Faulkner of horror. Beyond the cinema of charisma, the industrial context for producing films in late-dictatorship Spain was apparently not propitious. The tentatively liberalizing ‘aper- turista’ attempt to foster a Spanish art cinema to rival the New Cinema movements of Spain’s (democratic) North-European neighbours in the 1960s (the ‘Nuevo Cine Espaol’ [New Spanish Cinema]) had yielded one-off arthouse hits, but, unsurprisingly, largely failed to generate significant box-office returns. According to John Hopewell, ‘only a few forms of film-life survived and festered in such an economic climate’ (1986, 80). Writing in 2004 of the significant commercial success of comedy and horror in the period, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andrew Willis seize on Hopewell’s colourful description to query the neglect of these genres (2004, 12–13), and, in further studies, question their omission from the Spanish ‘cinematic canon’ (Lázaro-Reboll 2005, 129). In the context of the formation of a canon in which politically inter- ested forces sought to stress a democratic cinema for democracy (Triana-Toribio 2003, 108–11), Lázaro-Reboll’s work salutes the role played by cult movie fandom and their circuits of exchange in maintaining the interest in, and availability of, films that might otherwise have been ignored and lost (2005, 129–30; 2012, 1–7). The examination of middlebrow cinema in this period nuances this account of a dictatorship lurching from the liberalization of the 1960s to the repression of the 1970s, and a film industry lurching from charismatic exceptions to genre cinema. Beyond questions of politics and industry, a third context raises further issues: the rise of the middle class. While the very limited freedoms allowed by the regime’s ‘apertura’ in the cultural field could be taken away (for example, the relaxing of censorship that occurred under José María García Escudero’s Director-Generalship of Film and Theatre [1962–7] was reversed when hardline Alfredo Sánchez Bella took over from Manuel Fraga as Minister of Information and Tourism in 1969), the significant upward movement of individuals into the middle class (according to criteria like disposable income, car ownership and university attendance) (Payne 1987, 463–88) was not wholly reversed. While rejecting a formulaic connection between social class and culture (which I discuss in the Introduction to this volume), this chapter argues that the reconfiguration of the early 1970s Spanish film audience opened up new opportunities for film practitioners. The new middlebrow cinema that followed, while modest in relation to the number of features produced, was popular with audiences, middle-class or otherwise, and, as I have argued elsewhere in connection with ‘Tercera vía’ (Third Way) films (2013, 7; 119–23), would go on to provide a blueprint for the ways both middlebrow Spanish television and film would develop at the end of the decade. If consideration of the middlebrow audience aims to bring into view a previously overlooked filmgoing sector, my argument that the middlebrow films rehearsed this audience for democracy finds common cause with recent historiography of the Spanish Transition. As part of a wider defence of the analysis of social movements (Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements 2013–), Tamar Groves, for example, notes that rather than attribute the success of Spain’s Transition to the political elite, or to the popular protests that influenced the decisions of the elite, the role of often informal social movement in civic society might also be considered. Groves focuses on primary-school teachers of the end of the dictatorship Rehearsing for democracy in dictatorship Spain 91 period, some of whose activities, she argues, constituted a ‘Rehearsal for democracy’ (2013, chapter 3) in the classroom. While their procedures and practices are difficult to capture for subsequent analysis (as in many film audience studies, oral history is a key source), such informal movements nonetheless contributed to the gradual change of ‘society’s discourses and day-to-day practices.

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