Un monstruo viene a vermeLa historia de la guerra civil española que el cine franquista quiso imponernos (1934-1964)

Abstract

This article analyzes, through the methodology of the relationships of history and cinema, a selection of films from the Franco era that range from the mythical Raza (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), through Cerca del cielo (Mariano Pombo and Domingo Viladomat, 1951) to Un puente sobre el tiempo (José Luís Merino, 1964), which allow us to extract the Manichaean and false imaginary that the dictatorship tried to establish about the causes and those responsible for the Spanish Civil War. It will be clear that, despite the temporal distance between them, they will share the same message: their accentuated anti-republicism and their fierce anti-communism. This cinema of the winners (with little or no prominence for the losers) sought to instill, through the cultural apparatus, a series of myths (that still persist) as an unquestionable History for the following generations. For all these reasons, the key to this investigation is to reveal the equivocal and perverse way in which the dictatorship attempted to accommodate the meaning of the conflict to its ideological interests through cinema.