On Spanish History

SPAIN: THE CRISIS OF HISTORY. 

Spain's Empire in Europe in the time of Charles the 5th (Grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella)

It is almost impossible to set a historical starting point that would explain a Spanish Volkgeist, but as the 20th century is concerned, 1898 is often used as a key historical marker to explain the unfolding of political events that transformed the country through the century. In that year, Spain, which in the 16th century had been the largest imperial power in the world, reigning over the Americas, most of Western Europe, and some parts of Asia, lost control of its last colonies: the Philippines, in Asia, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Americas. The Spanish kings saw the nations' power as a god-given right derived from the nation's allegiance to the Catholic faith. Catholicism had been the rallying cry for the reunification of the country after 700 years of Islamic occupation, and also was behind the justification for the conquest of America. During the height of its imperial power, again the state rallied around the Catholic tradition, and Spain became the protector of the faith against Protestantism, which challenged the traditional authority of the church, and therefore also of those monarchs who allied themselves with it.

In the 1800s, as the wave of anti-monarchic feeling erupted through Europe culminating in the Napoleonic wars, the Spanish people rallied around their authoritarian king, and again sought refuge in their allegiance to the church to set themselves apart from the rest of Europe, where industrialization and capitalism were transforming social, political, and cultural structures. Through the 19th century, while European nations grew economically and expanded their trading networks and political influence around the world, Spain remained relatively unindustrialized, except for some urban areas. In the southern part of the country there still existed a semi-feudal agrarian system where large landowners inherited farms and its inhabitants from one generation to the next. When in 1898, with the help of the United States, the country lost its last colonies, Spain suffered a devastating blow to its national identity. Many, including thinkers and artists who had exposure to the European world, advocated a democratic transformation for Spain that would allow it to follow the path to modernization taken by other western countries. Through the first decades of the 20th century, these social and political pressures resulted in radical transformations of the Spanish political and social landscape; the monarchy was abolished, and Spain became a republic, although it was still far from a democracy. In 1936 Spain's cultural landscape looked very much like that of other western nations in the middle of the great depression. Tensions between labor and industry, between nationalist groups and regionalist ones, between the defenders of the traditional values established by the monarchy and the new values demanded of global, industrial modernity, culminated in a Civil War between two factions: The Nationalists, under the command of general Francisco Franco, who demanded that Spain return to an authoritarian form of government under a single ruler, and the Republicans, who wanted to establish a republic governed by popular democracy. This is where you do your homework and look up the Spanish Civil War.

Franco, on the right, with Charlie Chaplin

Franco, on the right, with Charlie Chaplin

Now you know who Franco is, and that he won the war. (That's Hitler in the picture with him, by the way). Because he had received support from the Axis powers during the Spanish Civil War, and supported Hitler and Mussolini in World War II, Franco did not get much sympathy from the winners of the war. Its Civil War devastated Spain, and the economic crisis that accompanied the European war only worsened conditions in the country, were a new economic elite was emerging that combined the remnants of the traditional aristocratic classes and some industrialists who benefited from government influences and massive smuggling. The country was economically, politically, and culturally isolated. Then, the Cold War heated up. In the early 1950s, with many European countries on the brink of social revolution and increased hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States and their allies, it was to the advantage of the west to allow Spain into its sphere of influence. Spain was accepted into the United Nations and became open to trade with the international community. Seeking the social and economic benefits of modernization, Franco's growth strategy was building a State-directed industry that would provide for the nation, building infrastructure for tourism and products for national consumption. This jump-started the Spanish economy, but also created an exodus from the countryside to the cities, where farmers who had lived meager subsistence existences, found jobs in the new factories, or industrial projects.

Our class begins at that moment. Spain was under an authoritarian government that justified its authority on the preservation of traditional principles, but needed, in order to survive, to adopt some social and economic strategies that compromised its authority in relation to those principles.

And here is Franco with U.S. President Eisenhower. Politics make strange bedfellows

Franco's motto was "Spain: One, Great, Free". His promise was that even if Spain could not become the world power it once had been, it continued to be the "Spiritual Repository of the West", the one place where the true faith, as it had been defended by the great warriors of medieval times, survived in principle and practice, under the guidance of those who had inherited their authority (the church, the traditional aristocracy, and the military).

The economic growth that accompanied modernization also eroded the very tight control over information that was exercised by the regime. On the negative side, urban expansion generated an urban underclass that presented the regime with a new set of challenges, and an urban middle class that, because of its access to education and communication, found itself empowered financially, but not politically. Members of these groups, and other critics of the regime, sought ways to challenge the ideological principles of the state, demanding to play a role in the destiny of the nation by contributing to its redefinition. This was a tremendous task in a country where information was as ferociously controlled as in under Franco's Spain.
In Cinema, we can observe such a strategy in the adoption of specific visual languages (in the case of Spain in the 1950s, that of Italian neorealism) that produce a type of message that indirectly challenge the state ideological apparatus. In the film "Muerte de un ciclista" (Death of a cyclist, 1955) we will see a bit how this works. In the next few days we will also explore more direct critical strategies such as those used by Luis Buñuel, a key figure in the development of Spanish cinema, who uses the Spanish historical and cultural tradition to challenge the version of Spanish identity espoused by the regime.

After that we will watch films from the period of transition to democracy, which goes from the time of Franco's death in 1975 to the consolidation of the democratic process in the early 1980s. Here there are attempts at creating a "new" Spanish cinema, one that speaks of the new realities of the nation, as well as attempting to incorporate some elements of both modern and traditional popular culture.

The last part of the course will focus on contemporary film. It covers the period of what we could call the Europeanization of Spain, when the country, having chosen a new direction --democratic, European, capitalist, globalist-- sets out to define its new identity internally and externally --for its own inhabitants and for the international market. Almodovar's "Talk to Her," which we watched on the first day of class, clearly illustrates this period.

Throughout the course we will see how Spanish filmmakers develop a visual language that, while critical, accompanies Spain in a redefinition of itself that seeks to reconcile with its past --it is even used as the justifying basis for the "new" Spain-- but also is able to recognize and meet the challenges of the modern world, those which constitute the new "ideological state apparatus".