Date Thesis Awarded
5-2010
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Modern Languages and Literatures
Advisor
Francie Cate-Arres
Committee Members
Carla Olson Buck
Timothy L. Barnard
Abstract
In 1939, Spain saw the end of a bloody three year civil war and the beginning of Francisco Franco's nearly forty year military dictatorship. The immediate postwar was one filled with hunger, poverty, and executions as Franco silenced all opposition. Although cinema was a respite from the terror outside of the theater, the regime utilized Spanish films in order to spread propaganda and write their own version of the civil war, glorifying the victorious Nationalists and demonizing the Republican losers. My thesis examines three pairs of films, each pair containing a Spanish production and a production from Hollywood, and analyzes how the imported American films spoke more to the immediate wounds of the losers from the war than the highly-political Spanish films. Although the American films were censored, their themes and images still provided opportunities for this traumatized audience to appropriate them and form their own subtle subversion to counter the terror and repression of Franco's dictatorship.
Recommended Citation
Hoback, Nathan, ""Hooray for Hollywood": Postwar Cinema and Trauma in Franco's Dictatorship in Spain" (2010). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 709.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/709
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.