(en) Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #85 - Book
REVIEW -- Franco's Crypt Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936,Jeremy
Treglown Chatto & Windus 320 pages paperback £16.99
This book starts from the premise that an awful lot of post-civil war Spanish culture has
been ignored by the rest of the world because it originated in Spain itself. The writers,
filmmakers and artists under Franco were seen by many as tainted by the regime, their art
compromised in order to impress the censors, and therefore were not as valued as the work
of the literary exiles living abroad. Those who stayed in Spain were judged to be either
Francoists themselves or willing to accept the censorship of the regime. ---- Treglown
quite correctly points out that Franco's regime lasted nearly 40 years and so many artists
who were working in the 1960s and '70s were born under his rule, in time and it could be
argued that they had little choice in the matter. Even immediately after the civil war
there were still Republican artists who managed to produce work that either passed
censorship or which was published abroad and distributed in Spain through underground
bookshops.
The level of censorship also varied during the regime,
becoming less strict in the later years when a number of
social-realism style films were produced to highlight urban
and rural poverty.
One particularly interesting case of censorship highlighted by
Treglown is that of Luis Buñuel, co-writer and director of Un
Chien Andalou. Buñuel worked as a spy for the Republic and
produced propaganda films during the war and eventually left
Spain for the USA where he worked at MoMA in New York
until he was fired during the McCarthy era for his communist
links. Buñuel returned to Spain in 1961 when censorship was
being relaxed and co-wrote and directed Viridiana. The film
passed Franco's censors and went on to win the Palme D'Or
at Cannes. And then the embarrassment began. The Vatican
saw the film as a satire of authoritarian Catholicism and
condemned the film, leading to a hasty blacklisting in Spain.
The story serves to show that although censorship existed, it
was still possible to get subversive material out, particularly
as the censors were often dealing with abstract and surrealist
works whose meaning was open to interpretation.
The central thesis of the book, that Spanish culture lived on
through the Franco regime, is hard to deny but in attempting
to assess the impact of the regime Treglown makes some
odd decisions in terms of which topics to discuss. In the first
half of the book he covers themes that have had an impact
on Spanish cultural identity and collective memory. For one of
these themes he chooses Franco's dam building programme
which brought irrigation and hydro-electric power to many
parts of the country. Treglown focusses on the cultural effect
of the programme on the displaced villagers who made way
for the new lakes and reservoirs; a group that represented a
very small proportion of the rural population. Given that only
a few topics are considered in the book this seems a strange
choice given that dam building was hardly a feature exclusive
to Franco's regime - similar reservoir building was occurring
in Devon and Cumbria in the UK around the same time.
The attempts to find Franco's mass graves and identify bodies
in order to give those individuals proper burials are covered
in detail and through this we get a sense that Treglown, and
many of the Spanish people, are trying to move on from
the years of the regime. Given, however, that the book is a
study of culture since 1936 there appear to be some glaring
oversights. After spending much time on villagers displaced
by dam building, it seems strange to not cover some Francoist
policies which had a massive impact on Spanish culture,
namely the attempt to stamp out regional identities. No space
is given to the suppression of Catalonian or Basque language
and culture, the resistance against this or indeed any armed
resistance which occurred throughout the regime.
Overall the book seems flawed in the aspects of Spanish
cultural life explored but it covers some interesting ground:
the projects to discover Franco's mass graves and the yearly
commemoration of his birthday which still goes on at his crypt
are two examples. The second half of the book gives short
reviews of key books, films and works of art which would
be useful to anyone wanting to approach modern Spanish
culture. Treglown, however, seems to gloss over some of the
more radical parts of Spanish culture and goes so far to say
that anarchism was an ideology that appeals 'to the lazy as
well as the rebellious and individualistic'. When anarchism
has been such a strong force in Spanish cultural life for over a
century, this seems like a deliberate attempt by the author to
downplay the influence of a group he does not agree with.
