Fiction pictures about the Civil War built a new look during the Transition

Abstract

This article considers what were the innovators elements on the civil war in fiction films during the Transition. While several scholars argue that these films only recovered silent memories, this study aims to show how they dismounted part of Franco's version of the war. To this end, films and their discourse are analyzed using sequences, characters, dialogues that help create new images about the conflict and attack certain pillars of the official version disseminated both in the history books and movies during the francoist period. This study, which takes an historical approach, resorts to film analysis and relies on cases of censorship and classification, reviews published in newspapers, declarations of directors. What appears is that fiction films, despite censorship, began building an unorthodox image of war, in clear disagreement with various points of the dominant discourse. Thus, especially in filmic narratives proposing a broad chronological framework, the socio- economic interests that had motivated the war are largely denounced, the war was presented as a class struggle, nationalist violence was shown as obeying a desire for annihilation of the other. Far from being inconsequential films, certain stories are clearly presented as a rereading of the conflict.