ABSTRACT
The cultural studies debate of the early 1990s on the transformative potential of mass culture helped to revitalize an interest in melodrama while simultaneously revealing the political and epistemological concerns of the genre and its aesthetic universe. This chapter explores the ways in which one can understand the contradictions within melodrama and, in the Spanish context. It points to the ways it serves not only as a means of understanding the marco sentimental of various generations of Spaniards, but also how this aesthetic form is a kind of second skin, inseparable from the sociopolitical parameters of Francoism. The chapter points out that Ana Mariscal is one of two woman filmmakers—the other being Margarita Aleixandre—directing films in the Spain of the 1950s. Filmmakers ranging from Falangists like Jose Maria Garcia Escudero, to underground communists like Juan Antonio Bardem turned neorealism into a national project of sociopolitical renewal through aesthetic innovation.
