ABSTRACT
According to Brother Ángel Ayala, the founder of the ACNP Catholic pressure group in Spain, the cinema was ‘the greatest calamity that has befallen the world since Adam. A greater calamity than the flood, the two world wars and the atomic bomb’ (Hooper, 1995, p.153). It was the sexual content of the cinema both real and, worse, imagined that alarmed Franco’s doomy clergy into setting up their board of film censors; but they had no one to blame but themselves. The seeds of their distress had been unwittingly sown by the determination of their predecessors to divide man from beasts by the imposition of the missionary position; for this turnaround in sexual relationships had the consequence of prioritising the look in the sexual act and so encouraging voyeurism, a pleasure that would, in time, be explored and exploited by the cinema. Actors that an audience liked looking at became objects of dangerous desire: ‘Garbo’s flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition’, Roland Barthes wrote (1983, p.56). In its crusade against spiritual ruin, film censorship during the dictatorship was infamously puritan; but the liberalism that followed brought an amnesty on taboos and there emerged a discourse on changing attitudes to sex and sexuality in the films of directors who worked repeatedly with new stars such as Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz – sex symbols whose symbolism is specific to Spain’s evolution since Franco.
