ABSTRACT
Cuts were called corrections by the censor. The Civil War was not a vile and bloody disaster but a holy, successful crusade. There were no other languages besides Castilian Spanish. There was no such thing as poverty, nor adultery, nor dissidence, nor differences of any kind. There was only Spain, favoured by God and Franco, watched over by the military and the Catholic Church. This, at least, was the cinematic version of life for Spaniards during the dictatorship. For close on forty years it was a regime that subordinated all media to its conservative and nationalist discourse. Through censorship and dubbing, the supervision of scripts and shoots, the rationing of permits and licences, and the imposition of prohibitive film classifications, Spanish cinema was press-ganged into the rewriting of history and the dissemination of fascist propaganda. Nevertheless, as the historian Paul Preston has stated: ‘The hostilities of the Spanish Civil War ended formally on 1 April 1939 but the war went on, in the form of… a resistance movement until 1977’ (1999, p.5). Accordingly, a cinema of opposition did emerge in the films of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis Garcia Berlanga, with reinforcement from the exiled Luis Buñuel. Like advancing snipers, their efforts paved the way for many and ensured that an otherwise stagnant period was vivified by their innovation and nerve.
