Aplicación de las métricas

The first chapter, “From Bullfighters to Red Sailors: The Influence of Soviet Film

118 Ramos Arenas, “Un cine leído. Cultura cinematográfica, censura y especulaciones en la España de la década de los sesenta.”

119 Ramos Arenas, 239.

Culture in pre-Civil War Spain (1931-1936),” explores how a remarkable radical film culture was created in Spain despite the lack of a strong film industry and a ban on Soviet cinema that was not lifted until 1936. It focuses on a circle of Marxist intellectuals who called for a

transformation of Spain's film culture from an anemic version of Hollywood to a new cinema devoted to social change. In the absence of relevant political filmmakers at the time, figures like Juan Piqueras, Antonio del Amo, Mateo Santos or Cesar M. Arconada became the center of an alternative film culture project radiated from the pages of journals such as Nuestro Cinema, Pueblo, Mundo Obrero, Popular Film, or Octubre. They successfully introduced Soviet cinema, Agitprop, and social documentary into Spanish cultural circles, paving the way for the

proliferation of proletarian film clubs and revolutionary film screenings during the Civil War and significantly influencing the propaganda efforts of the Republican government.

The second chapter, “Film Called into Action: Juan Piqueras, Léon Moussinac, Harry Alan Potamkin and the Internationale of Film Pedagogy,” follows this project of creating a Spanish proletarian cinema into the international networks of radical film culture circulation that Spain was part of well before the outbreak of the Civil War. Establishing Piqueras as a nodal point in these networks, the chapter explores how the avant-garde’s transformative energies were translated across the Atlantic into local pedagogical initiatives based on critical spectatorship, smallgauge filmmaking and worker organization. Translation (understood both literally as the translation of foreign texts into native languages and metaphorically as the adaptation of international film initiatives into local contexts) emerges throughout the chapter, and the dissertation in general, as a key component of 1930s moving image culture.

Contrasting the openly politicized film culture discussed in the first two chapters, I will continue my assessment of noncommercial film culture in Spain with the overlooked, but highly

relevant, bourgeois amateur film movements that developed in Catalonia around cinema associations and excursionist centers. In the third chapter, “A Vernacular National Cinema:

Amateur Filmmaking in Catalonia (1932–1936),” I focus on the little-known history of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (Catalan Excursionist Centre, herein CEC) and its fundamental role in the organization of international amateur film contests and congresses.

Beyond the institutional role of the CEC, the chapter explores the film production of Catalan bourgeois amateur filmmakers, and how their defense of amateur cinema as guarantor of the artistic essence of cinema was aligned with a class-conscious anxiety about the prominence of the so called mass in Spanish society. The chapter also explores how the inclusion of these materials in film history allows us to rethink accepted narratives on the emergence of moving image culture. In this sense, it also revises the negative categories (nonprofessional,

noncommercial, nontheatrical, etc.) used by scholars to describe these materials, offering instead a definition of amateur cinema based on its distinct modes of production, exhibition, and

distribution.

In the final chapter, “‘A Formidable and Decisive Medium’: Institutionalizing Cinema in Interwar Spain (1929-1936),” I analyze how the importance of film as a pedagogical tool (in all its different forms explored until now) coalesced in a series of official institutional policies on cinema, education and governance in Spain. The politics of this relationship and their

relationship with international developments will be fleshed out through two different case studies; the 1931 CHC (Hispanic American Film Congress) and the CCGC, created in 1933.

Both initiatives reflect the interest of state institutions in using film as a political and cultural instrument at the service of nationalistic narratives, either through film policy and cultural diplomacy or by setting up government-sponsored educational film initiatives and mobile

screenings.

The assassination of Piqueras and Salvans with which I opened in the prologue epitomizes the tragic end met by the transformative forces that swept Spain after the proclamation of the Second Republic on April 1931. Franco’s failed coup against the democratic government in July 18, 1936, the ensuing Civil War, and the thirty-six-year dictatorship that followed the defeat of the Republic not only destroyed the pedagogical impulses that had attempted to dissolve Spain’s traditional centers of power (the church, the aristocracy, powerful landowners, local oligarchs, reactionary elements of the military, banks, etc.), but also erased the memory of these same transformative projects. My dissertation recovers many of these initiatives devoted to

modernizing Spain through noncommercial moving image culture from 1931 to 1936. With this, I seek to counter the widespread notion that Spain was a “terra incognita” (as described in Piers Brandon’s opening quote) yet to be discovered by the world with the eruption of the Civil War, and I argue instead that the country was well inserted into the international circuits of

noncommercial film culture circulation that disseminated avant-garde, educational, amateur, and militant film initiatives throughout the world. The aim of the dissertation is, then, to include the Spanish context into 1930s film scholarship, from which it has been largely excluded, showing how it can illuminate new perspectives on the emergence of film culture, the avant-garde, film education, institutionalization and cinema beyond the commercial screen.

Chapter 1. From Bullfighters to Red Sailors: Alternative Film Culture and Socialist