Figure 1. Wreck of the Vizcaya (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
On July 4, 1898, the above film was shot off the coast of Santiago de Cuba by a Biograph operator after the naval battle that saw the Spanish fleet completely destroyed by the United States (Figure 1). The armored cruiser Vizcaya, heavily damaged, had been abandoned and was about to sink. The single shot film consists of a phantasmagorical panorama that shows the wrecked boat, which it then leaves out of the frame as the camera continues to pan left. It is worth quoting in full the description of the film from the Biograph catalogue:
This is a wonderfully impressive picture, taken on the morning after the battle in which the Spanish navy was destroyed. This battleship, once the "Pride of Spain," is shown a
ruined hulk on the beach, the terrible effect of the guns of Uncle Sam's warships being apparent everywhere. Contrasted with our earlier picture of the "Viscaya" in New York Harbor ["Vizcaya" under full headway], the "Viscaya" here presents a woeful
appearance.12F13
The text reflects the humiliation inflicted on the former empire that had once ruled over large parts of the world and had now lost its “pride.” As with the Vizcaya cruiser in the film, Spain left the sphere of international geopolitical power after the 1898 loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Philippines, and Guam and the subsequent defeat in the Spanish-American war. These developments were called the desastre del 98 (disaster of 1898) by Spanish authorities and society, which plummeted into a deep moral, political, and social crisis. In the following decades the country struggled to assert its geopolitical position in the new capitalist world order. It mixed introspective and autocratic diplomatic policies with new colonial campaigns in Morocco,
declared itself neutral in the First World War, later attempted to have an active role in the League of Nations, and ultimately became a battleground for international solidarity and anti-Fascist struggle during the Civil War (1936-1939) and an ally of Hitler through better part of the Second World War.13F14
To understand the effects that the disaster of 1898 had in the socio-political and cultural context of interwar Spain in general, I suggest applying a failed empire framework that accounts for the country’s displaced position as a former global power that then reacted by embarking on an often contradictory struggle between tradition and modernity. Throughout the following
13 “Wreck of the ‘Vizcaya,’” image, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed May 15, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/item/98500519/.
14 Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston, eds., Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century (London: New York: Routledge, 1999); Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
decades, intellectuals and institutions attempted to both redirect and rescue the nation. The coincidence of cinema’s emergence with the symbolic loss of the last overseas colonies also must be considered. The new medium appeared in Spain as the country was facing the
consequences of the loss of the empire and the rejection of the “museum of traditions” that John Dos Passos’s opening quote describes. With the disappearance of the last remnants of the glorified colonial past—except parts of Morocco and Equatorial Guinea—Spain faced a fractured identity as a peripheral actor in industrialized Europe with a nonetheless rich and influential cultural past. Different political and cultural actors began to theorize and discuss the direction Spain should take after this turning point, and cinema played a central role in the construction of this new and uncertain national project.
Figure 2. Proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in the Sant Jaume square of Barcelona (April 14, 1931).
Photograph from Josep Maria Sagarra, Banda Municipal de Barcelona.
This thesis, though, is not about Spain’s 1898 loss of colonies and consequent
geopolitical demise, but about the effects that the reality of a failed empire had in the cultural production of the country thirty years after, when the fall of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the explosion of moving image culture allowed for a new society to be imagined and, finally, put in practice and represented on the screen. The empty shot that ends the Wreck of Vizcaya film was, so to speak, filled with the images, many of them shot by amateur filmmakers and
photographers, of the proclamation of the Second Republic on April 14, 1931 and the crowds of people celebrating in the streets (Figure 2). For the first time in decades, it seemed possible to break with the past, something which the previous period of Bourbon Restoration had been incapable, or unwilling, of achieving. After a thirty-three-year ellipsis where only a few intellectuals and pedagogues had been working to break Spain’s cultural isolationism and
traditionalist spirit,14F15 a transformative and emancipatory national project based on social equality and modernization was devised as an optimistic follow up to the ruins of the former empire and its “woeful appearance.”
As the different chapters of the dissertation reflect, though, the image of the failed empire did not simply disappear as in the Biograph film. It remained off-camera, so to speak, and greatly informed the cultural production of Spain in the following decades.15F16 For some it enabled a nostalgic reclaiming of Spain’s utmost centrality in the cultural production of Europe in the last centuries (for instance in painting and literature through figures like Miguel de Cervantes, Luis
15 Promoted by a key progressive pedagogical institution: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) which later created the Residencia de Estudiantes and the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (JAE). In Catalonia there was the Escuela Moderna promoted by Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia and the Institut Escola. See the introduction and chapter four for more information on these initiatives.
16 And one can argue that it has done so up to the current moment in Spain. See the exhibit organized by the Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (CCCB) “The Baroque D_effect Politics of the Hispanic Image”
(November 2010-February 2011) and its catalogue; Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia, eds., El d_efecte barroc:
polítiques de la imatge hispana; guia d’interpretació (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2010).
de Góngora, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez, or El Greco). For others it provided a departure point from which to rekindle Spain’s status as the mother nation of Hispanic culture and articulate a Spanish-speaking front to face Hollywood (see chapter four). The failed empire was also equated with an old and hegemonic Castilian culture to be surpassed (especially for Catalan, Basque, and Galician intellectuals as discussed in chapter three). We can finally mention leftist intellectuals, who were at once very much attached to the nationalistic idea of rebuilding the glory of a racialized Spanish culture (see chapter one) but were at the same time very receptive to Marxism through radical film culture projects (chapter two).16F17
This nostalgic resilience of the failed empire, which I relate to what Paul Gilroy has called “postcolonial melancholia,”17F18 has been little explored in Spain in relation to the cultural production of the Second Republic.18F19 Scholars have focused more on the immediate effects of the great disaster in the so-called Generación del 98 (Generation of ‘98, which describes the intellectuals and artists that came to the fore of Spanish cultural life after the loss of the colonies and that attempted to cure the dying nation and surpass its corrupt, ignorant and localist
institutions).19F20 But less work has been done on the persisting, and multifaced, effects of Spain’s
17 The multiple and competing versions of nationalism that followed the end of Empire in Spain can be
paradoxically equated with the Italian context in those same years, where the consolidation of Mussolini’s colonial project (epitomized by the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935) spurred, to quote Neelam Srivastava, a “nationalism that rejects imperialism and supports internationalist solidarities.” Neelam Srivastava, Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018), 8. This crucial connection between Spanish and Italian interwar societies is yet to be fully explored.
18 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
19 Scholars have mostly focused on how the authors of the Generación del 98 reacted to the emergence of cinema.
See Rafael Utrera, Modernismo y 98 frente a cinematógrafo (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1981).
20 The metaphor of the diseased or dying nation was widely used at the time to describe the situation of the country after the loss of the colonies—especially following Lord Salisbury’s famous “Dying Nations” speech given on May 4th 1898 for the conservative party that was inspired by the collapse of the Spanish empire and conceived as a warning to Great Britain’s own colonial enterprise. Salisbury divided the world in living and dying nations, where the former “would gradually encroach on the territory of the dying.” Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. Such biopolitical metaphors can be found extensively in the work of intellectuals of the time. See the description
failed empire on the film culture of the following decades, especially in relation to the
transformative moment opened up by the proclamation of the Second Republic on April 1931.20F21 Take for instance the avant-garde film Esencia de verbena (1930) from Ernesto Giménez Caballero, director of La Gaceta Literaria (1927-1931)21F22 and the Cineclub Español and
representative of Spain at the International Educational Cinematograph Institute in Rome (herein IECI). The film was made in 1930 and was shown at the IIème Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (second International Congress of Independent Filmmakers, herein CICI) in
Brussels that same year. This ten-minute city symphony is divided into twelve parts that analyze from different perspectives the verbenas (open air-fairs) that happen in Madrid throughout the year. Instead of focusing on the usual topics of city symphonies (the modern elements of the city, technologies, communication, electrification, etc.), the film blends tradition and modernity through images of popular entertainments and art (fairs, virgins, folklore, paintings from Goya, bullfighting) with avant-garde artists (using paintings from Francis Picabia, Maruja Mallo, Pablo Picasso and the figure of writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna as an improvised actor that
vertebrates the different segments) and cinematographic techniques of fragmentation and collage
of philosopher Ortega y Gasset of Spain as a “fatigued organ” or a diseased “body” in José Ortega y Gasset, España invertebrada: bosquejo de algunos pensamientos históricos (Madrid: Calpe, 1921), 25, 48–50, 63.
21 The work of Marta García Carrión is the only exception, although she does not explicitly connect the highly nationalistic discourse of film critics and policymakers in the interwar period with the desastre del 98 and the persistence of the failed empire. Marta García Carrión, Por un cine patrio: cultura cinematográfica y nacionalismo español (1926-1936) (Valencia, Spain: Universitat de Valencia, 2013), 113–209.
22 La Gaceta Literaria was a key publication for the modernization of cultural debates during the interwar period. It included essays on literature, poetry, theatre, music, cinema, painting, and architecture and provided an outlet for some of the most important critics and intellectuals of Spanish culture. The journal came to an abrupt end in 1931 when the embrace of fascism by its director Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s put him at odds with the leftist positioning of many of its contributors. The Cineclub Español was organized by La Gaceta Literaria and became the center of avant-garde film culture in Spain throughout its three seasons (1928-1931), providing an outlet for experimental, scientific and, especially, Soviet cinema to be shown for the first time in Spain. It helped consolidate a film club culture that would rapidly spread throughout the country after the end of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (see chapter one). Both La Gaceta Literaria and the Cineclub Español were instrumental for avant-garde film and visual culture to take hold and spread throughout Spain in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were also a key outlet were Valencian Marxist critic Juan Piqueras (one of the main protagonists of this thesis) and filmmaker Luis Buñuel (among other key figures in the Spanish avant-garde) developed their interests and knowledge of Soviet moving image culture (see chapter one).
(Figure 3). In the last segment of Esencia de verbena, Giménez Caballero describes hydrangea flowers as an essential part of the verbena, since they decorate the “Manila shawls, silky and unforgettable memories of the old Spanish empire.”
Figure 3. Stills from Esencia de verbena (Ernesto Giménez Caballero, 1930). Courtesy of Filmoteca Española.
The film’s apparently contradictory and chaotic blend of surrealism, documentary, folklore, modernism, and nostalgia for the lost empire—and made by an avant-garde agitator who was instrumental to the careers of many Marxist critics and filmmakers but who eventually turned towards fascism—is a perfect illustration of the manifold referents, artistic currents, and political ideologies that collided during the interwar period in Spain. Following Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s call to “write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, the contradictions,
the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it”22F23 I pose the notion of
disorganized modernity as a conceptual framework from which to analyze the role of moving image culture in the Spanish whirlwind of the 1930s. In the following section I unpack this argument, and its specific importance to the emergence of film culture in Spain during the period.