Procesos de la estrategia de prueba

I have chosen these two images (Figure 4) to introduce the concept of a pedagogical impulse since for me they encapsulate the complexity of the relationship between cultural production and the socio-political transformation that Spain went through in the early 1930s. The historical period opened by the loss of the last colonies in 1898 also marked the emergence of popular classes as a central element in the political life of the country.^46F47

46 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas (Madrid, 1934), 31. See also Julio Montero Díaz and José Cabeza San Deogracias, eds., Por el precio de una entrada: estudios sobre historia social del cine (Madrid: Ed. Rialp, 2005), 150.

47 As Sebastian Balfour argues, the growing immigration to urban areas, and the constant upheavals in industrialized areas increases in the first decades of the 20^th century ultimately politicized many intellectuals, especially after the fall of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. See Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 86–87.

Figure 4. On the left photograph from Gabriel Casas, “Dia del llibre 1932” (“1932 book day”). Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya. On the right image of a Misiones Pedagógicas film screening in a remote village, “Niños andaluces en el cine de Misiones.”^47F48

In the first image a boy stares curiously—from the outside—at a bookstore's window display, where one finds (among many other publications) a journal on communism, a book on Queen Isabel II (who was overthrown by the first Spanish Republic in 1868), and the modernist newspaper Mirador, which became one of the main outlets for film criticism in Catalonia and organized a film club under the same name during the 1930s. The second image captures the ecstatic faces of a group of children in a remote Spanish village in Andalucía as they watch a film—either a Charles Chaplin or Mickey Mouse short or an instructional film according to testimonies. The screening had been organized by the Misiones Pedagógicas, an illustrated project developed by prominent intellectuals during the Second Spanish Republic to bring culture—including literature, theatre, film, painting, and photography—to remote areas of the country.^{48 F49} In its brief years of operation this initiative organized 2,395 projections in village

48 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, 20.

49 María García Alonso, “Intuiciones visuales para pueblos olvidados. La utilización del cine en las Misiones Pedagógicas de la Segunda República Española,” Cahiers de civilisation espagnole contemporaine. De 1808 au temps présent, no. 11 (September 26, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4000/ccec.4861; Jordana Mendelson, “The Misiones Pedagógicas and Other Documentary Excursions,” in Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939 (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 93–123; Alejandro Tiana Ferrer, Las Misiones Pedagógicas: educación popular en la Segunda República (Madrid: Catarata, 2016);

Eugenio Otero Urtaza, Las Misiones Pedagógicas: una experiencia de educación popular (Sada, A Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1982); Eugenio Otero Urtaza and María García Alonso, eds., Las Misiones Pedagógicas, 1931-1936 (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes : Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2006). I

squares, schools, asylums, nursing homes, prisons, and civic centers.^49F50

Both images reflect the cultural and educational effervescence of a society that was experiencing an accelerated pedagogical impulse on all fronts, with the hope of leaving behind decades of failed modernization attempts. As historian González Calleja mentions, “the will to participate in the public life [of the country] thrived as never before in Spanish history.”^50F51 The new constitution, approved on December 1931, declared in its first article that Spain was “a republic of workers of all types, structured around freedom and justice,” and the Republican government declared it a priority to secularize education and create an extensive network of public schools throughout the country.^{51 F52} Article 48 of the constitution included this commitment and legally bound culture and education, as part of the common life of the society to come: “The service of culture is an essential attribution of the state, which will guarantee it through

educational institutions linked with the unified school system.”^52F53

As Antonio Molero Pintado has mentioned, this reforming spirit was ultimately devoted to changing the individual and collective bases of social relations in Spain and creating a new

“civic contract” that appealed to both traditional and modernizing elements in society and that was firmly rooted in a “democratic system of life.”^53F54 This was the basis of the “new life” (to quote Lefebvre’s opening quote) desired by intellectuals, social institutions, and governments in Spain. New and life should be understood here as floating signifiers that different political factions appealed to and gave specific form to according to their own agendas and concrete

have chosen not to include the Misiones Pedagógicas as an object of study precisely because it has been widely addressed by scholars, inadvertently obscuring many other film culture pedagogical initiatives that appear throughout this thesis.

50 Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, 90.

51 González Calleja, La Segunda República española, 14.

52 “Constitución de la República Española,” December 9, 1931.

53 “Constitución de la República Española,” 14.

54 Antonio Molero Pintado, “El pensament educatiu republicà, utopia o realitat?,” Educació i Història: Revista d’Història de l’Educació, no. 11 (2008): 16, https://doi.org/10.2436/20.3009.01.21.

cultural policies. To attract citizens to these competing national projects and initiatives, many of them resorted to mass means of communication and culture. For philosopher Jaume Serra Hunter, dean of the University of Barcelona from 1931-1933, stated that “The new culture opposes two vital and fertile conceptions: the duty of learning and the courageousness of a search for truth that is never entirely satisfied […] The current time can be decisive for the development of humanity. This idea is not born out of a utopia, but from a reality that catches your eye and reaches to the spirit.”^54F55 As the quote than opens the introduction states, for Serra Hunter the duty of intellectuals and politicians was not only to construct the new society through

“laws and statutes,” but to encourage an “imperative of culture” that could reach every citizen in the country.^55F56

In this context, film and photography were seen by government officials, intellectuals and teachers as a key instrument in such ambitious educational program, which planned to create a total of 27,000 schools and hire 5,000 teachers a year in a country with elevated levels of illiteracy (31.15% in 1930).^56F57 The activities of the Misiones Pedagógicas, or that of the Comité del Cinema de la Generalitat de Catalunya (Cinema Committee of the Catalan government, herein CCGC) are only two examples; in chapter four I provide the first English language study

55 Serra Hunter, “L’Imperatiu de la cultura.”

56 Serra Hunter. Emphasis added.

57 Mariano Pérez Galán, La Enseñanza En La Segunda República, Ed. de Manuel de Puelles Benítez, 28 (Madrid:

Biblioteca Nueva, 2011); Rodolfo Llopis and Antonio Molero Pintado, La revolución en la escuela: dos años en la dirección general de primera enseñanza (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005); Antonio Molero Pintado, La reforma educativa de la Segunda República española: primer bienio, Aula XXI 15 (Madrid: Santillana, 1977). As Pérez Galán details in his book, these numbers (and the support for a secular education) varied according to the different governments that Spain had during the Second Republic. In the first progressive biennium (1931-1933) over 10,000 schools were built, and the annual budget for education was raised by 28% in 1932 and 18% in 1933. See Antonio Molero Pintado, “La Segunda República española y la enseñanza (primer bienio),” Revista de Educación, no. 240 (1975): 56, 57. For the statistic on illiteracy see María G. Núñez Pérez, Trabajadoras en la Segunda República: un estudio sobre la actividad económica extradoméstica (1931 - 1936), 16 (Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social, 1989), 51–58. This number varied greatly when comparing rural with urban areas. Just as an example the illiteracy rate in Barcelona at the same time was significantly lower; 21.38%. See José Luis Oyón, José Maldonado, and Eulàlia Griful, Barcelona 1930 un atlas social (Barcelona: Edicions UPC, 2001), 19.

of this latter initiative. In addition to such pedagogical efforts, innumerable private and public developments in mobile projections, film sessions for children, educational film libraries, and film clubs accompanied by conferences are also discussed throughout the following four chapters. These type of initiatives—together with progressive pedagogical institutions such as the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (herein JAE), the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (herein ILE), the Residencia de Estudiantes, and the Instituto-Escuela that were already in place before 1931 (but which found in the first government of the Second Republic its closest political ally)—created an expansive and lively climate of emancipation through culture and education.^57F58

In the words of Rodolfo Llopis, appointed head of primary education in 1931 and advisor to the IECI, the school would become “the ideological weapon of the Spanish revolution,” a revolution that in order to endure had to take refuge in pedagogy.^58F59 This ambitious program, headed by the ministry of education Marcelino Domingo, had widely different referents: from the work of Jules Ferry in France, to José Vasconcelos in Mexico, and Anatoly Lunacharsky in the USSR.^59F60 The international circulation and local translation of social, political, and cultural

58 See González Calleja, La Segunda República española, 320–55; Mercedes Samaniego Boneu, La Política Educativa de La Segunda República Durante El Bienio Azañista, Historia de España En El Mundo Moderno : Estudios 6 (Madrid: C.S.I.C. Escuela de Historia Moderna, 1977). For an excellent analysis of the international models that inspired this progressive pedagogical impulse see Eugenio Manuel Otero Urtaza, “Els orígens del pensament educatiu de la Segona República,” Educació i Història: Revista d’història de l’educació, no. 11 (2008):

50–74, https://doi.org/10.2436/20.3009.01.23.

59 Mercedes Samaniego Boneu, La política educativa de la Segunda República durante el bienio azañista (Madrid:

C.S.I.C. Escuela de Historia Moderna, 1977), xii; these ideas were developed by the pedagogue in Llopis and Molero Pintado, La revolución en la escuela. This openly politicized vision of education from Socialist and Communist pedagogues was at odds with the liberal progressive idea of the secular unified school promoted by the ILE since the late 19^th century. But the transformative window of opportunity opened up by the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic filed down these differences in a common effort to transform the country through new models of education. This climate of understanding would only last briefly, and as the political situation radicalized the divergence of opinions on the instrumentalization of education (summarized in the struggle between a liberal state school system and a free school with openly leftist ideology) would ultimately slow down the process of educational reform.

60 Samaniego Boneu, La política educativa de la Segunda República durante el bienio azañista, 95–96.

referents is another key characteristic of 1930s Spanish society, and, although explicitly analyzed in chapter two in relation to proletarian film culture, it can be traced in all of the initiatives explored in the thesis. This “expanding culture” (to use Raymond Williams’s description of the socio-cultural matrix created by education, the public, and means of communication)^60F61

assimilated an array of national and international referents with no precedent in the country’s history.^61F62 The cultural policy of the Republic was directed towards the creation of a pueblo-ciudadanía (people-citizenship) that could sustain the fragile democracy in the years to come.⁶³ As we will see in chapter one, this entailed the inclusion of popular culture and folklore as constitutive elements of modernity, clearly departing from the perceived image of modernity as an expression solely of progress and modernization.

Despite the constant efforts by reactionary and conservative elites to undermine this project of popular and cultural emancipation, to the point of orchestrating two coup d’états against the Republic (José Sanjurjo in 1932 and Franco et al in 1936), this policy was successful in generating enough support for the democratic state that both rebellions failed (the second inaugurating the Civil War after the opposition of popular classes through the organization of improvised militias). The pedagogical impulse of the Republic was also literally inscribed in the façade of Spain’s pavilion in the 1937 Paris International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life (Figure 5), reminding neighboring democracies of what was at stake in the Civil War (a call that only the USSR and the International Brigades chose to answer). The current longing in many progressive sectors in Spain for a similar pedagogical and emancipatory spirit to

61 As described by Tony Pinkney in the introduction to Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: [Against the New Conformists], ed. Tony Pinkney (London ; New York: Verso, 2007), 9; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 140–41.

62 Francisco Caudet, Las cenizas del Fénix: la cultura española en los años 30 (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1993); Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Medio siglo de cultura española: (1885 - 1936) (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1977).

63 Idoia Murga Castro, José María López Sánchez, and Jorge de Hoyos, Política cultural de la Segunda República española (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias, 2016), 11.

be applied in the country testifies to the lasting effects of such pedagogical impulses.⁶⁴

Figure 5. Façade of the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris with emphasis on the educational spirit of the Second Republic.

The photographs in

Figure 4, discussed earlier, also convey the complexity of the pedagogical impulse promoted by the cultural policy of the Second Republic and the ambiguous relationship between culture, indoctrination, growing participation of citizens in the public sphere, and politics, that plunged the country into a dynamic of increasing radicalization and social tension. Until what point was the so-called “masses” just looking from outside the glass window like the child in Gabriel Casas’s photograph or towards the improvised screen set up by enthusiast cultural missionaries and intellectuals? What space and position did popular classes—the majority of the population in a deeply unequal society—occupy in this pedagogical sphere? The answer is

64 See for example the 2006 approval (with the opposition of the right-wing Popular Party) of a law proposed by Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Socialist Party, PSOE) that formally recognized the Second Republic as the first genuinely democratic regime in Spain and declared 2006 as the official year of historical memory. Carlos Cué E., “El congreso conmemora la II República con la oposición del PP,” El País, April 28, 2006, https://elpais.com/diario/2006/04/28/espana/1146175216_850215.html.

complex since the concept of the masses or people was appropriated by virtually every political and cultural institution throughout the 1930s. Take for instance how historian Enric Ucelay reminds us of the emphasis that Catalan regionalist movements put into developing cultural institutions that could incorporate the “malleable” and “culturally virgin” masses of illiterate migrants from Spain.⁶⁵ This strategy of expanding the social base of Catalanism by incorporating popular classes into the cultural narratives and spaces previously reserved to elites was met with great suspicion and rejection by the ruling bourgeoise, which warned against the “watering down of culture.”⁶⁶ As chapter three shows, amateur cinema became a refuge for some of these

bourgeois industrialists, who saw in smallgauge cinema a new cultural space that popular classes could not access at the time.

Throughout the dissertation we will see how the issue was approached from different perspectives via initiatives ranging from critical spectatorship, film clubs, mobile projections, state policies, or educational screenings. And it is important to have in mind that the people-citizenship policy of the government was contested from all ideological standpoints. Radical film critics criticized the patronizing attitude of enlightened intellectuals and called for a proletarian cinema that emerged organically from the working class itself, although as we will see in chapters one and two this position was not devoid of hypocrisy (since most film clubs were in fact oriented towards an intellectual leftist elite). Bourgeois sectors, such as the Catalan amateur filmmakers and conservative liberals, shared Ortega y Gasset’s aversion to the masses and their advance “to the foreground of the social plane, occupying the spaces, using the tools and enjoying the pleasures previously reserved for the minority.”⁶⁷ Reactionary right wing and

65 Enric Ucelay da Cal, La Catalunya populista: imatge, cultura i política en l’etapa republicana (1931-1939) (Barcelona: La Magrana, 1982), 18.

66 Ucelay da Cal, 19.

67 José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2009), 82.

catholic sectors criticized the emancipatory projects of the Republic with constant euphemistic mentions about the “gravity of the situation” caused by the “uncertain future” opened by the questioning of the social, political, and religious order.⁶⁸ There was no consensus even among leftist intellectuals.

As poet Antonio Machado warned in his closing speech for the 1937 Second

International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture celebrated in Valencia: “the mass-men doesn’t exist, it is an invention of the bourgeoise […] We must distrust the topic of the human masses. A lot of people with good faith, our best friends, use it today without realizing that the term comes from the enemy: from the capitalist bourgeoise that exploits men and needs to degrade them. We must be very careful. Nobody saves the masses, but in turn, they can always be shot at. Careful!”⁶⁹ Contrary to this position (which included a veiled criticism of the USSR, “our best friends”), Marxist critics and writers like Piqueras or César Vallejo defended the term as an expression of proletarian pride, fraternal spirit and anti-individualist philosophy.

One of Vallejo’s last poems, written in November 1937 just months before his death in Paris, is appropriately titled “Mass” (Masa), and poignantly recalls the force that the image of an

internationalist worker movement had in the mind of leftist intellectuals:

When the battle was over,

and the fighter was dead, a man came toward him and said: "Do not die; I love you so!"

But the corpse, it was sad! went on dying.

[…]

Millions of persons stood around him,

68 See the infamous May 7, 1931, pastoral from cardinal Pedro Segura against the Republic and in defense of traditionalist Catholic monarchy; Pedro Segura y Sáez, “Nuevo estado de cosas,” ABC, May 7, 1931. Segura quoted the following passage from the bible, which is a perfect summary of the attitude of the church and the powerful elites against the Republic; “when the enemies of Jesus’ reign advance with determination no catholic can afford to remain inactive, retired in his home or dedicated exclusively to his private affairs.” Segura y Sáez, 36. Emphasis in original. The text develops this idea into an open opposition to the Republican government, with all Catholics united in a “tight phalanx” (“apretada falange”), a premonition of the Fascist-Catholic union that would rule Spain during 36 years of ruthless dictatorship.

69 Antonio Machado, “Sobre la defensa y la difusión de la cultura,” Hora de España, no. 8 (August 1937): 11–19.

all speaking the same thing: "Stay here, brother!"

But the corpse, it was sad! went on dying.

Then, all the men on the earth

stood around him; the corpse looked at them sadly, deeply moved; he sat up slowly,

put his arm around the first man; started to walk...⁷⁰

Figure 6. Stills from Battleship Potemkin and the newsreel that captured the funeral of Anarchist hero Buenaventura Durruti in 1936, The Mass Tribute to Buenaventura Durruti (CNT-FAI, 1936).

We can imagine this poem accompanying a screening of Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) or the newsreel that captured the funeral of Anarchist hero Buenaventura Durruti in 1936 (The Mass Tribute to Buenaventura Durruti, CNT-FAI) or other revolutionary and propagandistic films that circulated in film clubs and battlefront screenings during the early 1930s and Civil War years (Figure 6). A large part of this thesis, especially chapters one and two, is devoted to exploring how moving image culture was used as an instrument of cultural enlightenment and as a representation of the large sections of the

population that had remained invisible both to the power circles and cultural elites of the country.

population that had remained invisible both to the power circles and cultural elites of the country.