From the arrival of Hollywood to censorship: Francoist Spain of the fifties, in vignettes | Culture | EUROtoday

Teresa Valero’s father -in -law, Manuel Díaz Corvera, arrived in Madrid in 1956 to dwell in a cave. One of those who proliferated on the outskirts of the town and the place very poor households took refuge, primarily emigrants within the countryside. It was a divided, grey, resigned and simply started to get better from the cruelty of warfare. The similar that started to open once more to the world – the nation entered the UN in December 1955 – after the disastrous financial outcomes of an autarkic coverage, however maintained the repression and suffocating censorship of the dictatorship. Valero portrayed that nation in Counterpart. The youngsters of the others (Editorial norm), your first comedian. A black novel starring Emilio Sanz and León Lenoir, two journalists of occasions – with a soul fairly researchers – dedicated to the reality and the necessity to report some information that, in response to the regime, “in Spain they did not happen.”

Four years after that comics that grew to become an editorial phenomenon and with which he gained the Award of the Comic Zone Libraries for one of the best comedian of the 12 months, Valero returns with the second a part of the saga. In Counterpart. Older, with repairsthe duo of journalists is immersed in a metropolis the place the Hollywood trade lands, interested in the low prices, and that finds among the many luxurious of the celebrities a world of actual property hypothesis, corruption and distress. It is the situation of a black novel that begins with the homicide of an ecclesiastical censor that they discover useless within the armchair of a cinema with a celluloid roll within the mouth.

“I like cinema very much,” says the writer, “and has been the basis in my training as a person and artist. Long before the comics, long before anything else, was the cinema. The animation [Valero empezó su carrera como animadora] and the classic. ”In the pages of the comics, the author recreates the Spanish cinematographic scene of that time, from the glamor of the American stars, through the rooms as a refuge for the homosexual meetings, to the famous non-do-which news to advertise the regime that was projected before each film session-or the always lost fight of the national creators against the Dictatorship And not only censorship of the people, but also the creators, who did not have clear rules, in addition, and had to do with censors that were a bit arbitrary. ”

The censorship in Spain had intensified since the arrival of Gabriel Arias-Salgado to the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1951. The censors-as the dead of the beginning-cut off the films without tapping and classified them according to the moral, social or political danger of the projection. The 3R classification, “main with restore”, which gives title to the comic, was the second most serious. “They hung the classifications on the doorways of the parishes and suggested you what you may see or not. If you noticed a 4 or 3R film, you may be committing a mortal sin,” explains Valero. There are famous statements of Arias-Salgado that the author collects in her history. “Say what you need,” he told an Italian newspaper, “however I’m going to make a revelation: earlier than we implant these new orientation requirements, 90% of the Spaniards went to hell. Now, due to us, solely 25% are condemned.”

In the absurdity of that and many other situations that take place in the book, Valero finds a tribute to the Enster of Valle-Inclán and Berlanguianism: “Many years earlier than, they portrayed very effectively one aspect of Spanish life, which I additionally imagine that contributes to a constructive criticism and attempt to get one thing good.”

Counterpart It is a fictional work, but what is told is based on real events. In order not to be frivolous or indifferent to the pain of war and the later years, the Valero universe has its foundations in a “rigorous” research process – which it describes in the final pages of the book – that also reaches its living and colorful stroke. The city that recreates still flows in the memories of the elderly and that is why there can be no trap. Valero chatted with film academics, forensic doctors, documentary drivers, and recovered all those films he had seen before. “The cinema had an vital position within the course of. Especially to indicate me what the streets, the autos had been, how folks dressed, even how they talked. I’ve seen all the films, from essentially the most raised to the cinema a little bit extra costumbrista or extra of method, however above all, the cinema of which they talked concerning the folks on foot, that of the neighborhoods and employee,” says the author. He also visited places like the theater turned into cinema by Franco in the Pardo Palace, where the dictator saw films twice a week for 40 years. “Many occasions with the pictures it’s not simple to get the thought of ​​the areas,” he justifies.

But that investigation did not reduce Valero’s creative process, and fiction takes through the ways of a noir full of enigmas. “Normally I additionally attempt that fiction has a giant weight. It is the best way to articulate all of the emotion, the lifetime of the characters, what you might be telling. If in actuality it was talking on a regular basis talking nothing greater than it actually exists, it might be very troublesome to create a black gender plot, which can also be what pursuits me as a result of it’s what helps you do the metaphor that you’re going to inform. Fiction is able to doing many occasions what doesn’t do actuality.”

What are those metaphors that Valero wanted to count? There are two that are breathed intensely in the pages of Counterpart. The crisis of housing and divided Spain that, he explains, “is more and more much like that of the twenties and thirty of the final century.” “We are going a little worse. It is true that it is said that the story is not repeated, but Rima. The atmosphere of now rhymes enough with what was in a matter of polarization and of people developing a tremendous hatred for whoever thinks differently. That sounds already known to us and usually leads to places a little nightmare. In addition, we are at the time of dismantling social rights that during the sixty and seventies So angry and when we get angry.

To the saga of Counterpart He has at least one more chapter to count. And Valero is clear what he is looking for: “I would like to talk about how the postwar period in rural Spain was. In the cities it was lived in a very different way, but the wound in the villages was tremendous. And then I would also want to talk about the women’s section and women in the rural environment, contrasted with the city’s women. The weight they carried, the moral weight, how they should behave. How did those women lived. Talk because in 1958 the separation law changed and women, instead of leaving with nothing after separating, they began to have a minimal coverage. ”

It will resort to fiction again, which “has an emulation energy and awakens the empathy of the folks”, to rescue those stories. As he did in this book with that of his father-in-law, that 16-year-old girl inhabitant of a cave, embodied in the comic by a playful, spicy girl and with a soul of an artist who, at some point in the narrative, proudly presumes her house-cueva: “Look, mine has a door … and class!”. It is Manuel Díaz Corvera’s royal housing. Her father had achieved her in the warehouse where she worked. “They had measured it badly and so they had been going to throw it,” Valero explains. It was made for Valdefuentes, Franco’s looking farm. Specifically, for its kennel.