1_Introduction

Dealing with newsreels today, in the flowering of the digital era, might deem somehow antique, worn out, and/or old-fashioned. The triumphalist orchestral music and the enthusiastic prosody of the voiceover superimposed on grainy, black-and-white footage certainly transposes the spectator to the past. In Spain’s case, this footage can even trigger unpleasant Proustian memories, [1] since NO-DOs (from Noticiarios [News] and Documentales [Documentaries]) are closely associated with Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). Created by Francisco Franco’s propaganda ministry in 1943, NO-DO reels were shown until 1981, just a few years after Franco’s death in 1975. However, Spanish newsreels are nothing if not highly vivid. As Luke McKernan argues, newsreels should not only be conceived as “news stories released at regular intervals in cinemas,” but also as “reel of film containing reports of past events, found in archives and utilized chiefly by television programs seeking to illustrate historical events.” [2]

In this sense, Spanish NO-DO had and still has — just a couple of months before its 75th anniversary — a rich and healthy afterlife. TV programs, especially on public channels, [3] make constant use of NO-DO’s archives. These shows employ newsreels footage to illustrate historical events and draw large audiences. [4] One recent example is Los años del NO-DO, [5] broadcast on La 2 [channel 2] in 2012 and 2013. This series of documentaries shifted the focus from the previous historical representation of events to a memorial analysis of the NO-DOs. It offered a yearly selection of what was and was not depicted in the newsreels between 1944 and 1977.

Academics have mainly focused on analyzing the origins of the NO-DOs and their stabilization in the 1950s. [6] Only a few researchers have examined Spanish newsreels up to 1964, and most have neglected their final stages. [7] This article aims to fill some of these knowledge gaps. To that end, it scrutinizes versions A and B of NO-DO issues 1304–1356, aired weekly in Spanish cinemas between January 1, 1968 and December 30, 1968. The goal is to examine how these newsreels depict politics and political alterity. Most specifically, this article seeks to analyze NO-DO’s depiction of the different political antagonist entities that facilitated the Francoist regime the relational construction of its own identity in 1968.

This article first defines its key concepts before drawing a genealogy of the NO-DO and framing it within the context and discourses of the country in 1968. Then, it presents an overview of the contents and the modes of representations of the newsreels during this year, and finally zooms in on their politics of representation in the time frame from May to August. This enables an analysis of the medial strategies for dealing with the ghosts of political Others lurking within and beyond Spain’s borders.

‘Politics’ and the ‘political’ are understood here in Chantal Mouffe’s sense. This is to say, it conceives the ‘political’ as the ‘constitute outside’ that modernist collective identity constructions found as an antagonist in order to sustain the relational and contingent narrative emplotments that articulates them. A clear example is the retrospective, national origin narrative forged in Spain’s and Portugal’s 19th century: the medieval wars in the Iberian Peninsula against the ‘Moors’ (714–1492) [8]. This eight-century war was then called the ‘Reconquista,’ a process that was understood — an idea still defended with great effusion under Franco — as the inevitable means to defeat and expel the enemy and thereby consolidate the ‘true’ Spain.

Mouffe’s post-fundamentalist approach understands the ‘constitutive outside’ in Derridian terms and therefore does not conceive of it as a mere dialectical negation, but rather as an ongoing and never-ending process of exclusion that makes an inside identity possible. [9] She differentiates between the political — “the [ontological] dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies” — and politics — “the [ontic] set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political.” [10] She draws on this distinction to state that it is the political which turns the difference of the Other into “someone who is rejecting ‘my’ identity and is threatening ‘my’ existence.” [11] Although she does not call the result of this process of demarcation the creation of a political alterity, I agree with Vazquez Fernández that this is the logic underlying her thought. [12] Thus, alterity is, in her conception always political, as it is hostility which constitutes political identities articulated around religion, ethnicity, economy, etc., with varying degrees of animosity ranging from pure antagonism to agonism. The degree of animosity derives from the common symbolic space shared by the Self and the Other/Alter: the purest antagonism does not allow for any common ground, while agonism implies that Self and Other share a symbolic space, but have different ideas of how to politically organize it. [13]

The political context, and the medium in which this symbolic space is constituted, will be examined in the next section.

2_The NO-DO in 1968’s Spain

From 1943 onwards, Franco’s regime (1939–1975) produced, circulated, and held the monopoly on newsreel production in Spain. The founding guidelines of the newsreel company regulated the launch of the first unified Spanish NO-DO in November 1942. [14] This regulation forbade the circulation of any other newsreels — such as the American Fox Movietone, the Italian Luce, and the German UFA — that had been shown in Spain before. [15] By this point, General Francisco Franco had consolidated his power and become the head of a personal dictatorship that would last for 36 years. He had neutralized Carlists, Monarchists, and the extreme Falangists who had fought with him during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) against the legitimate Republican government and the left-wing coalition, the Popular Front. Additionally, he had declared his non-intervention in the Second World War. Since then, his dictatorship apparatus had focused on controlling all non-fiction film production in Spain. [16] According to the founding regulations of the state-controlled newsreel company, NO-DO “should function as political propaganda for the New State.” [17]

After the end of the Second World War, the production of the NO-DO was transferred from the Ministry of Propaganda to the Ministry of Education. [18] Newsreels were then produced with the function of educating society. [19] Franco aimed to foster his international relationships by showing a more democratic face and dissociating his regime from accusations of fascism. The same political move motivated the decision to integrate the NO-DO into the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1951.

Since the 1960s, Spain had been characterized by so-called ‘developmentalism,’ a series of economic development plans implemented by technocrat ministers. These plans resulted in the autocracy that characterized Franco’s economy after 1939. They aimed at applying the rules of Western liberal capitalism to the Spanish economy to modernize the country. Spain invested in industry, infrastructure, and architectural reforms in cities, prompting an important wave of migration from the villages to the cities and increasing the wealth of the country. [20] The most significant growth took place between 1961 and 1964, and this had repercussions in the NO-DOs. [21] In 1962, they were at their peak: three versions and several international editions for Brazil, Portugal, and Latin America were produced weekly at the Spanish newsreels’ headquarters. [22]

Due to this production rise, NO-DO was granted 7,800 pesetas in the First Development Plan in 1964, which it invested into renewing its infrastructure. [23] At the same time, Francoism celebrated its 25th anniversary with a fatuous publicity campaign. It was conceived to celebrate, and thereby legitimize, Franco’s regime 25 years after the end of the Civil War. The discourse surrounding this propagandistic campaign did not stress its belligerent origins, as it used to do, but rather the successful outcomes of its government: peace. [24] It pointed out that this was the longest period in Spain’s recent past without a war and assigned this success univocally to Francisco Franco. The dictator was thereby discursively consolidated as the only keeper of Spain’s peace, since he had also secured the economy and every Spaniard’s welfare. [25] Similarly, these discourses indirectly warned the country about the consequences of Franco’s absence, the loss of everything he guaranteed: peace, well-being, and consequently the imminent impoverishment of the population, which could cause another war. [26]

1968 can be considered a key year for Franco’s dictatorship. [27] Forty percent of Spaniards owned a television, a washing machine, and a refrigerator, and Spanish consumerist habits did not differ much from those of other Europeans. [28] Enrollment at Spanish universities raised significantly. [29] Tourism and mass media helped to disseminate liberal values and lifestyles that were sometimes at odds with the immobilist, conservative ideology and domestic politics of Franco’s regime. [30]

Student and workers’ demonstrations and strikes were numerous and significant, and the pro-independence Basque group ETA (Euskadi eta Askatasuna [Basque Country and Freedom]) started carrying out terrorist attacks. [31] These civil disturbances made 1968 a year with one of the highest rates of social unrest during Franco’s dictatorship, just as it was in the rest of Europe. [32] The police occupied the universities, [33] some of which closed for months, [34] and a state of exception was declared in the Basque country. [35] In the face of this incertitude, the regime doubled down on repression and censorship. 1968 registered the peak of publications sanctioned in Franco’s Spain and witnessed the implementation of the Official Secret Act. [36] According to this law, the government could declare information to be a state secret and prohibit its circulation. [37]

1968 was also the year of the NO-DO’s 25th anniversary, and a turning point in its history. The late rise of television in Spain did not impede Spanish newsreels’ identity crisis. [38] From January 30, 1967 onwards, only two versions were produced weekly. However, it was a year later, on January 18, 1968, when the NO-DO was incorporated into the Department of Radio and Television in order to cut down on production and administrative costs. [39] After that, newsreels were run by Rogelio Díez Alonso, who adapted the NO-DOs to the competitive media situation of the country. [40] For this reason, they were released under the name Revista cinematográfica [Cinematographic Magazine].

The new format was first broadcasted on October 7, 1968 and had clear artistic ambitions. [41] The directors of Revista cinematográfica no longer sought to cover breaking news anymore, but to make their audience enjoy the magazines. [42] However, although the audience appreciated the new format, [43] the results were not satisfactory, and as in the rest of Europe, Spanish newsreels went into a progressive decline. [44] Revista cinematográfica lost its mandatory status in 1975. [45] In 1978, the production and circulation of newsreels were liberalized and the last item was shown on May 25, 1981. [46] Since 1982, the NO-DOs has belonged to La Filmoteca Española, an entity that signed an agreement with the Spanish public Radio and Television, Ente Público Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE). [47] Since 2011, all NO-DOs have been digitalized and published on RTVE’s website <http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/>.

3_NO-DO’s World in 1968

“El mundo entero al alcance de todos los españoles” [The entire world within reach of all Spaniards] was the official motto of Spanish Newsreels.

The big letters of NO-DO superimposed on and exceeding the borders of a schematic picture of a globe on the cinema leaflets visually insist on the alleged endeavors of Spanish newsreels: [49] in a pre-constructivist mindset, it was claimed that NO-DOs objectively registered the world in a sort of technical duplication and made it accessible to all Spaniards. [50]

From the constructivist approach I follow, this might sound naïve. Additionally, the research on the Official Secret Act passed in 1968 provides some important clues about Francoism’s politics of representation. Guy Hermet contends that this act was originally conceived to block the publication of any news concerning the student protests and the debate about the Labor Union Act. [51] Considering that NO-DO was the voice and the ideological lingua franca of Franco’s regime, [52] Hermet’s statement hints at political issues that have been retrospectively constituted as narrative keys to the memory of 1968, but that were not supposed to be depicted in the NO-DOs of the time. Therefore, the naïve belief in the objectivity of the NO-DO advertised by the regime seems untenable. Nevertheless, newsreels provided Spaniards with other (selective) pictures of the world to create an imaginary that I will examine next. [53]

Spanish newsreels do not structurally differ much from other international and commercial newsreels: [54] they are composed of a miscellanea of ‘soft’ news including sports, fashion, costumbrista stamps showing Spanish traditions, curiosities, and inventions from all over the world in a kind of variety show, and ‘hard news’ including institutional reports and news about — mainly, but not only — science, technology, and industry. Events do not dominate Spanish newsreels, [55] and 1968’s NO-DOs are no exception. As in previous decades, 1968’s news follows the Spanish liturgical, political, and seasonal calendar produced as a sort of extemporal ritual cycle by the first NO-DOs: [56] Christmas, snow sports, and football in winter; Easter, bullfighting, football, and the ‘Victory Day’ on April 1 in spring; popular and religious festivities, cycling, bullfighting, national but mostly international musical video clips, and the ‘Day of the National Uprising’ on July 18 during the summer; as well as more popular and religious festivities in the fall, along with more sports — in 1968, the Olympic Games in Mexico. [57]

This event-less and cyclic articulation of ‘reality’ in Spanish newsreels creates a sense of permanence, stability, and routine that permeates ways of life, habits, values, modes of conduct, and a way of understanding history defended by Franco’s sexist, Catholic, traditionalist, conservative, and nationalist ideology. These features are what Sánchez Biosca has called — following Billig’s concept — the ‘banal nationalism’ that characterizes Spanish newsreels and their celebrations as an incarnation of ‘Spanishness.’ [58] Every occasion and petty detail is mobilized to emphasize Spanish superiority. For example, Salvador Dali’s art is argued to reveal “Spain’s athletic, spiritual and vital energy.” [59] Sport is another good illustration of this nationalism. International games are mostly commented on neutrally, but when Spain wins, NO-DO highlights the victory as an “evidence of Spanish superiority.” [60]

Nevertheless, ideology is not dispensed as propaganda as the term was understood in the 1940s. Francoism aimed at demobilizing the people and NO-DO consequently practiced a sort of ‘integration propaganda’ that did not make use of dramatism or cinematic tension in order to promote a harmonious statism and conservatism. [61]

This effect is achieved through the prevailing discourse in the newsreels of 1968: the dazzled celebration of  (a specific) ‘modernity.’ This modernity was identified with technology and social felicities, characteristic of the ideological renewal of Francoism since the end of the fifties and above all after 1964. It appears weekly in clips relating to national and international fairs, informative and touristic reports on new highways, bridges, airports, train lines, state housing, schools, hospital, new factories, machinery, as well as in clips covering the inaugurations of Franco himself or other authorities. Such clips abound in impressive numbers — the total number of kilometers of new highways, the height of a bridge, the square meters of a new building, the quantity of new equipment, machinery, and other resources — and highlight each example’s superior and ‘brand-spanking new’ technological quality, as well as the comfort they afford. Triumphant music dominated by brass instruments or light, melodic music intensifies the heroic treatment of new works provided by the text and by the shots showing them from different perspectives.

Newsreels focusing on Spanish development are clearly predominant in 1968; the number of newly inaugurated infrastructural projects shown weekly on NO-DO impresses the spectator. This emphasis directly and indirectly points to the unstoppable work of the State and to the extraordinary effective outcomes of its work. However, the repetition in the structure and modes of representation of these proofs of Spanish modernity produce a sense of routine in the spectator, as if infrastructural renewal was an uninterrupted and continuous flow. This strategy homogenizes the products and the time in which they are produced. It consequently reinforces the cyclic temporality and the harmonious depiction of Franco’s Spain that pervades the NO-DOs in general.

This is even more evident in the numerous clips covering inaugurations of new public works by Franco, which will be analyzed in the next section. [64] Before that, however, it is necessary to briefly examine the ‘constitutive exteriority,’ the ‘alter’ of NO-DO’s ‘banal nationalism.’ International clips, which appear much less frequently than those dealing with Spain when addressing modernity, are treated with the same levity as ‘soft’ news and a bland admiration of science and progress. They do not focus on political authorities’ inaugurations, but rather on the actual products. The main difference is that foreign clips are presented with a less celebratory and nationalistic tone than Spanish clips. One representative example is a report on NO-DO number 1324 B about Barcelona’s new airport. [65] The clip concludes by stating that the new airport “is on a level playing field with the best airports in Europe.” [66] A comparably nationalist tone highlighting Spanish superiority also appears in a NO-DO clip about an international fair trade in Barcelona. [67] The voiceover affirms that this fair is well-attended by foreigners who want to catch up with “our industrial progress.” [68]

However, foreign clips are not treated with disdain in the NO-DOs and do not therefore constitute pure antagonists in Mouffe’s terms. Consequently, it can be stated that there is a slight distinction in how national and Western international topics dealing with progress  and modernity are treated. However, under this rhetoric of Spain’s alterity in relation to foreign countries, Spanish newsreels attempt — as Crumbaugh has remarked — to include Spain in the league of other ‘modern’ capitalist countries. [69] Following Mouffe, it can be thus stated that the animosity sustaining Spanish identity construction through the NO-DOs is deployed in an agonistic way in this sort of clips. This is above all the case in items focusing on what are claimed to be proofs of a country’s modernity. Most newsreels strategically present foreign countries of the West, such as France and Germany, as sharing a common imaginary space of modernity with Spain. These countries can be therefore constructed as worthy counterparts that are able to compete with Spain’s proficiency in the creation of a modern and, following the discourse related to it, ‘better’ world.

4_Alterity in the NO-DOs of 1968

This predominant mode of representation deployed throughout Spanish newsreels has led researchers such as Álvaro Matud and Vicente Sánchez Biosca to claim that Spanish newsreels avoided politics, were apolitical, and offered an apolitical view of society. [70] This is partly true, since conflicts and polemics — manifestations of the political in Mouffe’s sense — tended to be avoided, since they could divide public opinion. This is a feature that the NO-DO shares with international newsreels produced by big companies that preferred “viewing their ‘readership’ […] as an entertainment-hungry audience rather than a well-informed public.” [71] However, as Sánchez Biosca and Tranche noted, Spanish newsreels were especially elusive and restrictive in this respect, since they only showed what could contribute to Franco’s spotless image. [72]

They did not cover any social, or political conflicts and there is no trace of strikes, terrorist attacks, or demonstrations at the national level. [73] As mentioned above, Hermet argues that these issues were prohibited  by the law of Official Secrets. However, what he does not specify is the geographical scope of this law, and Tranche has already observed that international conflicts were covered. [74] In the following, I will concentrate on NO-DO’s covering of ‘politics’ and of the ‘political’ in Mouffe’s sense. Because their portrayal of Francoist political festivities such as the ‘Day of the Victory’ on April 1 has been already analyzed by Sánchez Biosca, [75] I will focus on other depictions of Franco’s politics and of the political logic deployed by the newsreels to sustain the imaginary of the world it propagated. I will do so by examining the memorial coverage of the year 1943, included in 1968’s newsreels as part of NO-DO’s 25th anniversary commemoration. I will then examine more closely the coverage of international socio-political conflicts, and finally, the ritual representation of Franco’s inaugurations. This selection not only responds to the political nature of the topics, but also reveal clear semantic trends in the newsreels of that year.

NO-DO opens 1968 on New Year’s Day with item 1304 A, a special number commemorating the 25th anniversary of its foundation in 1943. [76] The clip provides a detailed meta-explanation and shots of the different technical and editorial steps leading to the creation of every NO-DO. The voiceover then shifts the focus and comments on a shorter re-edition of some clips that appeared in the first NO- DO in January 1943. This memorial endeavor continues from January 1 (section B) until February 12, 1968, within a section called ‘twenty-five years ago.’ Although it includes some curiosities and costumbrista scenes of the year, this section mainly focuses on the memory of the Second World War. The footage used in the 1943 NO-DOs is re-edited for 1968’s, with new background music, in most cases, and new commentary. This apparently naïve and apolitical memorial section clearly re-signifies the visual material. For this reason, I will examine the memorial narrative produced by this first newsreel of 1968 and how it strategically re-articulates foreign countries as the Franco regime’s constitutive antagonist alterity.

NO-DO 1304 A eludes shots indicating Spain’s fascist past and uses the clips about foreign countries in order to create a sharp dichotomy between Spain’s experience of 1943 and the rest of the world’s. On the one hand, the commentator uses past visual material about a Thanksgiving celebration in London and a report about the Second World War to emphasize the destruction and violence triggered by the war: “while Spain was peacefully recovering, the world was still at war. The ones were fighting the others. The first were fighting against half the world trying to impose a total peace, which unfortunately has still not been achieved.” [77] At the same time, moving classical music intertwined with thunderous diegetic sounds and images of the battlefield highlight the dramatic and murderous character of the world at war. This adversative syntactical structure — while — and the binary mode of referring to the counterparts of the conflict — the ones and the others — is vague and indefinite and completely excludes Franco’s Spain from the problematic, which underscores the explicit statement of Spain’s exceptional peace. However, the NO-DO — albeit very indirectly — still justifies Nazism for fighting Communism and transposes it to the present to historically legitimize Spain’s ‘rightful’ political position during the Cold War.

On the other hand, the same politics of vagueness serves to create the Spanish part of the binary opposition: the happy and vivid music accompanying the items about Spain, such as a Christmas market in Madrid in 1942 and a football game, are also deployed for the covering of a hair-and-hat contest in Paris, which the commentator denationalizes in the first newsreel of 1968. [78] The absence of national details in this last item, together with its re-editing via modes conventionally used for the depiction of a so represented carefree Spain, indirectly situates the ‘soft’ news about 1943’s hairstyles and hats within the harmonious part of the dichotomy. An abrupt cut between the sequence ‘remembering’ the Second World War and the subsequent item covering Franco’s nomination of the new chief of the defense staff of the military at the fortress Alcázar de Toledo is a clear example of this structure.

The voiceover emphasizes this binary, introducing an alleged sharp contrast between Spain and the world at war. It affirms, “meanwhile, Spain was dedicated to reconstructing,” [79] as a series of shots of Franco in the ruins of the fortress Alcázar de Toledo are shown. The oxymoron produced by the destruction in the images rapidly dissolves, as the voiceover introduces a very unusual feature: a speech by Franco on the occasion of NO-DO’s 25th anniversary. Franco’s old, high, weak voice and the poor technical resources available at the time normally made the NO-DO team opt for dubbing Franco’s speech. [80] However, the dictator’s original voice congratulating the NO-DO’s team for “registering with its cameras Spain’s and the world’s history for a quarter of a century” are not accompanied by the images of the speech. [81] Rather, the speech is superimposed on what should serve as a visual summary of Spain’s last twenty-five years: military parades of the last decades led by Franco’s personal Moorish guard and followed by enthusiastic crowds rapidly give way to numerous shots of Spanish metallurgy, housing, and infrastructure industries producing materials and literally reconstructing Spain. [82] These are edited as false shot reverse shot with others of an exultant young dictator inaugurating construction sites and factories, which signals him as the figure responsible for Spain’s development. [83]

This NO-DO and the speech end with the shots of Franco in his office which opened the first Spanish newsreel in 1943. The voiceover congratulates the team for having been the “visual speaker of our resurgence on the screens all over the world.” [84]

The re-release of these shots anchors the meaning of the past images in a Barthian sense and legitimizes Franco’s government for its ‘victorious’ origins. [87] Additionally, the deixis produced by  the repetitive usage of the possessive ‘our’ clearly marks the targeted community: all Spaniards. In spite of the veiled verbal excuse of Nazism that constructs Communism as the radical Other whose hostility justifies any means, all in all, the audio-visual and most of the verbal codes in the NO-DO’s memorialization of 1943 constitute a vague and abstract ‘the world’ as Franco’s Spain alterity: the chaos of ‘the world’ is the other side of the coin of Spain’s harmonious resurgence. It could therefore be concluded that the agonist mode articulating the alterity construction of foreign countries dominating the depiction of modernity coexists in Spanish newsreels of 1968 with a clear antagonistic mode in Mouffe’s sense.

However, NO-DO does not reserve this mode exclusively for memorial issues, even if these are used to emplot a legitimizing narrative in the present. International political conflicts — the student revolts in France, Rudi Dutschke’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassinations — are articulated around a very similar logic and deploy recurring audio-visual strategies. The background music adopts a clear emotional function: funerary-like music and/or alarming classical music with strident chords sharply contrast semantically and structurally with the harmonic légère music used for items that represent what could be included within Spanish identity features, and even within those of Spain’s agonist alters.

The footage selected focuses on the material destruction and violence produced by the so-called “activists,” [88] “rebels [and] […] troublemakers.” [89]

These adjectives have clearly different sematic nuances. However, the voiceover blurs them by combining them within repetitive, coordinative structures. The recurrence makes them function as false epithets — referring to a naturalized intrinsic quality of something — and construct a univocal semantic relation between the political performance, in Mouffe’s sense, of non-conforming people (activists and rebels) and dangerous troublemakers. The commentary reinforces this semantization by highlighting the fatal and “distressing” effects of the “disorder” in the economy and the safety and the welfare of the “families,” using the Francoist’s organicist metonymic understanding of society. [94] The actual news is not the student protests or King’s and Dutschke’s deaths, but rather the results of the riots. The voiceover goes as far as to claim that such violence “has achieved the highest degree ever registered in other capital cities in Europe and America.” [95] It argues that these sort of scenes “had never been seen in Paris since the last days of the war.” [96]

The voiceover clearly exaggerates the effects of the riots by comparing them to the Second World War and casting them as “a warning about the dangers threatening the neighboring country.” [97] Here is where the memorial discourse about 1943 and its underlying antagonist alterity logic intersects with the narrative produced by this mode of representation of the riots: it is again used as a sharp contrast to Spain’s harmonious life, presented on the NO-DOs as lacking any sign of the dangerous conflict-proneness of the political. The vague comment about how these ‘disorders’ could lead to another cruel war on the other side of the border helps at the same time to reaffirm Franco’s discursive campaign ‘twenty-five years of peace.’ It indirectly warns its viewers about the consequences of an absence of Franco’s ‘rightful’ politics, the loss of the order he guaranteed, and an imminent impoverishment of the population that could cause another war.

The repetitive, semi-obsessive, ritual representation of Franco’s inaugurations as proofs of his effective politics stresses this discourse. NO-DO 1330 A’s covering of Franco’s visit to Sevilla is a good example. [98] The clip opens with a shot of Franco’s arrival at the airport, where he is welcomed at the plane stair by personalities of the city, who salute and honor him. Then, he gets into a car and is driven to the first inauguration’s site. The camera shows masses of enthusiastic people waiting on the crowded streets to welcome him, while the voiceover characterizes this as the people’s “act of renewing its trust in and support for the leader.” [99] According to the voice-over, the bridge and the highways inaugurated by Franco were necessary in Sevilla, and this is why the people have come out to the streets to thank Franco. The gratitude is so great that, it continues, “their enthusiasm exceeds any commentary.” [100] The shots of cheering and clapping people, the légère and triumphal music, and the uninterrupted non-diegetic clapping superimposed on the images confirm the message transmitted by the voice-over. The predominance of this message eclipses the actual news of the inaugurations, which demonstrates that they are merely a pretext for reaffirming Franco’s legitimacy.

The clip ends with a speech held by the dictator on a balcony, with a setting and an editing more typical of older NO-DOs. [103] The commentator sums up the speech, dubbing Franco’s voice and stressing that the masses congregated endorse the dictator’s words: “we have walked a long way together, but the way we still need to walk is much longer. We will manage, by staying together, to maintain the unity of Spain’s territories and to fight our enemies.” [104]

These words reveal a fracture in the celebratory mode of representation of Franco as the keeper of Spain’s peace and development. Franco feels his existence threatened by ‘someone’ or ‘something,’ an enemy that needs to be fought, the incarnation of the antagonist alterity — the ‘political,’ following Mouffe’s theory.

5_Repeat until You Win? NO-DO’s Lurking Alterity

NO-DO has a long history of using reports as a pretext for praising Franco’s government and for reaffirming its legitimacy and societal loyalty. [105] In this sense, the representation of politics in the omnipresent figure of the head of state that has just been examined is not a novelty in 1968 newsreels. However, a closer quantitative look at the repetitive topics, as well as at the absences — two basic aspects that María Antonia Paz and Inmaculada Sánchez Alarcón declare to be crucial methods for any analysis of newsreels — provide us with some clues about the NO-DO’s politics of representing the political, this enemy that Franco alludes to in his speech. [106]

From May 1 until July 30, 1968, the presence of Franco and the above-mentioned reaffirming discourse invades Spanish newsreels. Both versions A and B provide the audience with at least one such clip nearly weekly, adding a total of twenty-one appearances in just three months — an average of seven per month. These numbers are higher than those of Franco’s average monthly appearances during the sixties, around 4.5. [107] However, considering that Franco’s official travels through Spain progressively declined after the fifties, these numbers seem significant. [108]Additionally, in twenty-seven of the clips (more than half), Franco is depicted in military uniform. Just one clip focuses on topics related to Franco’s private life (1320 A). [109]

Experts such as Araceli Rodríguez Mateos and Sánchez Biosca have argued that the NO-DOs had concentrated since the fifties on showing a more human and paternal image of the dictator by increasing the number of clips in which he wore civilian clothes while inaugurating, or else hunting or fishing. [110] These images aimed to reaffirm Francoism’s legitimacy via a discourse that characterized the dictator as the bringer of peace and well-being. However, the examples provided by such studies do not include 1968. This absence signals the need to re-interpret the exhaustion of Franco’s military image — an image that was used to support Franco’s discursive legitimacy of origin (the Civil War) — as well as how it is entangled with the above-analyzed celebration of his legitimacy of exercise.

The repetition of Franco’s (omni-)presence in the newsreels in this period of time cannot go unnoticed. From April on, first student and then workers’ demonstrations took place not only abroad, as NO-DOs from 1968 reported, but also in Spain itself. These movements protested the established order (what Mouffe calls ‘politics’), and aimed via the conflict-proneness of the political at creating a better and fairer society, a new set of politics. Consequently, it could be argued that Franco’s obsessive demonstration of his politics, that is, the practices and institutions through which his order was established and shaped a supposedly harmonious coexistence, is the NO-DO’s mode of representing Francoism in 1968.

This way, the ‘political’ gets constituted in Spanish newsreels as the most radical antagonic alterity of Franco’s dictatorship, as precisely that conflict-proneness constituting any political system, that his regime compulsively tried to repress. The protests against the established order in and outside of Spain’s boundaries — the political, as Mouffe puts it — turns the difference of the other countries into something that threatens Francoism’s own discourse of peace and development, and therefore its own existence. For this reason, NO-DO turns the conflict-proneness of the ‘political’ in something foreign to Spain happening in the world, which is again constituted as its lurking, discursive, radical antagonist alterity. The repetitive and apparently anachronistic figure of Franco the soldier is at the same time a clear visual manifestation of Francoism’s ‘political:’ a warning that Franco could eliminate the enemy just as he did during the Civil War. The explicit semiotics produced by the voice-over and the celebratory music rounds out the discourse produced by Spanish newsreels of 1968: only Franco’s politics can guarantee Spain’s peace and well-being.

This last identity feature is shared with the foreign ‘alters’ that the NO-DO strategically constitute as agonist entities in the clips focusing on a common imaginary space of modernity. This mode of representing alterity coexists with the illustration of the (democratic) foreign Other as a radical antagonist when it comes to ‘politics’ and to its constitutive conflictual counterpart, the ‘political.’ As has been examined throughout this paper, dramatic music and a visual and textual focus on the calamitous economic consequences of the foreign lack of peace since the beginning of the dictatorship, together with the repetitive exhaustion of Franco’s image, are the medial strategies deployed by the NO-DO in 1968 to deal with the ghosts of the political Others lurking within and beyond Spain’s borders.

_How to Cite

Danae Gallo González. “Politics and Political Alterity in the Spanish NO-DOs of 1968.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 4 (2017). <http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2017/13391/>.