Soundtracks for the Republic: musical propaganda in documentary films during the Spanish Civil War

• Autores: Lidia López Gómez
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music / Laura Miranda González (ed. lit.), 2024, ISBN 9781003174974, págs. 45-56
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), documentaries helped to vindicate partisan ideologies while seeking to empathize with citizens and representatives of potentially allied countries. To this end, the music used for the footage played an essential role, being the primary resource to condition the affections of the audience through the use of traditional songs, anthems, or empathic music synchronized with the image.This chapter presents an audiovisual analysis of the uses of music in documentary films shot during the Spanish Civil War by the leading production companies of the Republican side: the Subsecretaría de Propaganda (Governmental Undersecretary of Propaganda), SIE Films, Laya Films, and Film Popular. The proposed methodology considers original and pre-existing music focusing on the semiotic, musical, emic, and contextual characteristics of the soundtrack in order to analyze the stylistic similarities or differences between productions, and to specify the musical processes for generating a propagandistic discourse that was ideologically accurate to the political ideals of the producers.