Fashion victims?: women, costume design, and music in 1940s spanish cinema

• Autores: Laura Miranda González
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music / Laura Miranda González (ed. lit.), 2024, ISBN 9781003174974, págs. 104-116
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Spanish cinema in the 1940s featured a variety of genres, including historical films and literary adaptations, folkloric musicals and zarzuela adaptations, crime films, and Hollywood-style comedies. The historical genre presented a biased account of major events in Spanish history, such as Columbus's discovery of America, the reign of Joanna the Mad of Castile, and the story of María Pacheco. Literary adaptations took love themes with a sizeable political element and were an excuse to misrepresent episodes of Spanish history. Folkloric musicals were based on the success of the leading folkloric actresses of the time, Imperio Argentina and Estrellita Castro, performing a new style of song called coplas. Crime films starred female protagonists with scandalous love lives that sneaked past the censors. And American-style comedies, featuring brilliant women and dummy male performers, consisted of unpretentious plots and the main characters’ quest for social advancement.Female roles negotiated stereotypes of femininity in the private sphere in films that articulated the dominant ideology, or portrayed situations of subversion, with women performing public roles usually restricted to men. Costume design played a key role in expressing gender issues and the regime's ideals, as did music, and their interaction thus proposed a strict moral code for women in 1940s Spanish cinema. This chapter explores how costume design and music helped underscore the indoctrinating effect of the new ideology of power over women and femininity proposed by the dictatorship, with reference to the two main female stars of the post-Civil War period, Imperio Argentina and Conchita Montenegro, particularly the latter's work in Ídolos (Idols, Rey, 1943).