This May, Cátedra has published the book El cuerpo erótico de la actriz bajo los fascismos (2018) as a result of research conducted under the Eros/Censura project by the CINEMA research group of the Department of Communication at UPF.

Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez, members of the CINEMA research group, coordinated the work. It analyses the relationship between the constraints of censorship and the sociopolitical principles of women approaching the matter from the images and the body of actresses, from the paradigmatic case of three totalitarian states (Spain, Italy and Germany).

El cuerpo erótico de la actriz bajo los fascismos brings together the work of several authors: Albert Elduque, Carlos Losilla, Gonzalo de Lucas, Endika Rey, Alejandro Montiel, Jordi Balló, Núria Bou i Xavier Pérez approach the careers of Spanish actresses; Marga Carnicé, Gino Frezza, Mario Tirino, Raffaele Pinto and Gonzalo de Lucas analyse Italian fascism and Marta Muñoz, Manuel Garin, Marta Verheyen, Gonzalo de Lucas, Carlos Losilla and Chantal Poch focus on Nazi Germany.

The book sheds light on the crucial differences in the way in which each regime construes the visual status of women

From the cases studied in this work it is concluded that Spanish filmmaking is the most conflictive with eroticism. During the Franco regime, the body was totally associated with sexuality and therefore the slightest manifestation of anything sinful was highly repressed. Only in the field of comedy does sexuality have some leeway.

Spanish filmmaking is the most conflictive with eroticism

Bou and Pérez comment “it is funny that Italian cinema, even with the Vatican, allowed greater room for manoeuvre to include more voluptuous female figures in its cinema, even some naked, and opened a line of spontaneity that was later picked up by neorealism”. The Spanish cinema is always metaphorical, everything is more shrouded, while, for example, the Italian cinema is more metonymical and can show with some cunning some parts of the body to finally reach the whole”, add the coordinators.

The interest of Nazi ideology in the Arian body is quite disconnected from sexuality and manifests itself without the moralistic connotations

With regard to the case of Nazi Germany, the authors note that repression did not have the same effects. The interest of Nazi ideology in the Arian body is quite disconnected from sexuality and manifests itself without the moralistic connotations.

The work of all these authors recognizes a common effort to deal with the problem without resorting to merely deterministic models (to consider eroticism as a direct cause of repression) or seeking universal conclusions (reducing national differences to a single patriarchal ideology). However, the book highlights crucial differences in the way in which each regime construes the visual status of women and tries to give account of the contradictions and often subtle metafictional reflexes that allow glimpsing references to the actresses’ own professional careers.

As the chapters of this book reveal, the body of the actresses receives narrative imperatives of many kinds, loading political models and symbolic archetypes, but in all cases, the carnality of gesture seems to overflow the moulds in such a way that, inevitably, ambiguity and sensuality pose new questions. It is from this premise that El cuerpo erótico de la actriz bajo los fascismos offers its own interpretation of the historical imaginaries.

This research is to continue in a new project “Female desire in the Spanish cinema during the Franco regime: gestural evolution of the actress under the constraints of censorship”, which will focus strictly on the Spanish cinema throughout the Franco period.

Reference work:

Núria Bou, Xavier Pérez (2018), El cuerpo erótico de la actriz bajo los fascismos, Cátedra publishers. Signos e imagen collection, pp. 300, 17 May.