Abstract

This volume, edited by Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez, explores female desire in the Spanish films produced during the Franco regime, considering it as a source of symbolic and figurative resistance to censorious repression. The first part of the book focuses on a typologization of the different female archetypes that marked the cinematographic imaginary of the four decades of Francoism: "body-home", the "woman-country", the "mystical body", the "marriageable virgin", the "body-spectacle", the "modern woman" and "the monster-woman".

The second part of the publication, meanwhile, covers the filmography of the main actresses who came into contact with these archetypes, whether to add nuance to them, to embody them, or to change them: Aurora Bautista, Analía Gadé, Emma Penella, Josita Hernán, Lola Flores, Sara Montiel, Carmen Sevilla, Marisol, Concha Velasco, Geraldine Chaplin, Teresa Gimpera and Helga Liné. All these actresses, as the book proposes, carried out in their performances a suggestive poetic affirmation of female desires.

Recovering the analysis model of the previous volume edited by Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez, "El cuerpo erótico de la actriz durante los fascismos: España, Italia, Alemania (1939-1945)", this new publication brings together a group of specialists in Spanish cinema and star studies to analyze the gestures, the expressive force of the bodies and the gazes of these actresses, who transcended the narrow margins that the Franco regime had imposed on the women of the time.