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Football and Visual Culture under Francoism: Discourses of Class, Gender and National Construction in Cinema, Newsreels and the Press 1939-1975

Football and Visual Culture under Francoism: Discourses of Class, Gender and National Construction in Cinema, Newsreels and the Press 1939-1975
Study that aims to identify, analyze and document the main themes and forms of visual representation of football in Spain during Francoism, focusing on three critical points of view: class discourse, gender, and national construction.

I+D Project financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation

REF: PID2020-116277GA-I00

 

In recent years there has been a clear growth in academic interest towards the world of sports, as well as an increase in audiovisual and media production focused on its main characters, stories and places. On that note, the Spanish case is specially complex and rich, given that throughout the 20th century, sports and particularly football, have generated an ecosystem of communicative processes, public figures and visual motifs with deep liaisons in the structures of political, economic and civil powers in the country. The reinforcement of such system goes back to the use of film and media under Francoism, that is, the imagery that film critic Carlos Marañón labeled nacionalfutbolismo. A unique and extremely pregnant corpus of cinematic fictions, newsreels and graphic press coverage, where big sporting stars performed as actors in films while they appeared in the NO-DO and on the covers of newspapers and magazines, thus creating a series of historical, political, sociological and cultural ramifications with no equivalent in other national cinematographies of the period

 

In that context, the goal of this research project is to identify, analyze and document the main themes and forms of visual representation of football in Spain during Francoism, focusing on three critical points of view: class discourse (1), gender (2) and national construction (3). To do so, a process of comparative historiographical documentation will be implemented, juxtaposing the images of fiction films (a), documentary newsreels (b) and photojournalism (c) within the 1939-1975 period.

In dialogue with leading researches in the fields of sport sociology, iconology, star studies, gender studies and critical theory, the project will study the patterns of visual representation and performance of footballers both in fictional works and in reality, in order to expose the relations between football, power and the establishment, and foster critical thinking about this key topic in our society. Throughout the analysis of images and historical documents, the research will extract a list of the key themes, figures and visual motifs of nacionalfutbolismo that will stand as the iconographic node of the project. Textual analysis, from the triple perspective of class, gender and national construction, will be complemented with methodologies of parametric quantification, mapping and data visualization, along with audiovisual re-editing tools and reappropriation.

The project assumes the hypothesis that the visual motifs, themes and figures of the Francoist period may have iconographic echoes in subsequent historical periods, and particularly, in the contemporary one, due to the exponential growth of audiovisual products centered on football. Therefore, the research outcomes will not only be shared in key academic impact forums, but also, through divulgation materials and actions, such as audiovisual clips for social networks and a cultural exhibition with creative workshops, with the aim of underlining the connections between images of the past and images of the present. The reason for focusing on Francoism is above all the rich documental depth of the period, as well as the will to create methodological and theoretical tools that allow for the interpretation of contemporary images, figures and social issues by articulating a historic-critical documentation of the 20th century visual archive.