Abstract

The women featured in this book were the most important feminine stars in Spanish, Italian and German cinematographies during World War II (1939-1945), when the new totalitarian regime in Spain coexists with German Nazism and Italian fascism. In all three dictatorships, censorship exerted a strict control not only over political content but also over eroticism and sexuality. Feminine stars from these fascisms worked in connivance —more or less explicitly— with the ideology from the states where their filmography was carried out, but their bodies spoke, through images, giving messages which were normally contradictory to the prevailing morality. This book suggests a study on these bodies’ gesturing and questions the underlying tension between servile femininity and freed femininity, between denied femininity and erotic affirmation. The relation between acting and erotic imaginary is carefully studied throughout its pages, in the filmographies from Imperio Argentina, Estrellita Castro, Ana Mariscal, Conchita Montenegro, Conchita Montes, Mercedes Vecino and Amparo Rivelles for Spanish cinematography; Clara Calamai, Luisa Ferida, Anna Magnani, Isa Miranda, Assia Noris and Alida Valli within the Italian context, and Zarah Leander, Marika Rökk and Kristina Söderbaum in terms of Germany.