El deseo femenino en el cine español (1939-1975)

This book explores the presence of female desire contained in the film images of Spanish cinema produced during the Franco regime. Desire appears, in the film frame studied, as a source of symbolic and figurative resistance to the repressive slogans of the censorious ideology. In the first part of the book, a classification of the main female models that crossed the cinematographic imaginary during the four decades of Francoism is proposed. The "home-body", the "country-woman", the "mystical body", the "marriageable virgin", the "show-body", the "modern woman" and "the monster-woman" constitute archetypes whose detailed examination It allows us to discover the different forms of desire that the feminine figuration could summon, beyond the fact that the woman was satisfied with a domestic life, subordinated to the husband or to the patriarchal order. In the second part of the book, a journey is made through the filmography of some of the main actresses who embodied, nuanced and made these archetypes evolve: 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 of them adopted, in their way of acting, a suggestive poetics of affirmation of feminine desires. Following the same model of analysis of their previous book "The erotic body of the actress during fascism: Spain, Italy, Germany (1939-1945)", Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez have summoned a large group of specialists in Spanish cinema and film stardom to analyze the gestures, the expressive force of the bodies and the looks of some performers who went beyond, sometimes in a more visible way, sometimes in a more subtle way, the guidelines of containment that the Regime had demanded of the women of the epoch.