Hooray for Hollywood : Postwar Cinema and Trauma in Franco\u27s Dictatorship in Spain

In 1939, Spain saw the end of a bloody three year civil war and the beginning of Francisco Franco\u27s nearly forty year military dictatorship. The immediate postwar was one filled with hunger, poverty, and executions as Franco silenced all opposition. Although cinema was a respite from the terror outside of the theater, the regime utilized Spanish films in order to spread propaganda and write their own version of the civil war, glorifying the victorious Nationalists and demonizing the Republican losers. My thesis examines three pairs of films, each pair containing a Spanish production and a production from Hollywood, and analyzes how the imported American films spoke more to the immediate wounds of the losers from the war than the highly-political Spanish films. Although the American films were censored, their themes and images still provided opportunities for this traumatized audience to appropriate them and form their own subtle subversion to counter the terror and repression of Franco\u27s dictatorship