Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar: Football and Cinema under Francoism – Comparing Visual Motifs to Unveil Historical Symptoms

Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar

Football and Cinema under Francoism – Comparing Visual Motifs to Unveil Historical Symptoms

(Dr Manuel Garin – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

Virtual Lecture via Blackboard Collaborate: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/4e5604442fcb44b68f5d5630040e8755

When it comes to the relation of archival materials with historical and political epistemes, the uses of sport, and specifically football, during the Francoist Regime in Spain stands as a key (but still under-researched) topic. Connecting with previous imageries of the silent era, like Bergfilme or Hollywood sport biopics, football movies became a genre of its own during the dictatorship, once labeled by historian J. A. Durán as nationalfootballism (a reappropriation of the historical term nacionalcatolicismo). This audiovisual corpus comprises dozens of fiction films where the biggest football stars of the time, such as Zamora, Kubala or Di Stefano, performed as actors, and vice versa, where the biggest actors of the time (like Fernando Fernán Goméz) performed as footballers or fans. More importantly, these movies created a strong intermedial relationship with other visual works produced during the dictatorship: hundreds of hours of sport-centered footage within the archive of NO-DO (the official newsreels), and thousands of photographs in sport newspapers, film journals, and popular magazines. Not to mention the aural components of radio broadcasting -and soundscapes- in and out of the films.

This talk delves into that critical juncture between football and moving images, which shaped and still shapes the core of Spanish identity/ies (with political, class, and gender trouble), by studying such intermedial links in three complementary ways: as an atlas of politicized bodies (sportsmen but also women and minorities), an archive of visual motifs (gestures, situations, narratives) and a network of places and influences (production companies, football clubs, cities, Francoist institutions, repressed regions or nationalities, etc.). Framed within a new research project funded by the Spanish MICINN, the talk will share its main findings and methodology with our colleagues from NUI Galway, to foster debate within the Research in Sport seminar.

Manuel Garin is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He has been visiting scholar at different institutions like the Tokyo University of The Arts, the University of Southern California and Columbia University, where he developed the comparative media projects “Gameplaygag: Between Silent Film and New Media” and “A Hundred Busters: Keaton Across The Arts”, financed by public grants. Author of the book El gag visual (Cátedra, 2014), his research on cinema, art history and new media has been published in scientific journals such as Feminist Media Studies, The Sixties, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication & Society, EJHR, L’Atalante, EPI, CJCS or Comparative Cinema, and in books from Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Routledge, Amsterdam University Press, Palgrave, De Gruyter, ABC-Clio, Mimesis, Intermedio, Cátedra or Edicions 62. As a cultural critic, he has written for magazines such as La Maleta de Portbou, Contrapicado or Cultura/s – La Vanguardia. Currently, he is the PI of the research project “Football and Visual Culture under Francoism”, financed by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PID2020-116277GA-I00) and focused on the relations between sport, class, gender, and national identities in Spanish cinema and audiovisual media.