Madrid: Um olhas cinematográfico sob uma cidade de conflito

Abstract

"The city had to invent the cinema not to die of boredom" Wim Wenders Known for its vast cultural agenda and architectonic heritage, Madrid conceals the scars of its conflictive background, imprinted deeply into the city's urban spaces. The idea of analysing a city's evolution through its cinematic legacy came to me during my Erasmus year in Madrid after one semester of La Arquitectura de la Metrópolis en el Cine. Some cinematografic works, like España,1936 (Dreyfus, 1937), Raza (Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), El inquilino (Conde, 1957), Las chicas de la cruz roja (Salvia, 1958) or Barrio (Aranoa, 1998) prove to be crucial to understand important periods of Madrid's urban history. Spanish cinema's early activities date back to 1896, during the Restoration period. Despite the ongoing conflicts (Cuban war, Morocco war, etc) the country experienced a strong economic growth, clearly visible in Madrid: Gran Via's construction work was completed and Castellana's expansion plans were put into motion. The economic welfare came to an end during the Second Republic and the country's inner conflicts began to grow. Six years after the king's exile, Madrid witnessed a Civil War that devastated the entire country; both parties portrayed the city's destruction through a series of news' broadcasts and documentaries, designed to transmit their political ideals. After the war, a long dictatorship was settled by Franco, where the censorship process and the advertising the regime's main ideals walked side by side to supervise artistic productions: both cinema and architecture were under the regime's influence. This long period of deep cultural control molded Madrid's contemporary identity: thirty years of Franco's censorship leads to La Movida, a period of great artistic freedom formed in the eighties, that is the core of the city's reputation nowadays. In conclusion, this essay's main purpose is to carry out a study of Madrid's urban evolution and determine how it is portrayed throughout the movies, in order to determine a possible trademark of "Madrid in the cinema".