Foundational Landscapes: Visuality and Regimes of Historicity in Francoist Spain

Abstract

This dissertation traces the ways in which the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) mediated its relationship with history through visual culture. Through a broad approach to visual culture that includes architecture, museum culture, film, television, and the visual arts, this project explores the ways in which the materials studied aided in producing what François Hartog defines as “regimes of historicity” to define the articulation of the relationship between past, present, and future. This dissertation is organized following the traditional historical periodization of the dictatorship, each chapter is treated as a specific “regime of historicity.” The first chapter analyzes the magazine "Reconstruction", various documentaries directed by the Marqués de Villa-Alcazar, and the architectural thought of the time as the elements that conceptually sustained the process of national reconstruction during the post-war (1940s and 1950s). The second chapter focuses on the celebration in 1964 of the "XXV años de paz" during the years of economic development in the 1960s with a particular focus on the exhibitions España 64, España en paz, the Spanish Pavilion in the New York World’s Fair, and the film "Franco, ese hombre". The third and final chapter studies the connection between the later years of Francoism and Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s through the analysis of the TV show La transición and the work TVE: Primer intento by artist Antoni Muntadas. I analyze the role of these materials in the articulation of these three different regimes of historicity through a critical study of their visuality. My approach to the notion of visuality is informed by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s and Georges Didi-Huberman’s formulation as a critical tool that complicates the relationship between visual representation and power. As such, this approach is an effort to move away from an alleged mimetic relation between image and ideology and instead focus on the disjunctions that exist between visual culture, historical discourse, and Francoist ideology. Although this dissertation is rigorously historical, this project points at the limitations of these periodic divisions in accounting for the conceptual networks that exists at the heart of these regimes of historicity. This project is explicitly interested in bridging history and the study of visual culture beyond the approaches traditionally employed in art history, with the goal of broadening our understanding of Francoism and the ways in which the dictatorship constituted a conceptual framework to portray the past, create a sense of the present, and imagine the future in Spain.