Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Spanish Colonial Cinema: Contours and
Singularities
Alberto Elena
Despite the fact that the Spanish colonial cinema, as a matter of
course, fails to appear in relevant specialised studies on an
international scale and has not even received the attention it certainly
deserves from the nation’s own historians and scholars, an initial
recognition is in order and that is to say that Spain has a far from
negligible colonial film heritage. Although, logically, many of these
films can at the same time be attributed to other specific genres and
subgenres (melodramas, thrillers, adventure films...), several dozen
titles -varying considerably in nature and quality – do in fact recount
the Spanish presence in Cuba, the Philippines and the African
enclaves, producing a sweeping colonial fresco which, however, has
received much less attention than that accorded by the British,
French, Italian, German or even the Belgian
cinemas to their respective possessions. An indepth
review of the Spanish colonial cinema – a
task clearly beyond the scope of this paper,
which is an advance of a more extensive study
currently in progress – will assuredly provide a
few surprises and very probably reveal an
identity of its own with respect to the
contemporary contributions of other European
powers.
As the invention of the cinematograph
practically coincided in time with the loss of the
Spanish possessions in America and the Pacific,
it is to be expected that Spain’s colonial cinema
would have necessarily been characterised by
an unequivocal African slant. In effect, although Los Últimos de
Filipinas (Antonio Román, 1945) ranks among the most
outstanding titles of the genre, the films devoted to the Spanish
presence in the Pacific are very few in number. Noche sin cielo
(Ignacio F. Iquino, 1947) and Aquellas palabras (Luis Arroyo, 1948)
are clearly in debt to the interest in the region awakened by that
noteworthy and successful film by Román, although neither was able
to even remotely match its historical fortune. Aquellas palabras,
together with Misión blanca (Juan de Orduña, 1946), filmed two
years earlier and centred on Guinea, nonetheless initiated an
emblematic subgenre of the Spanish colonial cinema in the period of
the Franco regime, featuring the missionaries sent to the colonies,
which was practically without a parallel in the history of other
European cinemas. The possibilities of this subgenre – evidently
29 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001
José Nieto and Armando Calvo in
Los últimos de Filipinas, Antonio Román (1945),
courtesy of La Filmoteca Española, Madrid