Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

to the Moors, which is the reason why he decided to serve in Africa
and even to learn a smattering of Arabic in order become familiar
with “the customs of these people”. Herrera’s conflict, arising from his
attraction to the Península on account of his love for Amparo (Luchy
Soto), but always hearing that Call of Africa, which in the end he
would not fail to heed, constitutes precisely the underlying theme of
a number of the fundamental titles of Spain’s colonial cinema: as is
the case with ¡Harka!, films such as Alhucemas (José López Rubio,
1947) or La Llamada de Africa (César Fernández Ardavín, 1952)
illustrate the constant tension in the contemporary history of Spain
between those in favour of maintaining the African possessions and
those in favour of abandoning them.
Throughout 1942, with Tangiers still occupied by Spanish troops and
the dreams of an empire still intact, the magazine Primer Plano, on
two separate occasions, called for a worthy cinematographic epic on
an African theme (thus, implicitly disparaging earlier efforts to do
so). However, as irony would have it, that great film materialised in
Los Últimos de Filipinas, the chronicle of a defeat cinematographically
converted into an exaltation of heroism and desperate resistance, but
in no way an epic tale of an Empire reborn. The last major effort in
this regard was precisely an unusual and little known film made by
César Fernández Ardavín in 1952 entitled La Llamada de Africa. The
most peculiar aspect of La Llamada de Africa is not so much its being
centred on the Spanish possessions in the Western Sahara, but rather
the fact of its conjugating, perhaps for the first and last time in
Spanish colonial cinema, the exaltation of the military spirit with the
zeal of a civilising mission comparable to that undertaken by other
colonial powers. In effect, the film by Fernández Ardavín is the only
one in Spain’s cinematographic history that explores that mystique of
the desert so characteristic of a number of outstanding titles of the
French or Italian colonial cinemas. However, above all, it presents –
under the guise of a commonplace story of wartime espionage –
Spain’s efforts in order to develop a civil work in its North African
colonies, materialised in this case in the construction of an
aerodrome in the Sahara. Even though the military element is
constantly in the foreground throughout the film, the fact that it is
narrated from the perspective of an engineer (in the end identified
with military values and seduced by the Llamada de Africa (Call of
Africa), the overall effect is still somewhat unusual. Otherwise, the
film is extremely respectful of the native population and includes a
few dialogues in Arabic, and – the same as occurred earlier with La
Canción de Aixa – it portrays racial intermarriage free from the
stigmas to which it had been normally associated in the framework of
colonial cinema. Perhaps for this very reason, as its excellences as a
cinematographic work would not warrant further attention, La
Llamada de Africa deserves closer scrutiny.
Although it appears clear that Spain – unlike Great Britain, France or
Belgium – did not rehearse the production of a cinema specifically
34 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001