Elisabet Escoto Fibla proposes an approach to the billboard of films, its criticism and publicity, as a means to understand the nature of the franquist occupation regime barely established in the Barcelona of 1939.
The present study intends to be an analysis of the offer of films in Barcelona once General Franco’s army enters and how this new outlook is explained to the citizens through the cinema billboard of the entertainment section of the newspaper La Vanguardia, which It includes the information of the projections in the cinemas, reviews of the tapes and news related to the film industry. It is a work focused on the year 39 because it is the moment in which the city is occupied, the beginning of the new regime and in which the new Francoist hierarchy begins to settle in the positions of government and power, among them the media , once it has been seen that the war was lost.
The work constitutes an extensive overview of the films that the locals saw when they went to the cinema to get information or to get distracted from the harsh daily life of post-war, those they had already seen and those who spend the first time in the city. Of the films and how they were described and publicized to the public through criticism. Of how everything, the included cinema, is part of the “new spain” that is being built in the price of a military uprising and an armed conflict. It is an analysis of the structure of the billboard as such, its skeleton and characteristics, and how it evolves after the time in reference to the nationalities of the films, the premieres, the cinemas and the different neighborhoods.
The choice of the billboard of shows of the newspaper La Vanguardia as primary source of the present study is due to the fact that this was one of the reference newspapers of the time in Barcelona, was one of the spokesmen of the regime barely conquered the city as it had been previously of the Generalitat, and is therefore, the publication with the most complete information of the cinematographic world of the city. It is the most complete, and it is reliable, since its raison d’être is to inform and publicize the films and the cinemas, but it does not give us a total information. There are cinemas that appear intermittently, in some cases because they are smaller neighborhood halls, and the programming of the cinemas that usually appear, there are weeks that appear published more rigorously than in others.
