Between film and TV: Cursilería and the return of politics in 1970s’ Spain

Only recently have some critics started challenging the image of an elitist New Spanish Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, disconnected from the general public and in indirect complicity with Francoist strategies of international self-promotion. Within that trend, the fact that the most important names of the New Spanish Cinema were simultaneously working as publicists, scriptwriters or TV directors allows us to map a more complex reality. Fascinated with a new medium full of unknown possibilities, those directors assimilated new techniques and the possibilities of dealing with a different and much bigger audience. The TV experience was not only the point of departure for a renewed aesthetic, but also for a more complex positioning of film as a political tool that was conceived then not in radical opposition to Francoist mass media but as strategically linked to them. This analysis of a paradigmatic film of the period in dialogue with TV aesthetics, Martín Patino’s Canciones para después de una Guerra/Songs for After a War (1976), opens the possibility of a re-contextualization of TV ‘cursilería’ and its transformation into modern kitsch as an innovative aesthetic and, simultaneously, an oppositional discourse.