Un cinéma sous influence

Un cinema sous influence speaks of the fiction films and the documentaries of the CNT, but also of film production during Franco’s regime. Is this the logical continuation of your research? RP: In effect, I have been working on this subject, on the history of the period and its cinema, since the mid-1980s. Thanks to this research I did work for the Ciné Classics channel when I learned they wanted to do a series of 15 to 20 Spanish films – both fiction and documentaries – of the war period. In addition they wanted a documentary about its cinema. So I wrote up the project called Un cinema sous influence. Cinematographically, the period runs from 1936 to 1941-42, ending with Franco’s film Raza. The documentary places the films in historical context, explains the evolution of the film industry in Spain, the arrival of talkies, the number of films produced, and then what happened in 1936. The film extracts shown in my documentary are largely from productions antedating the Spanish civil war.