Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975 by Jorge Pérez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975 by Jorge Pérez Diana Roxana Jorza Pérez, Jorge. Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2017. 260 pp. Confessional Cinema is, in many ways, a remarkably fresh and necessary book in the field of Spanish cultural studies, undoing many entrenched presuppositions about cinema and religion during the last years of Franco's regime. The author seeks to analyze the changing role of religion in the technocratic modernization of Spain during 1960-1975, dwelling not on a theological point of view, but on a cultural and sociopolitical understanding of religion as a key force of the public sphere of the time: religion, argues Jorge Pérez in the Introduction, remained relevant and operative and it did not just vanish in the development years from the public scene, as axiomatic secularist positions have maintained. Furthermore, the confessional cinema of this time (a term that the author prefers to that of religious cinema) actively engaged, much more than the literature of the age, with this shifting role of religion in the public sphere, which means that these films can become a surprisingly fruitful realm of cultural analysis, being much more than a mere ideological residue of political propaganda. Moreover, Pérez's non-doctrinal approach to movie analysis is hermeneutically productive also as it avoids an elusive common ground (e.g., what religious films are as a rigidly defined, auteurist-based, aesthetic genre that would partake of a sublime in the depicted relation with divinity). Pérez chooses to address movies that feature religious communities and characters that are [End Page 720] intricately linked to the broader sociocultural milieu of the late Franco regime, at a time when modernization and secularization were rapidly changing the country and transforming the traditional values of National Catholicism. These profound transformations also took place within Spanish Catholicism, following the aggiornamiento recommendations of the Vatican II Council (1962-65), meant to renew the structures of the Catholic Church by reconfiguring a stronger, more accessible presence of the Church in the modern world while supporting a bolder social activism, religious liberty, political pluralism, etc. This modernized conception of intervention in society clashed not only with the earlier, reviled position of the Spanish Catholic Church in the power structures of the Franco regime, but also with the Opus Dei technocrats' view of economic modernization, which was not meant to change the authoritarian foundation of the regime. Despite their formulaic commercial layout, the popular religious films that Confessional Cinema analyzes seem to delve into these conflicting discourses much more than the contemporaneous oppositional, auteurist movies of the New Spanish Cinema that engage with religion and its role in the public sphere of the time: the latter "narratives of suspicion," as Jorge Pérez terms them in his fourth chapter, tread the all too familiar path that tends to monolithically conflate the role of religion and of the Catholic Church with a repressive cultural and political anachronism that is incompatible with modernity. This hermeneutic cliché also sadly pervades the field of Spanish cultural and film studies, whose institutionalized criteria of distinction tend to follow the politicized legacy of the hegemonic oppositional culture and of its elitist cultural capital against the alleged propaganda contamination blindly ascribed to all mainstream, commercial cultural products during Franco's regime. Confessional Cinema never disregards, however, the undisputed pro-regime ideological bias of the popular religious films examined in the first three chapters of the book, showing their transparent intentions to reconcile traditional religious and moral values with economic modernization, a staple of all "comedies of development," for instance, that is, of the broader genre that comprises some of the analyzed movies from this book. This acknowledged bias notwithstanding, the in-depth study of these popular religious films reveals they were much more complex, sometimes verging on the potentially subversive, than mere vehicles of ideological propaganda. One of the remarkable contributions of Pérez's multilayered study is to show how these movies illustrated the regime's change of political discourse in the development years. Cogently appropriating...