Abstract
During Spain's massive economic liberalization of the 1960s and early 70s, official pro-regime film participated in the symbolizing of tourism as a propagandistic emblem of Spain's rapid modernization. It was a paradoxical attempt to reaffirm an atavistic and univocal nationalist agenda through an appeal to international capitalism, also known as the official policy of 'development without change'. Strategically combining the culture industry and tourism under one government institution, the Ministry of Information and Tourism carried out a reinscription of national identity as a function of tourism. 'Spanish culture' was thus reified, 'metonymically frozen' (Appadurai), and served up to the tourist in the form of a product in a process of national marketing repeatedly portrayed in late-Francoist film. The present study will examine pro-regime cinema's problematic deployment of tourism as an aesthetic resolution to Francoism's internal contradictions regarding economic liberalization through a reading of two box office hits — Un beso en el puerto (Dir. Torrado 1965) and Me has hecho perder el juicio (Dir. Orduña 1973) — both starring Spanish popular cultural icon Manolo Escobar. At the same time, this study will also read these two films' commodified patriotism against the grain, that is, as evidence of tourism's ultimate failure as an aesthetic enterprise and political contrivance.
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