Abstract
Author(s): Woods Peiro, Eva | Abstract: Spanish film culture of the 1920s celebrated the aspirations of technological power and the enjoyment of or anxiety around technology. This chapter historicizes a set of propaganda films made in Spain between 1923 and 1925 about Juan de la Cierva’s invention, the Autogiro, a machine that fused the airplane and helicopter. These short hybrid media artifacts—a coalescence of documentary, actualite, and advertisement—promoted de la Cierva’s invention while also drawing upon and furthering ideas about whiteness and its intimate, if not generative, connection with technology. Balancing theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler with Richard Dyer and Judy Wajcman’s arguments about the raced and gendered construction of technology, I argue that these cinematic objects, which entertained cinemagoers and served military interests, were deeply saturated with the discourse of whiteness. The implicit assumptions of this race rhetoric, which were built into the material specificity of the airplane, were the control of the Spanish and European-identified race over this conquest of the air and the maintenance of the white viewer-driver-pilot.
Highlights
Spanish film culture of the twenties showcases the convergence of cinema and aviation
Historicizing early and silent cinema helps us understand how cinema’s reflectionproduction of reality has engaged in questions of war, will to empire, and international flows of power. Returning to this earlier cinematicity allows us to better theorize how the transnational, global, conversation on technological empire was mediated by the rhetoric of whiteness
I examine a set of propaganda films made in Spain between 1923 and 1925 about Juan de la Cierva’s invention, the Autogiro, a machine that fused the airplane and helicopter
Summary
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Whiteness as Airmindedness: Juan de la Cierva (1923-1925), Film and the Airplane Journal TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 8(2)
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