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  • "¡Hay que motorizarse!":Mobility, Modernity, and National Identity in Pedro Lazaga's Sor Citroen
  • Jorge Pérez (bio)

Among all the periods of the history of Spanish cinema, the 1960s may easily be the decade in which critical discourse has been the most polarized. Most scholarship refers to it as a transitional moment with two antipodal types of filmmaking. With the term Viejo Cine Español (VCE), critics designate a commercial, popular cinema that draws on generic models—mainly comedy—well received by mainstream audiences.1 Ignored or excoriated by many histories of Spanish cinema—owing largely, no doubt, to its conservative ideological agenda and its poor aesthetic quality—this popular cinema was only acclaimed by supporters of Francoism as nation-building narratives that contained positive (conformist) political values that evinced the apparently healthy state of the regime. VCE has commonly been fathomed as diametrically opposed to the Nuevo Cine Español (NCE), a new art-house film produced by the graduates of the Escuela Oficial de Cine, and whose first steps were made at the famous Conversaciones de Salamanca of 1955, envisioned as "a cinema of social and critical realism and political engagement" (Triana-Toribio 71).2

Recent studies have reassessed the status of such polarization by exploring the nuanced levels of complexity of Spanish popular films traditionally lambasted as escapist endeavors that merely naturalize the dominant ideology.3 As Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andrew Willis advocate in their introduction to their engaging academic volume on Spanish popular cinema, we need: [End Page 7]

to place Spanish popular film in a political and cultural context, showing how large sectors of the population were, and still are, consuming an aspect of culture which has been largely overlooked by critics.4

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In this article, I intend to follow in the path of these investigations with a close analysis of Pedro Lazaga's Sor Citroen5 (1967) as a compelling example of the comedy of desarrollismo, a Spanish cinematic genre that enjoyed extensive popular support during the 1960s. My reading of the film, though, will go beyond examining it in relation to a comedy formula, since that approach would fail to grasp the multilayered negotiations of this cultural artifact with the prevailing social practices and conditions of its timespace context. Despite its appearance as a formulaic, commercial comedy intended to reach a wide audience and the undeniable reactionary undertones of its plot and characters, this film is imbricated, in no simple way, in a heterogeneous web of competing social discourses during the desarrollismo years. Concretely, through the development of the storyline and the characters, but also through the trenchant use of the mise-enscène, music, and editing techniques, Sor Citroen extols the miracle of desarrollismo as a balance between the economic success in modernizing and industrializing the nation, and the preservation of two of the salient values underpinning Francoism: Catholic moral rigidity and patriarchal domination. Simultaneously, the colored picture of the development of Spanish national-Catholicism in the 1960s contains, in its comical and excessive portrayal in this film, a parodic tone that allows an alternative reading of its ideological apparatus, one that reveals the fissures of that very reactionary rhetoric that it seems to legitimize. As we shall see, the film enters a dialogue with important social issues that were points of friction with the precepts of the Francoist rhetoric of the 1960s, especially in relation to the tensions provoked by the II Vatican Council and the escalating access to social mobility by women.

The label "comedia del desarrollismo" was first coined by Javier Hernández Ruiz and Pablo Pérez Rubio to designate a cine artesanal shaped by three main influences: the Spanish folkloric cultural tradition, the Italian comedy of the early 1950s, and the hybrid assimilation of Hollywood cinematic genres (313). These heterogeneous materials are crafted by a collaborative team, organized around the pivotal figure of the producer Pedro Masó, which echoes, albeit on a reduced scale, the specialized production system of the Hollywood studios.6 They manufacture a type of comedy which, unlike earlier comedias costumbristas of the 1940s and 1950s, does not offer the image of a poor society that struggles to survive with...

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