Spain: defenders of historical memory fight for the end of Franco's censorship

Francoist censorship is still present in cinematographic or literary works in Spain, according to the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory: texts by Hemingway, Orwell, Ian Fleming have thus been redacted by Franco's scissors.

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Text by: RFI Follow

2 min

The main association (the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, the ARMH) fighting against the Francoist legacy has issued an unprecedented request to the head of the socialist government Pedro Sanchez: the search and revision of films or books that have censored during the 36 years of the Franco dictatorship.

A job that has never been done until now.

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with our correspondent in Madrid,

The president of the

, Emilio Silva, recently realized that Frank Capra's famous film,

 is still being shown in Spain in a truncated 7-minute version.

Verification made, he realized these missing minutes are the result of Franco's censorship and that, more than four decades after the death of the dictator, the film has not been restored in its unredacted version!

'Qué bello es vivir', 'Casablanca' y otras obras que sigues viendo censuradas por el franquismo

Los memorialistas demanded from Pedro Sánchez that acabe con la emisión en forma parcial de las cintas y libros que el dictador manipuló https://t.co / tmUS9FIcmk

- Emilio Silva Barrera 🌏 (@Emilio_Silva_) December 27, 2021

And so are countless books by Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, James Baldwin, among others.

Francoist censorship is still in place in the most recent editions available in bookshops. 

Return to original works  

The association calls on the current government to do two things.

On the one hand, to appoint a commission which takes stock of the extent of this

.

Movie clips cut off, pages torn off or passages deleted.

And on the other hand, once this work is done, to restore the original versions before Franco's censorship.

For the association, these operations should be supervised by the Ministry of Culture. 

Francoism, a censorship machine

Under Franco's government, censorship was in full swing.

According to the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, the scissors cuts of the Ancien Régime were extensive and touched on many subjects.

As soon as it concerned a social subject, supposedly of communist tendency, like the cooperatives (like that of George Bailey played by James Stewart in the film of Capra), the censorship acted.

Ditto if it affected sexuality;

thus in Ernest Hemingway's novel

(1950), two lesbians become, in the censored translation, two male friends.

Esta es una de las escenas censuradas en España.

https://t.co/wFBXyO21MI

- Emilio Silva Barrera 🌏 (@Emilio_Silva_) December 26, 2021

Generally speaking, we censored when we thought that Catholic values ​​and social order were being called into question.

So far, the association's request has not received a response from the head of government Pedro Sanchez.

This same association is also calling for the reopening of tens of thousands of mass graves where the victims of Francoism are piled up during the civil war of 1936-1939. 

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