Propaganda towards an education of the Iberian friendship: the official visit of the Generalissimo to Portugal in 1949 in the newsreels

Abstract

The article deals with propaganda cinema as a pedagogy of authoritarism and focuses particularly on the Portuguese Jornal de Atualidades (1938-1951). It proposes to explore the pedagogical potentialities of the newsreels starting from the hypothesis that Franco, in his official visit to Portugal (1949), acts as an “invisible teacher” who would guide the news. The investigation is carried out using both a content analysis making a comparison with the same episode in the Spanish No-Do’s, constituting a relatively unique methodological proposal. It turns out the that the newsreel carries a discursive ambivalence, in which Franco is not at all the “invisible teacher” and the dictator’s wife, guided by the hand and lens of the Portuguese director, is the one who effectively embodies the correct and expected disposition. This interpretation gives rise to a new possibility, viz. that it is the director and his pro-artistic ambitions who effectively and inevitably rules these contents.