Abstract/Summary

During the early years of Franco's dictatorship, the film magazine Primer Plano, a publication aligned with the Falange, was an important instrument for the promotion of the regime's ideas about the construction of a national film industry and about the film production of other countries. In the case of depictions of love and sexuality, the double-edged threat (spiritual and economic) represented by foreign films could be seen, according to the magazine, in the invasion of alien gestures which the Spanish people sought to imitate and in the proliferation of films whose thematic focus was sexual desire, which threatened the stability of Francoist society, especially where the role of the woman was concerned. In opposition to these narratives of desire, Primer Plano advocated a chaste and morally edifying conception of love.