Film Cultures in Spain's Transition: The “Other” Transition in the Film Magazine Nuevo Fotogramas (1968–1978)

In the story of the fight for democratic freedom and the drive to bring Europe and the world closer to Francoist Spain, Nuevo Fotogramas (NF) deserves a central position. Fuelled by the spirit of May 1968, the long-running Barcelona-based magazine Fotogramas became NF in 1968 and set out to define the pro-democracy struggle in contrast from the Madrid-based film cultures. It also set out to engage with European cultural production as if censorship and being closed off from European modernity were simply temporary situations. NF helps us to write the transition differently, by debunking the myth of its having been a process led solely by the film-makers and critics who engaged in direct confrontation. Explaining the different approach that NF had to documenting and taking part in the cultural industries of the transition helps us to locate resistance in the “trivial” and “female” world of consumption rather than exclusively in the production sector, more often associated with visible and well-documented acts of opposition. Three aspects of the magazine contribute to this reconfiguration of inherited ideas about the transition, particularly the ethos of the publication, the writers who collaborated in it and what seems to be more “marginalia”: its letter section, “El consultorio de Mr. Belvedere”, and its advertisements.