Music in Non-Fiction Films: New Practices in Spanish Documentary Soundtracks in the Late Francoist Era

Abstract

From the late 1950s, Spanish documentary filmmaking began to diversify in terms of the aesthetic approaches taken by filmmakers, who, while still in the Franco years, sought to balance the educational purpose of documentary films with their own particular and more critical form of expression. This alternative approach to producing Spanish documentaries developed further in the 1960s, through films that offered a more committed social and aesthetic vision from filmmakers, who were also open to new trends in international cinema, though not without the pressures of the censorship that remained in place during the later years of the Franco regime. In this chapter we give an overview of documentary filmmaking in Spain in the 1960s through a selection of films that we appraise in terms of how elements in the soundtrack are used to devise different meanings, relations or identifications as part of the audiovisual discourse. We then narrow our focus on Rías y ramblas (1968), with music by the film’s director, Antonio Pérez Olea, and El largo viaje hacia la ira (1969), directed by Lorenzo Soler, two examples of geographical documentary and social critique, respectively, within the various subject matters tackled by documentary filmmaking in the 1960s, and through which it is possible to assess the various musical styles and practices used in Spanish documentary soundtracks from that period.