Politics and Political Alterity in the Spanish NO-DOs of 1968

Abstract

NO-DO is the official name of the Spanish state newsreels, an acronym formed by the abbreviation of Noticiarios (News) and Documentales (Documentaries). In contrast to cinema newsreels in other occidental countries, NO-DO is closely associated with Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). Created by Franco’s propaganda ministry in 1943, NO-DO reels were shown until 1981, just a few years after Franco’s death in 1975. The aim of this paper is to analyze Spanish newsreels’ modes of representation of politics and of political alterity in Mouffe’s sense. It seeks to examine how NO-DO portrays the political antagonism that facilitated the Francoist regime’s construction of its own identity. In order to do so, the paper firsts draw a genealogy of this genre in Spain and frames it within the context of 1968. Second, it presents an overview of the contents and the modes of representations of the newsreels during this year, later focusing on the timeframe from May to August. The goal is to examine the medial strategies used by the newsreel genre to deal with political Others lurking within and beyond Spain’s borders.