A dispositif of wonder: cinema spectatorship, pedagogy and the avant garde in 1930s Spain

Abstract

In the early 1930s, groups of cultural activists brought moving pictures to Spanish regions where until then cinema had been totally unknown. As part of a broader program of popular education known as the pedagogic missions, the campaigners registered the reaction of rural audiences confronted with this ‘new extraordinary’. These missions are the focus of this essay, as they offer the opportunity to rethink spectatorship in a situation similar to that ‘cinema of attractions’ usually identified with the early years of the medium. The focus lies first on the significance of the missions as a vortex where film pedagogical initiatives connected with avant-garde screening practices. In line with Frank Kessler’s reformulation of the cinema of attractions as dispositif, I follow an approach that takes into consideration the specific configurations of technology, spectatorship and texts that converged in the work of the missions. The career of José Val del Omar (1904-1982) will help to illustrate these general arguments on cinema of attractions, pedagogy and avant-garde. His contemporary writings on these subjects and particularly his films of the 1950s Water-Mirror of Granada (Aguaespejo Granadino, 1953) and Fire in Castille (Fuego en Castilla, 1956-1959) embody an aesthetic and technological revision of the epistemological dispositif that he had helped to redefine with his activities during the mid-1930s.