Resumen de Film, medicine and empire: inclusion-exclusion practices and discourses in Spanish medical-colonial documentaries of the 1940s
Carlos Tabernero Holgado, Isabel Jiménez Lucena, Jorge Molero Mesa
Inclusion-exclusion dynamics in contemporary societies are complex, multidimensional processes involving the active intertwining of wide-ranging social, economic, political and cultural factors.
In this regard, scientific-technological discourses, considered as a basic constituent of western hegemonic thought, play a fundamental role in the definition, classification, framing, rationalization and disciplining of distinct human clusters. This is especially apparent when conveyed through health-medical practices and policies, inasmuch as direct contact between experts (physicians) and laypeople (patients) necessarily occurs through practice itself, which in turn purportedly offers immediate solutions to pressing everyday life problems.
On the other hand, mass media, particularly when image-based, such as in the case of film or television, are crucially conducive of the construction, diffusion, representation, interpretation and reinterpretation of the beliefs and values upon which human communities are shaped. Moreover, they are also technological means of contact between experts (writers, directors, producers, distributors) and laypeople (readers, listeners, viewers), offering as well multifaceted immediate solutions (information, entertainment) to modern life needs, and thus bearing an undeniable strategic importance precisely from a joint social, economic, political and cultural point of view.
Upon these premises, our aim is to contribute to the historical understanding of the role played by the concurrence of the cinematographic and scientific-medical discourses in inclusion-exclusion dynamics in the context of post-war Spain. To do so, we have analyzed from this perspective five medical-colonial documentaries produced between 1946 and 1949, three of them in fact under the directive of Franco’s government. In these films, a third discourse (colonial), equally strategic for the regime, plays an essential and complementary role as well. Thus, the joint articulation of these three discourses offers some explanatory keys for basic inclusion-exclusion traits pertaining to the categories of gender, class and ethnic group.
