Political Theology of Empire: Hispanidad from Doctrine to Spectacle

Abstract

This article reimagines Hispanidad as a flexible cultural repertoire rather than a fixed ideology, examining how Francoism, after 1945, staged official doctrine as public spectacle that then served as “evidence” of its own legitimacy. Through a combined lens of political theology (Schmitt on decision and secularization) and media theory (Benjamin on the aestheticization of politics; Agamben on glory and acclamation), it analyzes Juan de Orduña’s Alba de América (1951) and its paratexts to show how National-Catholic principles—unity of faith and language, providential destiny, and obedience-based authority—were translated into affect through narrative voice, emblematic staging, liturgical music, and choreographed acclamation. Although the film underperformed commercially, it thrived institutionally, excerpted in newsreels and rebroadcast annually on October 12 as a ritual object of state culture. The article argues that spectacle in Francoist Spain functioned not only as propaganda but also as a mechanism for stabilizing power by shaping collective memory and everyday habits, revealing how aesthetic form can naturalize political authority and offering a model for analyzing the everyday workings of power across media and regimes.

1. Introduction

In mid–twentieth–century Spain, a familiar story was retold with new urgency: a nation that had bled itself in civil war and then lived through scarcity learned to imagine its future by re-enchanting its past. This article treats that re-enchantment as political technology. It asks how a regime that had exhausted the rhetoric of fascism rebuilt domestic legitimacy and international respectability by reactivating the older idiom of Hispanidad, translating doctrine into spectacle without naming the process as such1. The narrow observation is that Juan de Orduña’s Alba de América (1951) became the regime’s prestige vehicle for staging providence, hierarchy, and chosenness at a moment when Spain needed to appear renewed yet traditional. The broader claim is that this was not merely a response to a British biopic but a deliberate conversion of political theology into a doctrine → spectacle matrix—devices that move ideas from pulpit and pamphlet into mise–en–scène, music, and narrative pleasure.

Two premises guide the inquiry. First, Hispanidad is not a fixed creed later seized by the dictatorship; it is a mobile repertoire of values—anti-materialism, spiritual hierarchy, a pedagogy of distinction—articulated in Spanish American modernismo and then absorbed, with notable shifts, by Spanish conservative thought. I treat that repertoire as politically malleable rather than inherently liberal or authoritarian. Second, cultural forms are not decorative to politics. They help produce the “normal situation” that Schmitt describes, especially when the legal–administrative order seeks religious sanction and popular enjoyment at once2. Keeping the lens in view allows discussion of specific shots, sequences, and publicity without turning theory into recap.

I analyze the film and its accompanying materials through a political-theology lens set within a media-historical framework. Following Carl Schmitt, I treat sovereignty as the power “to decide on the exception” and consider modern state concepts as secularized theological ones. I also draw on Walter Benjamin’s claim that modern politics adopts aesthetic forms to address mass audiences. These ideas ground my use of presentización—the staging of the past as present—and what Spanish critics call “double redundancy” in Alba de América (Llinás 1998, p. 108): a pedagogical design that both tells and shows, aligning spectators with the leader’s viewpoint. The aim is to show how craft carries doctrine.

The historical setting gives that craft its urgency. After the Axis defeat, the regime shifted from revolutionary bravado to National–Catholicism, elevating ecclesial authority and promising order as moral restoration. Diplomatically, a new alignment was brokered in 1953 through the Concordat with the Holy See and the Madrid agreements with the United States. Domestically, rationing did not end until 1952. In that window—precarious abroad, austere at home—Hispanidad offered continuity where there had been rupture and dignity where there was dependence. Cinema offered something complementary: budgets, stars, and a grammar of spectacle capable of turning providence into a shared mood.

“Spain, a bridge between Europe and America, a point of convergence between two worlds, has been fulfilling this glorious task of fully transferring the spiritual values that define our civilization since the Discovery. The new world of Hispanic America, lush and mature, stands today… as the only safeguard, as a strong hope for peace and salvation in a future threatened by the impiety of error and the desolation of matter.”

—Francisco Franco (1950, p. 234, October 12)

With these words, delivered on the Día de la Hispanidad in 1950, Franco condensed the regime’s post–war self-presentation: Spain as transatlantic bridge, guarantor of spiritual order against material desolation, and heir to a providential mission. The rhetoric’s theological density and imperial nostalgia did not merely ornament policy; they furnished a mandate for the cultural apparatus in what follows—most visibly the prestige epic Alba de América—to translate doctrine into spectacle and spectacle back into doctrine.

The case study is well known but benefits from being reassembled with these stakes in mind. The film was not conceived in a vacuum. A public contest organized by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (ICH), overseen by a jury with high-level state participation, cleared the way for a prestige production by CIFESA, the studio most closely associated with Francoist historical epic. The designation of Interés Nacional and the project’s scale signaled more than entertainment; they functioned as policy. The British Christopher Columbus (MacDonald 1949) provided a foil, but the Spanish film’s wager was grander: to bind the regime’s present to an older sacred history and to rehearse that binding as pleasure.

This article makes three contributions: (1) it situates Hispanidad’s genealogy as transatlantic rather than exclusively Spanish; (2) it reads the post-1945 pivot as a strategic redeployment in which National-Catholicism launders authority while a politics of exception remains close at hand; and (3) it offers a doctrine→spectacle account of Alba de América, pairing doctrinal propositions—unity of faith and language; providence and chosenness; crusade and restoration; authority and obedience—with screen devices—voice-of-authority narration, allegorical blocking, ritualized scenes, and choral scoring. The aim is explanatory rather than moralistic: to show how legitimacy is felt as well as asserted.

2. Theoretical Framework: Political Theology, Exception, and Spectacle

Political theology names how authority borrows theological form and how spectacle popularizes that form. The framework is not meant to overrun the film reading; it is meant to discipline it. Following Agamben, I use “glory” to name the doxological apparatus—rites of acclaim that attach splendor to rule and stabilize obedience3. By clarifying what I mean by decision, exception, secularization, representation, glory, and acclamation, I can show more precisely how the film converts doctrinal propositions into cinematic devices without inflating theory or diluting history.

A brief terminological clarification. In modern debates the phrase names at least two strands. First, following Carl Schmitt, it is an analytic of decision and exception: modern state concepts persist as secularized theological ones. Second, in a distinct but intersecting register, Jürgen Moltmann’s (1993) Theology of Hope helped give “Political Theology” a Christian programmatic sense within post-war theological discussions. I adopt the term diagnostically rather than confessionally—but I acknowledge the theological reception (including in Spain) that kept the phrase in circulation in the 1960s–70s, alongside popular echoes in cultural production (e.g., José Luis Martín Vigil). This clarifies usage without collapsing Schmitt’s juridico-conceptual thesis into confessional claims.

To account for how these devices reach spectators, the analysis draws on Althusser’s concept of ideological interpellation and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Althusser is useful not as a totalizing theory but as a description of how subjects are hailed by institutional forms—school, Church, and, in Spain, cinema—so that obedience can be lived as recognition rather than constraint. Hall complements this with a communication model in which texts encode a “preferred reading,” yet audiences decode through negotiated or oppositional positions; meaning is structured, not guaranteed. Read together, these frameworks explain how Alba de América can stage unity, providence, and authority with strong cues while still relying on pedagogy—timing, repetition, redundancy—rather than on logical entailment. Uptake is never automatic: authority calls subjects into position, but reception is a practical labor within structured cues4.

A starting point is Schmitt’s lapidary sentence—“sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2005, p. 5)—because it locates the seat of authority at the point where rules are suspended and order is refounded. The exception is not a mere anomaly; it is the moment when the system reveals who can interrupt it and still claim to guarantee it. From this starting point, follow two corollaries central to my reading. First, the ‘normal situation’ that the law presupposes is not found; it is produced by the very act of decision that declares normality restored. Second, the exception is to jurisprudence what the miracle is to theology: a breach that confirms the rule by showing who can suspend it. Francoism’s postwar turn recasts political judgment as a species of miracle, and the cinema supplies the liturgy that makes that miracle legible to a mass public. On screen, the exception registers as a breach through which authority refounds order.

Schmitt’s secularization thesis provides the second pillar of the framework. Modern state concepts, he argues, are secularized theological concepts. Sovereignty resembles divine omnipotence limited by covenant; providence maps onto an idea of historical vocation; glory and honor migrate into modern forms of representation. Whether or not one endorses Schmitt’s conservative politics, the analytical claim has purchase in the Spanish case. The regime presents unity as a gift of faith, hierarchy as a natural order, and mission as a transhistorical calling; the film then supplies figures—Pinzón’s intradiegetic narration and homiletic dialogue, ritual, allegorical blocking—through which those abstractions can be sensed as obvious. The value of the thesis is not to flatten differences but to track how sacred grammar survives in new clothes.

Because Schmitt has been misread as a prophet of pure decision, the emphasis here falls on institutions and representation. In his preface and throughout his vocabulary, Schmitt distinguishes among normativist, decisionist, and institutional ways of thinking about law and politics. Decisionism concentrates power in the person who decides; institutional thinking (offices, calendars, routines) distributes power through durable forms; normativism defers to rule. Francoism’s post–1945 rhetoric does not annihilate institutions; it baptizes them. Corporatist bodies, Church offices, and pedagogical organs reappear as the scene where decision is rehearsed, blessed, and made routine. The cinema is one such organ, a quasi–institution that stabilizes obedience by turning it into recognition. Decision is dramatized; the institution is applauded; the norm is declared restored.

A media–historical strand complements the juridical thread. Walter Benjamin’s account of the aestheticization of politics clarifies how modern regimes translate doctrine into feeling at mass scale. In the shift from argument to arrangement, exhibition value displaces proof: pageantry, choral scoring, and ceremonial blocking organize perception so that authority is sensed as obvious. Benjamin’s point is not that technology merely manipulates; it is that reproducible forms—rhythm, refrain, montage—recode persuasion as habit. In Alba de América, monumentality works against scarcity to produce compensatory pleasure; liturgical cadences and choreographed acclaim make “normality” enjoyable and therefore durable. The grandeur here is not a luxury accessory but an engine for assent, the medium through which a politics of exception is made to feel like continuity.

This framework would be incomplete without specifying how these abstract terms touch the screen. Two analytical operators from Spanish criticism are used here: presentización: the deliberate arrangement of historical episodes so that the past explains and authorizes the present, and double redundancy (voice tells what the image also shows): a narrational pedagogy in which the film both tells and shows the same lesson. When the narrator instructs and the image confirms, identification with authority becomes intuitive rather than a matter of argument. These operators do not replace close reading; they name the mechanics by which close reading registers ideological work.

With these tools in hand, a doctrine → spectacle matrix is applied selectively, at moments where doctrine and device clearly touch. Doctrinal propositions—unity of faith and language; providence and chosenness; crusade and restoration; authority and obedience—are paired with recurrent devices: intradiegetic narration, liturgical cadence, allegorical montage, hierarchical blocking, and choreographed acclamation. The aim is to show how a theological grammar becomes cinematic common sense, how slogans turn into cues, and how cues sediment into a world that feels already given.

Two clarifications about scope will prevent the framework from becoming a Procrustean bed. First, political theology is here a diagnostic, not a creed. It helps explain why National–Catholicism could present itself as moderation after 1945 while intensifying the regime’s claim to decide who belongs and who does not5. The language of providence and mission is not a mere ornament; it is a warrant. Second, spectacle is not reduced to manipulation. The craft of Alba de América matters to the analysis because craft enables belief. Monumental sets, choral scoring, and ceremonial tableaux are not mere decorations. They are the means by which a politics of exception is made to look like continuity, and by which obedience is made to feel like recognition.

A number of studies have described Hispanidad as a retrospective utopia and as a “magical theology of history” that relocates sovereignty in sacred time (Juan-Navarro 2006, p. 393; Morodo 1985, p. 148). The framework adopted here retains that characterization while specifying the translation process it relies on who declares a crisis concluded; which devices render that declaration providential; and how voice, gesture, and ritual distribute the decision across the film. The emphasis falls on the craft through which political theologies persist. With this compact grammar, the case study advances without theoretical detours, and the conclusion can point beyond Spain without forced analogies.

In practice, I apply political theology in three steps: first, locate appeals to exception or providence and linked claims about unity, mission, and hierarchy; second, trace how institutions and rituals—on screen and around it—stage and stabilize those claims; third, show how specific filmic devices convert them into felt normality through cadence, blocking, montage, voice, and music. Read sequence by sequence, this means tracking how unity of faith and language surfaces in voice-of-authority narration, choral scoring, and chanted dialogue; how providence and chosenness are rendered through presentización, miracle-like breaches, and providential montage; how crusade and restoration take shape in ceremonial tableaux, allegorical blocking, and processional rhythm; and how authority and obedience are naturalized by hierarchical staging, scenes of acclamation, and homiletic dialogue.

3. Genealogy of Hispanidad: From Cultural Modernization to Imperial Myth

This section explores the concept of Hispanidad from a more focused perspective, emphasizing its reactionary aspects. Rather than viewing Hispanidad as a timeless belief or a mere slogan, I consider it a repertoire—a collection of images, priorities, and hierarchies that can be directed in various ways depending on who is guiding it and for what purpose. The discussion will transition from the modernista period, where this repertoire is framed as a cultural pedagogy, to the Spanish conservative reinterpretation, which presents it as a theology of history, and finally to its consolidation under Franco, where this theology provides a usable past for an authoritarian regime. While the connections between these phases may seem seamless, that is precisely the aspect I examine.

Spanish American modernismo first gave the vocabulary its elegance and reach. José Enrique Rodó’s (1967) Ariel and Rubén Darío’s essays, stories, and poems defended a ‘Latin’ spiritual aristocracy against what they perceived as the flattening utilitarianism of the United States and the weary positivism of late–nineteenth–century Europe. Their program was unapologetically elitist and pedagogical: culture should refine appetites, literature should educate taste, and intellectuals should lead public life. Politically, that program could bend to either side. It is this very bendability—the insistence on form before policy—that will later make the vocabulary available to Spanish conservatives intent on turning culture into order.

Spanish intellectuals writing after 1898 absorbed and redirected that modernista sensibility. Ángel Ganivet’s elegies for national vocation, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s Catholic historicism, and, above all, Ramiro de Maeztu’s (1931) Defensa de la Hispanidad staged a decisive shift: anti-utilitarianism becomes anti–liberalism, spiritual aristocracy becomes confessional hierarchy, and the transatlantic bond becomes proof of a providential design. Where Rodó still hopes to civilize modernity, Maeztu commits to restoring an order whose legitimacy lies in its sacred pedigree. It is a subtle pivot in tone—less anxiety about North American influence, more confidence in Spain’s civilizing mission—but it carries a large political charge.

This operates as a “retrospective utopia” (Juan-Navarro 2006, p. 392): an imagined community that looks backward to an irrecoverable empire to stabilize a troubled present. The phrase names two operations at once. First, the past is condensed into an idiom of unity—one faith, one language, one vocation—that compresses all the ambiguity of history into a litany. Second, that litany is offered as a remedy for modern disarray: what institutions cannot enforce, memory will persuade. The effectiveness of the formula does not lie in its historical precision but in its portability. Once you can say ‘Hispanidad’ and have it mean dignity, hierarchy, mission, and language all at once, you have a key you can fit into many locks.

Francoism will take that key and cut a master. After 1945 the regime badly needs a story that is at once venerable and exportable. Fascist grandstanding no longer purchases goodwill abroad; revolutionary rhetoric no longer reads as youthful at home. National–Catholicism supplies the theological grammar, and Hispanidad supplies the idiom through which that grammar can be spoken in public without sounding like a police order. The point is not that the regime invented the concept. The point is that it discovered how to make the concept do more work, more efficiently, and for more audiences. The trick lies in institutionalization: take a flexible repertoire and saturate the school, the parish, the parade, the newsreel, and the cinema with it.

Two institutional hubs illustrate the process. The first is the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (ICH), established to choreograph cultural diplomacy across the Atlantic6. Scholarships, exhibitions, book series, and public contests (including the call that paved the way for a prestige Columbus film) turned Hispanidad into a calendar and an address book. The second is the set of policies that governed screen culture: censorship, subsidy, and the coveted label ‘Interés Nacional,’ a designation that accelerated approvals and channeled material advantages to select productions7. Between the ICH and the film bureaucracy, Hispanidad acquired both a foreign policy and a house style.

Newsreels and radio supplied the weekly pulse. NO–DO’s ceremonial montage of processions, inaugurations, and diplomatic visits gave the impression of a polity moving in step under a providential banner8. Acción Católica and the Sección Femenina9 rehearsed the gendered pedagogy that made the home an annex of the parish: the ideal mother as guardian of faith and language, the ideal daughter as future educator of the nation. In schools and catechism, the lesson condensed to a slogan I analyze in the film: “a single faith in a single language.” What reads as benign unity is, in practice, a demand for confession and obedience; in minority–language regions, it is also a language policy by other means10.

To understand the reactionary flavor of this consolidation, we must linger on its enemies. Francoism’s anti–masonic, anti–semitic, and anti–communist imaginary offered a capacious matrix into which any dissent could be poure. The ‘judeo–masónico–comunista’ cliché is not a mere verbal tic; it is a dramaturgy of suspicion that justifies surveillance as vigilance and coercion as purification. Hispanidad helps by pre–sorting the moral universe: if Catholic Spain is the keeper of civilization, then enemies are not political rivals but metaphysical saboteurs. The logic is primitive and ingenious at once, and its theatricality suits a regime that must rule by ceremony as much as by law.

Diplomatically, the concept served as a bridge from isolation to selective partnership. Cultural agreements across Spanish America, carefully publicized visits, and the cultivation of sympathetic elites made Hispanidad look like a transatlantic common sense. The point was less to dominate than to curate: to appear as the senior member in a family bound by language and faith. That pose also traveled domestically, where Hispanidad rebranded the Civil War as a crusade and the ensuing decades as a patient restoration of order. The civilizational register softened the edges of police power; the liturgical register dignified discipline as ritual.

I do not want to erase the concept’s intellectual thickness in the rush to describe its uses. Menéndez Pelayo’s erudition is real; Maeztu’s argument is not reducible to a pamphlet; the Spanish American interlocutors were neither ventriloquists’ dummies nor proto–Francoists. What I want to stress is the mechanism of refunction. A repertoire of cultural hierarchy and spiritual mission can be plugged into very different state projects. Under Francoism, it is plugged into a political theology of exception that maps unity onto obedience and vocation onto sovereignty. That mapping is what my film analysis will trace at the level of the device: how voice, gesture, and rhythm sell metaphysics in pieces.

If we look at the holiday calendar, we can see how the repertoire becomes furniture. The ‘Fiesta de la Raza’ refashioned as Día de la Hispanidad, the processions that fold Marian devotion into national pride, the school pageants that rehearse a shared discovery—each event shores up the same chain of equivalences. None of this is accidental. It is a pedagogy of belonging that proceeds by repetition rather than proof. The brilliance of the move lies in its modesty: it does not ask the public to learn a catechism; it asks them to enjoy one.

It is worth pausing on language. The unity imagined by Hispanidad is not only theological; it is philological. Castilian is treated as the transparent medium of civilization, and the empire is remembered as a school where faith travels with grammar. The claim can seem harmless until we place it against the actual linguistic map of Spain and the Americas. Then its disciplining force becomes visible. A reactionary Hispanidad does not need to ban other tongues to make its point; it needs only to treat them as picturesque, local, or quaint. By elevating one language to sacramental status, it assigns others to folklore.

Because I later focus on a single film, a final connective thread may be useful here. Francoist screen culture did not start with Alba de América, and it did not end with it. From Raza to the historical epics that consolidated CIFESA’s brand, the regime learned how to turn budget and prestige into catechesis. What distinguishes the Columbus film is not that it preaches; it is that it becomes the hinge where diplomatic Hispanidad, domestic National–Catholicism, and a Schmittian sense of decision meet. In an age of scarcity, the regime invested in magnificence; in an age of distrust, it invested in unanimity. The film collects those investments and makes them legible.

All this may sound obvious to readers who lived with these archives; it did not feel obvious to the audiences for whom the routines were designed. That is why I insist on describing the mechanics rather than only the claims. Hispanidad under Francoism worked because it felt like common sense: a way to be Spanish that reconciled humiliation and pride, defeat and vocation, parish and state. It also had the advantage of being portable. You could pray it, teach it, film it, and export it. That range—from liturgy to cinema to diplomacy—is the range made concrete in the following section.

4. After 1945: From Filofascism to National–Catholicism

The hinge year is 1945, but the mechanism is older. By the time the Axis collapsed, the Franco regime had already tested the limits of revolutionary rhetoric at home and learned the costs of ideological intimacy abroad. Defeat was not simply military and diplomatic; it was semiotic. A language of youth, mobilization, and “new state” no longer bought credit with neighbors or comfort with citizens. In that moment of exposure, the regime did not renounce authority; it recalibrated it. After 1945, a politics built on exception presented itself as restoration; Hispanidad supplied the repertoire that made the shift legible.

The first move was lexical. “Revolution” yields to “tradition,” “movement” to “nation,” and the future-tense bravado of filofascism gives way to a rhetoric of guardianship. The state discovers that dignity travels better than novelty and that Catholic respectability can do diplomatic work that Falangist defiance never could. This is not conversion; it is redeployment. The conceptual grammar remains decisionist: the sovereign continues to decide who belongs and who does not, who is enemy and who is ward. But the stagecraft changes. The decision now appears as the restoration of a pre-political order, an act of care rather than a seizure of the future.

If the grammar was decisionist, the diagram was institutional. The postwar coalition pruned Falangist maximalism and elevated ecclesial and conservative technocratic sectors without dissolving the authoritarian core. The cabinet reshuffles, the rise of Catholic ministries, and the rhetorical embrace of “order and moral reconstruction” gave the impression of a state returning to itself. In Schmittian terms, the regime decided that a “normal situation” existed and then manufactured its signs: a calmer press, a more ceremonial public sphere, an insistence that Spain had always been what it must now be—guardian of Catholic civilization. The lesson is not subtle, and it was not meant to be.

Internationally, the rebrand is legible in three dates that still anchor the regime’s own chronicle: the Concordat with the Holy See (1953), the Madrid Agreements with the United States (1953), and UN admission (1955). The sequence narrates normality by catechism—deal, alliance, recognition—and scripts the registers in which the postwar state later projects them: at once antiquity and outreach, pedigree and network.

The domestic context explains why the idiom mattered. Ration cards did not disappear until 1952; scarcity and surveillance were facts of everyday life. Under those conditions an appeal to providential election did consolatory work. It promised that privation was not mere misfortune but a kind of spiritual training; it promised that austerity could be honorable. In sermons and schools the equivalence chain I named earlier—Spain/Catholicism/Civilization—reappeared as pastoral counsel. In parades and newsreels it reappeared as choreography. The regime sold consolation in the language of vocation. The sale did not require everyone to believe it; it required enough people to act as if they did.

This pedagogical constellation exemplifies what Althusser called ideological state apparatuses: Church, school, and cinema operate in concert to reproduce obedience across everyday routines. Yet, as Hall reminds us, preferred meanings are not passively absorbed; they are encoded with authority but negotiated in practice. That tension is legible in period programming and reception: ritual and repetition scaffold a preferred reading, while local publics recode it as consolation, habit, or mere entertainment. What matters for my argument is not unanimity but the routinization of recognition—the point at which enough viewers behave as if the film’s hierarchy were common sense.

Institutionally Hispanidad acquired an address and a calendar. The Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (ICH) became the node through which scholarships, exchanges, exhibitions, and public contests traversed the Atlantic. The office did not dictate taste; it curated it. Its mission was to make belonging visible by attaching concrete offerings—funds, travel, prestige—to a civilizational premise. The film contest that smoothed the path for a prestige Columbus film was part of that strategy. It announced that Spain could speak in a major key, and that its preferred subject matter—Catholic discovery, imperial origin, mother-tongue—could still organize a market and a mood.

Screen policy supplied the other half of the architecture. Censorship and subsidy set the limits and incentives; the designation “Interés Nacional” signaled that certain productions would be escorted through the approval maze and granted material advantages. It is tempting to describe this as mere heavy-handedness, but the policy was more cunning than that. It rewarded films that could do several jobs at once: placate moral guardians, demonstrate industrial competence, travel to Spanish American screens, and domesticate the past as a usable present. In that sense the bureaucracy behaved not only as a gatekeeper but as a dramaturg. It shaped a repertoire and then called the repertoire “national.”

This is the scene in which Alba de América will be made to matter. The irritation with the British Christopher Columbus (MacDonald 1949) was real enough, but irritation is the wrong scale for what followed. As Rafael de España shows, the film—aimed at Anglophone markets and fronted by Fredric March—casts Spaniards in a hostile key: Ferdinand is mocked in a palace episode skirting sexual misconduct and humiliation; Bobadilla appears as Colón’s vindictive nemesis; Pinzón as a turncoat; and Juan de la Cosa as incompetent. In the postwar climate of anti-Franco prejudice, Madrid read this not as a misjudgment but as an affront (de España 2010, pp. 76–79). With no leverage to block distribution, the government turned to the remedy already outlined above: it activated the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica mechanism—formalized in the BOE call of 19 April 1950—to commission a prestige reply, which would become Alba de América.

The Spanish response is not a counter-film; it is a counter–world. Instead of arguing with a foreign portrayal, the production builds a liturgical universe in which Spain appears only as it should have been, and perhaps always was. Isabella becomes the sacramental image of sovereignty; Columbus becomes vocation made flesh; the New World becomes the stage where providence and hierarchy reconcile. That is not a quarrel with a neighbor; it is a catechesis for home use.

To clarify the Francoist redeployment of Hispanidad without rehearsing the entire diplomatic record, a word about enemies is in order. The regime’s conjuration of a “judeo–masónico–comunista” plot worked as a solvent of difference11: varied dissent was reduced to a single metaphysical sabotage. Within that dramaturgy, conservatives appear as guardians, priests as physicians, and the state as steward of a fragile but sacred normality. Hispanidad helps the plot by preassigning roles. If Catholic Spain keeps civilization, then the Jew, the Mason, and the Communist—at once literal and allegorical figures—keep its negation. The list could expand or contract as needed; the ritual remained the same.

None of this makes the post-1945 shift a mere propaganda turn. It was a structural reorganization of the way authority was imagined and distributed. The Falangist fantasy of permanent mobilization gives way to a slower pedagogy of obedience; the jackboot yields to the procession. We should resist the urge to moralize the swap as simple hypocrisy. It was an effective solution to a compound problem: how to stabilize a dictatorship after the fall of its ideological cousins; how to woo foreign partners without conceding the monopoly of decision; how to persuade citizens that discipline was a domestic virtue rather than a police requirement. Hispanidad—and the forms it subsidized—offered a way to do all three at once.

I have called this elsewhere a “teología mágica de la historia”: a recoding of political time such that the present appears as the fulfillment of an older design. The word “magical” is not an insult; it is a description of effect. In the film sequences where Isabella speaks as if in trance, or where a cross is planted as if it changed the ontological status of a shore, we see how the exception–miracle analogy becomes a habit of perception. Decision takes on the glow of destiny. Obedience borrows the dignity of ritual. In an economy of scarcity those glows and dignities do real work.

The price of the redeployment was steep but manageable. It required the regime to accept a narrower heroic vocabulary, to trade youthful futurity for aged legitimacy, to share the stage with ecclesial actors whose authority could be both useful and inconvenient. The benefit was measurable: international rehabilitation, domestic pacification, and a story that could be told without the embarrassment of yesterday’s allies. If I seem clinical about this, it is because the record suggests competence more than brilliance. The system updated itself. It found an older music that audiences knew how to hum.

A politics of exception cannot live on decrees; it must be felt. After 1945, obedience is staged as recognition and restoration as relief. The devices named next—Pinzón’s intradiegetic narration and homiletic dialogue, processional ritual, allegorical blocking, choral/acclamatory scoring—show how a redeployed Hispanidad becomes a popular technology of rule.

5. Cinema as Political Theology: Alba de América (1951)—Allegory, Device, and Afterlives

Between 1952 and 1955, Spain moved from scarcity to staged normality: rationing ended (1952), the 1953 Concordat and Madrid Agreements sanctified and aligned the regime, and UN admission in 1955 completed the diplomatic catechism. In that setting, Alba de América is not just a historical flagship; it is a device for making order feel restored. The same bureaucracy that labeled projects of Interés Nacional and the ICH network that curated Hispanidad abroad shaped this film’s brief: ceremony over adventure, recognition over surprise. What follows reads the film’s devices—voice-of-authority, liturgical cadence, allegorical blocking, choreographed acclaim—against that timeline to show how doctrine becomes feeling.

Because very few readers will have seen Juan de Orduña’s Alba de América, I take care here to dwell on what the film is doing without drifting into plot paraphrase. The emphasis is on allegorical work: how figures, settings, and rhythms carry a political theology consistent with the post-1945 redeployment of Hispanidad reconstructed earlier. What follows treats allegory as an instrument rather than a code; less a puzzle to be solved than a way of organizing perception so that authority appears obvious and continuity feels earned. The reading proceeds device by device, sequence by sequence, keeping the theoretical tools of §II in view and anchoring them in the historical conjuncture that made this kind of film both urgent to the state and, as reception showed, not especially welcome to paying audiences.

The film announces its program immediately in the credits. The caravels glide like processional floats, underscored by a choral anthem (“Gloria in Excelsis Deo”)12 whose harmonic language leans toward the liturgical (Figure 1). Advisors listed from the Navy, the academy, and the Church certify tone and purpose before any character speaks. Already we have Schmitt’s secularization in miniature: sovereignty is presented with sacerdotal ceremony, and a historical enterprise is framed as a quasi-sacrament. The credits are not ornament; they are a prolepsis. They instruct the spectator to expect revelation rather than debate, procession rather than argument, and confirmation rather than discovery13.

Columbus appears less as a mercenary navigator than as a figure of decision: a man who names a crisis (Europe’s waning routes, Spain’s missed destiny) and embodies the capacity to resolve it. In narrative terms, this is conventional heroization; in political-theological terms, it assigns him the sovereign accent—he will decide the exception. Isabella, by contrast, is not primarily a tactical partner; she is filmed as Marian sovereignty, a queen whose stillness and measured assent provide the sacramental confirmation that converts decision into order. The pairing is not gendered sentimentality; it is a theory of rule: vocation initiated by the leader, legitimacy conferred by the sacred crown. Ferdinand’s function, often reduced in modern biopics, is here institutional ballast—the polity as guild of offices that crystallize around the queen’s assent.

The court’s quarrels are staged as domestic allegory for the regime’s ‘families.’ Clerical counsel, military prudence, and a courtier’s factional suspicion jostle for the monarch’s attention, mapping onto the postwar balance among Church, Army, and the trimmed Falange. External antagonists—French intriguer, Portuguese rival—supply safe foreign foils; internal ‘aliens’—the Jewish financier, the cosmopolitan skeptic—translate the period’s conspiratorial imaginary into legible faces. This is not historical reportage; it is dramaturgy. The point is to display a politics that distinguishes friends from enemies without having to say so, and to naturalize a hierarchy in which dissent is not disagreement but spiritual error.

La Rábida supplies the film’s most explicit conversion of miracle into exception (Figure 2). The cloistered mise-en-scène—stone, shadow, measured steps—slows time so that counsel can feel like benediction. The friars are not merely advisers; they curate the temporality in which the decision will make sense. In Schmitt’s terms, this is the theological analog of sovereignty’s decision: the moment that cannot be derived from rule but that guarantees the rule. The scene’s success lies in its pace. It teaches viewers how to breathe the film’s time, and that breath will return on the open sea when the mutiny tests whether decision can carry faith without visible proof.

At sea, the allegory tightens. The ship is a micro-polity; the ocean a tribunal; weather the verdict. Mutiny is the exception staged as crisis: the rules of ordinary navigation do not suffice, and a decision must be made that cannot appeal to the very norms it will restore. The film deploys what Francisco Llinás called ‘double redundancy’ (Llinás 1998, p. 108): the narrating authority frames dissent, and the image confirms its framing. The pedagogy is duplicative by design. It ensures that when land appears, the discovery vindicates not only seamanship but the moral grammar that equates fidelity with leadership and obedience with recognition. Decision becomes relief, and relief becomes proof.

This redundancy functions like Althusserian interpellation—the film hails the spectator twice into alignment with sovereign authority—while anticipating Hall’s observation that preferred readings require scaffolding but never guarantee assent. Arrival is handled as rite rather than encounter. We are spared the awkwardness of first contact and given instead a choreography of proclamation, prayer, and the planting of a cross. The substitution is programmatic. The camera prefers consecration to relation and liturgy to negotiation. Benjamin’s aestheticization thesis helps name the transaction: doctrine becomes cadence; cadence becomes pleasure. The audience is asked to enjoy recognition—the sense that an ancient vocation has found its stage—without dwelling on the fact that the stage is populated by others who are not asked to speak.

The film’s treatment of language makes the sacramental program plain. ‘Una sola fe en una sola lengua’ is not merely spoken; it is scored and staged. The baptismal scene crowns the formula (Figure 3): faith and Castilian arrive as a single benediction, and the cross’s shadow literally joins the two. Without issuing a decree, the film has allocated sonic and symbolic prestige to one language, training the ear to accept linguistic unity as sacred normality. The backflow into policy is easy to infer: school and sermon can later speak with an aura the film has already rehearsed.

Throughout, the voyage is figured as purgation and the sea as trial—a medieval moral technology updated for mid-century pedagogy. The ship-of-state allegory that Rafael de España (2010) tracks in La nao capitana (Rey 1947) reappears here under a heavier confessional weight: the captain’s charisma is pious vocation, the crew’s doubts are temptations, and landfall is revelation. What changes from the earlier cycle is not the allegorical kit but the diplomatic brief. In the age of the ICH and the Concordat, the film must speak simultaneously to domestic scarcity and to transatlantic audiences, which it does by equating unity with care and discovery with recognition.

Mise-en-scène codifies the hierarchy the allegory claims. Verticals are for sovereignty—balconies, thrones, masts; horizontals for obedience—decks, plazas, nave aisles. Processions punctuate the cadence, and choruses sacralize transitions. Agamben’s ‘glory’ is not a metaphor here; it is a camera direction. Acclamation is engineered as much as narrated. The crowd is taught where to stand and how to look so that sovereignty can appear as the thing that has always already gathered them.

Villains are organized to do interpretive labor. The French intriguer consolidates the foreign threat; the Jewish financier shoulders a confessional anxiety that the regime had already inflated in its anti-masonic imaginary; the bureaucratic skeptic models the sin of worldly prudence. None of this is subtle, but none of it is gratuitous. The clarity serves a pedagogy that wants dissent to look like error and order like care. The enemies are not to be debated; they are to be recognized, and the film furnishes the cues of that recognition.

The iconography of Isabella binds the intimate to the imperial. She is posed as Marian monarchy: chaste, composed, and recognizing rather than inventing the future. The Sección Femenina’s domestic catechesis echoes in this portrayal, projecting household virtues onto imperial administration. The effect is to argue by resemblance: a well-ordered home and a well-ordered empire are the same image at different scales. In both, hierarchy promises care and care justifies hierarchy.

Given this program, the film’s relative inattention to adventure and romance is not accidental. The exploration template of Anglo-American adventure cinema—danger, improvisation, erotic subplot—is displaced by ceremony, catechesis, and allegory. This choice clarifies both the state’s expectation and the audience’s disappointment. The regime wanted a liturgy of legitimation; the public, conditioned by imports and by genre memory, wanted velocity and courtship. The mismatch helps explain why a project so lavishly sponsored could register at the box office as heavy and dull14.

The record bears the point out. Despite privileged approvals and intensive publicity, the film’s box-office performance was a bluff: respectable initial bookings followed by fatigue, with critics remarking on its didactic weight and thin romance. If we borrow Stuart Hall’s language, the preferred reading—obedience as recognition, unity as consolation—was encoded with care, but negotiated and oppositional readings abounded. The state learned from the tepid receipts what its bureaucracy had already suspected: the function was less to convert spectators than to coordinate institutions. That is why Alba migrated so smoothly from theaters to NO-DO excerpts and, later, to the state-controlled TVE programming grid, where it became virtually ritual on 12 October, the Día de la Hispanidad, through the end of Franco. Cinemas balked; television obliged.

Paratexts keep the catechesis intact where the feature alone could not. Posters quote the anthem’s cadence in typographic form; press releases harvest language from sermons and officials; and the premiere is wrapped in its own liturgy of arrivals, speeches, and ecclesial attendance. The event makes the film truer than its narrative can. Even viewers who never sat through the feature learned to recognize its tableaux through newsreel repetition and anniversary scheduling. The film was less commercial property than a repertoire for ceremonies distributed across venues.

A few devices merit closer description because they carry more weight than an outline suggests. First, the oracular narrator (Pinzón) is not merely a storyteller; he is a guarantor. His voice does for time what Isabella’s gesture does for decision: it certifies. The rhythm of his sentences—declarative, retrospective, confident—removes contingency from the voyage and installs pedagogy in its place. Second, the film’s use of thresholds—doors, gangways, chapel arches—literalizes the passage from uncertainty to order. Characters cross from one light to another as if moving between states of political being. Third, the score’s choral entries do not simply decorate; they legislate. They arrive at moments of recognition to lift perception into consent, teaching the body to assent even when the mind might be restless.

Presentización—arranging the past to authorize the present—operates not only at the level of plot but within the edit. Time is telescoped to favor recognitions over negotiations. We leap past the messy terms of patronage and finance to dwell on sacramental tokens: a rosary in hand, a glance read as confirmation, a cross aligned with the horizon. The effect is not ignorance but pedagogy. The film trains spectators to look for signs of chosenness rather than for the procedures of agreement, and in doing, so it harmonizes with the regime’s claim that a normal situation has been restored by providential design.

Even the film’s fascination with craft—sails rigged, maps unfurled, timbers caulked—feeds the allegory. Labor is filmed as obedience given grace by purpose. No guild turbulence, no bargaining; the workshop is a chapel of effort. In a Spain marked by rationing and scarcity, this sublimation of toil promises dignity where material reward was thin. Cinematic technique thus sustains a pastoral economy: discipline as consolation, patience as virtue, utility as worship.

Diplomatic allegory runs in parallel. The ICH imprint and the careful citation of advisers in the credits curates an export aesthetic: a Spain that speaks in a major key to a family defined by language and faith. The allegory doubles as policy.15 While the Concordat and US agreements rebuilt Spain’s position, the film offered a gallery of images through which that position could be felt rather than argued. If the world would not buy Spanish goods at scale, it could be invited to buy Spanish memory. The regime needed that invitation to sound inevitable; the film supplies the accent.

Why allegory, and why so declarative? Partly for medium—historical epics invite emblem and tableau. Partly for censorship—allegory can declare what discourse would have to hedge. But mostly for pedagogy: allegory reduces ambiguity by doubling. Every character stands for an argument and the argument returns to bless the character. The round-trip bestows inevitability. In a postwar regime eager to rename exception as normality, that inevitability was the prize.

Much of this effect depends on the camera’s pedagogy of looking. The film gives viewers practice in the gaze that the regime itself will later presume. It lingers on Isabella’s pauses so that assent feels like the restoration of harmony; it frames Columbus’s horizon-fixated stare so that perseverance reads as proof of vocation; it rehearses the crowd’s acclamation so that unanimity looks like the most human of responses. The lesson is not that sovereignty is rational; it is that sovereignty is recognizable. Once recognizable, it can be enjoyed. Once enjoyed, it can be remembered as custom.

Seen from the cinema ledger, Alba failed; seen from the pedagogy ledger, it endured. Theaters did not love it; television ritualized it. The annual October 12 broadcasts on state-controlled TV turned the film into a civic sacramental, an audiovisual Mass for the Día de la Hispanidad. That ritualization explains why the feature could be both a flop and a fixture. Box office measures appetite; ceremony measures regime need. The latter outlasted the former until the dictatorship’s end.

If I step back from the detail, a structural image emerges that dovetails with Section 2. Decision is staged as a miracle; representation as recognition; acclamation as proof. Allegory, far from being a dated technique, is the hinge that lets these moves travel between doctrine and spectacle. The film’s heaviness—its preference for rite over romance, cadence over velocity—was not a miscalculation so much as an index of purpose. Alba de América was built to be exemplary, not loved. In the terms of this article, exemplary meant teachable: a grammar of legitimation cut in images, sung in choruses, and reissued on a calendar. If that grammar bored mid-century audiences, it also taught them what obedience should feel like. That feeling—recognition without argument—was the regime’s real treasure, and the film remains its clearest reliquary.

6. From Doctrine to Spectacle—And Back

What begins as a one-way translation—doctrine flowing outward into image and ritual—quickly turns reciprocal. Spectacle does not merely illustrate doctrine; it coaches it, giving maxims a cadence and furnishing institutions with reusable scenes and sounds. That reciprocity matters because it explains why a political theology outlives a premiere: once a lesson acquires rhythm, it can be reissued across sermons, school routines, newsreels, and commemorations without announcing itself as repetition.

Schmitt’s first axiom anchors the loop. The exception is not only a juridical breach; on screen, it takes the form of a felt interruption that allows a decision to read as rescue. In Alba de América, the mutiny supplies the breach, landfall supplies the rescue, and the narrator supplies certification. Suspense resolves into relief, and relief returns as proof. Once that sequence is learned as experience, it travels lightly: “order restored” in a newsreel, “prudence vindicated” in a column, “trial and grace” in a homily. The maxim returns carrying the memory of how it felt.

The secularization thesis clarifies why Catholic imagery bears so much of this load without sounding antiquarian. If modern state concepts are secularized theological ones, it is natural that decision, order, and vocation are staged as epiphany, liturgy, and mission. The miracle/exception analogy becomes a staging manual: the camera modulates expectation, the score consecrates transitions, and ritual pauses confer authority. La Rábida’s counsel, Isabella’s composed recognitions, and the cross at landfall crystallize the sequence—discernment, confirmation, consecration—each gesture claiming to be history while doing theological work.

Agamben’s reminder about “glory” fills in the administrative afterlife. Acclamation is not a verdict but a technology; it attaches splendor to rule and makes sovereignty feel older than any single act. The prestige epic renders glory reproducible: bodies are arranged into unanimity, icons are posed for recognition, and the camera gathers both into tableaux that look like memory. When the balcony or reviewing stand reappears, the after-images help the scene read as continuity rather than improvisation.

Benjamin guards against reducing all this to manipulation. Pleasure is not a concession; it is a strategy for durability. Choral writing makes doctrine breathable; monumental scale turns scarcity into reassurance; pacing supplies the relief of form in a life of queues and permits. Enjoyment does not erase coercion, and craft does not absolve intent, but they explain why certain messages persist. A line in a pamphlet can be forgotten; a cadence that resolves as sails enter frame is hard to shake, and the next motto arrives with that cadence attached.

The institutional diagram completes the loop. Decision provides drama; institutions supply calendar and venue; habit gives it back as norm. Church, ICH, censorship, and schools distribute the film’s lessons as events—feasts, contests, approvals, pageants—so that what is decided in a script is rehearsed in procession and then taught as ordinary. Here, interpellation operates in a modest key: narration hails the audience as the “we” for whom the vocation is already true; mise-en-scène positions the gaze as if consent had been given; music clinches the invitation. Encoding is firm, but decoding remains practical: Alba’s mixed box office does not cancel its function; it clarifies it. Coordination across venues, not conversion at the ticket counter, is the measure of success.

Language belongs to this media economy rather than only to policy. If unity is to be felt as obvious, one language must carry the timbre of sacrament while others acquire the patina of folklore. Film helps allocate those timbres: the voice of authority speaks Castilian without comment; the prayer under a cross is Castilian; the anthem closes in harmonies associated with sacred music. No decree is necessary; the ear has been trained, and later policy borrows that training without naming it.16

Friction does appear—social (scarcity and fear), regional (local memories and languages), generational (audiences aging out of the thrill). The apparatus hedges by varying scale: epic for prestige, newsreel for routine, school ceremony for intimacy. When one register tires, another carries the refrain. That portability is visible in later commemorations: the 1992 Quincentenary could not speak National-Catholicism, yet it solved a related problem—how to make a claim legible and pleasant to busy, skeptical publics—by returning to curation, pageantry, soundtrack. The choreography persists even when the story shifts.17

The pay-off for criticism is methodological. Describing the loop requires staying with shots, phrases, and cadences. In Alba de América, decision is staged as epiphany, representation as recognition, acclamation as proof. Those large claims stand or fall on small details: a pause before royal assent, a choral entrance, a cut that spares negotiation and delivers proclamation. Naming those moments shows how authority becomes ordinary—and how the ordinary, rehearsed long enough, walks back into law as “custom.” Political theologies endure when they are enjoyable: not frivolous, but relieving—companionship in scarcity and a story that makes obedience feel like care. Cinema learned to deliver that enjoyment efficiently; institutions learned to distribute it. Between those efficiencies, a cadence was born and taught to travel.

7. Conclusions: Spectacle’s Afterlives and the Work of Criticism

Hispanidad works less as a creed than as a repertoire that Francoism steered toward National-Catholic ends, and Alba de América shows how steering turns doctrine into habit. The film stages sovereign decision as epiphany, representation as recognition, and acclamation as proof; the result is a pedagogy that makes exceptional rule feel like custom. Its commercial reception was tepid, but in institutional life, the response was robust: Church, school, press, and diplomacy learned the film’s timing and redeployed it, with 12 October broadcasts ritualizing what ticket sales could not.

Two clarifications follow. First, the doctrine → spectacle → doctrine circuit does not presume passive audiences. Viewers negotiated the text, often finding its catechesis heavy, yet negotiation occurs within a choreography of cues repeated across venues and seasons. Second, to read Alba as political theology is not to reduce it to propaganda. Craft matters—thresholds that literalize passage from uncertainty to order, choral entries that legislate rather than decorate, iconography that binds intimate and imperial scales—because craft makes authority enjoyable. Enjoyment here means relief and belonging, not frivolity.

My vocabulary has been pragmatic. Schmitt names the center of gravity—exception and the production of a “normal situation,” together with a secularization thesis that explains why sacred grammar travels well into modern state rhetoric. Agamben names the aura that attaches to power through ceremony—glory and acclamation—while Benjamin keeps attention on the political work of form under mass conditions. Althusser and Hall keep the micro-mechanics honest: invitation is structured; uptake is worked. None of these frameworks decides the case; the film sets the limit of what they can explain. Their value is diagnostic: they help track how decisions masquerade as destiny, how institutions stabilize charisma as custom, and how media provide the rhythm that makes both feel ordinary.

The Spanish case is instructive because it is explicit about its exchange: discipline for dignity, scarcity for chosenness, hierarchy for care. The choreography is portable. Historical epics that soothe anxiety with curated memory, anniversary festivals that convert pedagogy into amusement, and public media that rehearse assent by remastering archival scenes all repeat the same logic. The point is neither nostalgia nor melodrama. It is a description of how authority learns to be felt—and remembered.

Methodologically, staying close to devices keeps abstractions accountable. Presentización names an editing habit that privileges recognition over negotiation; “double redundancy” names a narrational pedagogy that certifies lessons twice; mapping doctrine to screen—voice of authority, allegorical montage, hierarchical blocking, choreographed acclaim—requires that claims show up in shots and sequences. The moral stakes—coercion, exclusion, enemy-conjuration—remain visible because their staging is visible.

Limitations remain. The preference for rite over romance and cadence over adventure clashed with audience expectations trained by imports. Television, governed by the calendar rather than the market, masked that mismatch without removing it. A full account of Francoist cultural hegemony needs both ledgers: tickets and rituals. The latter outlasted the former, but the former keeps us honest about cost and resistance.

Two paths of inquiry open naturally. One concerns circulation: how stills, posters, and newsreel excerpts traveled relative to the feature, with what local edits or musical overlays. Another concerns reception beyond Spain: how Spanish American distributors selected or refused, and how Hispanidad was read in settings with different Catholic nationalisms. A third, closer to language policy, would trace how the film’s sacralization of Castilian aligned with post-war restrictions on Catalan, Basque, Galician, and other languages in school and broadcast. Each line tests the portability of the doctrine→spectacle cadence.

I close on a simple claim. To describe how a film turns doctrine into habit is not to absolve doctrine or demonize film. It is to take seriously the craft by which authority becomes ordinary and to recover our capacity to read that craft. Alba de América is not a forgotten masterpiece, but it remains a lucid manual. Reading it closely does not revive its charisma; it clarifies how charisma was manufactured and why its afterimages endure—for film and media studies, political theology, cultural diplomacy, and memory studies alike.