TO DESCRIBE AND PRESCRIBE: THE SPANISH MOVIES ON THE CIVIL WAR AS FACTORY OF MEMORY. PROPOSAL OF AN INTERPRETIVE MODEL

Besides being a means of artistic expression and a flourishing cultural industry, cinema is a powerful tool to create imaginaries and collective memories. This article proposes a model of analysis that allows to evaluate and to compare the changing and event contradictory messages than on a historical phenomenon can launch the big screen. This methodology is applied on concrete case of the Spanish civil war and its consequences in the Spanish cinematography of fiction. The procedure reveals the double and simultaneous ability of the seventh arte, when it addresses historical themes, to describe the past and to prescribe attitudes in the present.