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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Deep Emotions, Poor Narratives: on the Iconography of the Retreat (La Retirada)

subject

description

The Spanish Civil War and the subsequent border crossing of the Republican population towards France in February 1939 generated a profusion of images of which only a few have become recognizable icons that represent the injustice performed by Franco's victorious army. However, most of these images have circulated without any historical context, thus becoming abstraction rather than historical realities. This article discusses the way the corpus of visual -mostly through film- representations of exile have been used and abused, how they have been 'migrating' from one media to another, and hence how they have changed their semantic value and have been use to support different ideological messages.