Songs for After a War

Made in 1971, Songs for After a War was banned by the highest authorities of the Francoist dictatorship, despite having passed censorship and even being classified as a film of Special Interest. When it was finally shown in 1977, it became a resounding success—the emblem of a necessary collective catharsis—and remained in theaters for months. Today, a digitized copy is housed in Room 206.11 of the Museo Reina Sofía, complementing the galleries dedicated to Picasso’s Guernica, the Spanish Civil War, and its historical context.

From well-known anthems to ballads, love songs, humorous tunes, film scores, and radio advertisements, more than thirty songs support and interact with an impressive montage of visual elements. Many of these songs were still familiar at the time of the film’s release and their enduring popularity and nostalgic patina contributed to the film’s generational anchoring and emotional resonance.

The film contains an immense amount of visual material that appears in the film: archival fragments from documentaries, advertisements, and fiction films alongside private and public photographs, magazine covers, comics, pages from newspaper, and other materials that defy easy classification, such as a printed funeral notice commemorating Mussolini’s death. These images, most of which appear on screen only briefly, establish relationships of contrast or harmony with the lyrics and emotional tone of the songs, while simultaneously generating themes that develop and intertwine with others throughout the film. In this way, the film creates a multifaceted and far from univocal discourse—emotive or detached, ironic or sorrowful—that invites multiple interpretations.

Among the themes that Songs for After a War gradually weaves together, we might focus, for example, on the condition of women in postwar times, or on children—victims who suffer but also dream. But also on the war itself, which seems to persist despite having officially ended, especially in the first part of the film, with memories of bombings, the violent erasure of Republican memory, ruins that refuse to disappear, tears, militaristic rhetoric, hunger, and the new war beyond Spain’s borders, whose course begins to partly reshape the national propaganda narrative. Above all, the film allows viewers to perceive the gradual construction of a collective imaginary in which inertia, resilience, imposition, and hope are all interwoven.

FGG