MLA Annual Convention 2027
Los Angeles, California | 7–10 January 2027

Cinema occupied a central place in the cultural imagination of Francoist Spain, where it was understood as one of the regime’s most powerful tools for ideological dissemination and moral regulation. Through a complex system of state subsidies, classifications of “national interest,” import quotas, dubbing policies, and multiple censorship boards, film production, exhibition, and reception were subject to intense political, religious, and economic control. Scripts required prior approval, completed films were subjected to cuts or enforced modifications, and foreign films were often radically altered through dubbing practices that reshaped meaning, ideology, and affect.

Censorship in Spanish cinema was not monolithic. It evolved across different stages of the dictatorship, from the early postwar period to the so-called segundo franquismo, and continued, in reconfigured forms, during the Transition and into democracy. Alongside overt state and ecclesiastical censorship, filmmakers, producers, translators, and exhibitors developed strategies of negotiation, economic self-censorship, double versions for domestic and international markets, and coded forms of resistance. These practices raise crucial questions about authorship, spectatorship, institutional power, and the afterlives of censored films in archives, restored versions, and contemporary critical reassessments.

This panel invites papers that examine censorship in Spanish cinema through case studies of films that were censored, altered, mutilated, dubbed, reclassified, or economically penalized during Francoism and beyond. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that engage with archival research, film analysis, cultural history, reception studies, etc.

• Institutional mechanisms of film censorship under Francoism
• The role of the Catholic Church and moral classification systems
• Economic censorship, subsidies, and the politics of funding
• Double versions, international cuts, and transnational circulation
• Self-censorship as creative strategy
• Censorship during the Transition and democratic Spain
• Recovery, restoration, and reassessment of censored films
• Spectatorship, border cinemas, and illicit viewing practices

Submission Guidelines
Please submit a 200-word abstract (in English or Spanish) for consideration.