Marcelino pan y vino, a foundational film about masking political orphanhood

Abstract

Marcelino pan y vino (1954) directed by Hungarian Ladislao Vajda, with the stellar participation of Pablito Calvo in the role of Marcelino is based on a popular religious story whose written version is authored by José Maria Sánchez Silva (1952). This study will focus on film analysis including: gender role inversion by which friars are feminized in their maternal role; temporal ellipsis situating the story in 1808-14; Marcelino and his mystery of origin, among some of the most salient aspects of the film. Moreover, the study argues that the religious and political prejudices are masked in order to render a mythological origin of an orphan child as a way to deal with the trauma of the Spanish Civil War in which hundreds of children were left orphans. Finally, it will conclude relating the film to the monument of the “Valle de los Caidos†as another religious symbolic act promoting social reconciliation about a fratricidal conflict.