El Cuerpo Erótico de la Actriz Bajo los Fascismos: España, Italia, Alemania (1939-1945)

The women who are the subject of this book were the most important female stars of the Spanish, Italian and German cinematographies, during the years of the Second World War (1939-1945), in which the new totalitarian regime in Spain coexists with the German Nazism and Italian Fascism. In the three dictatorships, censorship exerted a severe control not only on political content, but also on eroticism and sexuality. The feminine "stars" of the fascism worked in connivance, more or less explicit, with the ideology of the states in which they developed their filmography, but their body spoke (from the images) offering messages often contradictory with the prevailing morality. This book proposes a study of the gestures of these bodies, and questions the underlying tension between servile femininity and liberated femininity, between denied sexuality and erotic affirmation. Throughout its pages, the relationship between acting and erotic imaginary is revealed in the filmographies of the Argentine Empire, Estrellita Castro, Ana Mariscal, Conchita Montenegro, Conchita Montes, Mercedes Vecino and Amparo Rivelles for Spanish cinematography; Clara Calamai, Luisa Ferida, Anna Magnani, Isa Miranda, Assia Noris and Alida Valli in the Italian context, and Zarah Leander, Marika Rökk and Kristina Söderbaum for the German case. (Publisher)