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The entry into Barcelona of the Nationalist troops in January 1939 and the taking over of official information in the city by the Director of the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda, the poet Dionisio Ridruejo , meant the end of the style of information dissemination established by the democratic government. Ridruejo replaced the journalist Jaume Miravitlles, who throughout the war headed the Comissariat de Propaganda, the official organ of the autonomous government of Catalonia. This paper attempts to reconstruct and analyse the final efforts of official republican propaganda in Catalonia, and contrasts them with the propaganda of occupied Barcelona, which, in nationalist terminology, had just been ‘liberated’. We will analyse how the end of the Civil War represents the replacement of propaganda carried out by professionals in persuasion by an alternative supervised, and, often dictated, by the military. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the death of the dictator, Spanish cinema began to offer a series of films committed to portraying the Civil War. These narratives often selected characters from the Republican side—civilians or combatants—underscoring their suffering and the violence that characterized this era. Yet, it could be asked whether these productions genuinely attempt to rehabilitate the Republicans, who previously had been so vilified. In contrast to the films made during the dictatorship, which were based on simplified and mythical representations, do these new stories succeed in creating new myths? This paper sets out to examine what has changed and what has not in representations of the Civil War in film productions from the transition to democracy onwards. In this way, we can analyse how aspects of the Francoist myth-making persist in certain films which retain obvious links to the cinema of the dictatorship. It also explores how the representation of the war evolves in five films dealing with two Republican myths: the siege of Madrid and the defence of Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]