Madrid, June 1978. A sweltering heatwave is
matched by the tensions bubbling through
newspaper headlines. Nearly three years since
the death of dictator Francisco Franco, politicians
are intensely debating the new constitution at
the Palacio de las Cortes. Will the Left accept the
monarchy or demand a republic? Will the Right
accept abolishing the death penalty and omitting
any reference to the Catholic church? Will
regions such as the Basque Country and
Catalonia receive the sovereignty they demand?
Around the corner, people queue for the latest
hit film. Is it Grease, newly premiered in New
York and on its way to becoming a global
colossus? No. Spanish audiences won’t be
introduced to Danny, Sandy and the gang until
September. Today’s crowd awaits a much more
explicit celebration of cinematic sexuality: Las
eróticas vacaciones de Stela (Stela’s Erotic
Vacations).
Played by Azucena Hernández, the reigning Miss
Catalonia, Stela has returned from her strict
Catholic boarding school and is set on disrupting
this peaceful Castilian town. Unlike the
negotiators in the congress, Stela is not
diplomatic towards the guardians of Catholic
morality. She sexualises everything – even a
banister becomes an erotic toy as she slides
down in ecstasy. She seduces a priest, a maid
and her stepfather – she even flashes her own
mother.
Such films became possible after Spain abolished
censorship in December 1977. This was
monumental – it is hard to convey how much
censorship shaped public consciousness during
the dictatorship. It created such hunger for erotic
images that many made pilgrimages to France to
see Last Tango in Paris (1972), among other
films. Group tours of x-rated cinemas were even
organised.
Rated ‘S’ for sexual
In Franco’s day, some Spaniards believed the
world outside was freer than it was. When
audiences saw Rita Hayworth’s famous scene in
Gilda (1946), where she provocatively removes a
long white glove onstage, many in Spain
assumed she did a full striptease in the uncut
version.
Occasionally censorship even made things more
lurid. In Mogambo (1953), Spanish censors
changed the script to conceal the adulterous
relationship between Grace Kelly and Clark
Gable’s characters, turning Kelly’s husband into
her brother. When she later shares a bed with
him, they appear to be committing a much
greater sin.
Ending censorship gave free rein to what was
known as the destape, literally “the undressing”.
The “S” rating was created, allowing films with
soft porn elements to infiltrate the mainstream.
S-rated films were generally cheap and big
money makers. Stela’s Erotic Variations alone
sold 600,000 tickets, and was followed by other
great successes such as El mundo maravilloso del
sexo (The Marvellous World of Sex), Trampa
sexual (Sexual Trap) and La orgía (The Orgy).
The 17 S-rated films screened in 1978 probably
attracted more customers than the four million
people that went to see Grease.
Neither was the destape limited to cinema. The
magazine Interviú, formed in 1976, was creating
waves with revealing covers of famous actresses,
including a nude photo of Franco-era child star
Marisol – sadly without her permission.
In February 1978 another iconic photograph
appeared. It shows future Madrid mayor Enrique
Tierno Galván giving actress/stripper Susana
Estrada – star of El mundo maravilloso del sexo –
a prize for being the most popular actress of the
year. Her jacket has moved, revealing a breast,
while she smiles unconcerned. The picture
became an emblem of Spain’s transition to
democracy, showing it was much more than a
political process.
The S rating endured until 1983, when it was
replaced by the more permissive but more
marginalised X rating. Where the 1970s releases
often included good scripts and serious social
commentary, the destape was becoming more
purely gratuitous by the early 1980s.
Since then the genre has often been considered
an embarrassing footnote in Spanish cinema. But
that risks missing something important. As one
writer has put it , Stela, like other young S-rated
protagonists, “embodies the myriad ironies of the
transition to democracy, for she does not merely
awaken the village sexually, but reveals what
was always simmering under the surface of
franquista repression”.
Sex and nudity have been especially pervasive in
the nation’s cinema over the past four decades. A
recent book, Spanish Erotic Cinema , argues
convincingly that sensual pleasure on Spanish
screens is bound up with historical, political and
social issues.
Priests and politics
A good example is El sacerdote (The Priest),
another S-rated success during that sultry
summer of ‘78. It shows a priest torn between
conservative ideology and sexual desires,
awakened by a billboard of a woman in a bikini
and the steamy confessions of an unhappy
housewife. His inner turmoil reaches such a
frenzy that he eventually castrates himself.
Director Eloy de la Iglesia’s films are often
criticised for being heavily didactic. Yet some
argue that movies such as El sacerdote helped
broaden the moral horizons of the audience. In
October 1978, de la Iglesia premiered El diputado
(Confessions of a Congressman), one of many
films that featured gay characters and arguably
contributed to Spain’s widespread acceptance of
homosexuality.
The same summer also saw Bilbao , a landmark
in the genre by director Bigas Luna . His work
over the next two decades would blur erotic and
art-house cinema. Penélope Cruz and Javier
Bardem were launched to stardom in his 1992
send-up of Spanish stereotypes, Jamón jamon
(Ham Ham), where they famously make love
under one of the country’s emblematic bull-
shaped highway billboards.
More recently, the popular films Torremolinos 73
(2004), Los años desnudos (The Naked Years,
2008) and Kiki, el amor se hace (Quickie, Love is
So, 2016) all pay homage to the genre. In this
#MeToo era, many might prefer it was buried
instead. Yet in contrast with the female sexual
objects of the original destape, it has been argued
that the women in Kiki, for example, are “utterly
in control of their sexuality, well informed about
various practices, open-minded and confident in
their pursuit of their preferences and desires”.
The Spanish people approved today’s constitution
in the referendum of December 1978, founding a
political order that now appears in disarray. The
Catalan conflict is rooted in that constitution’s
negation of the right of Spanish regions to self-
determination. The former president, Mariano
Rajoy, was recently forced out of office over party
corruption.
Many now question the entire political culture
that was forged in the transition years after
dictatorship. If we consider the conscientious
undressing of old morals and sexual hang-ups
another of the founding acts of democratic Spain,
this parallel process is arguably in much better
health. To give just one example, Spain was one
of the first countries to legalise same-sex
marriage, preceded only by Holland and
Belgium. While the difficulties with the destape
are obvious, we should concede it has played an
important role in creating the culture we see
today.
