Black Waters on the Silver Screen: Franco-era Extractivism in Las aguas bajan negras (1948)

Abstract: This article analyzes filmic depictions of the human and environmental impact of the Asturian coal industry during the Franco dictatorship in José Luis Sáenz de Heredia's Las aguas bajan negras (1948). Approaching the understudied film through an ecocritical lens, I consider the slowly violent effects of coal mining for the sake of a progress predicated upon the destruction of Asturian resources, lands, and people under Franco. The film establishes Asturias as a sacrifice zone, in which the region is called upon to sacrifice itself for the greater benefit of the Spanish nation and discursively redeem its unspoken revolutionary past. It preemptively silences concerns surrounding the environmental degradation of the region and the human cost of industrialization, figuring them as the cost of a necessary, inevitable modernization project. Even as the film visually evidences these impacts, it discursively endorses a capitalist growth mentality that prizes progress and profit above all else. Through brief comparisons with the canonical novel upon which the film is based and a 1962 documentary, I trace a genealogy of Francoist extractivism in Asturias, revealing continuous demands on the lands, minerals, and people of the region.