El militar decimonónico en el cine español de nuestros días

If we made a survey about the qualities of the good soldier, many people would answer with qualifications such as bravery, courage, sacrifice, compaionship, disciplina. War cinema has contributed a lot to form that image of the military. However, on certain occasions, it is posible that this way of representing the armed men could have distorted reality, creating myths or discarding human feelings that the good soldier has to repress, sometimes, in an unnatural way. This paper aims to analyze the way in which cinema has transmitted the values and ways of thinking and acting of the Spanish military of the nineteenth century. For this, two films have been taken as a reference: 1898: Los últimos de Filipinas (2016) and Prim. El asesinato de la calle del Turco (2014). In both films the spectator is shown a type of military, daring, fearless, virile and honorable, but they also reflect othe types of characteristics that nobody would think of relating to the good soldier. This article studies how that nineteenth-century military image is transmitted and its correspondence with reality.