Little is known about Miguel Spiguel (1921-1975), one of the most prolific directors and producers of Portuguese tourism films in the 1960s. Born in Turkey of Russian and Austrian descent, Spiguel arrived in Portugal during the Second World War. He began his film career in the mid-1950s as an assistant director, but was soon making his own films, specialising in travelogues about Portugal and the Portuguese colonies. These films were commissioned or bought by the SNI and the AGC/ AGU, the state propaganda organs in Portugal and the colonies, and had wide distribution at home and abroad. After the 1974 revolution, Spiguel was dismissed for his association with the regime, whose values and mores resonated in the themes and style of his films. For his supporters, however, he was just an entrepreneurial filmmaker who understood the film industry and tried to make the most of it. Drawing on oral history interviews and untapped private archival materials, this paper unearths some of the travel and filmmaking practices of this filmmaker in order to address the vexed question of agency in a dictatorial context. I argue that Spiguel’s travelogues are imbued with the regime’s understanding of tourism as propaganda, but they also reflect his involvement in the fast-disseminating field of commercial travel and leisure practices, and, more generally, the changes that were taking place in the 1960s in Portuguese cinema, tourism and politics. Finally, I offer some thoughts on how social sciences methods were mobilized to build this case study.

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Miguel Spiguel (1921-1975); tourism film; Portugal; Estado Novo; film practices