THE RECUPERATION OF MEMORY IN REGIONAL AND NATIONAL TELEVISION DOCUMENTARIES: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ELS FOSSES DEL SILENCI (2003) AND LAS FOSAS DEL OLVIDO (2004)
2010; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14636204.2010.517405
ISSN1469-9818
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Memoria de España met with intense controversy while it was being shot due to the conservative views of its director, historian Fernando García de Cortázar. As a result, representatives of Basque and Galician nationalist parties expressed concern about the lack of a pluralist view of Spanish history (El País, December 3, 2003). When the series was introduced to the press, its director, as well as the president of RTVE Juan Menor and the president of TVE José Antonio Sánchez, responded to the accusations by stressing that more than 200 historians had been involved in the making of the 27-episode series. They also noted that the purpose of the program was to provide a public service and to teach as well as entertain (El País, February 3, 2004). 2. The series features a total of 13 documentaries produced by film-makers from Spain, Austria, France, Switzerland, and the United States. One of them had been made for cinematic release, Javier Corcuera's La guerrilla de la memoria (2001); two others, originally produced by TV3 in Catalan, are included in their Castilian translation, Armengou and Belis's Los niños perdidos del franquismo (2002) and El convoy de los 927 (2004); the remaining ten, which had never been screened before, include Santa Cruz por ejemplo (Günter Schwaiger and Hermann Peseckas 2005), La mala muerte (Jose Manuel Martín and Fidel Cordero 2003/2004), La columna de los ocho mil (Ángel Hernández García, Antonio Navarro, Fernando Ramos, Francisco Freire 2005), Presos del silencio (Mariano Agudo and Eduardo Montero 2004), Los héroes nunca mueren (Jan Arnold 2004), Muerte en El Valle (Christina Hardt 1996), España-Última esperanza. Apuntes de una odisea (Karin Helml and Hermann Peseckas 2006), Una inmensa prisión (Carlos Ceacero and Guillermo Carnero Rosell 2006), Los alzados de Palma (David Baute and Cirilo Leal 2006), and La memoria es vaga (Katie Halper 2004). These ten documentaries are for sale in a DVD pack, as advertised in the series website (http://imagenescontraelolvido.com/), which also contains information about the documentaries, the film-makers and past and future screenings. 3. I will be using the Castilian version of Els fosses del silenci distributed by Vernal Media in 2005 and marketed in two DVDs as part of the series "Documentales históricos". The series is sponsored by TV3 and Enciclopèdia Catalana. 4. The objectives of 30 minuts is clearly stated on their website: "No hi ha, en principi, cap limitació sobre la temàtica que s'aborda en el programa, però, en general, es busquen temes rics en imatge, d'actualitat, amb contingut social i amb un criteri ampli per explicar un aspecte desconegut o nou d'uns fets." Likewise, the philosophy of Documentos TV is explained as follows: "Los proyectos de producción propia de DOCUMENTOS TV se plantean buscando ópticas diferentes. Parten de una investigación exhaustiva basada en un estudio riguroso de la información disponible y se desarrollan buscando, mediante entrevistas a protagonistas, testigos, personas implicadas y expertos, datos novedosos, aspectos desconocidos, ángulos nunca abordados de un asunto." 5. Els fosses del silenci, broadcast on March 2 and 16, 2003, garnered unexpectedly high ratings. The first part had a 17% share, representing almost 500,000 households, and the second, 25%, close to 700,000 households (data provided by TV3 in an email to the author). 6. In 2003, the double DVD of Els fosses del silenci was included with the purchase of the popular historical magazine Sàpiens as part of their "Col·lecció els millors documentals històrics", in the now common marketing practice in Spain of issuing free gifts with magazines to increase sales. In 2005, Vernal Media of Barcelona distributed the double DVD commercially in both Castilian and Catalan as part of the series "Documentales históricos". Why was this particular documentary considered an enticement to buy the magazine and how should we understand the widespread distribution of television documentaries dealing with the recuperation of memory? 7. Gina Herrmann compares the narrative structure of Els fosses del silenci to judicial procedures in her 2009 essay. 8. Armengou presented a paper entitled "Investigative Journalism as a Weapon for Recovering Historical Memory" at "The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain" colloquium held at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University (November 10–11, 2006). 9. Furthermore, new technical resources permit more complex and expensive productions that merit study. As Paul Julian Smith states in Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodóvar, Spanish television deserves to be valued more highly by both critics and the general population (12; 162). Smith's book is the very first to be exclusively devoted to Spanish television shows. In additional, he has edited a special issue of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies entitled 'New Approaches to Spanish Television' (Volume 8, issue 1, 2007). Barcelona-based publishing house Gedisa has a series on Television Studies. See also López, Cueto Asín, and George. 10. See note 1. 11. The PSOE government 2006 proyecto de ley excludes the demands of civic organizations for public funding to cover the expenses of exhumations. 12. Recent years have produced a voluminous body of writing on memory, much of it in relation to twentieth-century European history. Worthy of mention are Paloma Aguilar Fernández's Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil española, Henri Rousso's Vichy, l'événement, la mémoire, l'histoire, Régine Robin's La mémoire saturé, and Susan Suleiman's Crises of Memory and the Second World War. For memory studies in contemporary Spain, see the special issue of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (Volume 9, issue 2, 2008) edited by Jo Labanyi, as well as Jerez-Farrán and Amago. 13. The PSOE government's 2006 proyecto de ley initially denied the demands of Izquierda Unida and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya for annulment of the "juicios sumarísimos" during the war and postwar period. On April 18, the Socialist Party and Izquierda Unida agreed to declare the summary trials illegal, but Esquerra Republicana refused to sign the agreement because it did not annul individual sentences. The government ultimately declared that the annulment was a purely legal decision and therefore fell outside the jurisdiction of executive power. For more information about this debate as well as the revised sections of the proyecto de ley see "PSOE e IU-ICV dan un vuelco total a la Ley de Memoria y declaran ilegítimos los juicios de Franco" (El País, April 20, 2007). 14. We need only recall Javier Cercas's immensely popular novel Soldados de Salamina (2001), whose forty-something protagonist-narrator embarks on the difficult task of locating several of the few remaining survivors of the civil war. This fictional character's passionate search reflects a very real interest 15. División Azul consisted of volunteers to fight with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, but it was always officially a "private" band of volunteers. Although the Franco dictatorship officially remained neutral in World War II, that did not prevent the División Azul from having a heroes' welcome on their return. See Paul Preston's Franco, (546–63). 16. Santos Juliá (2006) provides plenty of evidence against the so-called "desmemoria histórica" (27–78). 17. The most reliable research estimates that there were 150,000 victims of Francoist repression and 57,000 victims of Republican repression (Juliá 407–12). 18. See notes 10 and 12. 19. Carlos Castilla del Pino is one of Spain's best-known psychiatrists, and a Communist, who treated certain victims of the Francoist repression or their children who suffered psychological disturbances as a result. In the reportage he relays how two of his relatives were taken from their house and killed by Anarchists during the war. His testimony makes the important point that indiscriminate killing took place within the Republican side as well. 20. Ricard Vinyes Ribas, a professor at the University of Barcelona and a long-time collaborator of Armengou and Belis's, maintains that emotional manipulation is lamentably evident in some of their works. Remembering his role in the creative struggles at the time Els nens perduts del franquisme was being written, he claims that the others chose more sensationalist terms such as "experimentos" ["experiments"] that enable the audience to emotionally connect the activity of psychiatrist Vallejo Nágera to the Nazis' horrific experiments with prisoners, disregarding his own insistence on the more neutral and accurate phrase "investigaciones psiquiátricas" ["psychiatric research"]. Ultimately, he thinks that the film-makers made "concesiones demagógicas" ["demagogic concessions"] (e-mail to the author). The migration of Holocaust Studies terminology to Spanish Civil War memory studies is the focus of my 2010 essay. 21. I am indebted to Melissa González for her invaluable editing assistance.
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