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Exile, cinema, fantasy: Imagining the democratic nation*

2005; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1463620042000336929

1469-9818

Helena López,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This is a revised version of the paper which I delivered in November 2003 at the “Hispanic Cinemas: the Local and the Global” conference (Institute of Romance Studies, University of London). I wish to thank Sabela Pita Babío and David Castro de Paz for their indispensable and generous help with documents. Special thanks to Mari Paz Balibrea, for her inspiring comments on a draft of this article, and for providing me with a copy of her forthcoming article “El paradigma exilio”. I am also grateful to Peter Anderson, David Clark, Paul Kennedy and Jesús Vega, for their remarks, and to José Castro de Paz and Sally Faulkner for having given me access to their respective works before they were published. I wish to mention just a few examples of this interest shown in the cultural industry, the media, academia and the political scene. From 17th September to the 28th October 2002, the Palacio de Cristal in the Parque del Retiro in Madrid hosted an exhibition, organised by the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, on the Republican exile of 1939. This event, which had a significant impact on the media and on public opinion, was accompanied by a very interesting catalogue (Ramírez, Admetlla and Barbadillo Ramírez Ana Dolores Admetlla Patricia Barbadillo coords Exilio Madrid Fundación Pablo Iglesias 2002 [Google Scholar]). Its inauguration also coincided with the broadcast on TVE, on the 22nd and 29th September 2002 of the documentary Exilio. As far as fiction literature is concerned, a curious phenomenon has been the success of sales of Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas since its publication in March 2001, followed in 2003 by the homonymous cinema version directed by David Trueba. Other novels which are worth enumerating are La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón, Las Trece rosas (2003) by Jesús Ferrero and, in particular, the trilogy on memory by Alfons Cervera comprising El color del crepúsculo (1995), Maquis (1997), which inspired Montxo Armendáriz's film El silencio roto (2001), and La noche inmóvil (1999). In view of its political impact, I should mention the work carried out by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica 20 Feb 2004 http://www.memoriahistorica.org [Google Scholar] since October 2000. Its task consists of searching for the remains of Republicans, executed by Francoist groups during the Civil War and the Dictatorship (around 30,000). The ARMH has filed a petition with the Working Group on Forced Disappearances of the UN requiring the Spanish state to organise the creation of a truth commission (See report in El País Semanal of August 11 2002). On the 28th January 2004, the TVE programme Documentos TV broadcast the documentary “Las fosas del olvido”. On the 1st December 2003, all the parliamentary groups, apart from the Partido Popular, paid tribute in the Congreso de los Diputados to the victims of Francoism. The conservative government denied the act institutional status as part of the 25th Anniversary of the Spanish Constitution. In his article Chirbes Chirbes Rafael “Quién se come a Max Aub.” El País, Babelia 31 May, 2003 4 5 [Google Scholar] writes : “Se cumplen cien años del nacimiento de Max Aub. Es hora de comérselo. En estos tiempos en los que poco importa lo que diga un libro, y lo que vale es lo que los medios de comunicación dicen de él, vamos a ver quién se lleva las mejores piezas del cadáver de Aub. Disputan los contendientes. Años atrás, José María Aznar (heredero directo del franquismo contra el que Aub luchó) inauguró una fundación en la que se recogen los documentos de una de las vidas más representativas de los avatares del siglo XX, y que avanza a toda máquina en las tareas de edición de su obra completa. Sin duda, Aznar buscaba apoyos para su segundo mandato. Por eso, el fugaz candidato socialdemócrata a la jefatura del Gobierno, Joaquín Almunia, encontró inmoral esa inauguración. Aub era de los nuestros, dijo el candidato, Aub era socialista. Pero, claro, los de Aub, los socialistas, habían estado 14 años (¿fueron 14? Pareció un siglo) en el poder y, durante todo ese tiempo, la obra de Aub no existió” (4). “[ … ] the invention of a democratic tradition in our political culture which is “new”, or different from that of previous ones (such as those of the nineteenth century or the first decades of the twentieth century), as a result of the trauma of civil war and the experience of Francoism” (Pérez Díaz 5). “El miedo a la repetición de un conflicto social violento, como el de 1936–39, suscitaba prudencia en una gran mayoría de los ciudadanos y de los miembros de las élites políticas” (Colomer 174). See Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido, as well as Aguilar and Humlebaek. See Chaput and Maurice Chaput Marie-Claude Jacques Maurice eds. Espagne XX siècle. Histoire et Mémoire Paris Université de Paris X-Nanterre 2001 [Google Scholar], Chaput and Gomez Chaput Marie-Claude Jacques Maurice Thomas Gomez eds. Histoire et Mémoire de la Seconde République Espagnole Paris Université de Paris X-Nanterre 2002 [Google Scholar], Desfor Edles Desfor Edles Laura Symbol and ritual in the new Spain. The Transition to Democracy after Franco Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1998 [Google Scholar], Moreiras Moreiras Cristina “¿La agonía de Franco? Políticas culturales de la memoria en la democracia.” Intransiciones. Crítica de la cultura española Ed. Eduardo Subirats Madrid Biblioteca Nueva 2002 99 131 (Also reprinted in Cultura herida. Literatura y cine en la España democrática. Madrid: Libertarias, 2002. 27–58) [Google Scholar], and Resina Resina Joan Ramon ed Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy Amsterdam Rodopi 2000 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. This seems to be the idea put forward by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone in their introduction to the collective volume Contested Pasts. The politics of memory: “But we do not have ways of conceiving of the person that would allow for the transmission of memories from one to another by spiritual means; there must be institutional forms that mediate the transmission of memory, and it seems they often do so in ways that reinforce existing models of the relation between self and social, or self and other. Concepts such as cultural memory, social memory, public memory, important as they are in detaching the idea of memory from its fixation on the individual, seem unstable, too capacious and imprecise to allow for much clarity in all this” (11). Along the lines of theoretical reflection suggested by Hodgkin and Radstone micro-political studies covering the politics of memory for the post-Franco period are still very scarce; see, however, the interesting approaches of Carrie Hamilton Hamilton Carrie “Memories of violence in interviews with Basque nationalist women.” Contested Pasts. The Politics of Memory Eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone London Routledge 2003 120 135 [Google Scholar] and Steven Marsh Marsh Steven “Insinuating Spaces: Memories of a Madrid Neighbourhood During the Spanish Transition.” Political Transitions. Politics and Cultures Ed. Paul Gready London Pluto Press 2003 198 211 [Google Scholar]. “The institutional effort has been paralleled by a collective cultural effort, partly conscious and partly unconscious, to forget some fragments of Spain's history while keeping alive or reinterpreting others. The Francoist past has been not so much denounced as silenced” (Pérez Díaz 22). In the light of this argument the traditional feminist conception of the unconscious as a site of resistance is quite problematic. As Butler says: “The double aspect of subjection appears to lead to a vicious circle: the agency of the subject appears to be an effect of its subordination” (12). See also Laplanche and Pontalis Laplanche J Pontalis J-B The Language of Psycho-Analysis London The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis 1973 [Google Scholar]: “Such defences are themselves inseparably bound up with the primary function of phantasy, namely the mise-en-scène of desire- a mise-en-scène in which what is prohibited (l'interdit) is always present in the actual formation of the wish” (318). About the structuring function of fantasy within the political unconscious, Fredric Jameson Jameson Fredric A Singular Modernity. Essay on the ontology of the present London Verso 2002 [Google Scholar] has written: “It is not a distinction between fantasy and some objective reality but rather a fantasy or protonarrative structure which is a vehicle for our experience of the real” (The political unconscious 48). The cinematic repertoire, which has dealt with the Spanish Republican exile, is wider than might appear at first sight. Amongst others: En un rincón de España (1948) by Jerónimo Mihura, Rostro al mar (1951) by Carlos Serrano de Osma, Aeropuerto (1953) by Luis Lucía, La guerre est finie (1966) by Alain Resnais, El amor del capitán Brando (1974) and El Nido (1980) by Jaime de Armiñán, El corazón del bosque (1978) by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Vivir mañana (1983) by Nino Quevedo, Golfo de Vizcaya (1985) by Javier Rebollo, Los paraísos perdidos (1985) by Basilio Martín Patino, Días de humo (1988) by Antxon Eceiza, El mar y el tiempo (1989) by Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Después del sueño (1992) by Mario Camus, Los años oscuros (1993) by Arantxa Lazcano, En la ciudad sin límites (2002) by Antonio Hernández. See Kinder 280–286. He collaborates in the shooting, connected to “Teleproducciones”, of Raíces (1953) by Benito Alazraki, Torero (1956) by Carlos Velo, Nazarín (1958) by Luis Buñuel and Sonatas (1959) by Juan Antonio Bardem. Two episodes filmed by García Ascot, at the request of the director of the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematic Industry, made up, with a third episode directed by Jorge Fraga, the film Cuba 58 (1962) (Gubern 174–175). He is also the author of the short Remedios Varo (1966) and of the film El viaje (1976) (Castro de Paz “La ventana”). Ediciones El Equilibrista, created in 1986 by Diego García Elío, son of María Luisa Elío and of Jomi García Ascot, together with Gonzalo and Rodrigo García Barchana, published these biographical notes in 1995, in collaboration with the Mexican Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, under the title Cuaderno de apuntes. In an interview with Casimiro Torreiro, Basilio Martín Patino comments on the consideration of Nueve cartas a Berta, subsequent even to a film like La tía Tula (1963) by Miguel Picazo, as a Manifest for the NCE: “La tía Tula sigue siendo la gran película: a Miguel le salió redonda. Es un melodrama de estilo clásico, que no necesita de atrevimientos como los que yo ensayé en Nueve cartas a Berta. Atrevimientos, dicho sea de paso, que no hice porque sí, sino porque creía que eran expresivamente interesantes. Yo tenía a Ricardo Muñoz Suay de ayudante y, al rodar algunas secuencias, por ejemplo en el Casino de Salamanca, obligué a los actores a mirar a la cámara. Él me decía que era una tontería, que no lo podría montar. Pero a mí no me importaba; al fin y al cabo, ese mirar fijamente al espectador lo habían realizado ya Velázquez o Tiziano en sus cuadros, y a mí me parece de una eficacia extraordinaria. Yo proponía un juego de otro tipo. Pero no me parece que ello dé para lo de Manifiesto” (315). “[ … ] the New Spanish Cinema, a term coined by the critic Juan Francisco de Lasa and soon promoted by the magazine ‘Nuestro Cine’, which became the movement's voice” (Molina Foix 18). To the question “¿Érais conscientes de que el estado, a través de García Escudero y de su legislación, os utilizaba, o crees que era una cuestión de mutua conveniencia?,” Martín Patino replies: “Pienso que en aquella guerra, no sé si declarada, la calificación no era la de ser o no utilizados. Cada uno sobrevivía como podía de acuerdo con sus luces o con sus ganas de luchar. ¿Tú crees que fui utilizado por García Escudero? Pues bueno. A mí me hubiera gustado haber podido utilizarle a él, sin escrúpulo alguno. Pero no debí saber hacerlo. O lo hice incorrectamente. Ahí están los resultados, con sus limitaciones y con sus cicatrices. Lo terrible es que tuviéramos que pasar por tales irracionalidades. ¿Es que el estado de cosas por el que hay que mercadear ahora no es en otros muchos aspectos mucho más irracional?” (312). Note, as Sally Faulkner says, Lorenzo's fiancée does not have a name. Huxley's title Brave New World has been translated into Spanish as Un mundo feliz. See also Joan Ramon Resina analysis of Los paraísos perdidos (1985) by Martín Patino (83–125). Same solution in El mar y el tiempo (1989) by Fernando Fernán Gómez. “¿Quién se acuerda hoy [1969] de la Hispanidad? ¿O de los mil otros monstruos falangistas? Hasta el nombre de José Antonio se ha vuelto ceniza. Ni Franco, siquiera” (Aub, La gallina ciega 524) “[ … ] la prisa de esta España por tomar al fin el tren de la modernidad burguesa europea, sumándose así al incremento de lo que Nicol ha llamado “la razón de fuerza mayor” (La reforma de la filosofía, 1980), razón calculadora que “se desentiende de los fines” y que permite, es verdad, modernizar el país y desarrollar una economía escindida de la justicia” (Sánchez Vázquez 128).