11 - Erotohistoriography, Temporal Drag and the Interstitial Spaces of Childhood in Spanish Cinema

Summary

In a series of films from the final years of the political regime of General Francisco Franco to the recent past, a child figure is seen to be the conduit for the exploration of the trauma and loss of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath of dictatorship in Spain. In films such as El espíritu de la colmena/ The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Víctor Erice, 1973), Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (dir. Carlos Saura, 1976), Secretos del corazón/Secrets of the Heart (dir. Montxo Armendáriz, 1997) and Pa negre/Black Bread (dir. Agustí Villalonga, 2010), children are figures of loss linking trauma, war and memory. As I noted in my book The Child in Spanish Cinema (2013), the returns through time to the motifs of child, trauma and memory are so marked that ‘it may make sense to speak of a new cine con niño, a genre in itself’ (Wright 2013: 101), a reference to the well-known cycle of child-centred films from the 1950s and ‘60s. In an article of 2016, Erin Hogan coined the term nuevo cine con niño to refer to this more recent cycle of child-centred films (Hogan 2016: 1).

Repeatedly, these films feature a scene where a child views adult erotic acts in a rendition of Freud's ‘primal scene’ (Freud 1992: 364). In Cría cuervos, for example, a little girl (Ana Torrent) witnesses her father's adulterous lovemaking and plots revenge on behalf of her terminally ill mother (Geraldine Chaplin). The scenario recalls the primal scene, but where for Freud the primal scene (whether real or imagined) involved love for the parent of the opposite sex and a death wish against the parent of the same sex, here the situation is reversed. Furthermore, with its striking central image where Ana refuses to look into the coffin of her dead father (Héctor Alterio), who is dressed in military uniform, the scene has been interpreted (by, for example, Smith 2011) as capturing a death wish against the dictator, General Franco, who was on his deathbed as filming took place. In addition, through the presence of Ana's mother as an apparition from the past, the film has been seen to highlight the context of intergenerational memory which connects in interesting ways to recent attempts to recuperate Spain's traumatic past as well as to national debates over ‘memory wars’ (Kim 2005: 69–84).