Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:41:18.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Spanish Past in Transnational Films. The ‘Otherlands’ of Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2014

Adriana J. Bergero
Adriana J. Bergero*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California Los Angeles, 5310 Rolfe Hall, Box 951532, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1532, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Translated by Chase Raymond

Based on the work of theoreticians prevalent in the field of Memory Studies (Rothberg, Nora, Radstone, Aguilar, Faber, de Diego, Gómez López-Quiñones and Labanyi), this article analyses the films The Devil Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth by the Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro as examples of a memory-formation that is deeply entrenched within Spain’s current political, legal and cultural debates on the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist dictatorship and the political immunity institutionalised by the Transition’s pact of silence. At the same time, as emerging from ‘otherlands’ of memory, Del Toro’s films are good examples of how multidirectional memories react to universal/transnational concerns about traumatic pasts and violations of human rights.

Type
Focus: Transnational Memory in the Hispanic World
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 632 - 641
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.M. Hirsch (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); A. Landberg (2004) The Prosthetic Memory (New York: Columbia University Press); S. Radstone (2011) What place is this? Transcultural memory and the location of memory studies. Parallax, 17(4), pp. 109–123, 110; M. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press).Google Scholar
2.Huyssen, A. (2002) En busca del futuro perdido (México: FCE), p. 161. All translations from Spanish texts are our own.Google Scholar
3.Nora, P. (1989) Between memory and History. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, 26, p. 8.Google Scholar
4.Faber, S. (2012) Raising the specter of ‘Argentinization’: the temptation of Spanish exceptionalism. In: L. Martín-Estudillo and N. Spadaccini (eds), Memory and its Discontent: Spanish Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century. Hispanic Issues On Line, 11, p. 129.Google Scholar
5.Smith, P. J. (2006) Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 56.Google Scholar
6.Thompson, M. (2007) Troubling postcards from the past. Intellect Quarterly, 5, p. 120.Google Scholar
7.Labanyi, J. (2007) Memory and modernity in democratic Spain: the difficulty of coming to terms with the Spanish Civil War. Poetics Today, 28(1), p. 94.Google Scholar
8.Aguilar, P. (2002) Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books), p. 150.Google Scholar
9.de Diego, E. (2012) Pact of silence. History, memory and melancholic oblivion in Spain (2001–2011). In: L. Martín-Estudillo and N. Spadaccini (eds), Memory and Its Discontents, Hispanic Issues On Line, 11, p. 198.Google Scholar
10.Clark, R. and McDonald, K. (2010) ‘A constant transit of finding’: fantasy as realization in Pan’s Labyrinth. In Children’s Literature in Education, 41, 52–63, p. 60.Google Scholar
11.Gómez López-Quiñones, A. (2012) A secret agreement: the historical memory debate and the limits of recognition. In: L. Martín-Estudillo and N. Spadaccini (eds), Memory and Its Discontents, Hispanic Issues On Line, 11, p. 104.Google Scholar
12.Zumalde Arregui, I. (2013) El laberinto del fauno. A propósito de la identidad nacional de las películas. Zer, 18–34, p. 208.Google Scholar
13.Díaz Coria Aguilar, S. (2013) La intertextualidad en una secuencia de El espíritu de la colmena de Víctor Erice. In: L. Zavala (ed.), Posibilidades del análisis cinematográfico (Toluca: UAEMéx), p. 39.Google Scholar
14.Baetens, J. (2011) ‘Transmedial aesthetics is ordinary’: some remarks on Victor Eirce’s. The Spirit of the Beehive. Kritika Kultura, 17, p. 61.Google Scholar
15.Ferrán, O. (2012) Memory’s discontent. In: L. Martín-Estudillo and N. Spadaccini (eds), Memory and Its Discontent: Spanish Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century. Hispanic Issues On Line, 11, p. 233.Google Scholar
16.Ramblando Minero, C. (2009) Re-Imaginando al Maquis: la guerrilla antifranquista en el cine español contemporáneo. In: A. Ribeiro de Menezes, R. Quance and A. Walsh (eds), Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea (Madrid: Verbum), pp. 181–197.Google Scholar