This presentation will focust on recent Spanish films that have explored repression during Franco's dictatorship, through the image of spaces where it took place. Starting out from films Aquí y N'Otro Tempu (Ramón Lluis Bande, 2014) and Elefantes (Carlos Balbuena, 2017) we will analyze how landscape and empty spaces have been used to fight against oblivion in recent Spanish documentary.
The misse-en-scene from these films share the same use of fixed shot. The absence of camera movement and the long duration of the takes over locations with historical relevance disrupts the temporality and its perception. On one hand, the pause of the movement allows the audience to focus the attention in the space, so that the spectator becomes a witness of the past but in the space of the present, as if they were the scene of an unsolved crime. On the other hand these fixed shots allow the filmmaker to establish a landmark that enables the confrontation between the viewer and the past through the absence of its presence or its remains.
By means of the use of fixed shot the emptiness and lack of image of an historical event becomes an key element to fulfill that absence in the historical narrative. Other visual work have reviewed Spain's recent history as El futuro (Los Hijos, 2103), Edificio España (Víctor Moreno, 2013), or the photographic work of Bleda y Rosas or Ana Teresa Ortega. Through all these works we could define an axle whose formal characteristics remark the use of the space as a tool to evoke forgotten parts of history, following tactics already recognizable in films such as Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955), Shoah (Claude Lanzmann,1985), and Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (Fausto Fornari, 1952) where the audience is placed as witness of the past.
This proposal explores these attempts to rewrite the traumatic moment of Spanish Civil War through the remains which are still mute and unmarked. But also attemps to dive into the process of reflection involved in writing history through cinema, in how images are able to operate as spaces of experience of a time far from the audience, confronted to a past wich image maight desapear.
Bibliography
Koselleck, R. 2018 Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (Cultural Memory in the Present) Stanford University Press.
Benjamin, W. 1940. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In: Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. Trans.by Harry Zohn. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York.
Deleuze, G. 1983. L'Image-mouvement. París.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002. L'Image survivante. Histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Paris.
