Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America's Southern Cone

8. Popular Filmic Narratives and the Spanish Transition

144 u 8 Popular Filmic Narratives and the Spanish Transition Germán Labrador Méndez Is There Something Really Missing? It is commonplace for contemporary Cultural Studies to address the Spanish transition to democracy’s public representation and visibility in terms of memory and amnesia. Teresa Vilarós has explained in psychoanalytical terms the possibility of the emergence of a mono culture which would assure the repression of any representation of the period; were there to be any, it would have an “ill” symbolic form. This follows a tendency according to which “repressed elements turn out to be implemented.” Moreover, this Lacanian formulation conceives of any anomaly in discursive logics in the form of a lack-existence of references to Franco’s regime which are embodied in the person of Franco himself—taken to be the expression of a superior metonymy. The above-mentioned formulation, characterized by its powerful conceptual nature, prevailed in much of the criticism following the one by Vilarós. These works, written according to different theoretical approaches, aimed at placing the issue of amnesia at the centre of their analyses—to the extent that some of them include this idea in their titles. Alberto Medina’s book, which deals with the “exorcism exerted upon memory,” with the idea of an unhealed POPULAR FILMIC NARRATIVES AND THE SPANISH TRANSITION 145 mourning and with an ill rite of passage, is a good example; his work corrupts both the young democracy’s aesthetics and its politics. In this case, the metaphor is taken from the crypt in the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), a place where the essence of Franco’s regime is still preserved. Even if the regime has fallen into oblivion, this does not mean that its symbolism has disappeared . There are other works which stress the need to build a theory of amnesia in order to interpret Spain’s contemporary culture: for example, Cristina Moreiras’s and J. Francisco Colmeiro’s, both of which place “historical memory” at the center of the issue of “collective identity.” It should be noticed that this conception is highly linked to certain types of political discourses and citizens: those who champion “historical memory.” It is them who, in the last decade, have highlighted the need to revise in a critical way (i.e. in terms of political violence and social costs) the relations among history, institutions and society. These discourses aim at demanding the creation of new institutional stories about the past. These kinds of stories should judge in democratic terms the two most significant periods of Franco’s regime (the Civil War and the transition to democracy). In this way, stories about the Civil War and the repression would be involved with stories about the transition to democracy. This is linked to the aspiration of establishing a republican family tree about democratic institutions that can be used so as to put an end to the notion of a transitional space that counts as zero in time. The reason is that the lack of previous history gives way ex-nihilo to a completely new political culture which is free of moral or political implications with regard to its own past. The abovementioned academic discourses—be they built on the same wavelength or rather on a dialectical opposition, be they subordinated to each other or rather correlated—favor, due to their conceptual formulations, the emergence of such kind of historical languages. The advantage of these kinds of historical narratives is that they provide a satisfying response to certain discursive anomalies created during the transition and during the first part of the democracy. They offer an explanation for the interruptions and dysfunctions that arise between these two periods. The above mentioned scholars have dealt with this issue according to a series of interpretative theories which provide a more or less political, conscious and aesthetic response to an initial forgetfulness; an amnesia which short-circuits any representation about Franco’s regime and about the democracy. However, the construction of an omnipresent amnesia, to which these scholars refer constantly, may be objectified in relation to the linguistic and iconographic forms used in the documents of the period. It is necessary to highlight that there exist discursive continuities that emerge from the very historical 146 GERMÁN LABRADOR MÉNDEZ framework on which these narratives are based. Having said this, it is possible to state that these kinds of...