The Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance

In its analysis of the work of independent Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella from 1970 to the present day, this article seeks to engage with the politics of signification and virtuality. Its broad surveying sweep interrogates questions of origin or identity, particularly with regard to national identity, and does so by focusing on the split, the caesura, that emerges in Portabella’s cinema between cultural heritage and genealogy, which permits a poetics of the political image. Its discussion first addresses questions of representation before moving on to issues of fragmented national and supranational space in a context of cultural memory.