Dialogue with absence: The letter as a legacy of the traumatic past in the contemporary Spanish documentary

Identifier:  imarina:6185823

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/imarina6185823

Authors:  Quílez L; Araüna N

Abstract:
© 2019 Cineforum L'Atalante. All rights reserved. A recent trend in Spanish documentaries has been to recover the memory of a generation that is progressively disappearing. Notable among the filmmakers engaging in this practice, who in many cases were born since the Spanish transition to democracy, are those who use personal letters written by the victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship as a narrative focus. These letters are represented as legacies recovered by the filmmakers to establish an impossible dialogue with their deceased authors, a dialogue that allows them to delve into the familial and/or collective memory of a period marked by totalitarian terror and violence. Through an analysis of the films Pepe el andaluz [Pepe the Andalusian] (Alejandro Alvarado and Concha Barquero, 2012), The Great Flight (El gran vuelo, Carolina Astudillo, 2014) and Cartas a María {Letters to Maria] (Maite García Ribot, 2015), this article explores the subjectivities created by these epistolary dialogues and how they can shed light on certain blind spots in Spanish history.