The Past Is a Staging: Postmemory and Identity in the Documentary and Current Spanish TV Fiction

Abstract

The relationship between historical and personal memory has always been a controversial and not peaceful issue. Historians, narratology experts and even neuroscientists discuss the best way to access the traumatic past that supposes events like the Spanish Civil War or Franco dictatorship in Spain. The audiovisual documentary production about these issues has experienced a boom in recent times as a result of an increasing interest in recovering the memory of the older survivors. It has been a legitimate attempt to rewrite chapters that some pretended to be closed forever, if not directly forgotten. The need to fix testimonies and systematize them before the protagonists die has encouraged very diverse projects, sometimes undertaken by direct relatives of the historical protagonists. We are talking about products such as El muro de los olvidados (Joseph Gordillo, 2008), where the French director tries to find the remains of his grandfather, a Maquis fighter shot by the Civil Guard in 1946. And also films like Nadar (Carla Subirana, 2008), Pepe el andaluz (Alejandro Alvarado, Concha Barquero, 2012) or the short film Haciendo memoria (Sandra Ruesga, 2005), integrated into the collective documentary Entre el dictador y yo (2005). The aim of the article is to analyze the staging mechanisms used by these documentaries to find out to what extent such film resources reinforce or distort, recover or create, as the case may be, an accessible past. We want to analyse the status of the last Spanish documentary production and think about how the past is mediated by these film resources and how it is always affected by the rigors and inaccuracies of the personal memory and by the filter imposed by the film device itself.