Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition 9781487531089

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SARAH THOMAS

Inhabiting the In-Between Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0488-5 Printed on acid-free paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Iberic

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Inhabiting the in-between : childhood and cinema in Spain’s long   transition / Sarah Thomas. Names: Thomas, Sarah, 1982− author. Series: Toronto Iberic. Description: Series statement: Toronto Iberic | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20190093633 | ISBN 9781487504885 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures – Spain – History − 20th century. |   LCSH: Children in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.S7 T56 2019 | DDC 791.430946−dc23

This book has been published with the assistance of the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Faculty Development Fund at Brown University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

INHABITING THE IN-BETWEEN Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition

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To DB, for everything

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Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Note on Translation and Dates  xii Introduction: Inhabiting the In-Between  3 1 Impossible Returns: The Child as Self and Other in Carlos Saura’s El jardín de las delicias (1970) and La prima Angélica (1974) 26 2 Innocent Creatures: Child as Commodity and Animal in Antonio Mercero’s La guerra de papá (1977) and Tobi, el niño con alas (1978)  66 3 Oscillating Encounters: Alignment and Foreclosure in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and El sur (1983)  107 4 Betwixt and Between: Liminal Adolescence in Jaime de Armiñán’s El amor del capitán Brando (1974) and El nido (1980)  146 Coda 194 Notes 201 Bibliography 221 Index  233

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Acknowledgments

It is almost cliché but also entirely true that writing a book supposes a great paradox: it is work that must be done alone and yet cannot be accomplished without the support and input of so many others. There are many people and institutions without whom this book would not exist, and whose feedback, guidance, and encouragement have led me back to the page and the screen, day after day, month after month, year after year. The first of many thanks must go to Jo Labanyi, who has championed this project through several iterations, from its first tentative draft to its final read-through. Without her unflagging support, continued enthusiasm, and sharp insight, I could not have carried this project to its conclusion. Words are not enough to express my gratitude for her generosity, dedication, and care, and I consider myself truly lucky to have been able to work with her. I also thank several others who taught and mentored me at New York University and whose support continues to mean so much to me: Jordana Mendelson, who reminded me that the film, and the child, needn’t always win; Gabriela Basterra, who suggested waiting until my own theorizing hit a wall to look for other voices; James Fernández, who sensed before I did that my initial analysis had to be broken open and reassembled in new forms; and Kathleen Vernon, who encouraged me to listen to new aspects of films I thought I knew well. As the project took on new forms over the years, several colleagues and friends were instrumental in reading and providing feedback on portions of the manuscript. Tom Whittaker, my eternal “frientor,” deserves particular recognition in this respect, as he read drafts of the book proposal, chapters, and much of what has ended up in the final text, and also made time for lengthy transatlantic conversations about the project at several stages. I am grateful for his incisive readings and

x Acknowledgments

his generosity in dedicating time to my work despite the demands of his own. I likewise extend heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation to Sarah Wright and Emma Wilson, whose work on the child in cinema indelibly marks these pages, and who took the time to read and provide insightful feedback on chapters of the book, in addition to numerous enriching conversations in a variety of venues in the past years. I also thank Claudia Castañeda and Tara Mendola for their enormously helpful readings and edits, Daniel Sánchez Bataller for his creative and thoughtful response to a portion of chapter 2, Adam Malkin for his invaluable work as my research assistant in the summer of 2016, and Barbara Tessman for her insightful and meticulous copy-edit in the manuscript’s final stage. This book has benefited as well from formal and informal exchanges with colleagues in a number of conferences and lectures over the years. I am particularly indebted to the many scholars working on childhood and cinema who provided valuable feedback as audience members and co-panelists at a number of conferences, including the 2016 Leverhulme conference Child, Nation, and World Cinema held at Royal Holloway, University of London, and panels on childhood at conferences such as Cine-Lit, the Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literatures, and the American Comparative Literature Association. My thinking has been advanced and enriched thanks to these conversations with colleagues such as Carolina Rocha, Georgia Seminet, Erin Hogan, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Lotte Buiting, Rachel Randall, Geoffrey Maguire, Deborah Martin, Fiona Noble, Dunja Fehimovic, Isabel Álvarez Sancho, María Elena Soliño, Carmen Toro, Hattie Miles-Polka, and others. I am also grateful to colleagues who have invited me to speak about the project in several venues, especially to Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and Jonathan Eburne for their invitation to speak at the Pennsylvania State University Comparative Literature Luncheon in 2016 and Steven Marsh for his invitation to participate in the Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Archive in Spanish Cinema workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for the Humanities in 2017. It was an honour to be included alongside admired colleagues Julián Daniel Gutiérrez Albilla, Patricia Keller, Camila Moreiras, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, and Teresa Vilarós to share work from this book, which has been shaped by their own interventions and feedback, for which I am very thankful. Even outside such formalized venues of intellectual exchange, I have benefited and learned so much from my colleagues. The excitement, camaraderie, and encouragement of additional compañerxs in the field – such as Dean Allbritton, Vanessa Ceia, Julia Chang, Antonio Córdoba, Lee Douglas, Francisco Fernández de Alba, Leslie Harkema, Kostis

Acknowledgments xi

Kornetis, Susan Larson, Patricia López-Gay, Matthew Marr, Leigh Mercer, María Rosón, Jon Snyder, Rosi Song, Wan Tang, and many others – have carried me through the good days and bad as I brought the manuscript to completion. I am deeply indebted to my colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University, the most supportive and enthusiastic I can imagine, who have fostered and sustained my work since I arrived. I am especially grateful for the guidance and encouragement of Laura Bass and Michelle Clayton throughout the publishing process, as well as for the boundless enthusiasm and enduring friendship of Felipe Martínez-Pinzón. Brown University has been a nurturing and inspiring institutional home in which to undertake the project of writing this book, and I am grateful to several groups of undergraduate and graduate students I have taught in the past years for continuing to excite me about this research. I especially thank the members of my fall 2017 graduate seminar, whose insightful observations on some of these films brought me back to them with new eyes as I was completing the final stages of work on this book. This project was generously supported by Brown’s Salomon Faculty Research Grant in 2016–17, as well as by several cycles of the Humanities Research Fund; both of these were instrumental in my carrying out final archival work in Spain. For their hospitality and generosity, I thank those who opened their homes to me for extended stays in Madrid on several research trips: Erika Silvestri, Pelayo Gutiérrez, Laura Bass, Patricia Figueroa, Craig Borges, José Manuel Pérez Henriques, Daniella Oviedo Ponte, Jon Snyder, and Miguel Martínez Amoraga. Special thanks, too, to the staff of the Filmoteca Española (especially Trinidad del Río Sánchez and José Luis Estarrona) and of the Sala Barbieri at the Biblioteca Nacional Española, for their assistance in acquiring written materials and films. Last, but far from least, without the interest and enthusiasm of Bob Davidson and Mark Thompson of the Toronto Iberic Series, this book would not have become a reality, and I thank them for their encouragement and hard work on my behalf throughout the process. During the writing of this book, many friends and loved ones played instrumental roles. Johanna Hanink was a constant and most-appreciated source of emotional support, wise counsel, and inspirational signage, as well as welcome breaks from the daily grind for shared food, drink, and amusement. Several other friends at Brown and in Providence were also the joyful companions of time away from this work: Sarah Newman and the Felipes Rojas and Zapata on Wednesdays of old, filled with riotous laughter and musical accompaniment; Daniel Denvir and Thea Riofrancos, for day-long escapades including work, exercise, cooking,

xii Acknowledgments

and other antics; Elizabeth Mueller, serving delightful delicacies grown in her garden under the shade of a spruce tree; Daniel Rodriguez and Susan Rohwer, impassioned sources of solidarity and solace (and chicken wings) in dark times for the nation and the world; Fran de Alba and Alizah Holstein, offering world-class meals and guided tours, and sharing several transatlantic flights; and Patricia Figueroa and Craig Borges, whose basement gatherings warmed many Providence winters. And a unique brand of thanks goes to the friends who were the closest accomplices of this work: those alongside whom it was written in libraries, cafés, and homes in Providence and beyond. Sharing the process of writing in close proximity to dear friends was a true pleasure that brought me back to the task day after day, and I am especially grateful for Thea Riofrancos, Sarah Newman, Daniel Rodriguez, Daniel Denvir, Iris Montero, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Amaury Sosa, and the members of HPG5 in this respect (and in many others). The last stretch of work on this book was brightened immeasurably by regular work sessions with Thea and Sarah, whose support, hilarity, warmth, and good spirits were vital ingredients to its completion. Finally, despite distances separating us and extended stretches of time without seeing one another, I have felt and deeply appreciated from the very inception of this project the support of NYU comrades Sarah Arantza Amador, Graciela Báez, Kahlila Chaar-Pérez, Eunha Choi, Mar Gómez Glez, Marta Kaluza, Tate LeFevre, Romina Pistacchio Hernández, and Sarah Townsend, as well as beloved friends Jess Sauer, Liza and Dylan Ashbrook, Rebecca Vichniac, Liz Janiak, Jen Jude, Maggie Lehrman, Dusty Lewis, Sarah Potvin, Julia Reischel, Das Rush, Andrés Mitnik, Juan Norton, and Elsa Carolina Arcila. Special thanks are due to my family, especially Joan, Richard, and Julia Thomas, Seth Pitman, Carlos Padrón, Claudia Blanco, and Cecilia Clavier. Thank you for excusing my absence from certain events, for cheering me on throughout the process, and for your unconditional love. And, last but not least, Daniel Blanco, thank you for your patience, warmth, and care, for maintaining my sanity, making me laugh, and being my greatest champion and ally through it all. I owe you a lot of nights at the movies. Note on Translation and Dates Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Films are dated based on their release.

INHABITING THE IN-BETWEEN Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition

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Introduction

Inhabiting the In-Between

Children haunt the cinema of the Spanish transition to democracy. In perhaps the most overtly disturbing example among many, in 1976 veteran horror filmmaker Narciso Ibáñez Serrador released ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (Who Can Kill a Child?, marketed in English as Island of the Damned). Ibáñez Serrador’s film, which became a cult favourite both at home and abroad despite an initially poor reception in Spain, has gained increasing popularity as it was rediscovered by a broader critical and fan base in the twenty-first century.1 The film’s premise is straightforward: a British tourist couple, expecting their third child, come to the picturesque fictional island of Almanzora, somewhere off Spain’s southern coast, for a final vacation before their baby is born. Despite wife Evelyn’s (Prunella Ransome) entreaties to stay on the mainland in fictional coast city of Benavís, husband Tom (Lewis Fiander) insists on re-creating a trip to the island he took twelve years before.2 True to the genre, they miss or ignore all the signs that this is a terrible idea – newspaper reports of bodies mysteriously washing up on the mainland, the news there is no doctor on the island, Almanzora being eerily deserted save for a bunch of local kids who insist on pulling their boat to shore, and the utterly vacant pensión to which they arrive. It quickly becomes clear that something sinister has happened to the island’s children, who have taken to brutally murdering all of Almanzora’s adults, the remaining few of whom are locked away in hiding. The cause of the children’s monstrosity is never explained, though it appears to be transmitted via physical proximity or eye contact, as a later scene demonstrates.3 Tom and Evelyn witness a little girl beating an elderly man to death with his own cane (when they ask her why, she giggles and skips away); they see children playing with an adult’s dead body as a grotesque piñata and watch as a man is dragged to his death by his own daughter. Tom and Evelyn are, of course, next. After failing to escape the horde of

4  Inhabiting the In-Between

murderous children, the couple barricade themselves in the local Civil Guard headquarters while a seething crowd of homicidal kids encircles the building. An adorable child climbs up to the window and peers in, then points a gun at Evelyn, who has her back to him (figures 0.1, 0.2, 0.3); Tom sees the child just in time and shoots him with an automatic rifle, and the children retreat. We do not see the child being shot, only Evelyn’s horrified face as she does. Then, during a sweltering night in a tiny room, Evelyn wakes up screaming as her unborn child joins Almanzora’s murderous ranks and kills her from within. The next morning, Tom tries to flee, but the children assemble in a plaza and block his path. A series of shot–reverse shots shows him looking between their smiling, sun-kissed faces as if deciding what to do (figure 0.4); tears stream down his face as he unloads scores of bullets from an automatic rifle on the children as he struggles to reach the port (figure 0.5). After a lengthy fight sequence, Tom is shot by the arriving Coast Guard. The officers disembark and ask where the townspeople are, as the children giggle and lead them astray so they can steal the ship’s guns, with which they promptly shoot the new arrivals. Several children then discuss their next move: just a few will go to the mainland, so as not to attract attention, for the time being. The film closes with a question: one child asks another “¿tú crees que los niños de allá se pondrán a jugar como nosotros?” (Do you think the kids over there will start playing like us?) The ringleader responds, with a sinister yet innocent smile, “Sí, claro, en todo el mundo somos muchos chicos. Muchos.” (Yes, of course. In the whole world there are so many of us kids. So many.) Then, as the children begin frolicking in the sea, the closing credits roll over them, accompanied by ominous music. ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? turns multiple clichés on their head: the sun-drenched paradise of the Spanish island quickly becomes a claustrophobic inferno of tension and violence as Tom and Evelyn’s restful vacation goes to hell; the smiling faces of children come to inspire terror rather than tenderness; and these seemingly innocent creatures turn into homicidal monsters for reasons that are only hinted at by the film’s opening montage of worldwide atrocities. Before being introduced to the ill-fated Tom and Evelyn, the viewer is shown, during the film’s opening credits, a series of disturbing newsreels of recent world conflicts, featuring dark images and statistics. We see the number of children killed in Auschwitz superimposed on newsreel footage of bodies being lumped together in makeshift graves, how many children die per minute from malnutrition in India and Pakistan, and the numbers of children killed in the Korean and Vietnam wars, the statistics scrolling across images of

Introduction 5

0.1

0.2

0.3

6  Inhabiting the In-Between

0.4

0.5

children who are emaciated, have missing limbs, or are running from napalm. In each case the total number of deaths and number of child deaths are provided, and in each case the camera pauses to capture the children’s anguished faces in freeze frame, zooming into the static blackand-white images, while introducing the sound of children singing and laughing, before transitioning to the next image and poltical context. In the final instance, the Nigerian Civil War (commonly known as the Biafran War), we see scenes of horrendously malnourished children; the shot comes to rest on a static image of one of their faces, which dissolves into that of a blond child on a Spanish beach as the film shifts from black and white to colour to the sound of the children’s eerily hummed song. Its meaning evident only once the events of the film it precedes have been seen, the montage serves as a possible explanation of or justification for what is to come: implicitly, adults have inflicted suffering and death on children in the service of their wars and their political and economic interests, and now it is the children’s turn to have their revenge. The seeming simplicity of this premise, however, reveals several deeply rooted ideas about children, adults, and the complex relationship

Introduction 7

between them, issues that lie at the heart of this book. The film itself may shock or disturb viewers by suggesting the possibility of children’s monstrosity and violence – as well as the relative ease with which adults take up arms against them, posing the answer to film’s titular question of who can kill a child as an implicit anyone, if self-preservation is at stake. Yet I am more interested in the surprising way this film casts children and adults in a mutually adversarial relationship of us-versus-them across a boundary that is somehow clearly drawn, even when one being is corporally contained by another, in the case of Evelyn and her unborn baby. While the film does not establish a definitive reason for the children’s transformation, or a vector by which it occurs, one thing is absolutely clear: the child in this film is the adult’s absolute other, the two figures fundamentally different from and violently opposed to one another (figure 0.6).

0.6

In the war that has just begun, only one faction can be victorious; and if it is the children, as the first battleground of Almanzora would seem to suggest, what happens when or if they eventually grow up? If victory entails beating the adults at their own sinister game, as the plot seems to suggest, the children of Ibáñez Serrador’s film upend yet another cliché: the child figure’s symbolic attachment to hope for the future, a new tomorrow or a better world. Victims turned aggressors, the children of Almanzora portend a nihilistic future that only perpetuates the cycle of violence that marks both the present and the past. Despite the film’s insistent ambiguity with regard to the source of the children’s violent turn, and the wide-ranging geopolitical backdrop of its opening montage, this nihilism and violence must be seen in the context of Spain’s Transition to Democracy. As several recent critical accounts recuperating the film from scholarly obscurity attest (LázaroReboll 2012, Steinberg 2006, Wright 2013), the film cannot be taken out of the sociopolitical context from which it emerged: released in April 1976, its portrayal of children and adults killing one another takes on

8  Inhabiting the In-Between

powerful allegorical overtones in light of dictator Francisco Franco’s death in November of the previous year, which put an end to almost forty years of authoritarian rule begun at the conclusion of Spain’s bloody 1936–9 Civil War. Despite the fact that many reviewers in 1976 “hardly related the film’s subject matter to its immediate historical reality, the end of Francoism” (Lázaro-Reboll 2012, 119), instead reading its allegory as a more universal one that spoke to the lack of hope for future generations worldwide, the film’s emergence at a pivotal historical moment for the Spanish nation illuminates a different reading. Taken in the historical and political context of its release in the moment immediately following the dictator’s death – one marked by instability, uncertainty, radical potential for change, and unanswered questions about the future – beyond its seemingly simple though inventive horror premise, Ibáñez Serrador’s film shows how the figure of the child does not simply signify utopian futurity but is rather bound up with anxieties about the nation, the future, and the afterlife of violence. Although many critics at the time took issue with the film’s montage prologue as incoherent or a pretext (Lázaro-Reboll 2012, 120–1), it is worth noting that the child’s connection to the political emerges within its diegetic frame as well. When, still on the mainland, Tom and Evelyn stop to buy film for their camera, the television playing in the shop shows news footage of guerrilla violence in Thailand. The clerk comments that those who suffer most are the children. After an evening in town, Tom picks up the newspaper in their hotel room and, reading about Thailand again, says to his wife that the man in the shop was right: children always suffer. Escapist Evelyn’s reply is that it’s happening in Asia, and they aren’t there; Tom counters that there was a civil war in Benavís once too, and there could be another. The only reference to Spanish national history or politics in the film (in contrast to the opening montage’s contexts removed in time or space from presentday Spain), and spoken by a foreign tourist, this seemingly insignificant detail nonetheless plants the seed of the violent Spanish past in the context of a seemingly universal horror premise, linking the child not only to the diegetic future annihilation of the adults but also the historical past victimization of children by adult conflict on Spanish soil. Although it differs wildly in genre and subject matter from the films I explore at length in the pages of this book, I open with ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? because it foregrounds in simple and stark terms several of the most important themes of the chapters that follow: the child’s otherness or difference from the adult, the fraught relationship between adults and children, and the way these are represented in Spanish cinema produced during this period of political turbulence, instability,

Introduction 9

and change that is itself coloured by the legacy of prior violence. The children I analyse in the next chapters are not as violent or shocking as those who appear in Ibáñez Serrador’s film; they are endowed with more individuality, subjectivity, and filmic protagonism than his murderous horde. Yet, alongside the children of ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?, those that we find in the films of Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán emerge from this context of political and social instability as troubling, enigmatic, ambiguous, or ambivalent figures who are often placed in opposition to adults, at the limits of the subject and the human. These four filmmakers – whose works span several genres in the cinema of the late dictatorship and Transition years – are representative of a diverse cross-section of Spanish films in this period that all fix their gaze on, through, and alongside the child figure. Although children have proliferated in Spain’s cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in these films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation that I term the “Long Transition to Democracy,” “long” both because I use dates beyond the strict beginning and endpoint of the transition from authoritarian rule to constitutional monarchy and because I emphasize the ongoing, lengthy, dilated nature of transitional time and process.4 Unlike their filmic forebears in the earlier Francoist 1950s and 1960s cine con niño – singing, dancing, smiling Marisol, Joselito, Pili and Mili, or Pablito Calvo – the filmic children of the Long Transition resist being fixed in the category of spectacular object (Mira 2010), even when, as is the case with Mercero’s films that I discuss in chapter 2, they might seem to be direct inheritors of this earlier paradigm. Nor are these children the sentimental or fantastical conduits to historical truth that will emerge in the democratic historical memory cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, where children’s role as witnesses is deployed to provide the viewer with an easier understanding of the nation’s violent and contested past.5 Rather, these films can be seen to negotiate a series of in-betweens, in an uncanny mirroring of their socio-political context of transition, flux, potential, uncertainty, and change. Among these liminal or hybrid positions the child can be seen to navigate, I am interested in how childcentred films from this period depict overlapping temporalities and selves, casting the child as both self and other; the ways in which the child figure disrupts linear time and spectatorial identification as we alternately see with the child and find that perspective foreclosed; and how the child is cast both as seeing filmic subject and the object of the spectator’s gaze. In this sense, this book moves away from approaches

10  Inhabiting the In-Between

that tend to instrumentalize the child figure as a sentimental conduit to the historical past, as well as from readings that claim the child as an allegorical figure wrought out of the nation’s contested and violent history. Vitally, it resists casting the child in one particular role or interpretation, instead underscoring the child as a figure of multiplicity, liminality, and simultaneity: the in-between, the both-and. Like the children of Ibáñez Serrador’s film who are both murderous (in action) and wholesome (in appearance), it is my contention that the child in the Long Transition is marked by his or her ability to embody contradictions and doublings as both subject and object, self and other, child and not-child. The Child and (Transitional) Time This book centres the child within the complex historical conjuncture of a nation emerging from dictatorship, looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future, what Teresa M. Vilarós has eloquently described as a period suspended between life and death, a time and space hanging between two historical paradigms (1998, 20). H. Rosi Song likewise stresses the “political instability and popular apprehension about the future of the country” that marked this period, absent from its official narratives (2016, 25). It is no coincidence that this complex, multi-valenced child emerges from the Transition era, which since the late 1990s and with growing intensity in recent years has been the object of renewed scrutiny and re-evaluation by cultural critics, historians, and journalists. These critical accounts have questioned previous received ideas about the Transition’s narrative as making a break with the prior authoritarian regime; scrutinized the pacts of forgetting or silence that were made by politicians in the name of democracy’s advancement, and contested the idea that the populace indeed did sign on for such forgetting; noted the continuance of dictatorship institutions and individuals in the governance of the new democratic state; critiqued the hypocrisy and self-interest of both Left and Right in the “regime of ’78” (the year the new democratic constitution was signed into law); and demonstrated the lingering effects of the Transition years on contemporary democracy, affect, and cultural production, among other approaches.6 As many of these scholarly and journalistic accounts, as well as personal anecdotal narratives, attest, in this moment there was profound uncertainty as to what the future of the nation looked like at the most basic level; even following the constitution’s ratification in 1978, a failed 1981 coup attempt threatened to plunge the nation once more into violence or authoritarianism. This uncertainty included the hope for a true rupture with the past and the potential for radically different political, social, and vital projects (Labrador Méndez 2017), which in many quarters

Introduction 11

gave way to a retrospective sense of desencanto (disenchantment) or melancholy, which critics such as Vilarós (1998) and Medina Domínguez (2001) show marked the nation’s withdrawal from dictatorship, as the dictator’s absence in death only confirmed his presence in the nation’s socio-cultural processes of subject formation. This period of crisis and change, suspended between the history of dictatorship and the (retrospectively spurious) promise of a future democratic break with the authoritarian past, provides a particularly apt context for exploring the representation of the child, whose shifting temporal valences prompt us to look both backward – for example, to one’s own childhood past – and forward, to the future implicit in the child’s eventual passage to adulthood. In a moment when Spain was looking backward and forward from an uncertain present, the multiple temporalities of the child figure took on great appeal, resulting in particularly nuanced, compelling, and strange representations of childhood. But these are also children who, captured on screen, will never grow up; in this sense the filmic child aligns with Cristina Moreiras-Menor’s description of transitional time itself: “La transición, o más concretamente, la noción de transición histórica, también podría verse como una noción imposible: la transición es aquello que, nacido inevitablemente en media res, no alcanza nunca a ser, a tener presencia/marca ontológica porque se constituye siempre y necesariamente entre aquello que ya ha sido y lo que está por ser” (Transition, or more concretely, the notion of historical transition, can also be seen as an impossible notion: the transition is that which, inevitably born in medias res, never manages to come to be, to have an ontological presence/trace, because it is always necessarily constituted between what has been and what is to be) (2011, 116). Several recent approximations to the Transition period have hinged on the central connection of youth to narratives of Spain’s emergence from dictatorship towards democracy – always forcibly framed as a transition towards, not away from, as Moreiras-Menor (2011, 115) notes of transitional temporality, which aligns the nation’s “growing up” towards supposedly functional democracy in a parallel process to a child’s coming of age. Alberto Medina makes this connection explicit in his recent article “Over a Young Dead Body: The Spanish Transition as Bildungsroman” (2015). This text builds on his previous work in Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la transición (2001), where he noted that, in the years under Francoism, Spain was “sometida a una prolongada minoría de edad” (subjected to a prolonged period of being underage) (17). In the recent piece, Medina shows not only how the Transition was symbolically cast as the nation’s coming of age in a bildungsroman narrative of exemplary democratic maturity rapidly achieved, but also how this narrative “paradoxically

12  Inhabiting the In-Between

depended on a parallel spectacle, that of a self-sacrificial and suicidal marginal youth unwilling to join the master narrative, that is, unable to grow up” (2015, 301). The potential of youth is also the subject of Germán Labrador Méndez’s recent study of the Transition, which explores several generations of young people who came of age during this period, tracing the “emergencia de la juventud como un nuevo tipo de sujeto histórico” (emergence of youth as a new type of historical subject) and the high price paid for the narrative of a model transition to democracy, given that “mientras algunos llegan al poder, otros se mueren. Y es que el aumento exponencial de la mortalidad juvenil en los años ochenta nos impide declarar el carácter modélico de la transición si no queremos borrar las vidas y las voces de una juventud destruida, precisamente por su compromiso democrático” (while some come into power, others die. And the fact is that the exponential increase in youth mortality in the eighties prevents us from declaring the model character of the transition if we do no not want to erase the lives and voices of a youth destroyed, precisely for their democratic commitment) (2017, 25). While neither of these critics is writing exactly about childhood in the same sense I do, their work brings to light the fact that the Spanish Transition is a time tightly bound up symbolically and materially with youth and young people.7 To illustrate the interconnections of the child’s temporality and the nation’s, and the refusal of linear narratives of progress in both cases, I turn to another strange, compelling, homicidal representation of childhood emblematic of the period: Carlos Saura’s film Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, often marketed in English as ¡Cría!, released 1976). While I focus on two other films by Saura in this book’s first chapter, I have elected to address this film in the introduction and coda as a means of bookending the representations of Transition-era childhood I discuss with the period’s most seminal example of the child as an in-between and destabilizing figure. Here I would like to examine the representation of overlapping temporalities and realities in this film to demonstrate an iconic example of how the child figure troubles temporality as simultaneously gesturing towards the past and the future, and as a result, how it serves to question the modes through which events might be understood or narrated. Within this broader period of turbulence, the more precise moment from which the film emerges is one of heightened political and social instability, uncertainty, and change: it was filmed in early 1975, as Franco agonized on his deathbed after a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. As the dictator lay dying, the film’s writer and director, Carlos Saura, already an established auteur filmmaker and outspoken critic of the regime, struggled

Introduction 13

with the censors’ objections to his film, most of which had to do with its negative portrayal of the child protagonist’s military father as an adulterer and womanizer (Sánchez Vidal 1988, 98). After Franco was disconnected from life support and died on 20 November, the film was finally authorized for release in January 1976 and went on to receive a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Its portrayal of a bourgeois family in the powerful military officer class was seen to allegorize the nation, both by the film’s right-wing inmovilista critics (those desiring continuance of the Franco regime beyond the dictator’s death) and its left-wing or anti-Francoist supporters who yearned for democratization. For both factions, watching eight-year-old protagonist Ana (Ana Torrent) and her sisters coping with the deaths of their parents, including the military father, could not help but invite parallel readings of the Spanish nation, so recently bereft of its own symbolic authoritarian patriarch. But Cría cuervos is much more than a national allegory. It focuses on a summer in the life of eight-year-old Ana, as she grieves the recent loss of her beloved mother (Geraldine Chaplin), who appears in flashbacks, dreams, and fantasies. The film, whose diegetic present is set roughly in the moment of production in 1975, also gestures towards the future by introducing the adult Ana (also played by Chaplin), who reflects on and attempts to understand the feelings and experiences of her childhood, in projections towards an as-yet non-existent future.8 To illustrate the child’s imbrication with temporal instability, I will briefly explore a sequence from early in Cría cuervos that is emblematic of a film that constantly and seamlessly moves between subjective and temporal frames with little formal warning to the spectator, calling into question the mechanisms of perception and narration at every turn. In the first half of the sequence, Ana, who is standing in the leafy back garden of her family home beside an empty swimming pool, imagines herself atop a building across the street. The home and garden are enclosed by a high perimeter wall that separates them from the light and sounds of bustling Madrid, which appear in the imagined frame in stark contrast to the dark, quiet yard where Ana stands in the reality frame with her sister cycling in circles around their grandmother, who is seated in a wheelchair. This first outdoor scene shows the oscillation between subjective frames of the child protagonist’s perception and imagination, while the second scene of the sequence, where she descends into an underground storeroom next to the pool, shows a quite literal slippage between temporal frames and selves. Taken together, the two halves underscore how, throughout the film, the child protagonist serves as the nexus of both narrative and temporal instability.

14  Inhabiting the In-Between

The first scene is perhaps the film’s most radical example, among several, of a visual rendering of the child’s imagined experience alongside or in contrast with what we might call the film’s reality frame. What I find compelling about this scene is the way that imagination and reality interact with one another, as the camera cuts between the real-life Ana on the ground in the garden and the imagined Ana atop the building. The framing of the scene also reflects the duality of this moment: following the point-of-view shots of Ana’s gaze up at the tree canopy, the shot–reverse shot camerawork telegraphs to the viewer that Ana sees herself from both positions; that is, the “imagining” Ana sees her imagined self atop the building, ready to jump, but at the same time the “imagined” Ana looks down at her “imagining” counterpart on the ground. The shot–reverse shot structure blurs the line between perception and imagination, as the viewer can’t be fully certain which Ana is “real” – until, of course, the moment that the imagined Ana leaps from the rooftop. Here, as the camera adopts the position of the floating child, its swirling, non-gravitational movement punctures any remaining illusion of the second Ana as part of the reality frame. But, at the same time, the diegetic sound of the city traffic rises to a crescendo, grounding the fantasy in the material, sonic reality of the urban landscape, in contrast to the reality’s silenced distance from it. In this sense both frames are privileged as in different ways indexical of the real, despite the spatial impossibility of Ana’s flight of fancy. In the second half of the sequence, the slippage between frames is temporal in nature, as we hear in voice-over the adult Ana accounting for her feelings as a child while the screen image shows the child character, and eventually moves to show to the adult Ana, who is revealed as the source of the voice-over narration. The spectator sees the child Ana take out a can of baking soda she believes to be poison as the voiceover recounts the adult’s memory of a day when her mother was cleaning the house and told her to throw it away; when Ana asked what it was, her mother told her it was a terrible poison. Here the film adapts a familiar and prevalent cinematic technique: the adult retrospective voice-over explaining the feelings and thoughts of the filmic child. Yet Saura complicates the standard formula in several ways. First, the adult self looking back on childhood is positioned in the as-yet non-existent future, thereby creating two crisscrossing temporal vectors that disturb the chronology of the diegesis: on the one hand the backward gaze to the childhood past (and, in fact, the narrated further past prior to the diegetic moment shown onscreen) and, on the other, the Lacanian future anterior of the forward-projected adult that the present-day child protagonist will have become in a future moment that has both diegetically

Introduction 15

and historically yet to occur.9 In this sense, the temporal positioning of the child Ana and her as-yet non-existent future adult self does not, as retrospective adult gazes towards childhood tend to do, merely cast the child as what Lacan would term “the past definite of what was” or “the present perfect of what has been” and somehow remains in the remembering adult (1981, 63). Rather, the child is cast as “in the process of becoming,” a subject who will have been and ceased to be when the adult character comes to exist, in a moment that has yet to pass in the diegetic present (ibid.). Another complicating factor to add the film’s representation of temporality and narrative order arises from the fact that, in this early moment of the film (around minute 19), the spectator has already seen the actress Geraldine Chaplin playing the child protagonist’s dead mother in a series of flashbacks, so her appearance here as the future Ana (although dubbed by a Spanish actress to vocally differentiate her from the Anglo-inflected mother) initially has a further destabilizing effect on the narrative. In addition to this temporal placement of the characters and actors, the mise-en-scène, sound, and camerawork of this scene also dislocate the relationships between past, present, and future. In this respect, two aspects are worth highlighting: first, the pose of the child Ana as the voice-over begins and, second, the camera movement over to her future adult self. As the adult narration starts, the child Ana is sitting in the storeroom tasting the powder she believes to be poison (and with which she erroneously thinks she has managed to kill her father). As she spits it out, the voice-over recounts how one day her mother was cleaning the house and found a metal tin, which she asked Ana to discard. The memory narration quotes the mother interpellating the child protagonist, saying: “Ana, tira esto a la basura” (Ana, throw this away), and in this moment the child turns her gaze to the camera as if she has literally been called (figure 0.7). The child sustains her fixed gaze at the camera and viewer as the narration continues, and the actress holds unnaturally still, motionless but for occasional blinks of her eyes. The camera then begins to pan to the right, but the child Ana remains motionless and keeps her gaze on the previous fixed location, creating the effect of a photographic still within the moving image (figure 0.8) as we pan to the side and to a nondescript yet spatially contiguous location where the “future adult Ana” is revealed as the source of the voice-over narration. The two actresses are positioned just far enough apart so as never to share the frame; the closest we get is a shot where the child is just disappearing out of view and the adult’s shadow is fully visible on the rear wall (figure 0.9).

16  Inhabiting the In-Between

0.7

0.8

0.9

Introduction 17

What interests me here is how the child Ana is momentarily transformed from the living, moving child of the diegetic present to a static, photographic, yet-still-living child of the past that is not yet past (at least, in this moment of the diegesis). This rendering connects her to the many images of childhood in the family album from the film’s opening credits – photos that will have been curated by the adult Ana – and thus subtly shifts the viewer into the adult’s subjective frame. The contrast between the child’s pose and the camera’s movement is reminiscent of what Barthes conceived as the distinction between photography and cinema: the difference between something or someone having posed or having passed before the “tiny hole” of the camera (1980, 78). The passage over to the future adult Ana, in a sense, suggests the death of static child Ana that is necessary for the adult version’s (be)coming into existence, her photographic state attesting to the “this-has-been” that for Barthes bound the photograph to death. Yet, following this scene, we return to the diegetic present once more, and to its reanimated child, as narrative order is both restored and further complicated. I have discussed this sequence at length as a means of demonstrating how these interweaving temporal and subjective frames hinge on the figure of the child. On the one hand, the child’s subjective reality is represented as one in which the binaries of “reality” and “imagination,” “past” and “present” are resisted; on the other hand, the child points towards both the adult’s memorial past and the uncertain and unreal future of becoming-adult (and the child necessarily ceasing to be) in a present that is inextricable from past and future. In thinking about what the child figure does in instigating slippages between temporalities and realities, the writings of Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) on the relationship between childhood and queer temporality are among the most illuminating. It may seem counterintuitive in exploring a vision of privileged, normative bourgeois childhood like Cría cuervos to turn to queer theory, but Bond Stockton, in her book The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, suggests that, while we must carefully distinguish between the queer child and the child as a queer figure, the child might be read against the normative grain in the service of queering narratives of linear progress through time.10 Bond Stockton reads the child in a lateral rather than a linear temporality, noting that “‘growing up’ may be a shortsighted, limited rendering of human growth, one that oddly would imply an end to growth when full stature (or reproduction) is achieved” (2009, 11). She proposes an alternative view: “By contrast, ‘growing sideways’ suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts” (ibid.).

18  Inhabiting the In-Between

Reading the child in this film in lateral contact with the adult she becomes – an oscillating sideways movement materially enacted in literal fashion by the mise-en-scène and camerawork in this sequence – might account for the child’s appeal in this moment of political and social crisis and change, a kind of “untimely present,” to borrow Idelber Avelar’s (1999) term from the Latin American post-dictatorship context. In a film that evinces an anxiety about the future to come and gestures constantly towards past death and present loss, we might read such children as Ana against their normativity. Rather than serving as what Lee Edelman has called the “emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value” (2004, 3), the child can in fact undermine futurity itself and trouble the possibility of a coherent or linear narrative of the past, present, or future. In denying this coherence, the child figure aligns with transitional time where, in the words of Moreiras-Menor, “todo gira en torno a la convivencia de los tiempos, uno pugnado por desaparecer y otro por emerger” (everything revolves around the coexistence of times, one struggling to disappear and another to emerge) (2011, 125). Here the past, present, and future Ana are able to coexist and resist simple narratives of growing up, growing towards. Cría cuervos thus illuminates the historical period’s milieu of political instability, uncertainty, and potential for change, mobilizing childhood to question the modes through which events might be narrated or understood, if they can be at all. Childhood and Cinema in the Long Transition Cría cuervos is perhaps the most emblematic film of childhood in the Long Transition, emerging as it did almost simultaneously with the dictator’s death. But although the film has been read extensively in terms of what it has to say about Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and the legacy of the nation’s violent past, the political and historical spheres are largely absent from the film, save for the visible presence of the Spanish military in the figures of Ana’s father, Anselmo (Héctor Alterio), and his friend Nicolás (Germán Cobos). Their negative depiction as womanizers not attentive to their families touched a nerve in both the military and the right-wing press of the time.11 Despite frequent denials of political commentary on Saura’s part, the film’s subject matter evidently invites parallel readings of the recently orphaned nation. But like many of the films I explore in this book, Cría cuervos loses much of its power if we read it exclusively as an allegorical commentary on the nation’s history of civil conflict and authoritarianism. Rather, I view this contested and violent past as an intertextual presence in the film, one that informs its narrative and themes but also gives rise

Introduction 19

to a complex and nuanced representation of subjectivity, temporality, memory, and mourning that comments on much more than just the national past.12 All the films I examine in this book can be seen in such a framework: in some cases, they explicitly address or critique the legacy of violence of the Spanish Civil War and decades of authoritarian rule; in others, the past of civil conflict and repression is implicitly or silently present and shapes the lives of the characters in a secondary, but indelible, fashion, seething under the surface of spaces and subjectivities in the haunting described by Jo Labanyi (2000 and 2007) as common to cultural production emerging in the wake of the dictatorship. These varied films undeniably demonstrate the imbrication of childhood, cinema, and the contested past in the Long Transition. This study, however, departs from previous critical work on the films – extensive in some cases, scant in others – that has seen in the child figure a means of understanding the Spanish nation’s relationship to its violent history. Rather, as this book’s title indicates, what I propose in these pages is a deep theorization of childhood in cinema emerging from a period that gives rise to consistently complex representations of children in film. In shifting this focus, it is not my aim to disregard previous foundational scholarship that asks how cinema helps us understand the particular realities of Spain’s history and culture. Rather, I place these films by key Spanish filmmakers into new scholarly debates across several fields: not just recent re-evaluations of the culture, politics, and legacy of the Transition taking place within Iberian studies (debates in which film has not always been a primary focus) but also broader conversations about the representation of children in cinema that have arisen in the present century among scholars of film and media studies, queer theory, and Latin American studies, to name just a few fields. Recent scholarship attests to growing recognition of the child as a subject that is not only worthy of study but that raises thorny questions about identity, subjectivity, temporality, and knowledge. Several vital contributions to the general study of the child in film have emerged in the twenty-first century, including the now seminal books by Vicky Lebeau (Childhood and Cinema, 2008), Karen Lury (The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales, 2010), and Emma Wilson (Cinema’s Missing Children, 2003).13 Following these broader theoretical treatments, scholars of particular film traditions have engaged with the child’s representation in several national cinemas. Scholars of Spanish-language film, and especially film of (post-) dictatorship nations, where child protagonists proliferate, have been among the most active in this respect, examining the figure of the child as something more than a vehicle for allegorical commentary or means of skirting censorship.14 Surprisingly,

20  Inhabiting the In-Between

however, given the child’s enduring presence in Spain’s national film tradition, the first monograph devoted to the topic, Sarah Wright’s The Child in Spanish Cinema, appeared quite recently, in 2013. Wright’s pioneering book provides an excellent survey from silent cinema to the present day, demonstrating how Spanish film alternately brings the child to life and condemns the child to death onscreen.15 While it builds on Wright’s invaluable work, Inhabiting the In-Between is necessarily a very different kind of book, given its chronological focus on the Long Transition period and emphasis on the ontological particularities of the child’s representation therein. It also diverges from Wright’s approach in that it focuses closely on four directors, engaging in extended close readings of a set of films from a particular political and social context, asking what the child tells us about the Transition but also, more vitally, what kind of representations the Transition makes possible for the child. In revisiting well-known films by directors such as Saura and Erice, the book casts them in a new light, deeply theorizing childhood onscreen and placing them alongside far less-studied films by Mercero and Armiñán that emerge in the same complex historical and cultural context. It is my hope that, although this book is most evidently of use to those working on Spain’s culture and history, it also provides frameworks for thinking about children in cinema more broadly, especially in moments of historical crisis and change like Spain’s Long Transition. Inhabiting the In-Between traces the ways in which the cinematic child that emerges from this transitional period appears as a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that cannot be precisely pinned down as signifying a particular reading of history, temporality, or the subject. The proliferation of films in the period featuring child characters is testament to the power of this ambivalence and to the thorny nature of relationships between adults and children, between present, past, and future selves. In the chapters that follow, I situate the child in relation to this period of epistemological crisis where both the past and the future hang in the balance, resisting readings that claim the child as indicator of a particular historical or temporal reality, or emblem of future change. Rather, the children in this cinema point precisely to ruptures, multiplicities, simultaneities, and the impossibility of fully comprehending both the historical past and the figure of the other. Not unlike those literary authors who came to prominence under democracy, whom Moreiras-Menor describes as engaging in “an ethical project devoted to questioning the idea of a linear temporality by fracturing and fissuring the individual and collective experience of the historical event” (2008, 9), the child in the cinema of this period draws attention to the lack of coherent narratives, linear temporalities, or clear divisions

Introduction 21

between adult and child, self and other.16 Thus rather than reading the Long Transition as a moment in linear chronology that supposes a break with what came before (the decades of authoritarianism under Franco) and a progression towards a (constitutional democratic) future yet to come, as my title suggests I explore how these films emerge from a complex present of in-between-ness, incorporating multiple temporalities that foreclose either the possibility of a clean break with what has been or a blank slate for what is yet to be. The child figure in these films navigates and inhabits its own several in-betweens, which I theorize in chapters each devoted to two films by the same filmmaker that highlight a particular aspect of the child figure’s multiple configurations. Throughout, rather than an encyclopedic approach, I privilege close readings of a diverse and paradigmatic corpus of films as a means of exploring in depth what children and childhood do, mean, and make possible in the cinema of the Long Transition. In selecting the films, I have sought the work of filmmakers who, during this pivotal period, produced multiple child-centred offerings, speaking to a sustained interest in childhood and a crossfilmic approach that indicates ongoing working on and through the child, including both male and female children, although the directors I study (with the exception of the book’s coda) are all male.17 My analysis attends to the gender of the children represented, where relevant, as films about boys and films about girls do not necessarily operate in the same manner; for this reason, most of the chapters base their argument on films about either male or female children. In the final chapter, I set two films with different-gendered protagonists in contrast to one another to problematize the patriarchal underpinnings of the films in question. It is testament to the problematic structural gender dynamics of the Spanish film industry in the Long Transition years that this book lamentably does not explore works of female filmmakers from the period, given the absence of mainstream films made by women that feature child protagonists. Female filmmakers’ offerings either lie outside the chronological span of the Long Transition (e.g., Ana Mariscal’s film adaptation of Miguel Delibes’s novel El camino, made in 1963) or feature child characters in a more peripheral role rather than as the protagonists (e.g., Cecilia Bartolomé’s 1977 ¡Vámonos, Bárbara!). Throughout the book, however, I incorporate ample theoretical and critical approaches by women scholars, who are currently the most important voices in studying children in cinema and whose work has been foundational to my own. The corpus of films has also been delimited by the fact that I have elected to study filmmakers who made multiple films about children

22  Inhabiting the In-Between

during the period in question, enabling me to explore pairs of films that can be seen to work through similar theorizations of childhood. Taking up two films by the same director – at times produced in different moments of the Long Transition vis-à-vis the dictator’s death, the removal of censorship, or the adoption of the democratic constitution, for example – allows me to read the ways that a particular filmmaker’s vision of childhood changes over time or remains faithful to key elements of the child’s representation. In selecting filmmakers Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán, I not only privilege those who evince an enduring interest in the filmic child, I also place directors from the auteur, popular, and tercera vía (third way) cinema alongside one another (a rare gesture in studies of Spanish cinema) as a means of demonstrating the centrality and complexity of the child across the boundaries of intended audience, genre, and form. I begin the book by delving into a foundational aspect of theorizing the figure of the child: how we can consider the child as a simultaneous self and other, and the ways the encounter with the child produces a multivalent relationship to temporality in a moment of political crisis. In chapter 1, “Impossible Returns: The Child as Self and Other in Carlos Saura’s El jardín de las delicias (1970) and La prima Angélica (1974),” I analyse two controversial films by Carlos Saura that emerged at the tail end of Francoism, when debates about Spain’s future were raging in the public sphere. Both films explore in different ways what it means to revisit the childhood self, as the middle-aged protagonist of each attempts or is forced to return to his childhood memories of the Spanish Civil War in an effort to make sense of his present-day 1970s self. Set against a backdrop of political and personal traumas, the two films offer particularly nuanced explorations of the figure of the former child self and especially its simultaneous difference from, yet embedding in, the adult that the child has become. In both films, childhood is cast as a space and time that, paradoxically, lies both beyond reach and at the core of self. The films depict this relation between the present-day adult protagonist and the remembered child he once was in almost literal fashion: the same actor (José Luis López Vázquez) plays both the remembering adult self in the present-day frame and, unexpectedly, the recalled child self evoked in flashbacks. The film’s structure thus reflects the porous boundaries between child and adult, self and other, as the memory scenes interrupt the present-day narrative suddenly and seamlessly, suprising and disorienting both protagonist and viewer. This mechanism resists facile identification with the obscured child of memory, stressing how this figure is mediated by adult consciousness and highlighting the temporal gaps that emerge from the

Introduction 23

traumatic pasts of both family and nation. My reading of these films adapts political geographer Edward W. Soja’s (1996) conception of “thirdspace” to demonstrate how they refuse to consider the child as either an originary, essential version of self or a pre-subjective, inaccessible other. Rather, in a thirdspace of child-and-adult, the films represent the relationship between the two as oscillating, imbricated, hybrid. The chapter thus establishes the child’s duality as both self and other, a crucial axis of my analysis throughout the book. Chapter 2, “Innocent Creatures: Child as Commodity and Animal in Antonio Mercero’s La guerra de papá (1977) and Tobi, el niño con alas (1978),” turns to a very different representation of childhood in Antonio Mercero’s popular cinema featuring child star sensation Lolo García. These mainstream films emerge from a crucial moment of the Transition that includes in 1977 the nation’s first general elections, passage of an amnesty law freeing political prisoners and granting impunity to former regime criminals, and the end of censorship, followed in 1978 by ratification of the nation’s new (and current) democratic constitution. In this chapter, I first outline how the young child straddles the lines between human and non-human, subject (of bodily autonomy, politics, and language) and object (of spectacle, the gaze, and capitalist exploitation). I then explore how the child figure in these films further tests the limits of subjecthood and humanity in appearing as an animal figure and fetishized commodity. I demonstrate how the child is cast in these roles both by the extra-filmic narratives circulating in the media regarding Mercero’s coaching of García’s performance, and in the films’ diegetic representation of the child himself. Despite their relative generic simplicity (following the conventions of family melodrama and morality tale, respectively), and their emergence from the mainstream cine de la reforma (cinema of reform), beneath the surface both La guerra de papá and Tobi belie deep anxieties about Spain’s past, present, and future, especially the lingering effects of fratricidal conflict and possibilities for the nation’s reinvention as a global capitalist democracy in the post-authoritarian future. The films’ contradictory treatment of the child – simultaneously exploited and championed against that very exploitation – not only demonstrates how filmic representations of children tread a fine line between subject and object, but also gestures towards the limits of political subjecthood in Spain’s nascent democracy. In chapter 3, “Oscillating Encounters: Alignment and Foreclosure in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and El sur (1983),” I address one of the most iconic representations of childhood in the Long Transition period, Víctor Erice’s masterpiece El espíritu de la colmena,

24  Inhabiting the In-Between

made two years before the dictatorship’s end, and his later film El sur, a vital representation of childhood made in the nascent democratic period. While in the films by Saura we see the thirdspace of self-andother supposed by the child self, and in Mercero’s the child’s hybrid and ambivalent position as subject and object, human and not human, this chapter explores how Erice’s films construct a different kind of inbetween: mechanisms of identification and distance that approximate the adult viewer to the filmic child while simultaneously acknowledging her difference. Through close readings of the films’ formal and thematic elements, I demonstrate how, on the one hand, they generate viewer alignment, identification, or empathy with the child onscreen. Yet on the other hand, these gestures of approximation are consistently foreclosed, interrupted, or cut short, reminding the (adult) viewer of the child’s subjective difference from the adult and the impossibility of fully representing her subjectivity onscreen. Drawing from recent theory on film and ethics as well as Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), I argue that the films’ oscillating dynamics can be seen to work along ethical lines, forging a relationship between adult spectator and filmic child that resists mastery or elision of difference. The films thus not only question the (im)possibility of accessing or comprehending the child’s subjectivity but also raise epistemological concerns regarding the legibility of the past in concrete historical moments of the Long Transition. I note that El sur at times renders both the historical past and its child protagonist as overly legible, abandoning the more ambiguous and abstract approach of the earlier film, in part due to the elimination of censorship. The latest film that I discuss in the book, El sur can thus be seen to mark the chronological limit of the period’s complex representation of childhood. I then examine two films centred on the nebulous close of childhood itself. In chapter 4, “Betwixt and Between: Liminal Adolescence in Jaime de Armiñán’s El amor del capitán Brando (1974) and El nido (1980),” I turn to the figure of the adolescent in two films by tercera vía filmmaker Jaime de Armiñán.18 In contrast to the films analysed in the preceding chapters, Armiñán’s two films, which have adolescent protagonists, do not feature oscillating realities, identifications, or temporalities. They privilege their own in-between: the liminal state of adolescence itself. In both films, the adolescent protagonist – by definition situated in the in-between of childhood and adulthood – resists binary classification in one category or the other, his or her status shifting frequently, depending on who assigns it and for what reasons. These adolescent characters insist on challenging and transgressing the borders separating adults from children, especially when these boundaries are imposed by adults

Introduction 25

seeking distance from, power over, or superiority to the child character. I argue that the adolescent figures in these films emerge in response to anxieties about the rapidly shifting social and political landscape of transitional Spain. However, rather than merely allegorizing their historical period, the films’ stress on the adolescent characters’ resistance to easy categorization also emphasizes the power and potential of the liminal position that they occupy. Such a position refuses binaries of adult or child, casting the protagonist instead as an adult-and-child in a complication of both subjectivities. In the end, however, the ephemeral nature of this multiplicity and possibility entails an inevitable restoration of the codified separation of adult and child, present and past, with little hope for future change. In light of recent critical accounts of the period, this return to the status quo serves as a retrospective rebuke of the Transition’s own faulty narratives about a break with the prior regime, tracing the limits imposed on both the period’s radical potential for change and the representation of the child’s subject position. Finally, in a short coda, I close the book by exploring this pessimistic ambivalence, as exemplified by the final sequence of Saura’s film Cría cuervos, thus bookending my analysis with this key representation of childhood in the Long Transition. I suggest that its intertextual afterlife in a very different film – Carla Simón’s brilliant 2017 Estiu 1993 (Summer 1993) – demonstrates the enduring power of the cinematic child for ethically exploring history, subjectivity, and the other.

Chapter One

Impossible Returns: The Child as Self and Other in Carlos Saura’s El jardín de las delicias (1970) and La prima Angélica (1974)

The 1970s films of Carlos Saura (b. 1932), arguably the most important and internationally recognized Spanish filmmaker of the Long Transition period, betray a profound preoccupation with childhood. Two of these films, remarkably, refuse to show us an embodied child at all, but instead plunge both their protagonists and the spectator into what Nicci Gerrard has called, in a very different context, “a strange, familiar landscape of childhood that is terrifying, consoling, endlessly revisited and forever gone” (1997, C17).1 These words almost uncannily describe Saura’s films El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Delights, 1970) and La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica, 1974), two works that compel their adult protagonists to return to familiar landscapes rendered strange – childhood spaces and selves that are somehow at the same time both materially present and irrevocably lost. El jardín de las delicias stages this return in a theatrical fashion, with the family of wheelchair-bound protagonist Antonio Cano (José Luis López Vázquez) performing elaborate re-enactments of important events from his childhood in an attempt to recharge the wealthy industrialist’s memory – and retrieve his Swiss bank account numbers – following a car crash. La prima Angélica’s protagonist, Luis Hernández (also played by López Vázquez), revisits his childhood under quite different circumstances: he returns for the first time to Segovia, where decades earlier he spent the Civil War years with his mother’s conservative, repressive family, in order to re-inter her remains in the family cemetery plot. Over the course of the film, Luis ends up unearthing far more than he manages to bury, as he is bombarded by memories of his childhood wartime experiences, triggered by his return to the place where they occurred. These two films offer particularly thorny explorations of the figure of the former child self, its distance from and proximity to the adult the child has become. In both, childhood appears as “endlessly revisited

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and forever gone,” the idea of childhood pulling towards a space and time that paradoxically cannot be revisited yet lies at the core of self. Both El jardín de las delicias and especially La prima Angélica refuse to consider the child as either an originary, essential version of self or a pre-subjective, lost other. Rather, in what (following Edward W. Soja) I term a “thirdspace” of child-and-adult, they demonstrate the relationship between the two as oscillating, imbricated, hybrid.2 The films’ technique for depicting this relation between the adult protagonist and the child he once was evokes the experience in a strikingly direct and embodied fashion: not only does the same adult actor play both the protagonist’s remembering self in the present as well as the remembered child evoked in flashbacks, these flashbacks also come upon the protagonist and the viewer unexpectedly and seamlessly, as the character is confronted with spaces, objects, and people from his past. This mechanism, which repeats throughout La prima Angélica and features prominently in one scene of El jardín de las delicias, demonstrates the porous boundaries between child and adult, self and other. Yet while the films’ structure leads the viewer to “share some of the character’s own bewilderment at the sudden shift of temporal frames” (D’Lugo 1991, 120–1), they also refuse an easy slippage into the protagonist’s or viewer’s subjective identification with the visually erased child self. Instead, they show the ways in which this figure is mediated by adult memory and fantasy, as well as by the temporal disconnect from the personally and politically traumatic past. Understanding this central quandary – the child as both the adult’s former self and a kind of other who is no longer accessible to him or her – is vital to any analysis of how the adult might relate to the child as a figure of multiplicity, both familiar and strange, proximate and distant, in/comprehensible. While this relationship originates with the child self (the focus of the present chapter), the temporal, subjective, and epistemological concerns raised in approaching the child self likewise apply to an examination of the child as other (my focus in subsequent chapters). In examining El jardín de las delicias and especially La prima Angélica, which expands the earlier film’s more limited foray into childhood, I am interested in how these films depict overlapping temporalities and selves, and the ways in which the child figure upends chronological understanding of linear time. In the moment of the films’ production – the last years of the Franco dictatorship, when Spain’s future was uncertain but unearthing the contested past of the Civil War was still taboo – the child within the adult emerges as a disruptive and at times disturbing figure that troubles temporal and subjective boundaries. In examining the filmic encounter with the child self, this chapter

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proposes that the child figure, as well as its visual erasure, responds to a political and epistemological crisis by staging a complex encounter with both the other and the past. Crisis and Controversy: Contexts The two films central to this chapter were made in the last years of Francoism, when the dictator’s advanced age and infirmity led to the regime’s continuance being questioned, not only by the political establishment but also by the populace at large and the international community. Due to their politicized content, the films created tension with the regime and its censors, La prima Angélica especially. In a large part this had to do with the fact that, although the diegetic present of each resides in the 1970s of their production, the films both root their action in events several decades earlier, anchoring the protagonists’ memories of childhood in the personal and collective trauma caused by the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. This basis is partially autobiographical, as the films were co-written by Saura and Rafael Azcona, themselves members of the generation that had lived through the Spanish Civil War as children.3 One of the most immediately noticeable aspects of both protagonists’ childhood memories in both El jardín de las delicias and La prima Angélica is the degree to which they are negative memories of difficult experiences in their childhood years, underscoring a vision of childhood that rejects nostalgia and idealization to show the child’s exposure to violence, hardship, cruelty, and/or abuse. The protagonists’ troubling experiences that the films highlight are personal in nature (separation from or death of a parent; harsh physical punishment) but placed against the political backdrop of key events in the nation’s past, especially the past of the Spanish Civil War, which Marcel Oms has called the traumatizing “primitive scene” of an entire generation (1981, 57). In this respect, the two protagonists are emblematic of the opposing sides in the conflict: Antonio, the vencedor at the centre of a bourgeois right-wing family, and Luis, the vencido outcast trapped among his Nationalist relatives in Segovia while his left-wing parents are besieged in Madrid. Eduardo Haro Tecglen has called it a “serendipidad de incalculable riqueza” (serendipity of incalculable richness) (1976, 14) that both protagonists are played by the same actor, López Vázquez; by this point, he had come to embody the average Spaniard everyman for filmgoers, following his comedy roles in the 1960s (Whittaker 2016, 101). In showing both sides of the conflict, López Vázquez’s masterful portrayal across the two films illuminates the devastating consequences of the war for an entire generation: “En

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una misma imagen se pueden ver las dos caras simétricas del vencedor y el vencido: la misma perplejidad, el mismo no saber. Como si la guerra civil hubiese sido, en realidad, una derrota para todos” (In a single image we can see the two symmetrical faces of the victor and the vanquished: the same perplexity, the same not knowing. As if the Civil War had been, in reality, a defeat for us all) (Haro Tecglen 1976, 14). Haro Tecglen’s words echo those of many reviews at the time, which often referenced the collective trauma of the war without explicitly addressing sides. However, one of La prima Angélica’s most controversial aspects at the time of release was that it features a character from the losing side with whom the viewer is invited to sympathize, as the film stresses the damage done to the child Luis, who, like Saura himself, spent the war years with his mother’s repressive Nationalist family, separated from his more liberal parents.4 As a result of this charged political content, the two films touched a raw nerve in the Spanish public of the time. Saura was one of the period’s most overt cinematic critics of the regime, along with his collaborator Elías Querejeta, who produced both El jardín de las delicias and La prima Angélica, and the censors took issue with both films.5 Even in the last years of Francoism, sympathy for the Left around such taboo subjects as the Civil War or the Second Republic remained off-limits, though in the early seventies censors began to be somewhat more flexible than they previously had been (Kovacs 1981, 45), in part due to the opposing currents within Francoism that led to contradictory attitudes towards dissident art. Following the 1959 Stabilization Plan’s setting in motion of the “Spanish miracle,” economic modernization gave way to certain social liberalization in the so-called Second Francoism, marked by a fractured Francoist establishment. On the one side were the inmovilistas (hardliners also known as the “bunker”), led by Franco’s assumed successor, Carrero Blanco, and including the powerful Opus Dei technocrats; on the other were the moderate reform efforts initiated by the “blue” elements of the Movimiento in the 1960s, including slightly relaxed press censorship, which were “thwarted in part by the 1969 imposition of a new Minister of Information and Tourism (Alfredo Sánchez Bella) who started to crack down on expressions of dissidence in the media” (D’Lugo 1990, 50). Against this backdrop of growing tensions between warring factions within Francoism, in 1969 the dictator (already in decline) had also designated Juan Carlos, whom he had long groomed for a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, as his successor and the prince of Spain.6 The formation that same year of the “gobierno monocolor” (monochrome government), composed exclusively of Carrero Blanco loyalist inmovilistas, seemed to signal the triumph of the

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Opus Dei technocrats, who could in turn block any proposed liberalizing reforms on the part of the Movimiento’s aperturistas in the Cortes (legislature) (Di Febo and Juliá 2005, 121). And in any event, although many sectors of the regime supported economic liberalization in terms of international trade, cultural and political apertura (openness or liberalization) – for example, in the structure of trade unions and on matters of censorship – was another story. The complexity of the ideological strands within Francoism helps to account for the fact that, while the films were allowed to be released, they nonetheless caused their fair share of controversy with the regime, censors, and the public. In the case of El jardín de las delicias, which premiered in November 1970, the content of the re-enacted scenes was the main offence; they include overt references to the Second Republic and the Civil War, which conveniently coincide with important milestones for the protagonist: Cano’s first communion and the death of his mother. The most controversial of these features a mob interrupting Cano’s first communion on the day the Second Republic was declared in 1931, carrying Republican flags and singing its anthem, the Himno de Riego; any trappings of the Republic were forbidden by censors at the time (Besas 1985, 122). A more implicit source of trouble was the negative light in which the bourgeois 1970s family is shown: many critics read Antonio Cano as an allegory for Franco. Beyond their obvious connections as increasingly feeble yet nonetheless authoritarian patriarchs, several minor plot details subtly connect Cano to the dictator – for example, when Cano’s friends take him hunting and rig up a dead bird on a nylon thread so that he will believe he has successfully shot it (a trick Cano discovers in a pitiable moment in the film), alluding to similar tactics employed for the Generalísimo.7 Despite these clear parallels, Saura repeatedly insisted in interviews that he never intended for his protagonist to stand in allegorically for the dictator, or even more literally for the industrialist and backer of the 1936 Nationalist uprising Juan March (whose words about not touching his head Cano speaks verbatim after sustaining similar injuries in a car accident). In the end, El jardín de las delicias was tolerated, largely because of its abstract nature and the challenges it posed to sense making. La prima Angélica, on the other hand, unleashed a literal and figurative firestorm upon its release in 1974, a moment when debates about the future of Francoism were raging in the public sphere as the regime’s continuance hung in the balance. Despite a very warm reception in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it represented Spain (and where Luis Buñuel is said to have wept upon seeing it), the film caused ample controversy on Spanish soil. Prior to its release, Saura had a number of

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scrapes with the censors, who rejected the first two drafts of the script. The third version was begrudgingly accepted on the condition that producer Elías Querejeta sign an agreement that certain changes would be made; the permission to film was then granted on 18 December 1973, two days before the assassination of Franco’s assured successor, Carrero Blanco, plunged the nation into further uncertainty as to what the future might hold.8 Following the assassination, and regime changes instating Carlos Arias Navarro as president of the government and the more liberal Pío Cabanillas Gallas as minister of information, Saura elected not to make the originally required changes, save for the elimination of a brief nude scene (Jurado Morales 2011, 358–60). The timing of the assassination and the change in government combined felicitously to allow for the film’s release; critics have interpreted the surprising toleration and even support of the film as the late regime’s expression of “its desire for evolution from within” and attempt “to establish a wider, more liberal base for continuance” (Hopewell 1986, 76). La prima Angélica was released on 29 April 1974 in Madrid, and the public controversy began almost immediately. One of the film’s most scandalous aspects hadn’t appeared in the shooting script read by censors but rather was added during filming: the Falangist uncle’s broken arm raised in an eternal Roman salute by a plaster cast. Saura has commented that the outcry surprised him: “La verdad es que nunca pensábamos que iba a ser tan grave lo del falangista con el brazo en alto, que estaba hecho evidentemente adrede, pero como una broma” (the truth is we never thought the thing with the Falangist with his arm saluting would be such a big deal, it was obviously done intentionally, but as a joke) (Castro 1996, 59). Not everyone found it funny, to say the least. Pro-regime press of the moment demonstrates a vitriolic right-wing backlash in reviews, editorials, and letters to the editor. A letter signed by several railway workers to the far-right newspaper El Alcázar accused the film of violating the law in mocking the camisa azul and salute, stating that the film “intenta jugar a lo cómico con símbolos incorporados al Patrimonio del Movimiento (‘comunidad de todos los españoles que participaron en los ideales de la Cruzada’), y cuya supervivencia queda garantizada con el amparo de las leyes” (tries to poke fun at key symbols of the Movement’s Patrimony (‘community of all Spaniards who participated in the ideals of the Crusade’), symbols whose survival is guaranteed by the protection of law) (El Alcázar, 13 May 1974, n.p.). The authors’ sentiment that “todos los que vestimos la camisa azul, y la vestimos con orgullo, nos consideramos ofendidos” (all of us who wore the blue shirt, and wore it with pride, consider ourselves offended) is repeated in many similar pieces

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published in right-wing papers like El Alcázar, Arriba, and Solidaridad Nacional. The film’s opponents did not restrict their critiques to the pages of these pro-regime newspapers. Less than two weeks after La prima Angélica premiered, on 11 May, a group of youths broke into the projectionist’s cabin at the Amaya cinema in Madrid and stole twelve metres of the film (a stymied attempt to steal the entire thing, which according to some reports was still playing at the time of the incident). On another occasion, some fifty Falangist sympathizers went to the Amaya to set off stink bombs and throw bags of paint at the screen yelling “¡Saura, farsante! ¡Viva España! ¡Falange sí; farsantes, no!” (Saura, a fraud! Long live Spain! Falange, yes; frauds, no!) (Jurado Morales 2011, 359). When the film was released in Barcelona on 13 May, police were permanently stationed at the door to the Balmes cinema where it was playing. This precautionary measure did not prevent the theatre from being firebombed in the early morning hours of 12 July, touching off polarized reactions both in defence of the film and in support of those who had attacked it. A group of prominent filmmakers, critics, and scholars published an open letter in several newspapers condemning not only the violent act but also the impunity granted to whoever had committed it. The letter writers (including cinema notables Román Gubern, Pere Portabella, Maruja Torres, and Vicente Aranda, among others) noted their “enérgica repulsa por este acto incivil, que se une a una cadena de atentados recientes contra diversas entidades culturales” (forceful condemnation of this uncivil act, which joins a string of recent attacks on various cultural entities), including an attack the same month on the bookseller Distribuciones del Enlace (Portabella et al., 1974, n.p.). The film was then pulled from several theatres, in part given the impending anniversary on 18 July of the military uprising that instigated the Civil War. July 1974 was also a time of particularly high tension, as Franco was hospitalized for phlebitis on the ninth of the month, temporarily ceding power to Prince Juan Carlos. Newspaper articles and Ministry of Information and Tourism communiqués from 12–13 July show a scuffle between the Balmes cinema owner, ministry officials, press, and Querejeta as the regime attempted to save face and clarify that it had not technically banned the film. Typical headlines include “‘La prima Angélica’: No está prohibida, pero deja de proyectarse en España” (“La prima Angélica”: It’s not banned, but will cease to be shown in Spain) (Diario de Barcelona, 13 July 1974); “El ministerio de información y turismo desmiente que ‘La prima Angélica’ haya sido prohibida” (The ministry of information and tourism denies that “La prima Angélica” has been banned) (Tele/eXprés, 13 July 1974); “Se acabó

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‘La prima Angélica’: ‘El ministerio de información no ha prohibido su exhibición,’ afirma el subdirector general de cinematografía” (It’s over for “La prima Angélica”: “The ministry of information has not banned its showing,” the general deputy director of cinema confirms) (Diario de Barcelona, 13 July 1974). To say that La prima Angélica became a flashpoint in a moment of cultural crisis, then, is an understatement. In 1974, as the dictator’s health rapidly declined, opposition to the regime grew stronger in neighbourhood associations, student movements, strikes and union activities, and the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, among other sectors, and was reflected in the mirror of international opinion, which pushed for truly democratic change. Simultaneously, tensions within the regime between possible aperturismo (which by then had itself splintered into continuist and reformist strands) and the hardline maintenance of the political and social order of National Catholicism grew stronger by the day.9 La prima Angélica struck at the core of these multiple currents, as becomes evident in both sides of the coverage of the film’s censorship and the fact that it represented Spain at Cannes. One sector of society viewed with outrage the fact that La prima Angélica was allowed not only to show images mocking the Movimiento Nacional but also was chosen to represent the nation officially in perhaps the most important world film festival. This outrage was matched by an altogether different sector’s indignation that Spain was again prevented from modernizing, Europeanizing, and throwing off the shackles of censorship and repression. An editorial in the Canarian newspaper La Provincia lamented the scandal, commenting that “más que tristeza es vergüenza, una gran y profunda vergüenza, la que me produce, y como a mí, a muchos amantes del cine, de la paz y la orden, lo del ‘affaire’ de la película de Saura” (more than sadness it is embarrassment, a great and deep embarrassment, that I feel, and many lovers of cinema, peace, and order like me feel, about the Saura film “affair”) (Rosado 1974, n.p.). This editorial, and many others like it, reads La prima Angélica as a flashpoint in the culture wars that have begun to question what will become of Spain after Franco: “Si los tiempos cambian, si las mentes cambian, aquellos que rehúsan testarudamente de cambiar, se quedarán en la cuneta como despojos inútiles de una civilización que no espera al pasado para alcanzar el futuro” (If the times change, if minds change, those who stubbornly refuse to change will be left in the ditch like the useless waste of a civilization that doesn’t wait for the past in order to reach the future) (ibid.).10 In a moment of crisis and deep uncertainty about the future, La prima Angélica’s representation of both past and present resonated

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far beyond the walls of the cinema or the pages of the press, not only emerging from but also influencing political debate about the future of the nation. Staging the Encounter In this period of political crisis and uncertain future, La prima Angélica and its predecessor El jardín de las delicias take up the figure of the child as they look backward to the events of the past that have shaped the present, in the process offering meditations on the relationship between adult and child selves. El jardín de las delicias offers a more limited critical engagement with the past than its later counterpart, in part because it emerges from a moment at the beginning of Francoism’s death throes (and internal strife), rather than the fever pitch of the crisis discussed above. Yet El jardín de las delicias makes a first foray into interrogating the connection between the (in)accessibility of both the past and the child self, through the “interpenetrating narrative planes through which [the film] unfolds: staged past, evoked past, present-day frames, oneiric world and future,” noted by Saura in the original shooting script (Pavlović 2007, 151). Although my analysis of this earlier film is less extensive than that devoted to its 1974 counterpart (due to the more limited screen-time allotted to childhood), its opening scenes merit examination for their shifts between past and present, child and adult, which are by turns dramatically overblown and deeply disturbing. One key sequence from this first film sets the stage for what will be writ large in the second’s embodied engagement with the (in)accessibility of the child self. Following El jardín de las delicias’s opening credits, we watch several members of a wealthy family hastily preparing for what appears to be a theatrical performance, getting details of costume, music, and props just so at the direction of the aging patriarch Don Pedro (Francisco Pierrá). The camera then shows Pedro’s middle-aged son, the film’s protagonist, Antonio Cano, in a medium shot, seated in a wheelchair that seems to unnaturally propel itself forward towards the camera. The chair then abruptly turns 90 degrees, the camera remaining fixed on Cano’s expressionless face, in a disconcerting confrontation between viewer and protagonist (figure 1.1). A recent car accident, we later learn, has left him partially paralysed, mostly mute, and suffering from amnesia. While the house’s décor visible behind Antonio appears in the fashion of the 1970s, what he sees in the reverse point-of-view shot is a step backward in time to the 1930s: at Don Pedro’s instruction, his relatives have altered every aspect of the mise-en-scène – decoration, props,

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lighting, costume, and music (Pedro insists it must be Imperio Argentina’s “Recordar”) – to make it look as it did when Antonio was five years old. The camera films from Antonio’s point of view in a static shot as his father and an actress hired to portray his now-dead mother, both dressed in extravagant period garb, re-enact their scolding of the child Antonio decades before for some unknown offence (figure 1.2). Reverse shots show Antonio’s simultaneously expressive and impassive face, stressing both his mute immobilization and his participation in the scene as its sole intended audience member, serving as what Marvin D’Lugo has considered an onscreen surrogate of the filmic spectator (1991, 97). The actor López Vázquez masterfully communicates the character’s bewilderment at what he watches, using only subtle shifts in facial expression, which, as Tom Whittaker notes, have become his main form of communication, given his lack of movement and limited capacity for speech (2016, 104–5).

1.1

1.2

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The father’s and actress’s performance, framed like a tableau vivant by the static camera’s long shot of the room, is by turns melodramatically theatrical (as the actress sobs, fawns, and collapses over her vanity table) and even tinged with comedy (as the father forgets his lines and needs a nudge from the hired “mother”). But this performative re-creation of the past serves a serious purpose: to reactivate the adult Antonio’s lost memory by drawing out a traumatic experience from childhood. The spectator watches with him in the point-of-view shot as his “parents” re-enact his scolding and cruel punishment, being locked up in a dark room with a pig they claim will devour his hands and feet. Here the adult protagonist is cast in an infantilized state not only based on his lower stature – Antonio, positioned in the wheelchair, looks up at his “parents” from a child’s height – but also his lack of both movement and the capacity for speech. In this sense the adult Antonio aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the child in the adult world as “affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing” (1989, 3). Antonio, cast as a helpless spectator, nonetheless struggles to make sense of the spectacle, its metatheatrical quality emphasizing the spectator’s active decoding function (Colmeiro 2001, 278). Once a domineering man, the now childlike Antonio is no longer in control of what happens to him; this becomes painfully clear as his family draws near the wheelchair and begins to push him towards the room into which several men have just forced an enormous and agitated pig, which can be heard squealing inside. Despite inhabiting an adult body, Antonio’s physical powerlessness in the situation aligns him with the figure of the child, whose “lack of control over its circumstances, its environment, even at times its own body” is a key marker of the child’s difference from the adult, according to Emma Wilson (2005, 330). As his father narrates to Antonio that he is five years old and that inside there is a pig that will eat his extremities, the wheelchair-bound protagonist’s previously impassive face grows increasingly expressive, showing flashes of terror and sadness; his limited speech returns and he frantically implores, through the repetition of the word “no” in a vulnerable and shaky voice, that they not repeat the childhood experience (figure 1.3).11 Antonio’s father and son then violently push his wheelchair into the dark room and slam the door behind it; from within, we hear his muffled cries of terror, followed by silence. The atmosphere then becomes light once more as family and actress discuss the child Antonio’s subsequent nightmares and hallucinations of pigs, while his daughter is the only one to point out the re-enacted punishment’s cruelty as her father remains locked inside in darkness.

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1.3

This scene sets the tone for the first part of the film, where the viewer is frequently invited to sympathize with the childlike Antonio in opposition to his family, even though they are the ones who are supposedly mentally and physically sound. Although, as Ryan Prout has noted, Antonio’s physical disability has often been read as linking him to the infirm dictator or deploying a “negative metaphor of political retardation” (2008, 168), I would argue that, at least in the initial scenes of the film, it also generates sympathy for Cano by connecting him to the bewildered child he is forced to recall. Along similar lines to Prout’s disability studies–based critique of negative readings of Antonio’s affliction, Enrique Brasó comments of the film that “de alguna forma también se plantea esa ambigüedad entre los términos de la ‘normalidad’ y la ‘anormalidad.’ Porque con toda su ‘anormalidad,’ Antonio Cano es un personaje mucho más ‘normal’ que el mundo que le rodea” (in some way [the film] also lays out an ambiguity between the terms “normality” and “abnormality.” Because with all his “abnormality,” Antonio Cano is a character who is much more “normal” than the world around him) (1974, 284). The family’s condescending and cruel treatment of Antonio highlights the ways in which he is its most “normal” and sympathetic character, certainly at the beginning of the film before the spectator pieces together the type of man he was before the accident and why, in the eyes of his family, he might deserve this treatment. If, “paradoxically, a film built around an able-bodied/disabled binary can be reread to produce an interpretation which cuts across the structure which identifies disability with stigma” (Prout 2008, 178), the character’s facial expressions and physical state might also be read as serving to recodify his disability by aligning it in physical and metaphorical terms with a child-like position that provokes sympathy from the viewer.

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Indeed, in most of the film’s re-creations of the past, as in the pig sequence, Antonio’s family members interact with him as if he were still a child, forcing him to participate in theatrical scenes that performatively re-create prior events or infantilizing him through condescending treatment. The scene immediately following the pig incident, however, is the only one to represent the remembered child self through the subjective frame of the adult Antonio himself. After opening the door to the room with the pig, Antonio’s family pulls him out, his eyes red-rimmed and filled with tears. The family’s maids then put him to bed, tucking him in tightly: he is again made immobile and rendered childlike. The light goes out, and, after a slow zoom in to Antonio’s disturbed face, we cut to a shot of what appears to be the next morning, in a similar bedroom. He still lies tucked in tightly with the sheets pulled up to his nose, beside an open window whose curtains billow in the wind. The room’s decoration, however, has changed from contemporary 1970s to a seafoam green art deco style that telegraphs its pastness, including an elaborate clamshell bed complete with drapes.12 Alternating between looking with and at the protagonist, the camera pans back and forth from Antonio’s point of view to shots of him in the bed, and then shifts to a removed third-person position when a young, attractive woman enters the room. As Antonio begins to interact with the woman we learn is his aunt (Lina Canalejas), the viewer quickly realizes (if the décor had not already sufficiently betrayed the fact) that we are in a flashback or dream recalling Antonio’s childhood; this takes a moment to ascertain because the child Antonio is still portrayed by the adult actor López Vázquez.13 The ambiguously non-diegetic, and perhaps subjective, soundtrack again plays Imperio Argentina singing “Recordar” – the song the father had insisted upon for the pig re-creation scene as a means of jogging Antonio’s memory, a concept embedded in its very name. In a device that recurs throughout this film (and La prima Angélica), sound creates bridges in time and subjectivity. Here, the musical cue connects the two temporalities and selves, suggesting continuity between the previous scene and this one, where the adult remembering the past seems to set it to this specific soundtrack – that is, the theatrical re-enactment triggers another memory from the protagonist’s childhood, transporting him in subjective terms to the period his family attempted to recreate. As Kathleen M. Vernon notes, here Saura “seems to have tapped a fundamental intuition about the nature of remembrance and mental re-creation of the past and past selves,” given that “in contrast to the family’s theatrical reenactment of his first communion where a child actor is hired to play his role, the ‘I’ he sees in his mind’s eye is his

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present ‘I,’ the only one he knows” (1989, 130). Despite maintaining his adult body, López Vázquez masterfully alters his physicality and facial expressions as a means of signalling this representational shift to the child self: his demeanour is starkly different from the preceding scene’s – subtly shifting from childlike wheelchair-bound adult to fully remembered child – as he stares with wide eyes and smiles bashfully at his aunt. After giving the sick “child” medicine and wishing him a happy eleventh birthday, she begins kissing and caressing him while promising him all the things they will do once he is well again. All the while Antonio is unable to move, tucked in and under the weight of her body, and finally she manages to lock him in a long kiss on the mouth despite his previous evasions (figure 1.4).

1.4

The scene ends with a shot of López-Vázquez’s ambiguously perplexed or perturbed face, mid-kiss, leaving up to the viewer to determine whether this emotional response belongs to the child self of memory or the adult starting to regain consciousness in the present. Despite its lighthearted mise-en-scène, this flashback retains disturbing undertones due to the child’s visual erasure: it is a scene of child molestation, but without the child’s presence. This the spectator must fill in a posteriori, imagining the scene with a visible child the film erases (and this is in many ways the flip side to the rather disturbing repeated image of the adult-bodied remembered child López-Vázquez flirting with the child Angélica in the second film). My reading of López-Vázquez’s facial expressions here is that they suggest panic and perturbation; by contrast, David Archibald suggests that Antonio feels arousal and that the scene’s “depiction has an erotic sensibility suggestive of his childlike incestuous urges” (2012, 91). Both readings are plausible; indeed,

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their mutual possibility suggests precisely the challenge posed to sense making by the film’s representation of the child as remembered by the adult, and the disturbing undertones it generates in both films, particularly as concerns sexuality. Is this scene a fantasy or traumatic memory? Are the expressions we see the recalled child’s or the recalling adult’s? This opening sequence of El jardín de las delicias teases out these questions as it shifts from present to past, performance to memory, detachment to embodiment. The sequence of the two scenes in juxtaposition demonstrates how the autobiographical child is represented as lying at the most profound core of the self – as indicated by the first scene, where, despite his amnesia, Cano can immediately connect with his traumatic childhood memories, seemingly all that he has left – and at the same time as somehow off limits or not fully accessible, mediated by what we might call adultness, as the second scene shows. There, despite having connected with his memory of childhood, the protagonist appears onscreen as an adult embodying a child, demonstrating how his memory is inevitably, necessarily, filtered through his adult consciousness. The sequence sets up a structural mirror image: in the present day, we see an adult man treated as a child, and in the past, we see a child treated in a far-too-adult way by his aunt. But we never, in fact, see the child Antonio; the film denies the spectator a visible, material child. This child is accessible only through memory, memory in which the corporeal image of the adult Antonio appears as a kind of intruder in a time (and a self) to which he does not fully belong, his child self rendered an invisible other. The Child as Self-and-Other In what sense can the self’s own experience become other? Conventional wisdom – and the linear temporality of “growing up” – would hold that the child is simply an earlier version of the adult self he or she has become. At the same time, however, children present a complex form of alterity, given that the child is on the one hand the normative universal subject par excellence and on the other hand a subject who is at times stripped of agency, whose subjective reality is objectively not the same as the adult’s, even the adult the child has become. Claudia Castañeda has noted that “while important attempts have been made to reconcile the discrepancies between the child and the normative subject (of rights, the law, citizenship, and so on), the child remains an anomalous figure in the field of subject theory itself,” given that the child cannot quite be placed into the oppositional mode against a normative subject in the way that other Others – non-normative in terms of race,

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post/colonial status, gender identity, sexuality, and so on – can (2002, 143). Children experience the world in a fundamentally different way than adults do, and the child can therefore be seen as the adult’s other in terms of emotion, cognition, knowledge, and beliefs. Yet, crucially, unlike most such Others, all adults have been children at some point. In a unique relationship of self and other, the adult has occupied the position of its other, but cannot access what that experience entailed because the affective and cognitive links to it have been erased by the very transition to adulthood. Through becoming an adult, one necessarily un-becomes a child and sheds these ways of perceiving, thinking, and understanding: this is the process we call “growing up.” In her work on queer childhood, Kathryn Bond Stockton has noted that, even in semantic terms – let alone philosophical ones – this is a problematic concept, as “growing up” implies that human development ends “when full stature (or reproduction) is achieved” (2009, 11). In her alternative view, “growing sideways” (discussed above in the introduction), Bond Stockton stresses the potential for lateral contact between adult and child. Rather than the child self disappearing in a linear narrative of continuous progress towards adulthood, then, the child might remain partially present in a sideways process that resists replacing the child with the adult he or she becomes, despite changes in cognition, bodily reality, and subject position. Saura’s films of this period suggest the elements of such a “lateral” approach to childhood, as they too resist linearity, closure, and telos. In considering the child as a sort of other that remains partially within the self, it is not my aim to fall victim to what Castañeda has identified as a frequent (and problematic) position within oppositional theory: valorizing the child’s otherness only for its embodiment of adult potential. Theorizing the child as “a pre-subjective other we can inhabit or know as theorists,” she argues, “constitutes an exercise of adult privilege,” given that in such a formulation the child’s particular and different subjective experience is erased and devalued (Castañeda 2002, 168). The child one once was cannot be fully known, despite being a version of oneself; at the same time, this figure is not entirely other to the adult he or she has become. Thus the child self resists simple categorization either as an accessible and comprehensible former version of the adult or a completely distinct and inaccessible other. Both El jardín de las delicias and La prima Angélica embrace this resistance to categorizing the child as either originary self or presubjective other, instead locating the child in a hybrid position that allows for a kind of “thirding” beyond the binary pair of self versus other, instantiating the child instead as self-and-other. I adapt this idea

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from geographer Edward W. Soja’s concept of “thirding-as-Othering,” a gesture that seeks to break down binary divisions and find a third position as an inclusive alternative to two binary poles.14 This process produces a thirdspace: a “creative recombination and extension, one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the ‘real’ material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality,” therefore enabling the creation of “a multiplicity of real-and-imagined places” (Soja 1996, 6, emphasis in the original). Transposing Soja’s spatial framework to a subjective one allows for a new understanding of the relationship to the remembered child in these films. In such a reading, the firstspace of subjectivity would be the “‘real’ material world,” in this case the present-day 1970s adult Antonio and Luis, whose child selves are lost and invisible to the viewer; secondspace the “imagined representations” of subjectivity, of the child they once were; and thirdspace the “real-and-imagined” child, neither completely part of the self nor utterly other, but rather self-and-other, adult-and-child. The remembered child in these films thus resists binary pairs or easy categorization as present or absent, self or not-self. In this sense, the films align with Elspeth Probyn’s writings on the child figure in the context of queer identity. Probyn underscores the seeming contradiction of the encounter with childhood and especially with the child self: “Images of childhood, from childhood, pull us back to a space that cannot be revisited; they throw us into a present becoming, profoundly disturbing any chronological ordering of life and being” (1996, 103). Here Probyn’s dual emphasis on the pull towards somewhere, as well as the very impossibility of ever arriving at this place, demonstrates how the encounter with the child self is by definition an impossible comingling of temporalities and selves that simultaneously can and cannot coexist. The past, like the child one once was, is on some level inaccessible: we cannot touch it or talk to it; we cannot ask questions of it that will provide us with a satisfactory response (or perhaps any at all). At the same time, that past child self is somehow contained in the present adult self, fundamental to the adult the child has become and simultaneously overlaid with the adult’s experience, knowledge, and subjectivity. The encounter with the child self thus blurs the distinctions between self and other and disturbs the temporal fixity of present and past. In both of Saura’s films, this troubling of boundaries – between self and other, subject and object, present and past – performs a destabilizing function, negating neat formulations of chronological progress or subjective growth and providing disturbing meditations on childhood itself – as is the case in the opening sequence from El jardín de las delicias.

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While, on the one hand, childhood might serve as an anchor for the self or means of understanding the adult one has become – clearly the formulation deployed in El jardín de las delicias’s initial scene by Cano’s family as they try to bring him back to himself through theatrical recreation – on the other, childhood can also upend understanding of past and present selves, as is the case in La prima Angélica. In this second film, the return to childhood aligns with what Probyn notes about the destructive potential of recalling childhood: “Far from being reassuring, the retrieval of the past into the present is profoundly dislocating, disorienting. Bringing forth beginnings results in the loss of bearings” (114). When the adult is forced, as the protagonists of both these films are, to confront the estranged and incommensurable child self within, the presence of this other self throws singular understanding of both the self and time into crisis: the self, because the child self is another that is also the same, only partially accessible in memory and not at all in materiality; and time, because the encounter with the child other instantiates the overlapping temporalities represented by past and present selves. La prima Angélica opens with a scene that stages this encounter with the child self in both embodied and spatially inscribed terms. Having just retrieved his mother’s remains from a Barcelona cemetery, protagonist Luis drives along a desolate stretch of highway to her family home of Segovia, where he is to inter them in the family pantheon. He is returning for the first time since spending the Civil War years there with her conservative and religious family, separated across physical and ideological battle lines from his left-wing parents in Madrid. The travelling sequence does not betray anything out of the ordinary, alternating between static long shots of the car driving through the desolate Castilian plain and tracking shots of Luis through the windshield, but then he looks off into the distance to his right and suddenly pulls the car over to the side of the highway. He gets out of the car and looks towards the horizon, out of the frame; then, a point-of-view shot shows the object of his gaze – the distant but clearly discernible outline of the city of Segovia. As in much of the film, here the use of sound is crucial in telegraphing subjective experience and transitioning between temporal frames. In this moment, it underscores Luis’s utter solitude at the side of the road, staring at the city he has not seen since the war years of his childhood, with only the howling wind for company. It is all we hear as he knits his brow and breathes deeply, evidently overcome by emotion or memory, and walks down the road to stand on the grass at its edge. We see another long shot of distant Segovia, this time zooming in, maintaining Luis’s point of view, to emphasize his concentration on

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the image; then we cut back to a medium close-up of his face, tense and pensive, and in reverse shot see Segovia once more. The shot–reverse shot sequence stages a kind of conversation between the two, demonstrating the city’s hypnotic pull on the protagonist as he contemplates it from afar. Then, something changes. Luis appears in medium close-up again, but his facial expression has softened; he looks more vulnerable, and perhaps confused. The striking change in his demeanour coincides with the introduction of new sounds: the hum of a motor and the creak of a door, both of which are announced aurally before the visual appearance of their source, which lies out of the frame of both Luis’s and the viewer’s visual perception. Luis turns to the source of this auditory intrusion, and the spectator sees with him in a point-of-view shot as he discovers a 1930s car, from which a middle-aged couple dressed in oldfashioned clothing is emerging. The back door stands ajar, suggesting that a third passenger has already alighted. In the scene that follows, it becomes clear that this third passenger is Luis, as a child. As present-day 1974 Luis stands on the same spot where, many years before, he begged his parents not to leave him at his grandmother’s house for the summer, he encounters the child he once was in that moment. The spectator later learns that this separation from his parents is particularly important (and traumatic) because it takes place in the summer of 1936. The child Luis will therefore see his parents not in a month, as they promise, but rather in three years, when his life, and those of an entire nation, will be irrevocably altered by civil war. Yet in the most remarkable aspect of Saura’s film (and one that was prefigured in Jardín), that child never appears onscreen. Rather, the 1930s characters – his parents – interact with the adult actor López Vázquez, who subtly alters his physicality, gestures, and voice so as to indicate that what the spectator sees is a memory of Luis’s childhood experience, filtered through the adult character’s subjective frame. Replicating the adult’s experience of the encounter with the child self, the scene denies full access to the child Luis once was: not only do we never see him in material terms via flashback, we also never quite see through the perspective of the child Luis in the sequence’s camerawork. As Luis’s parents emerge from the car and approach the spot where he stands, the camera seemingly abandons the point-of-view shots that had characterized Luis’s observation of distant Segovia and adopts a slightly detached perspective that nonetheless maintains spatial proximity to him, suggesting a link to Luis’s subjective experience. While his mother comforts the “child” Luis, the camera is not positioned in his subjective point of view but is, rather, triangulated in a third position,

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1.5

1.6

behind and to his left. Likewise, in reverse shots, we do not see from the mother’s perspective but from a similar position just behind and to the side of her (figures 1.5, 1.6). While, at first glance, the camera has abandoned its previous perspectival frame, we can read the remembered scene as shot from 1970s Luis’s perspective as he looks at a memory of himself from the outside, treading between different positions exterior to the action. This action is in fact happening in his subjective frame but is spatially inscribed in his actual position at the side of the highway, his perspective represented by the camera capture in an out-of-body experience.15 Sound, as well as image, constructs this complex encounter with the child self – and the child’s invisibility or silence. Not only do the sounds of the car approaching and its door opening demonstrate how returning to the roadside space immediately conjures up the encounter with the child self-made-other from the past; the scene’s use of vocal

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performance also demonstrates how Luis at least partially occupies both positions of remembering adult and remembered child. His initial response is spoken in voice-over, as if to suggest that the corporeal screen image of the adult Luis still represents the present-day adult, recalling through memory the words we hear voiced over a medium shot of him: “Mamá, yo no quiero ir con la abuela. Quiero quedarme con vosotros” (Mom, I don’t want to go to grandma’s. I want to stay with [the two of] you). The vocal inflection of the voice-over, while clearly López Vázquez’s voice, is bashful and slightly high, signalling that the Luis we hear speaking is the remembered child, aurally marked as separate from the adult man whose mouth remains shut as the words are spoken. However, his second intervention, “Yo quiero estar siempre con vosotros” (I want to be with [the two of] you always) is spoken aloud, in the same intonation, by the adult actor, demonstrating that Luis also partially occupies the position of the child self. Yet this child self is multiply mediated: embodied and ventriloquized by the adult actor, who is in turn viewed from outside by the subjective camerawork representing the perspective of the adult Luis. When the three 1936 characters get back into the car to continue their journey to Segovia (with the “child Luis” still embodied by the adult in 1970s clothes), the camera abruptly cuts back to 1974 adult Luis’s original position at the side of the highway. We watch them pull away from his original perspective, although López Vázquez visually remains in the antique car. Luis is paradoxically in two places at the same time, two people at the same time: both the adult materially at the side of the road (indicated by the camera capturing his perspective) and the child subjectively in the 1930s car (indicated, counter-intuitively, by the adult’s visual material presence in it). The film’s later repetition of the sequence, shot from a position on the opposite side of the road as Luis unsuccessfully attempts to leave Segovia, demonstrates more concretely this subjective camera that can simultaneously look with the adult Luis and at the representation of his child self, visually embodied by the same adult actor. In this second scene, present-day Luis has decided to leave Segovia following his mother’s reburial in the family vault, seemingly overwhelmed by the memories of his childhood that he has been forced to confront in his re-encounter with his family. Heading out of town, he approaches the spot on the highway where at the beginning of the film he stopped and recalled the 1936 journey with his parents; this place holds great power for him, confirming Chris Philo’s assertion that “certain spaces are likely to be triggers [of childhood memory] because something about them returns us to the sensations and even contents of these

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1.7

1.8

childhood moments” (2003, 14). This moment where he returns to a charged space serves as both a literal and figurative turning point in the film, as the formerly reticent Luis decides to engage actively with the past and ends up turning his car around and returning. In this second, more complex version of the scene, Luis sees the old-fashioned car and his family members by the side of the road from a few yards off, approaches them, and pulls over on the opposite side of the road, evidently transfixed by the scene he quite literally revisits. In this second viewing, the detached triangulation of the adult and remembered child is even more pronounced, as present-day Luis stares out the window of his car (figure 1.7) and looks at the spot where, days before, almost-present-day Luis recalled child-Luis’s experience. In a mise en abyme of temporalities and selves, the protagonist looks across the road to see, in the reverse shot, himself as an adult recalling himself as a child (figure 1.8).

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The content of the memory – the scene of Luis’s emotional separation from his parents – is largely the same, and the dialogue almost identical to the first time we saw it at the film’s outset. Yet not only the camera angles but also certain lines of dialogue, facial expressions, and mise-en-scène of the actors’ placement in space have changed ever so slightly, underscoring that Luis’s recall of the event a second time, despite maintaining the key points of what happened, differs slightly from the first, suggesting memory’s faulty nature as a mechanism for accessing the child self. The repetition of the scene gestures towards the mediated nature of Luis’s access to the past as well as the lack of a single “true” version of what happened. Given that this is the only scene in which the viewer, adult Luis, and child/adult Luis are triangulated in this fashion – that is, this is the only scene where we watch the adult/ adult Luis watch the child/adult Luis – we might expect to see him in the memory frame embodied as a child. Yet the film denies both spectator and protagonist this satisfaction, stressing the ways in which the adult Luis will always be superimposed on the childhood memories that are filtered through his adult consciousness. In both versions of the scene, the camera films the triad of remembered child Luis/mother/ father always from a removed angle that represents no character’s point of view, demonstrating the adult Luis’s simultaneous immersion in his child self (in terms of embodiment) and distance from it (in terms of the camera’s position). Throughout the two versions of this sequence – and several others like it throughout the film – the boundaries between the adult self and child other, viewing and viewed subject, are broken down as the camerawork and sound shift seamlessly between time periods and subject positions, throwing any sense of chronological progress into question. The ploy of using the adult actor to play his child self in memory goes beyond a mere gimmick (and one indebted to Bergman) to suggest in immediate visual terms how the child self at once is and is not accessible to the adult he has become. In this sense the child aligns with Levinas’s conception of the other as a subject that “is not unknown but unknowable,” in a relationship that Levinas fundamentally defines as one of mystery (1987, 75). This child self represented in both Saura’s films is precisely not unknown, given that it is the former self of each protagonist, and yet unknowable because of the temporal, cognitive, and subjective remove supposed by growing up. The films thus show how, in the words of cultural geographer Owain Jones, “adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be a child are inevitably processed through adultness” (2001, 177, emphasis in the original). By its very nature, the encounter of the adult with his or her child self is limited

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and coloured by the adult’s subjective difference from the child. In a 1990 interview regarding La prima Angélica, Saura addressed this limited access along similar lines, stating that: While I was writing La prima Angélica and trying to reconstruct moments from my childhood, I didn’t see myself as a child; I had the mentality of a child, I had, or tried to have, the same ideas, the same thoughts, the same sensations as I’d had when I was a child at a given moment, twenty or thirty years earlier. But I still saw myself at the age I was in the moment I was writing, as if I were a kind of intruder who, at my age, was participating in the world of my childhood: I wasn’t that removed from it because it was my own.16 (Talvat 1992, 119; emphases mine)

Saura expresses in direct terms how the child appears in the adult’s subjective frame: he must reconstruct moments and try to have the same ideas and sensations as when he was a child, given that the originals are at once present and lost to him. The mental image of the self, however, remains the present-day adult one, overlaying the reconstructed child self to the degree that it has become an “intruder” in the world of the child. Yet that world still somehow belongs to the adult he has become; therefore the adult is an “intruder” who nonetheless retains proximity to, and even ownership of, the childhood he is invading. This spatial metaphor resists the binary of adult/child, as the adult paradoxically invades a space that somehow also belongs to him – or at least, to a previous version of him – demonstrating how the self-andother can simultaneously occupy both positions. At the same time, the idea of the adult as an “intruder” in the child’s world, from which he is “removed,” casts a temporal relationship in spatial terms: intruding into and being removed from now come to describe time as well as space. Saura’s categorization provides a particularly vivid image for contemplating the child figure’s relationship to both physical space and temporality, semantically constructing childhood as not just a time but also a place, as we have seen in several theorists’ description of returning to childhood as if it were a spatial, rather than merely temporal, point of origin. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that some of the most sophisticated contemporary theories of childhood (and the child’s particularly complex form of otherness) have emerged from the discipline of geography, where space comes into close contact with subjectivity. In this vein, Jones has written that it is “fruitless to get caught up in any fixed or binary notion of ‘possible or impossible’ in terms of adults meaningfully remembering childhood – or ‘lost landscape and lost self’ … These remembered, emotional geographies are hybrid, but indivisible, where

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the past and the present in terms of both self and landscape are present in new creations” (2003, 30). La prima Angélica denies precisely this kind of “fixed or binary notion” of whether or not the lost child Luis once was can be accessed, by turns showing his immersion in this “lost landscape and lost self” and his estrangement from it. Such imbrication of time and space is central to both films’ construction of overlapping temporal frames and selves, inextricable from one another and yet still somehow fundamentally separate. In structural terms, the films show how space connects intimately with time, as spaces are frequently the triggers for slippage between temporal frames. In La prima Angélica, temporal shifts take place in several rooms in the school and the family home, the stone where Luis and Angélica carve their names, or the spot on the highway where Luis has his first moment of recall; in El jardín de las delicias spaces from the family home are repurposed to summon the past events that occurred there (as in the opening scene or even the bedroom flashback), or theatrically re-created in other areas of the estate. The often seamless movement between these temporal frames, triggered by memories that occurred in the same spaces, places the spectator in a position of identification with the protagonist as he struggles to make sense of the chronological disturbances that thrust the past forward into the present and the adult backward into childhood. The two films pose these “hybrid, but indivisible” geographies and temporalities of self in different ways, with El jardín de las delicias more implicitly supporting the idea that the child is contained in the adult and attempting artificially to fuse the two (or cause them to collide) through the family’s theatrical endeavours. Sensing Time, Disavowing Memory In the second film, the thirdspace of self-and-other comes to the fore, as La prima Angélica not only resists binary classifications but also destabilizes the protagonist’s (and spectator’s) coherent understanding of both the self and time. As Luis seamlessly and disorientingly slips in and out of child and adult subjectivities, the film constructs overlapping temporalities and selves. This seamlessness is not only facilitated by both adult and child being played by the same actor but also achieved through the frequent lack of formal cues in editing, lighting, or sound to indicate that we are moving between temporal and subjective frames. In both films, “Saura conveys the fact that a scene is not real through certain details of décor and acting style rather than by means of dissolves, cuts, or soft-focus shots which are usually used … to indicate the passage from reality to memory, from present to past,” as in the

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flashback to the childhood bedroom in the first film and several slippages between present and past in the second (Kovacs 1981, 49). This sparse signalling to the viewer that we are moving between adult experience and childhood memory replicates the character’s subjective experience of the porous boundaries between the two aspects of his present-day self, as the overlapping leaves of subjectivity and temporality become difficult to pull apart. In both films, a flashback or reverie often begins when the character is in one place physically and ends to find him somewhere else, the viewer not knowing what has transpired in the present frame in the meantime. In this sense, the sequences deny a linear construction between what Deleuze would term the actual and the virtual, the “present and its contemporaneous past,” or, following Bergson, perception and recollection (Deleuze 1989, 79). Sound often figures prominently in the transition between planes, whether serving to “wake” the character out of his reverie and back into the present or to show the ways in which the childhood memory lingers on in the moment it is recalled, the two temporalities briefly coexisting in a disruption of linear time. In these cases, when the character returns to the present, the diegetic sound remains briefly in the past, the virtual continuing to intrude on the actual, leaving ambiguous which triggers the other.17 Such fluid temporal movement evinces the nonlinear nature of time in the film, where several temporal and subjective frames coexist in a single moment and bodily image. Not only does López Vázquez play the adult and child versions of Luis, the same actor (Fernando Delgado) plays Luis’s uncle Miguel in the 1930s and his cousin Angélica’s husband Anselmo in the 1970s;18 the same actress (María Clara Fernández de Loaysa) plays the child Angélica in flashback and adult Angélica’s daughter (also named Angélica) in the present day; and the same actress (Lina Canalejas, who had played the aunt in El jardín de las delicias) plays both the adult Angélica in the 1970s and her mother in the 1930s flashbacks. A particularly striking example of this overlap appears in the scene in which Luis, in his aunt’s apartment as an adult, looks down to Angélica’s apartment, where his cousin and her daughter are preparing their rooms for the day in adjacent windows (figure 1.9). They notice him looking down and begin a friendly conversation, simultaneously creating images of both a double self (Angélica as a child and an adult) and two generations of mothers and daughters, played by the same actresses. Thus childhood and adulthood, “present and past, still present and already past” (Deleuze 1989, 79), are viewed side by side, illustrating their confluence and inextricable nature.

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1.9

In this respect, the film conceptualizes temporality along the lines of Deleuze’s filmic crystal or seed of time, a composite of actual and virtual, present and past (1989, 78), revealing “the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved. Time simultaneously makes the present pass and preserves the past in itself” (98). In theorizing these flows and their privileged representation in the medium of cinema, Deleuze goes on to provide an example that is especially pertinent to the present analysis: “It is true that these regions (my childhood, my adolescence, my adult life, etc.) … appear to succeed each other. But they succeed each other only from the point of view of former presents which marked the limit of each of them. What Fellini says is Bergsonian: … We are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity’” (99, emphasis in the original). Saura broaches this simultaneity of presents and pasts in similar terms in a 1996 interview. In it, he explains that La prima Angélica’s guiding structural principles came from a meditation he once had while looking in the mirror: Cuando te ves en el espejo, te puedes ver en todas las edades. El espejo puede rebotar tu imagen. La imagen que tú ves, en el mejor de los casos, sería la imagen que tú recuerdas del espejo de cuando eras niño. Y en el peor de los casos, te estás viendo a ti mismo. En ese juego que tú puedes imaginarte cómo eras de niño, porque lo recuerdas o porque has visto fotos, es donde está el origen de esa imagen. La idea [de la película] era que uno … es todas las edades. Uno no es Carlos Saura en 1906 [1996], sino también en el 59 y el 68. Y por supuesto en 1936. (Castro, 60) (When you see yourself in the mirror, you can see yourself at every age. The mirror can bounce your image back. The image you see, in the best of

Impossible Returns  53 cases, would be the image you remember from the mirror when you were a child. And in the worst case, you see yourself. In this game where you can imagine what you were like as a child, because you recall it or you’ve seen photos, is where this image’s origin lies. The idea [of the film] was that you … are every age. You’re not Carlos Saura in 1906 [1996], but also in ’59 and ’68. And of course in 1936.)

Despite the unfortunate typographical error in the magazine – which prints 1906 when what is clearly meant is 1996, the year of the interview – Saura’s statement underscores how the child-and-adult can coexist in the thirdspace supposed by the mirror. Fellini’s simultaneity, taken up by Deleuze, here is staged in striking visual terms where the mirror bounces the image of child and adult back and forth to and from the same self, underscoring the multiplicity of selves contained in a subject throughout time. Saura’s comment that “in the worst case, you see yourself” as merely an adult and not also a child suggests that this multiplicity – the child self’s recoverability – is vital to his philosophical filmic project, that the erasure of the child is for Saura a tragic loss. Not coincidentally, the mirror makes a literal appearance in La prima Angélica, just after the initial roadside encounter. A key aspect of that scene, which transitions into the next one where Luis shaves in the mirror at his hotel, is the importance of sensory perception as a mechanism driving the film’s oscillation between temporal frames. As we saw, Luis seeing the city in the distance triggers a memory of this view from years before; however, it is hearing the sound of the remembered 1930s car door creaking open that pulls him – and the viewer – fully into the past. But perhaps the central sensory trigger into the following scene, which moves the action between the past and present, virtual and actual selves in both directions, is the cologne Luis’s mother applies to soothe him. Combining the senses of touch and smell, the cologne serves as a sensory bridge between scenes, where, after an abrupt temporal and spatial cut from the antique car on the highway, we find the adult Luis in the diegetic 1970s present in his hotel room in Segovia, shaving and then applying cologne, gazing into the mirror that is the camera. In the first scene, it calms his carsickness with its cooling effect on the skin; in the second, it refreshes and scents his skin after shaving. This temporal lapse between the memory scene of the child self and the present day of the adult protagonist is typical of the film. No transitional shot shows Luis move from watching the old-fashioned car pull away to getting back into his 1970s car, or how he gets to the hotel; rather, the narrative logic follows the subjective connection of the sensory trigger: after shaving he applies cologne to his own face, staring

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1.10

1.11

into the mirror, a sensory portal that provides a through-line into the past from the previous scene. The camera serves as the mirror he looks into, so in fact Luis is staring straight at it – and by extension, at the spectator, who is in this sense the mirror that “reflects him at all ages,” the crystal of time that confronts the actual image with the virtual. Reading the seemingly disparate scenes as two halves of a whole, connected by the suture of the mirror, demonstrates how the overlapping temporalities of child and adult self interlock. This connection is subtly made explicit by the actions of the actor, who, after applying cologne as an adult man in the diegetic present, pensively touches the spot on his forehead where his mother had applied it in the childhood memory (figures 1.10, 1.11). The cologne moves us from the past to the present, and then implicitly back to the past as the adult Luis appears lost in thought, perhaps mentally returning to the roadside scene once more. He pauses for a

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moment of reflection after making the tactile and olfactory connection to his multisensory memory of feeling and smelling, a reverie that takes on Proustian tones he will allude to later in a conversation about a madeleine with his cousin and her daughter. The emotional resonance of the sense-based memory is written across Luis’s face: a mix of sadness, bemusement, and perhaps even surprise at feeling the cologne on the bald head of a middle-aged man rather than a child’s, a kind of shock at still being inside his own adult body. His response aligns with Gaston Bachelard’s assessment of the role of reverie in recalling one’s (endlessly revisited and forever gone) child self: To live in this atmosphere of another time, we must desocialize our memory and, beyond memories told, retold and recounted by ourselves and others, by all those who have taught us how we were in the first childhood, we must find our unknown being, the sum total of all the unknowable elements that make up the soul of a child. When reverie goes so far, one is astonished by his own past, astonished to have been that child. (1969, 116, emphasis mine)

In this juxtaposition of the highway and hotel scenes, then, Luis appears doubly astonished: astonished to have been that child on the road so many years ago and equally astonished to return to the present day where that child is lost. In privileging multiple sensorial triggers, the sequence emphasizes the process of converting physical sensation to bodily recollection; it also demonstrates how selves and temporalities can coexist alongside, and in alternation with, one another, disrupting the idea of linear progress from past to present. While this hybrid subjective geography on the one hand opens up the possibility of moving beyond a binary of past or present, child or adult, it also necessarily denies the viewer and the protagonist material access to the child of the past, filtered as it is through the adult’s consciousness and memory. The actual child of the past cannot be parsed out from the virtual child-and-adult, for, as Saura has stated, “that was one of the fundamental ideas that made me make this film – that you cannot see yourself as a child” (quoted in Kinder 1979, 20, emphasis mine). In addition to underscoring the visual erasure of the child in embodied terms, La prima Angélica also repeatedly questions the means of access to childhood experience by progressively sowing seeds of doubt as to the veracity of Luis’s memories. Initially, despite being staged in his subjective frame, the memories are presented as an authentic past; there is no reason, for example, to doubt whether the opening roadside scene is a

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faithful representation of what happened on the highway to Segovia in the summer of 1936. When later in the film Luis revisits the scene on his way out of town, the camera angles as well as key lines of dialogue and the actors’ placement and facial expressions have changed slightly. These minute changes underscore that Luis’s recall of the event a second time differs slightly from the first and stresses the degree to which the viewer sees the memory from Luis’s perspective rather than having access to an imagined, objective past filmed from a detached position. What’s more, his unstable recall denies the possibility of such an objective capture, underscoring how any recuperation of the past is always already subject to such instability. Likewise, in a scene where Luis and Angélica look at photographs, the film’s use of the same actor as two different characters from each temporal frame is revealed to represent the malfunction of Luis’s capacity for recall, rather than the characters’ actual physical resemblance. Angélica asks in shock how Luis could have confused her father with Anselmo, revealing to both the spectator and protagonist Luis’s faulty subjective recall of the past. It is worth noting that even the “reality” of the diegetic present is somewhat difficult to pin down; as Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer points out, characters appear and speak only when Luis is present, and thus could be considered a part of his internal reality even in scenes in the present day, as the entire film is organized around the nexus of Luis’s consciousness (1994, 256–7). Luis’s faulty identification of family resemblances further draws attention to the inadequacies of adult memory in recapturing a childhood experience that is no longer fully accessible; as Karen Lury has written of the child in film, “Interweaving temporalities and ellipses provide a framework riddled with gaps and inconsistencies which represent the child’s experience and, in some cases, the interference of the adult’s memory with that experience” (2010, 114). Thus the film’s oscillating temporal frameworks not only replicate the protagonist’s confusion in attempting to recover some sense of a stable past or present self; much like the opening sequence of El jardín de las delicias, they also underscore the very nature of childhood experience as simultaneously compelling and beyond recuperation, Probyn’s disorienting pull “back to a space that cannot be revisited” (1996, 103). The film’s memory mechanisms in turn undercut the possibility of such a thing as faithful or accurate access to the historical past. The viewer’s progressive distrust of Luis’s memories runs in parallel to his own discovery of their faulty nature, causing both protagonist and viewer to question the very mechanisms of memory itself. In this sense, the film, like El jardín de las delicias before it, disavows the possibility of

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memory as an epistemological mechanism for comprehending either the past or the present, the virtual or the actual. In upending chronological structure and proposing instead the model of coetaneous temporalities and subjectivities, La prima Angélica suggests that, while neither the past nor the child is fully recoverable through memory, the hybrid thirdspace the film constructs to bridge them provides a vital, albeit partial, approach to both the past and the (child) other. In this destabilized relationship between times, spaces, and selves, the films follow D.N. Rodowick’s claims (via Cavell and Deleuze) that the “fundamental perplexity” of photographic media such as film is how they enable “things absent in time [to] be present in space, a paradox of presence and absence that ordinary language has trouble resolving … Film presents to me a world from which I am absent, from which I am necessarily screened by its temporal absence, yet with which I hope to reconnect or rejoin” (2007, 63). Time Out of Joint Rejoining this absent past world takes on particular urgency given the political contexts in which the films are both set and produced. In depicting oscillating presents and pasts, both emphasize the temporal distance between the Civil War period of their protagonists’ childhoods and the years of late Francoism from which they look back, as adult men, on the past. The theoretical abstraction of rejoining an absent world concretizes strikingly well in two scenes from La prima Angélica, twin iterations of a bomb falling on Luis’s school.19 The film opens with the first version of this scene, which comes immediately after the stark opening titles in white lettering on a black background, in unison with a soundtrack of choirboys singing the twenty-third psalm. With the song as a sound bridge (the technique yet again underscoring the bridging of temporalities and subjectivities), the image shifts to that of a 1930s school lunchroom, tables and chairs strewn about, pitchers of water tipped over and spilling onto blue tablecloths. The painterly compositions of the director of photography, Luis Cuadrado, evoke still-life paintings, but captured just after a catastrophe. Light streams in through the windows and the air hangs with dust that obscures the scene’s human figures; they are unnaturally frozen in their positions as the dust floats by them. The drifting particles, along with slight trembling of the actors’ bodies, reveals that this is not a still image, as it may at first glance appear. There is no diegetic sound; all the viewer hears throughout the sequence is the continued track of the choirboys intoning “el Señor es mi pastor” (the Lord is my shepherd).

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After three seconds in their frozen poses, the characters in the scene suddenly begin to move, with an urgency that sharply contrasts with their previous motor paralysis. Save for one adult man in a priest’s black cassock, they are young boys, running to take cover, helping each other up off the floor, drawing their hands to their ears in reaction to a deafening sound that the viewer does not hear but that indexically indicates the bombing that has left the dining room in its current state. Amid the chaos, the priest tries to help the boys to safety, and the camera takes up a different angle, which seems to show the same priest and boys; in this new perspective, the figures again start frozen in a tableau vivant, holding their poses bent over at the waist for about three seconds, long enough to signal that the diegetic time is out of joint and they are suspended in it (figure 1.12).

1.12

The camera zooms in past the frozen actors, whose bodies sway ever so slightly as they hold their poses, coming to rest on a motionless boy seated at one of the tables, his head down and hands covering his ears. The camera hovers unsteadily, adding to the sense of chaos and instability as the dust hangs in the air and the characters’ bodies hang limply in their bent positions. Once again, after a few seconds, the actors’ bodies begin moving as they react to the sounds the spectator cannot hear. The camera then pans across the room, showing broken tables and chairs, boys dusting themselves off, and comes to linger on one child’s (presumably dead) body, draped across the back of a fallen chair beside a tipped-over table, its tablecloth spattered in blood. The perspective shifts to the final tableau: a boy standing upright, frozen still, who after three seconds returns to life and pushes a nearby schoolmate to the floor as he covers his ears against another blast. In the final shot, no

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boys or priests are visible as the camera captures the dust and smoke floating through the room in a static shot; a chair falls disjointedly to the floor of its own accord and the sequence ends as we cut to a panoramic sweep of the port of Barcelona in the diegetic 1970s present day and the music fades. When it first runs at the film’s outset, the bombing scene has no explicit link to the characters or events of La prima Angélica to which we immediately cut: the adult Luis in Barcelona in the present day taking his mother’s bones from her cemetery niche to transport them to Segovia. Coming as it does at the film’s opening, the scene is disorienting and disturbing, and provokes more questions than answers. More than anything, it appears as a sort of setting of the stage: it indicates that the war will play into the film and anchors what is to come in a generic representation of concrete historical events. When the second iteration plays, however, the spectator better understands its significance. It occurs less than fifteen minutes before the film’s conclusion, a closing bracket to the first version’s opening one. It follows immediately upon a schoolroom scene where a priest lectures the boys, including López-Vázquez’s adult-child Luis who sits among them, railing on about the recent death of a young boy from aerial bombardment; the priest instils in his pupils not only the fear of dying in such a manner but also the risk of eternal damnation if their souls happen to be in sin when it occurs. The narrative then cuts to what appears to be a temporally sequential scene in which the schoolboys are eating lunch – in the same dining room that we saw at the film’s outset, though not immediately recognizable in its normal orderly state. Two boys stand reading San Juan de la Cruz’s “Oración del alma enamorada” as the rest (including the adult-child López Vázquez, who had not appeared in the initial iteration) slurp their soup, hunched over the tables adorned with blue tablecloths we saw in the previous version of the scene. A priest paces back and forth, surveying the boys as they eat – the same one who in the first version helped them to safety after the blast. The viewer, unlike the schoolboys and priests, knows what is coming. So, it becomes clear, does Luis; the camera moves to a shot of him in medium close-up at the table, and we enter his subjective reality by means of sound and camera movement. The other boys keep eating, spoons and bowls clinking, as Luis – the recalled child of the past embodied in the adult’s bodily frame – takes note of a sound no one else seems to detect. The camera shows his point of view as he lifts his eyes to the still-empty windows, and then in reverse shot we see his anxious uplifted gaze (figure 1.13).

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1.13

1.14

The diegetic sound of the boys reciting San Juan de la Cruz and the clinking of spoons slowly fades out as the sound of a military plane’s humming motor fades in, growing in intensity. None of the other boys notice it, and, coupled with the subjective camerawork, this subtle shift from diegetic to partially diegetic (and amplified) sound makes it clear that this is something happening in Luis’s mind; but which Luis, the child or the adult recalling him? Both at the same time? In reality or in memory? As the rumbling of the airplane engines builds to a crescendo, a new sound is introduced: the high-pitched whine of a falling bomb. During this crucial sound shift, as those around him remain oblivious to the approaching danger, Luis redirects his upturned gaze to look directly at the camera, transfixed with fear, the “helpless witnessvictim” (D’Lugo 1990, 55) (figure 1.14).

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Then the windows are blown in, the boys fall to the floor, and the air fills with dust and smoke. The viewer is back once more at the scene’s initial iteration, having arrived at what seems to be the same moment in time. This time, we watch the boys scramble at normal speed to get off the floor, helped by the priests, and the scene closes with the camera zooming in on a seemingly dead child who lies motionless on the floor, a large shard of glass protruding from his forehead, face covered in blood. There are several fundamental differences in this second screening of the same event. In addition to the fact that the first version begins in medias res with the bombing already underway, there are three principal alterations the second time around: the sound is diegetic in the second version (explosions, screams, glass shattering) whereas in the first it was mute and covered by the non-diegetic choirboy track; in the second version there are no frozen tableaux or overexposed lighting disjointing the scene’s temporal duration, but rather the boys and priests move in what appears to be a realist depiction of the events; finally, in the second instance, the adult-image Luis is present in the lunchroom. In a film replete with repetitions of characters, places, actors, images, and scenes, this one might not seem particularly significant. Most critics address it as representing Luis’s memory of a traumatic event, which is unblocked following his return to the places and people of his past. Yet beyond just breaking this traumatic blockage, the twin scenes also demonstrate how the past does not exist outside the individual, waiting to be recuperated, but rather within him as a disruptive force that poses epistemic challenges to the linear understanding of time and self. The presence of the adult-child Luis in the second version of the scene signals to the viewer that, as in so many other instances, we are in one of Luis’s reveries or memories of the war years. All of these, as we have seen, play with the imbrication of child and adult selves by casting the adult-bodied Luis as his child self with altered affect, gesture, and voice. This particular memory, however, demonstrates another aspect of the remembering adult’s presence within the remembered child – the ways in which the adult Luis intrudes on his former self. As with so much in the film, this intrusion is communicated by the facial expressions of actor López Vázquez, though here there is a crucial difference. Normally we see López Vázquez’s adult body and face incarnate the subjective experience of the invisible child: the past is cast as a flashback wherein the internal logic of the scene belongs entirely to the childhood frame but for the bodily appearance of Luis. Here, however, the adult-embodied rendering of the child self is privy (via his adult knowledge) to what is about to happen before it does: he

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hears the bomb no one else can because he is in fact not fully of the past despite being in the past. In this sense, the film embodies in its protagonist what David MartinJones (2011) has called the “child-adult seer,” a spectatorial function of adults watching films set in the (violent or conflicted) past featuring child focalizers. This conceptualization draws on Deleuze’s idea of the child seer in neorealism as a privileged spectator to events as they unfold in a moment of present crisis. In Martin-Jones’s formulation, due to a temporal lag between the events depicted onscreen and the moment of their depiction in films that stage a moment of past crisis, the adult spectator has access to historical information about what will occur in the child character’s future – the adult spectator’s past – that invites critical reflection on these historical events. The child seer onscreen is thus figured in “an informing layer of the past that is of relevance for the present generation” in a “recreated past that oscillates with the present” (2011, 82). Saura’s film diverges from Martin-Jones’s conception in the crucial fact that, in embodied terms anyway, there is no child seer present. Rather, Luis’s position is one that incarnates both the spectatorial child-adult seer – an adult who knows what is about to happen, both instantaneously and historically, when the child does not – and the child seer character himself. The moment in which Luis stares down the camera is a vital embodiment of this simultaneity. Just after it becomes clear that the Luis in the scene is in some sense the adult intruding into the child’s memory, that he can hear the bomb and knows what is coming, his gaze interrogates the spectator of these overlapping events, at once telegraphing the child’s fear and the adult-child’s horror in the face of what he knows is imminent. In this scene, arguably the film’s most direct representation of the child’s experience of war, the film creates a temporal composite akin to the subjective overlap of thirdspace. This composite acts as a sort of thirdtime that is not present or past but present and past. This thirdtime aligns with Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image as one simultaneously anchored in pastness and in the viewing of this past in the present. Calling the crystal a “mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection,” he writes that “the crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and which is the other” (Deleuze 1989, 81; emphasis mine). Taken together, the two bombing scenes provide a “constant exchange” between actual and virtual, present and past.

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Indeed, following Deleuze’s framework, the viewer is hard pressed to determine which bombing scene is the virtual and which the actual. While Deleuze in large part aligns the actual with his concept of the movement-image and the virtual with the time-image, it is not so simple to distinguish them here. For example, the first iteration of the scene would in many ways appear to correspond to the actual – showing the events from a detached, “objective” third-person camera, at the outset of the film before we can connect them to any subjective experience, and without the embodied adult-child Luis present (or, perhaps, it may in fact be the only scene with the “actual” child Luis present, unrecognizable to the spectator since we do not know what he looks like). However, the scene’s depiction of the time almost literally “out of joint” (perhaps Deleuze’s favourite citational description of the time image) aligns it much more closely with the virtual, in its stylized movements, disjointed temporality and duration, overexposed lighting, and distorted non-diegetic sound. In contrast to the disjointed time of the first version of the scene, the use of diegetic sound and realist camera capture in the second version seems, initially at least, much more aligned with the actual than its preliminary counterpart. The presence of the adult-child Luis, however, and his folding of remembering present/future adult into the experiencing past child align the scene with the time image’s virtual nature. So too does Luis’s status as an immobilized observer who, despite impossible knowledge of what is about to occur, can do nothing to warn the schoolboys and priests and is able only to stare helplessly at the camera. This position is akin to Alasdair King’s distillation of Deleuze: “The protagonists of the cinema of the time-image find themselves, famously, in environments in which they no longer know how to act or, on occasion, even to move. Deleuze describes this as the breakdown of the sensory-motor regime: The protagonist becomes less an agent and more an observer confronted by pure optical and acoustical images” (2014, 59). In this respect the second version of the scene conforms more to the virtual, despite showing the events it depicts, by and large, in accordance with the actual. Deleuze notes, however, that “if virtual is opposed to actual, it is not opposed to real, far from it” (41). In this sense the two scenes, in their oscillation between virtual and actual, construct a crystal-image that points to a reality of the past and of the self that is beyond the frame of representation: the actual child who cannot be retrieved, or even made visible. Such a comingled and oscillating relationship between temporalities might allow more complex understanding of childhood experience than separating time into a clear “then” and “now.” Amal Treacher has

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noted, in a position not unlike Bond Stockton’s conception of growing sideways, that “where time is understood to be linear, then the differences between adulthood and childhood come to the fore. If, on the other hand, the relationship between the past and the present is understood to be more permeable, then so too is the relationship between childhood and adulthood” (2000, 138). In this respect, nonlinear time serves as a means of exploring the connections between the child and adult selves, a sort of subjective thirdspace. At the same time, a key element is missing from the equation: the child self that never appears in either film. The first version of the scene is perhaps the only time we may have access to the corporeal image of the child Luis as child; and yet, because of the dynamics of his representation, this child figure is yet another anonymous schoolboy among those present – if he is present at all. The lack of an indexical relationship between Luis and any of them thus denies the viewer an embodied child in yet another fashion. As Bond Stockton writes in the context of queer childhood, but equally applicable here, “The child is precisely who we are not, and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back. It is a ghostly, unreachable fancy” (2009, 5). If perhaps “we cannot know the contours of children, who they are to themselves,” La prima Angélica suggests that neither can we know who we were to ourselves (ibid.). By staging an encounter with the adult/child self in this position of simultaneously known self and unknowable other, La prima Angélica situates its protagonist – and the spectator – in an epistemological border zone that points to the limits of knowledge: of the self, the other, and the past. In part because of the films’ overt and daring political critiques of Francoism and the violence of the Civil War years, critics have written a great deal about the ways in which they mobilize memory of the war in a moment when doing so was taboo.20 Yet it is also vital to acknowledge the ways that they disavow the very possibility of memory as a mechanism for fully accessing the past, as is writ large in their representations of access to the child self. In this respect, the films propose a new paradigm born out of the double crisis of the Civil War and its re-evaluation on the eve of the dictator’s death, a kind of untimely present that was looking simultaneously backward (to the war years) and forward (to the uncertain future of the post-Franco landscape).21 In his writing on the time image, Deleuze stresses the importance of the post-crisis moment for changing paradigms of both aesthetics and ethics. For him, it is the crisis of the Second World War that leads the movement image to give way to the time image. Much like the films Delueze explores in Cinema 2, Saura’s two films examined here mobilize political and social crisis by

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destabilizing epistemic knowledge of the child and of history. In this sense, the films do not propose the child as an allegorical figure fashioned in the shape of the past, or one that facilitates our access to historical understanding. Rather, through their hybrid subjective thirdspaces and disruptive chronologies, they show the need to reach back towards this figure while questioning to what degree we can indeed recuperate his or her experience. In the context of a nation decades deep in a repressive dictatorship that had not begun to work through its contested and violent past, and poised on the brink of an uncertain future, the films propose that the child, like the past, is, but is not, “us.”

Chapter Two

Innocent Creatures: Child as Commodity and Animal in Antonio Mercero’s La guerra de papá (1977) and Tobi, el niño con alas (1978)

In a 1997 television interview, former child star Víctor Manuel “Lolo” García discussed his faulty memory of the role that made him the darling of Spanish popular cinema twenty years prior, when he had his breakthrough starring in Antonio Mercero’s film La guerra de papá (Daddy’s War, 1977). Although the film broke box-office records and became the highest-grossing Spanish film of the year, the child actor left the profession a few years later after a series of subsequent flops, including the 1978 follow-up Tobi: El niño con alas (Tobi, the Boy with Wings, commonly known and henceforth cited simply as Tobi). Looking back on his initial forays into acting, and his role in La guerra de papá especially, García commented that, despite having seen the iconic film several times, he didn’t feel as if it was himself he watched acting onscreen: “[Es] una sensación bastante especial, sí … he visto ya muchas veces la película pero no me acabo de acostumbrar. No la veo como si fuera yo el que está allí actuando” (It’s a pretty special feeling, yes … I’ve seen the film many times but I still can’t get used to it. I don’t see it as if I’m the one there acting) (excerpted in Cine de barrio, 2014). García’s comments regarding the specific experience of the child film-star mirror Saura’s more broad depiction of the child self discussed in the previous chapter: here, the actor, too, is astonished to have been that child, no longer accessible to him via memory. The knowledge that the figure he sees is himself creates a sense of incredulity and dissociation. In García’s words, we see how the effect on the adult of seeing that child self is particularly staggering in the context of a commercial film, especially given that the actor was young enough at the time so as not to recall the experience of filming as an adult.1 Using the case of two films García made as a very young child, this chapter explores another kind of in-between from the thirdspace of child and adult selves: the visible onscreen child’s position at the limits of language, subjecthood,

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and even humanity as he becomes a very particular kind of filmic commodity. This chapter addresses the child’s oscillation between the human and non-human, subject and object, in Mercero’s two child-centred films starring García. La guerra de papá and Tobi, more mainstream than the auteur cinema explored in the previous chapter, emerge from a crucial moment of the Spanish Transition. The year 1977 was marked not only by the nation’s first democratic elections in over four decades, legalization of the Communist Party, and end of censorship, but also the brutal murder of labour lawyers by right-wing terrorists in the Atocha massacre and the signing of the Moncloa Pacts, which cemented Spain’s entrance on the world stage as a capitalist democracy, curtailing the power of unions, disenfranchising the poor and working classes, and defining the Transition’s project as one solidly of reforma rather than ruptura. The following year saw the ratification of the nation’s new democratic constitution following a popular referendum as well as a law separating the police from the military, but this change too was surface level at best. Labrador Méndez quotes an article from the magazine Bicicleta summarizing the change as one of uniform alone: “De grises a marrones, cambia de vestido, pero la policía es eterna” (From gray to brown, a change of clothing, but the police are eternal) (2017, 62–3).2 In a pivotal and contradictory historical moment, the child figure in these films emerges from anxieties around the nation’s past and future as an absolute other defined by his “innocence,” linguistic ignorance, and charm, more an object of spectacle than a subject in his own right. The films thus point to a key problem of representing childhood: the potential for fetishizing the child as an innocent, pre-subjective “other” fundamentally unlike the adults around him, not acknowledging his difference but rather benefiting from and spectacularizing it. Both films stress the child’s otherness as they capitalize on the charming appeal of their star’s mischievous precocity; both also fixate on the child’s scatological processes and bodily difference, frequently showing him naked, defecating or urinating, in a fashion that would be unthinkable for an adult actor. In this sense, the child’s status as different from the adult is what allowed Mercero to sell the La guerra de papá as a “white” alternative that would appeal to audiences in contrast to the nudity and sexuality of the destape (undressed) cinema popular at the time following the gradual elimination of the Francoist censorship apparatus (Ángulo 2001, 29).3 The idea that Mercero’s two films are an innocent antidote to destape cinema is somewhat ironic, given how the child’s nudity and scatological processes take centre stage in both of the director’s works featuring García. Indeed, the films’ intended wholesome or comic treatment of the child’s nakedness, limited access

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to language, and bodily functions illustrates how the child is depicted as other-than-adult, spectacular object, or performative animal.4 Both the diegetic and extra-filmic dimensions of Mercero’s films provide fertile ground to theorize how the child as both performer and character pushes the limits of the subject, even aligning with the non-human animal to serve as a pre-social creature, a blank slate that takes on particular appeal in a moment when the nation was attempting to reinvent itself in the political and social sphere. In this chapter, I trace how the child marks a limit figure, straddling the lines between human and nonhuman, subject (of bodily autonomy, politics, and language) and object (as commodity and fetish). I first explore how the child’s partial access to language and bodily difference mark him as a fetishized other who is denied full subjecthood; this initial analysis of the child’s objectified innocence focuses on Mercero’s first venture with García, La guerra de papá, striking for its impact and box-office success as a key film of the initial Transition.5 I then explore how the child further pushes the limits of the subject (and the human) in being cast as animal and commodity, focusing primarily on Tobi, a fascinating oddity that has largely escaped critical attention, save for Sarah Wright’s rescue of it from total obscurity (2013, 80–2) and a brief mention in Labrador Méndez’s recent re-evaluation of the Transition, which reads the film among Icarus narratives (2017, 350ff). In La guerra de papá, we see the child’s difference marked in the film’s treatment of the child’s body, access to language, and cognition. Tobi goes a step further in showing how the child is fetishized by science, the media, and consumerism, with the film’s narrative ultimately privileging Tobi’s moral superiority to those who would exploit him, setting his supposed innocence against the backdrop of anxieties about consumerist modernity as the film simultaneously exploits the protagonist and champions him against that very exploitation. Despite their adherence to conventions of family melodrama and morality parable, and firm situation in the conformism of the cine de la reforma, these films evince deep anxieties about the past and future of the nation, especially its reinvention as a modern global democracy in the post-Franco period. The complex and at times contradictory treatment of the child not only demonstrates the fine line between subject and object in representing the child in cinema but also gestures towards the limits of political subjecthood in Spain’s embryonic democracy. Context and Reception Antonio Mercero (b. 1936) is perhaps best-known for his work in television, in a career that spans from his early work in the Francoist newsreel service NO-DO, through the iconic late-Transition television series

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Verano azul (Blue Summer, 1981–2), to the popular 1990s series Farmacia de guardia (All-night Pharmacy, 1991–5). His cinematic career includes diverse films ranging from the absurdist parable La cabina (The Telephone Box, 1972) to 1998’s historical melodrama La hora de los valientes (A Time for Defiance). Much of Mercero’s output, from his first full-length film, Se necesita chico (Boy Wanted, 1963), through Verano azul and beyond, prominently showcases child characters, to such a degree that Paul Julian Smith, drawing on Foucault’s concept of authorship as based on “conceptual coherence,” argues that a preoccupation with childhood could be seen as a unifying principle of Mercero’s work across both film and television (2009, 156). Although La guerra de papá did not achieve the critical acclaim or scholarly exposure of child-centred films by auteur directors such as Saura or Erice, many critics, especially in Spain, consider it a key film of the Transition and one of the first examples of popular cinema to broach the Civil War past in a critical capacity. Based on Miguel Delibes’s novel El príncipe destronado (The Dethroned Prince, published in 1973 although written a decade earlier), La guerra de papá presents the events of one day in the life of three-year-old Quico (Lolo García), who has recently been “dethroned” by a baby sister as the youngest member and centre of attention of his large upper-middle-class Madrid family. It is set in 1964 as Spain is celebrating Franco’s commemorative “twentyfive years of peace” – enforced under dictatorship – since the end of the Civil War. The film shows how protagonist Quico’s “innocent” and mischievous hijinks play out against the backdrop of tensions between his parents as the authoritarian vencedor patriarch (Héctor Alterio) waxes nostalgic for his glory days in the war and condemns his beleaguered wife (Teresa Gimpera) for the more liberal ideas she has inherited from her Republican father. La guerra de papá showcases another abiding interest of the director’s, the Spanish Civil War, more centrally emphasized in Mercero’s film adaptation than in its source text by Delibes.6 Sally Faulkner notes that both narratives are emblematic of a “middlebrow intertwining of family life and politics on the page and the screen,” although Mercero’s version, produced after the dictator’s death, engages the political sphere more overtly than the novel, both in slightly altered content and a revised title that shifts focus from the domestic to the political (2013, 154). In addition to the title, Mercero’s version makes several significant politicized changes, including the child characters’ increased insistence on referring to “la guerra de papá,” the decision to have them play with a real gun rather than a toy in a scene shot in the father’s office (which also prominently displays right-wing memorabilia such as the flag of the Falange and a portrait of Franco), and the shift of the novel’s

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setting from any given day in 1963 to a day in March 1964. The decision to move the film’s temporal setting allows it to coincide with the country’s year-long anniversary celebration of Franco’s “twenty-five years of peace,” implicitly including the impending ceremony that the authoritarian war veteran father pressures his oldest son to attend so he can be pinned with military insignia, likely being held on 1 April to commemorate Franco’s victory in the war.7 The film was shot between 2 May and 8 June 1977, almost entirely on location in an apartment on Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana (whose northern stretch was at the time still called the Avenida del Generalísimo).8 It was released on 19 September of that year at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, to mixed reviews. Its Civil War theme, while a selling point for the box office, had ruffled some feathers in the process of obtaining shooting permissions. Despite script censorship having been been eliminated in 1976, and the abolition of censorship altogether soon to follow the film’s release (just two months later, in November 1977), La guerra de papá faced some obstacles, and the production company was forced to swear not to include any overt military references or uniforms in order to secure shooting permits (Arocena 1997, 771). These restrictions in part account for the film’s circuitous reference to the “25 años de paz” and telegraphing of the father’s military allegiance via his office décor, though he seemingly has since moved on to the private sector (booming in the desarrollismo years), judging from the business suit he wears when returning home from work. However, it was not only censorship, but also the ideological and market demands of the cinema termed cine de la reforma, that shaped such oblique representations of the nation’s recent political past. This was the more mainstream of two cinematic strands during the Transition, opposed to the cine de la ruptura, which left far fewer examples for study, largely due to the economic conditions of the film industry (Pérez Perucha and Ponce 1986, 36). These two cinemas can be seen as a “cinematic translation” of the two broad political positions concerning the post-Franco direction of the nation: a pact of reform or pseudo-rupture versus a truly radical and democratic break with the past – “reforma o ruptura pactada vs. ruptura democrática” (ibid., 26). In contrast to more radical, underground political cinema, the cine de la reforma, of which films like La guerra de papá are paradigmatic, called for a much more centrist approach during these key years of the Transition, matching the centrist political project of reconciliation fostered by sectors such as the centre-right party Unión del Centro Democrático, which was “made up almost entirely of former Francoists” (TrianaToribio 2016, 28–9).

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In keeping with a more reconciliatory and continuist platform, then, Mercero’s film sidelines the war and focuses instead on its multi-generational psychological effects, a choice likely to resonate with cinema goers of a variety of ages.9 J.M. Caparrós Lera notes that the film invites serious reflection from the “cultured spectator,” especially those themselves affected by “daddy’s war” (1992, 142), though it is striking that none of the characters belong to Mercero’s own generation. The film’s Civil War content was not lost on newspaper critics of the time, who mostly received La guerra de papá favourably, with the unsurprising exception of far-right papers like Arriba, whose negative review took issue with the film’s “opportunist” name change to a “título machaconamente reiterado en la película” (title tiresomely repeated during the film) (Arroita-Jáuregui 1977, n.p.). A similar critique of the film, despite ideological differences, came from Julián Marías in the Gaceta Ilustrada, who felt the film did not do justice to the original novel and speculated that Mercero had shifted the focus of his adaptation “tal vez pensando que lo referente a la política y a la guerra civil se vende más” (perhaps thinking that anything referring to politics and the Civil War sells better) (1977, 13).10 Most critics esteemed the film as entertaining, though in no terms groundbreaking, emphasizing its amusing and fresh tone and the charms of its child actor. While by no means bitingly critical of the Franco regime in the vein of the Saura films explored in the previous chapter – due in part to the generic conventions of family melodrama, as well as the film’s boxoffice ambitions and the director’s more apolitical stance – Mercero’s film nonetheless stands out for its critique of the bourgeois vencedor family at its centre, especially given its sweeping popularity at the box office. Jesús Ángulo considers the film one of the first, after La prima Angélica, to critically represent the winners of the Civil War “sin dramatismo” (without over-dramatizing) (2001, 30).11 Although it should be noted that they are a bourgeois family cohabitating with their domestic service employees, not exactly engaged in a utopian project across class lines, Carmen Arocena observes that the film’s depiction of a range of characters from diverse socio-economic backgrounds under one roof “crea una aguda introspección sociopsicológica de una familia burguesa manteniendo un tono político … no exento de un cierto conformismo” (creates a sharp socio-psychological examination of a bourgeois family, keeping a political tone … not without a certain conformism) (1997, 772). Indeed, this “conformismo” is a defining characteristic of the film, whose treatment of politics, by turns melodramatic and comic, is rather heavy handed. Nonetheless, most critics concur that the film would not have passed muster with censors under the regime, given its treatment of the war and its lingering effects.12

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Mercero capitalized on the film’s wild success the following year, tasking his screenwriter, Horacio Valcárcel, to come up with a new script for the cherubic García, who had captivated spectators of the first film with his blue eyes, golden curls, and propensity for comically using dirty words and discussing his penis. The result was Tobi, el niño con alas. This second film omits the Civil War intertext that marks the first. Tobi, however, is firmly grounded in the circumstances of its own historical moment of social and political change. Its bizarre morality play focuses on the son of a factory worker and member of the Comisiones Obreras labour union, which in January 1977 had seen five of its members killed by right-wing terrorists in the Atocha massacre, a watershed moment of the Transition. (It is worth noting here that labour unions feature prominently in Spanish cinema of this period, reflecting their presence in the public sphere in protests as they were being disenfranchised by the Moncloa Pacts’ reformist projects.)13 The Atocha massacre is not mentioned in the film, despite its insistence on the father’s membership in the Communist-affiliated union as being comically foiled by his angelic son, who sprouts wings on his back much to the dismay of his hapless parents.14 The changes the country is undergoing are, however, highlighted in a montage where Madrid residents are interviewed on the street by news media about the discovery of the winged child. A long-haired progre blames it on pollution, while a caricatured Francoist with a mustache and trench coat says Tobi proves that, despite the ongoing passage to a post-Franco universe, Spain is still the spiritual centre of Europe; another passerby conjectures that it is all a publicity stunt by the national airline, Iberia. Evidently intended as a satirical send-up of the new-found openness with which the nation’s citizens can express their heterogeneous views, as well as the ever-encroaching power of global markets, the brief sequence also situates the film within a context of sweeping social change, underscoring how the child can be co-opted or claimed for a variety of political agendas and revealing deep-seated anxieties about the authoritarian past of National Catholicism and the undetermined future of capitalist cosmopolitanism in a liberalizing Europe. These anxieties come to the surface in the film’s dénouement, where, after science, the media, and advertising seek to commodify the winged child (indirectly and directly abetted by his mother and father), Tobi finally manages to use his new wings, flying away from the top of an iconic tower in Madrid’s Casa de Campo amusement park, where he has been put on display as “Tobi: The 20th-Century Angel.” The film was a commercial flop that has nonetheless enjoyed a lengthy afterlife on television, leading several generations of Spaniards to recall it as an iconic film of the Transition years (Wright 2013, 80).

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Ideals of Innocence The child protagonists García plays in both of Mercero’s films are constructed as comically cute, innocent, unknowing, and ungoverned by the rules of the adult world. This depiction is by no means unique to Mercero’s work; rather, it emerges paradigmatically from a long-standing cultural tradition that conceptualizes the child’s difference from the adult along lines of supposed innocence, broadly defined as lacking (taboo) knowledge or experience that, in contrast, the adult possesses. This kind of othering of the child by, in essence, “childing” through epistemological lack (framed as “innocence”) can be seen to gloss over fundamental shifts in cognition, bodily reality, and access to language in rendering the child’s subjectivity as that of an insufficient or immature adult, rather than positively acknowledging the child’s radical difference in its own right. In this sense, the child is set against the adult as everything the adult is not, its often fetishized and idealized other. Succinctly summarizing a long tradition of philosophical treatments of childhood in this vein, Joanne Faulkner frames the binary as follows: Adult subjectivity has self-consciously defined itself in opposition to an image of childhood, conceived as immature, underdeveloped, and liable to indulge in fantasy. From Enlightenment entreaties to attain intellectual and political maturity, and culminating in the image of nostalgic childhood perfected by the Romantics, the child has operated as a foil against which adulthood conceives of itself. Yet this idealized image of childhood, crudely applied, is merely a husk of what might be conjectured about children’s experience. (2013, 142)

Along these lines, I read the ways in which Mercero’s films stress the child’s bodily, cognitive, and linguistic difference as a means of setting the child in opposition to, and reifying his difference from, the adults around him, as a charming object rather than acting subject. In so doing, I propose, they frame the child as a blank slate in a pivotal historical moment that in political, social, and rhetorical terms sought a clean break with the past of dictatorship and repression (despite the regime’s pervasive institutional and social continuance), a fantasy these films seek to fulfil via the child. Central to adult conceptualizations of childhood “innocence” that set the child in opposition to the adult is the idea that the child lacks knowledge and experience to which the adult has access. The child’s supposed absolute epistemological and experiential difference is most frequently articulated via the Western cultural taboos regarding sexuality and

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death. Even more generally, beyond these particularly fraught spheres, representations of the “innocent” child make use of the child’s lack of access to knowledge as the dividing line between adults and children, casting children in a position untouched by the sullying influences of sex, death, or politics, as is the case in Mercero’s films. Such a view can lead to an idealized or fetishized concept of the child: the Romantic “legacy of viewing the child as the human in its ‘purest’ form – that is, as pre-social humanity – can tend towards fetishization – ridding the human of its social context, or at least wishing away such a context” (J. Faulkner 2013, 132). These conceptualizations mark the child as a kind of “blank slate” (tabula rasa) in terms of experience and knowledge, to use John Locke’s classic formulation from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Such ideas separate the child from the adult in several ways that erase the child’s own particular knowledge and experience: they fetishize the child’s difference as a kind of ideal prelapsarian state to which adults can never return, while simultaneously privileging the adult’s access to knowledge; deprive the child of complex subjectivity attributed to adults by rendering children transparent vessels who are supposedly fully legible to adults; and acknowledge the child’s difference from the adult only in terms of a lack, or at best, a reification. But it is not just the child’s mind, but also his or her body, that has long been seen as fundamentally unlike the adult’s in terms of experience and knowledge. In her study of the child’s visual representation in the post-Enlightenment West, Anne Higonnet asserts that the modern fetishization of the child’s innocence has historically been based on the dual poles of mind and body, a notion that can lead to inappropriate sexualization of the child, who is in this paradigm believed to stand outside the sexual realm. She notes that this relatively recent conceptualization began with the Enlightenment pictorial tradition, which initiated the separation of children from adults, portraying them not as small versions of their adult counterparts but instead as fundamentally different beings.15 Yet this transformation has generally been conceived of as “the discovery of a natural truth, rather than as a brilliant pictorial version of an invented definition” of childhood innocence that required representations in art (1998, 8, emphasis mine). In this definitional shift of the child as inherently other than the adult, Higonnet notes that visual representations in art were key in “consolidating the modern definition of childhood … To a great extent, childhood innocence is considered an attribute of the child’s body, both because the child’s body was supposed to be naturally innocent of adult sexuality, and because the child’s mind was supposed to begin blank” (ibid., emphases

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mine). In the cultural imaginary, these concepts of the child’s “naturally innocent” body and “blank” mind are central not only to the ontological differentiation of the child from the adult, but also to the fetishization of the child’s subject position as an Edenic ideal to which the adult can never return. Representations of childhood innocence have much more to do with what the adults who stage them might want to convey than with the actual experiences, cognitive processes, or emotional realities of children themselves. Embodying Difference Both of Mercero’s films emphasize the child’s difference from the adult by foregrounding his body. This emphasis emerges in exemplary fashion in La guerra de papá’s opening scene, which is shot in semidarkness and grey tones, more meditative and abstract than any other portion of the otherwise cheerful and buoyant film. It contrasts with both the brightly coloured frames of the credit sequence that have come before it and the dynamics of humour and family melodrama that follow. As the dramatic orchestral music from the opening credits fades out, the diegetic sound of this first scene fades in: at first difficult to identify, it gradually becomes clear that the audio track plays the babbling non-verbal vocalizations of the child protagonist expressing amusement and delight; in parallel, the camera pans downward through a hazy, undefined interior space, of which the viewer can only catch glimpses – the corner of a headboard, the texture of wallpaper – that suggest the trappings of a bourgeois home. The camera’s pan comes to a stop as the source of the babbling/singing noises appears: Quico’s disembodied hand, thrown up in the air from inside his crib, which itself remains out of frame (figure 2.1). With only his hand and wrist in view, the child wiggles his fingers as the audio track synchronizes with his movements: he opens and closes his hand while making explosive sounds, then giggles with delight. The still-unseen child retracts his hand, and the camera pans slightly to the side as he thrusts his foot above the edge of the crib and wiggles it with a similar sonic accompaniment, in a kind of bodily puppet show where his limbs perform for both the camera and his own gaze, much to the child’s amusement (figure 2.2). Finally, the shot pans down to reveal the edge of Quico’s crib, which he grasps to pull himself up, popping his head above the railing (figure 2.3). He yells, in strikingly articulate fashion following his non-verbal babbling, that he is awake, giggling and hiding under the blankets as the family maid Vito (Verónica Forqué) comes in to rouse him.

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2.1

2.2

2.3

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Within this ambiguous sonic and visual environment, the scene introduces the child protagonist by visually disembodying his body parts while honing in on their materiality and performative substance. The sequence is noteworthy in that it simultaneously foregrounds the materiality of the child’s body and his own experience of its tactile reality – through the haptic focus on his gestural movements of hand and foot – but also introduces from the very beginning the artifice of the child’s constructed, performative corporeality, as his babbling audibly emphasizes the touching of the tongue, lips, and teeth. However, in a strange twist, the sounds emerge from the mouth of the adult woman, Matilde Vilariño, who dubs him in post-production. Quico’s overdubbed voice is perhaps most jarring in this opening scene, in contrast with its use in the rest of the film, where it is more easily accepted as belonging to the child character. This is in part because, for the initial seconds of the sequence, the voice is not grounded in any concrete body, nor has any character been visually introduced to whom to attach it. Likewise, the voice and its tone defy easy categorization in terms of emotional resonance or the speaker’s identity – initially, the voice sounds like it might even be transmitting a woman’s experience of sexual pleasure rather than a child’s non-verbal expression of amusement. The sounds’ non-linguistic vocal content of babbling and giggling unsettles the spectator/listener until the camera settles on the space above the crib and Quico’s extremities appear, grounding the voice as one of a child delighted at his own body’s materiality. In her work on the frequent (and concealed) dubbing of child characters by adult women in Spanish cinema, Sarah Wright has acknowledged the complexities of such ventriloquism, noting that “it is hard to escape the uncanny sense that we are witnessing a ventriloquist throw her voice to a dummy,” in what might be seen as “the assimilation of one body by another, and at once a theft and a prompting of the child’s voice” (2013, 45).16 Wright notes the audiences of the child-star cinema of the 1950s and 1960s (of which Mercero’s films are unquestionably heirs) accepted the widespread dubbing of children by adults in “a process of disavowal which acknowledged them as manufactured, kitsch commodities” in fact perhaps increasing their appeal to audiences in the process (2013, 49).17 I would suggest that, here and throughout, the at times uncanny dubbing of actor García also helps to account for the child’s limit position in both films, particularly as concerns his access to language. If the characters comment, especially in the first film, that the protagonist “speaks like a grown up,” it is precisely because he does – but like a grown up trying to speak in the voice and body of a child.

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Yet while, in aural terms, this opening scene deprives the child of a voice of his own, in visual ones, it offers perhaps the film’s most meditative and nuanced glimpse of the child’s bodily experience. Both body and voice are coded as fundamentally non-adult (ironically, in the case of the “child’s” voice) but are allowed to stand on their own without the objectification that marks the rest of the film, as in the immediately following scene where Vito takes Quico from the solitary reverie of his crib and into the bustling world of the household at large. Only four minutes into the film, its protagonist is placed naked into the bath (standing upright for full camera view of his genitalia) and engages in a conversation about his “pito” (penis, literally whistle) with Vito, calling it “pito santo” (the rough equivalent of “holy weenie”). His caregiver plays along, despite the child’s mother’s disapproving glances, and Vito laughs as he asks whether his mother and Vito have “pitos.” After the mother replies that it is something only little boys have, Quico rather logically concludes that his father must then not have one, to comic effect that will return later in the film as he tries to find his father’s pito (or lack thereof). This incident, seemingly a set-up for a cheap laugh at the child’s naiveté, nonetheless clearly demonstrates the key areas in which the child’s difference or child-ness is highlighted throughout the film. His bodily, cognitive, and linguistic “innocence” (a non-sexualized body; ignorance of social mores regarding the body and sexuality; and euphemistic vocabulary) set him in contrast to the adults around him, who, even from this early moment, are shown to know and understand in ways the child does not. This second scene sets the tone for the film as the child’s body is immediately offered up for adults’ touch, view, control, and commentary, highlighting its difference and fetishizing its child-ness, setting up the dynamic that will continue throughout this film as well as in Tobi. The child’s genitals serve as an implicit focus throughout La guerra de papá, as adult characters discuss among themselves and inquire of the child whether or not he has wet himself, given that he is not yet properly pottytrained (a concern some critics have attributed to repressed trauma triggered by the circulation in the household of violent narratives regarding the Civil War).18 Quico visibly urinates on several occasions in the film, both in his pants and in a toilet, and his incontinence becomes a kind of running gag that nonetheless suggests this more troubling psychological underside of the trauma that seems to cause the problem. The child’s scatological processes also make appearances in Tobi, where in one scene the winged protagonist gets stuck in a toilet and in another he urinates out a window onto a police officer and then defecates in the officer’s helmet (afterward, the policeman proudly commemorates the occasion as a brush with fame, printing on the helmet that media sensation Tobi “hizo caca” (pooped) there, with the day’s date).

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2.4

2.5

While both films deploy scatological processes in the service of humour, these also function as markers for the bodily difference between child and adult that determines what is permissible for representation on screen. For example, in La guerra de papá the camera can show the child urinating, whether in his pants or from on high into the toilet (figure 2.4), but in the scene where the child protagonist attempts to ascertain whether his father also has a “pito” like he does, the adult actor Héctor Alterio urinates with his back to the camera, shuffling back and forth to avoid not only the child’s insistent gaze but also, for the sake of propriety, the spectator’s (figure 2.5). The child actor’s body and genitalia, on the other hand, are materially and visually foregrounded as objects of the gaze throughout, as in the bath scene. Likewise, in what might be considered La guerra de papá’s climactic dramatic moment, the child’s bodily functions take centre stage as Quico’s feigned swallowing of a nail lands him the doctor’s office, where his body is the subject of medical scrutiny as he is undressed and X-rayed – a moment of the film that anticipates the more radical take on the child’s body that emerges

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in Tobi, where it becomes fodder for scientific experimentation. In these scenes, the child’s body is consistently marked as different by virtue of being not-adult, “innocent” of sexuality and therefore representable on screen. This “childing” is particularly evident in the films’ depiction of the child’s nudity, which is normalized as non-sexual by its frequency and the film’s tendency to play it for laughs, and his scatological functions, likewise played to humorous effect. This second film pushes the limits of the child’s nudity further than the first, bringing it outside the domestic sphere and into the public domain of the city streets and television advertising. Perhaps its most memorable portion (in part due to its use on the film’s poster; see figure 2.8) is an extended sequence where the winged protagonist escapes, naked, from the biomedical facility in which he is being held for analysis. Tobi’s getaway is facilitated by the on-duty nurse’s failure to lock the door after rescuing the child from inside a toilet into which he had fallen, an image that featured on the cover of Fotogramas, where an article focused on García’s high-grossing status as the “niño 300 millones” (300-million-[peseta-grossing] child) (figure 2.6, courtesy Fotogramas). His escape follows a conversation with her about his preferred terminology for his genitals. Once Tobi has eluded the nurse, the naked child runs through the facility against the sonic backdrop of whimsical xylophone music that stresses the humorous, innocent, yet incongruent nature of his nakedness; he then stows away in a truck headed for the city centre, hops out to hide among naked child mannequins in the storeroom of a shop, and cavorts nude through the streets of Madrid in the wee hours of the morning (figure 2.7). A sequence of shots in this last scene shows Tobi running down the middle of the city’s deserted streets, splashing in fountains and commanding statuary birds to take flight. An image from this scene was used for the film’s promotional materials, though in those the child was clothed in angelic robes that are conspicuously absent in the film (figure 2.8). The child is then discovered by a drunk, who believes the naked, winged child to be a hallucination, and a photographer, who sees in this small oddity an opportunity for financial gain by way of media spectacle; he snaps photos of Tobi that end up on the front page of every key newspaper of the period, demonstrating in clear terms how the child’s nakedness “symbolizes his innocence … but it also comes to reference the desires he provokes in the greedy characters to exploit him” (Wright 2013, 82). Both films’ use of nudity not only invites spectatorial scrutiny of the child’s vulnerable body, it also reinforces the casting of the protagonist as fundamentally non-adult (and implicitly, non-sexual), given that

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2.6

2.7

2.8

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such prolonged nakedness would be impossible for an adult actor to carry out, even at the apex of the destape films of the Transition period, which capitalized on newly relaxed social norms and the removal of censorship to profit from (usually female) nakedness onscreen. Because it is a child’s, however, Mercero’s films’ use of nudity seems to fulfil a different function. Nakedness here does not aim to titillate but rather seems intended as humorous or charming; thus Mercero was able to consider Tobi as diametrically opposed to destape films in his pitching of it to producers as a “white” alternative.19 Both the child character’s innocence and his exploitability, for Wright indexically referenced by his nudity, are qualities inextricably linked to the child’s bodily difference from the adult. This distinction is present in La guerra de papá but is writ large in Tobi, given the protagonist’s dual bodily difference: he is unlike the adults surrounding him both as a child and as a child who has sprouted wings. This increasingly far-fetched visual gag (which eventually leads Tobi’s mother to make him special clothing with holes and slipcovers for his new feathered appendages) lends the protagonist the appearance of a cherub, further linking his visual representation with ideas of purity and innocence via the angelic, in a long visual tradition closely intertwined with the historical representation of the child. The iconic innocent child differs from these religious figures inasmuch as cherubs, angels, and the Christ child are represented as innocent but also, crucially, not human (Higonnet 1998, 18). This last point becomes especially relevant in the case of Tobi, whose protagonist gradually becomes more aligned with the avian and the angelic than the infantile, as I will discuss below. However, as Higonnet addresses in her analysis of Edward Weston’s Neils series of nude photographs of his child, which Wright (2013, 82) places into conversation with Tobi’s mannequin scene, the naked child is by no means outside the sexual, even if insistently represented as such. In his review of Tobi for the magazine Fotogramas, notably entitled “Angelical paidofilia: Tobi” (Angelical Pedophilia: Tobi), José Luis Guarner provocatively deems the film “una absoluta curiosidad, y una probable pieza de veneración para paidófilos” (an absolute curiosity, and a likely object of veneration for pedophiles) (1979, 34). This remark, though likely intended as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the film’s quality more than a literal classification (coming, as it does, at the end of a lengthy negative review), nonetheless provides an assessment of the possible unintended consequences of Mercero’s film, gesturing precisely towards the disconnect between intention and effect that complicates the representation of children’s supposed bodily innocence. This problematic treatment of the actor Lolo García extended beyond

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the cinema screen and into the broader public eye.20 Despite (or even because of) the possible pedophilic undertones of attention to García’s genitals, the light tone with which his penis is discussed and the freedom with which it is displayed both demonstrate how the child’s body, even its most private recesses, is considered not only palatable and fit for public consumption but also appealing and commodifiable, despite the dark undertones acknowledged even in 1978 (and much more troubling by today’s standards). The child can be shown nude because he or she (but especially he) is a subject frequently considered as outside the sexual realm, innocent and untouched by carnal knowledge yet at the same time a body ripe for commodification and exploitation.21 Blank Slate: Epistemological Childing What enables the cultural conception of the child’s body as innocent and thereby un-adult is inextricably linked to the child’s supposed lack of access to or understanding of adult knowledge, in particular in the spheres of sexuality, violence, and death.22 The concept of the child’s epistemological lack has a long history in cultural criticism, and this idea of childhood was perhaps most famously initiated by Philippe Ariès. His seminal Centuries of Childhood (L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, 1960; English translation 1962) examines the modern (and predominantly bourgeois) “invention” of the Western idea of childhood, which, unlike earlier conceptions of children as simply smaller and younger adults, hinged on the concept of children as innocent beings from whom certain taboo subjects – among them birth, death, sex, and violence – needed to be concealed in order for “innocence” to be maintained. Reinhard Kuhn, following Ariès and writing on the child in Western literature, rather dramatically conceives of the “corruption” of the child’s idealized paradisiacal world by the dual discovery of sexuality and death, which, for Kuhn, shatters childhood: “In most works the childhood world is destroyed by a not unrelated disclosure, namely by the sudden, and often simultaneous, revelation of the mysteries of sex and death” (1982, 132). Kuhn’s line of argument suggests that, after witnessing these two great taboos, the child is no longer innocent and thus is no longer a child. Echoing a long tradition of canonical Western thinkers such as Rousseau who see the child’s experience of sexuality and death as implying an immediate and irremediable rupture with innocence, and thereby with childhood itself, Kuhn writes, “The childhood paradise cannot withstand the dual impact of Eros and Thanatos. Although normally its Rousseauistic transparency is gradually tarnished by time … the appearance of death and sex can becloud it with such

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violent suddenness that there occurs an immediate substitution of adult opacity for childhood limpidity” (170, emphases mine). In this problematic marking of a clear before and after, once certain knowledge is acquired, innocence is lost and the child becomes an adult, no longer a supposedly transparent subject unclouded by knowledge. This insistence on the child’s transparency, another form of tabula rasa that casts his or her supposed simplicity and blankness as a lack of adult opacity, fullness, and complexity, resonates with prevailing critical readings of La guerra de papá that focus on the child’s allegedly “transparent” perspective through which the (adult) viewer sees the film’s events unfold.23 Several critics write this way of Mercero’s protagonist, in terms that would never be applied to an adult focalizer of a film. This stance is encapsulated by Carmen Arocena’s attribution to the protagonist of a “transparent gaze,” in a passage worth quoting at length in its emblematic construction of the child as blank slate: Su mirada, transparente, objetiva y sin malicia, no llega a interpretar el significado de los hechos que percibe. El mérito de Mercero estriba en presentar los acontecimientos a través de la visión de un niño y en prever detrás de la pantalla, otra mirada, esta vez menos ingenua, que capte el significado oculto de los mismos. La mirada del espectador se acopla así a la mirada del niño protagonista y es capaz de ver más allá. (Arocena 1997, 772) (His gaze, transparent, objective, and without malice, cannot interpret the meaning of the events he perceives. Mercero’s merit comes from presenting the events through a child’s vision and anticipating, behind the screen, another gaze, this one less naïve, which captures their hidden meaning. The spectator’s gaze thus couples with the child protagonist’s and is able to see beyond it.)

This formulation of the child, as transparent vessel of objectivity through which the adult spectator sees with greater knowledge, is striking for how closely it echoes the director’s stated goals that the film’s spectator see through the child’s “innocent” eyes: “Todo era visto por los ojos inocentes del niño … Todo lo que veía el niño era lo que de alguna manera veía el espectador. Eso era lo que se pretendía. Todo lo que está recibiendo el niño es tremendo: esa educación represiva, esa obsesión religiosa. El niño tiene miedo de todo” (Everything was seen through the child’s innocent eyes … Everything the child saw was what the spectator in some way saw. That was the aim. Everything the child was exposed to was terrible: that repressive education, that

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religious obsession. The child is afraid of everything) (Mercero quoted in Ángulo et al. 2001, 128). Both the critic’s and director’s formulations demonstrate not only the recurrent insistence (in this film and beyond) on reducing the child focalizer’s perspective to a mere lens devoid of subjectivity but also how the child’s view is held up against the privileged perspective of the adult spectator, who can view critically the structures that keep the child ignorant.24 This idea of the child focalizer thus reifies the child’s “innocent” lack as contrasted with the adult’s position of knowledge, representing him as an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by knowledge imposed on him from without, whether from his caretakers, parents, or the filmic spectator whose gaze latches on to his. The child’s own perspective is thereby emptied of critical capacity, or really any subjectivity at all: incapable of interpretation, passively and transparently perceiving the events around him for the spectator’s critical benefit. However, Quico’s gaze and subjectivity are, of course, neither “transparent” nor “the child’s,” but meticulously constructed by the film’s narrative and mise-en-scène. Throughout, the film uses precisely the child’s lack of access to knowledge that Arocena and Mercero seize upon as his “innocence” to construct an epistemological barrier that places the child at the limits of the subject: not knowing, yet forced to exist within the system of knowledge that is foreclosed to him. As chapter 1 explored, the child’s and adult’s positions are at times mutually undecipherable: the child does not have access to certain knowledge that the adult has acquired or experienced, but, by the same token, the adult cannot unknow these things to return to the child’s subjective state of perception without this posterior informing knowledge. In their representation of child protagonists’ experience of what is fundamentally an adult world, both of Mercero’s films stress the ways in which the child cannot comprehend the actions or motivations of the adults around him, especially with regard to the sexual realm, the political sphere, or the exploitative desires of adults. In La guerra de papá, the child’s lack of knowledge or understanding is highlighted more directly throughout the film in several areas relating to the sexual or to violence and death: in Quico’s misconstruing the maid’s kisses with her beau for a biting attack; in his naive play with his father’s gun and inability to comprehend the context of “daddy’s war” while obsessively fixating on it and casting several objects as its props; or in his terror at his older brother’s narratives about hell and the devil. In Tobi, the separation between child and adult is less explicitly drawn along the lines of the sexual and political; rather, the limits on the child’s knowledge lie in the motivations of the adults who seek to exploit him for scientific, commercial, or monetary gain.

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2.9

2.10

On the surface level, the films play up the child’s lack of comprehension as a kind of cute gimmick that generates humour or amusement, especially in La guerra de papá’s treatment of taboo subjects; however, these seemingly innocuous incidents also demonstrate that the young child perceives and observes much more than the adult characters might imagine. In the case of Vito’s amorous encounter with her boyfriend, Femio (Fernando Valverde), the couple exchange loaded dialogue and glances and then kiss passionately in the family’s kitchen, out of sight of her employers, who would certainly not permit such a display. The lovers have little regard, however, for the presence of the child, who watches them at the beginning of the scene in a series of shots that are perturbing for their intensity, as the camera zooms in on Femio’s face as he bites his lip and stares lasciviously at Vito, who returns his charged glance with a coquettish stare (figures 2.9 and 2.10). The sexual charge is not lost on the child witness, who remarks that his “pito” is waking up, at which point the adults laugh away the

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child’s disturbing arousal at their exchange, disavowing his ability to perceive the sexual display they have just performed. After a small racially charged spat (Vito becomes concerned about her boyfriend’s faithfulness to her during his imminent deployment to Africa, and he reassures her by questioning whether “black women are women” and seductively telling her he likes his women “the whiter the better”), they embrace and kiss passionately. Quico, who had interrupted at several points with macabre questions about how many “malos” Femio would kill in Africa (and if on his return he would kill Vito), at first laughs in amusement at their kiss but then becomes disturbed as it continues, leading him to call for his family to come to Vito’s aid, as he screams at her boyfriend “¡no la muerdas tú!” (don’t you bite her!) while Femio laughs. Following this scene, the family’s older matronly servant, Domi (Rosario García Ortega), sequesters Quico and pries for the details of what he has witnessed, asking him where, how much, and for how long Femio was “biting” Vito. While the child character provides the information for which he is prompted to the best of his understanding, the adult’s lascivious interest in the salacious details is winkingly telegraphed to the viewer. In this sense, the adult spectator of the film might be said to see through the child character but also, in a sense, around him: skirting the epistemological boundaries that define his subject position as not fully understanding what he sees or experiences, especially its social dimension. In her writing on the child in cinema, Vicky Lebeau argues that, in films that show the viewer the world through a child’s perspective, sex and death are frequently employed to show how the child’s position as child is defined in relation to such taboos, which mark the limits of what a child can “perceive but not comprehend” (2008, 42). In this sequence between Femio and Vito, these limits come to the fore. Quico not only understands the threat of violence that Femio’s deployment supposes but also senses the tacit sexual undertones the characters wordlessly convey, becoming physically aroused as a result of their exchange. Yet, crucially, though he can speak like an adult and even become aroused by the adults’ lustful glances, what separates the child from the adult characters (and viewer) in this sequence is the ability to understand that which he observes and to which he reacts – what he can “perceive but not comprehend.” Here and elsewhere, this lack of comprehension is set against the viewer’s complicity with the adult characters, who knowingly chuckle at the child’s comments about his penis “waking up,” his conviction about the necessity of killing bad guys, and his furious attack on Femio when he believes the man is biting Vito (a “genuine” performance, given that Mercero conditioned the child actor to believe

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the attack was real).25 In this epistemological barrier – the adult knows what the child does not and thus understands the significance of actions and enunciations that the child cannot – the child’s difference from the adult is reified. It is a difference that is not explored or expanded in terms of what, exactly, the child does think and feel about the sexual and violent influences to which he is exposed; rather, the child is emptied of subjectivity and used as a humorous foil to the thinking and feeling adults who surround him – and the spectators who watch. From the Mouths of Babes: The Child and Language The scene between Quico, Vito, and Femio also touches on another vital aspect of the epistemological childing enacted in Mercero’s films: the child’s partial access to language and the limits of what he is able to articulate in words. Although the protagonists of both films are old enough to speak, neither has fully developed language; they are thus associated with the figure of the infans, or pre-linguistic child. This before and after of access to language is not only a key defining element of the human but also of the subject of politics. The infans, the child without speech, aligns more closely with the animal than the human and also, as Lebeau provocatively suggests, is the “child that must be left behind – or, more dramatically, put to death, to murder – if we are to find our way into the worlds of language, culture and community” (Lebeau 2008, 84). Language, and semantic comprehension, is a key arena in which the child is set apart as fundamentally distinct from (and comically deficient in comparison with) the adult in both films, which consistently underscore how language reveals the limits of the child’s understanding, usually for laughs. In La guerra de papá especially, language marks an epistemological limit that separates the child from the adults around him, who exploit his limited linguistic resources for humour or speak through him, on multiple levels – not only diegetically but also, of course, via dubbing. In La guerra de papá, protagonist Quico’s inability to comprehend metaphorical language (e.g., when his father has him relay the message to his mother that she go “freír puñetas,” which literally means to fry cloth trim but figuratively to bugger off) and frequent parroting of adults’ words (particularly sexual innuendo he does not understand but knows he is not meant to repeat) demonstrate that the child has not fully acquired language – and, by implication, full subjecthood. Yet while Quico’s misunderstandings are usually played for lighthearted laughs, they belie a deep epistemological division between adult and child that is central to the film’s conceit. Philip Mitchell summarizes

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Quico’s struggle as one of hermeneutics, noting that the protagonist spends the film “struggling to understand the images and sounds he is exposed to. Mercero is very attentive here to the expressive power of speech and its paradoxical opacity to the child’s ear” (2004, 180). The child’s partial pre-linguistic state also means he cannot articulate his own experience or interrogate what he sees, leading him to be cast yet again as a kind of “blank slate,” of supposedly innocent (uncritical) observation, particularly in La guerra de papá, where the character is younger and less verbally adept than in Tobi. The first film, especially, plays with the humorous effects of the child using language that is normally reserved for adults: for example, curse words, anatomical distinctions, and sexual innuendo, much of which he parrots from the adults surrounding him. In the opening minutes of La guerra de papá, for example, Quico is trotted out to the street by Vito to collect the milk; a neighbour woman mistakes him for a girl and complements his golden ringlets and blue eyes, to which he replies with a string of obscenities (“¡mierda, cagado, culo!” (shit, crapped, ass!)), which the scandalized neighbour reprimands by telling him that good children do not say such things. The incident underscores the fact that, although the child may understand his words’ impact on adults (deploying them here as a weapon after being mistaken for a girl), he does not fully comprehend their meaning in a social context. Throughout the film, Quico’s foul language is employed to similar comic effect, contrasting sharply with his infantile affect and cherubic appearance. But the film also uses the timing of these outbursts to demonstrate the young child’s sensitivity to the family dynamics that his dirty words interrupt or deflect. In a tense scene at the family table later in the film, Quico elicits riotous laughter from his father and siblings, and his mother’s sharp rebuke, for unpromptedly and repeatedly shouting “mierda!” with a broad smile on his face, effectively defusing the tension between his parents, who were about to come to blows. Although it transgresses the bounds of propriety and discipline, above all the child’s use of foul language provokes (sometimes uncomfortable) laughter in the characters around him (and presumably, spectators), because of its incoherence and incommensurability with his bodily, affective, and linguistic states. But the presence of such adult words in the child’s mouth is also jarring because they are in fact spoken by an adult’s voice, that of the voice actress Matilde Vilariño, a prolific (if invisibilized) dubbing artist whose most iconic credit is providing the voice of the angelic child star Pablito Calvo in Ladislao Vajda’s religious film Marcelino, pan y vino in 1954. It is paradoxically the child’s radical alterity or non-adultness that enables him to get away with such adult transgressions, which are

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emptied of their transgressive value by coming, as it were, from the mouth of a babe. In Tobi, Mercero employs similar gags, although the second time around they largely fall (even more) flat, as, for example, when a journalist calls the house and Tobi matter-of-factly informs him that his father cannot come to the phone “porque está cagando” (because he’s shitting), the vulgar phrase standing in overwrought ironic contrast to his angelic wings; his mother tells him just to say “que está en el cuarto de baño y basta” (he’s in the bathroom and that’s enough [information]), which Tobi then repeats verbatim to the reporter. Throughout La guerra de papá it is Quico’s parroting of adult discourse that largely gives the film its humour, with somewhat more success. At the film’s conclusion, the family doctor proposes that the child’s problem is that “he thinks too much and speaks too clearly for his age,” and Femio likewise notes that the child “speaks like a grown-up, what a mouth he’s got,” when Quico watches his and Vito’s exchange of lustful gazes and asks about the people he will kill. The child’s mixing of linguistic ranges not only garners laughs but also suggests that the protagonist has heard this kind of language enough to be able to repeat it, illuminating the degree to which, for example, the father’s narratives of his supposedly glorious, violent deeds in the Civil War have already permeated the child’s consciousness at the level of language. Quico’s frequent repetition of the patriarch’s bellicose rhetoric not only demonstrates the child’s casting as a blank slate easily inscribed with others’ words but also serves as a reflection on the political implications such mimicry suggests. The idea that the child absorbs what the adults around him say is directly addressed at several moments in the film, including when the mother uses it as a means of casting suspicion on the domestic employees of the household (with whom Quico spends most of his time), remarking to the maid Vito that someone must be teaching him to say such inappropriate things as “el pito es santo” (the weenie is holy). In her remark “alguien se lo enseñará” (someone must be teaching him that), the mother’s facial expression and vocal tone suggest she suspects Vito, but the hypocrisy of such an accusation becomes clear when, at the family table, she and the child’s father fight mercilessly in front of him and then use Quico as a go-between in their hostilities – indeed, “la guerra de papá” might be seen to refer not just to the Spanish Civil War but also the patriarch’s attacks on his beleaguered wife, both violent conflicts that their child witnesses and absorbs. The ironic hypocrisy of the bourgeois family is also evident in their censorship of the child, who in repeating what the adults say demonstrates its impropriety as well as their own perverse pedagogy: someone, too, has taught him to speak of killing a hundred “rojos” in the war. The child’s

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parroting of the adults’ language (for which he is frequently chastised) is evidently intended by Mercero’s film as yet another critique, via the child’s transparent “blank-slate” innocence, of the adult world of Francoist Spain and the lingering legacy of violence of the Civil War, which has come to contaminate a new generation born long after the war itself had ended – long enough, in fact, for a monumental commemorative celebration of twenty-five years of “peace.” In the end, the child emerges not so much as a blank slate or new beginning but rather always already marked by the past that preceded him, his childhood “innocence” inevitably soon to give way to the scepticism or conformity of his older siblings (at best) or the vitriol and violence of his parents (at worst). If the child in this film is cast as an innocent empty vessel, he is quickly being filled with the violent legacies that preceded his birth. Strange Creatures: Child and Animal In the final portion of this chapter, I would like to turn to another sphere in which the child is conceived as a limit of the human subject, in this case more radically than in his corporeal or linguistic “innocence.” In both the films’ narratives and their extra-filmic apparatus of interviews, media appearances, and reviews, the child is consistently positioned at the limits of the human as linked to the animal, the divine, and the commodity. In La guerra de papá, this begins at the level of the child’s performance. Period sources emphasize how García was coached via an off-screen process where the child mimicked the director to recite his lines since he could not read or memorize them – a relation Mercero described as the child imitating him “like a mimetic animal” (Wright 2013, 81; emphasis mine). On several occasions the adults involved in the film’s production draw out this connection between child and animal in terms of the child’s rote animal repetition of language he does not understand (here we can think of the animal origin of verbs such as “to parrot” or “to ape” in referring to ungraceful or talentless mimicry).26 In an interview from an episode of Televisión Española’s program Cine de barrio, for example, actress Teresa Gimpera discussed how difficult it was to work with the young actor, in contrast offering effusive praise for what Mercero “did with Lolo” (emphasis mine).27 This formulation is echoed by the novel’s author, Delibes, as he reminisces about the film years later, also framed as praise for the director’s successful manipulation of the child: “Lo que Mercero hizo hacer a aquel niño ante la cámara es conocido de todos” (We are all familiar with what Mercero got that child to do for the camera) (Delibes 1987, 5, emphasis mine).

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Gimpera relates that the director trained the child to deliver his lines by first speaking them himself from behind the camera, then having the child repeat them without looking at Mercero, a process made possible by the film’s lack of direct sound, as Mercero’s voice could easily be edited out after filming. The director further recounted in an interview that, when the lines were too long, García would frequently get them wrong; however, since he was being overdubbed in post-production, the director would just have the child count to ten in order to have his lips visually mimic extended speech. Mercero describes the process thus: “Lolo no sabía ni leer ni escribir, pero era tan espontáneo y tan vivo, con sus tres años y medio, que enseguida se acostumbró a que yo le soplase desde detrás de la cámara los diálogos, que él repetía sin perder espontaneidad y reproduciendo los tonos que yo le señalaba” (Lolo didn’t know how to read or write, but he was so spontaneous and lively, at three and a half, that right away he got used to me whispering the dialogues at him from behind the camera, and he repeated them without losing spontaneity while reproducing the tones I set) (cited in Ángulo et al. 2001, 127). Linking childhood innocence to illiteracy and lack of linguistic mastery, in Mercero’s narrative the child’s performance is constructed in telling terms. Paradoxically, García’s role is cast simultaneously as one of active spontaneity and rote repetition, employing language that lacks meaning. Reduced to a mimetic creature whose purpose is to faithfully imitate the adult, the child becomes aligned with the animal, being at the same time “spontaneous and lively,” unpredictable, and difficult to train. These seemingly innocuous comments merit further scrutiny, as they gesture towards a long-standing connection between the child and animal as undependable or difficult performers who pose a threat to the completion of a film, as Karen Lury (2010) has explored at length. In addition to the risks of abuse to which child actors expose themselves, Lury demonstrates that children also pose potential risks to the fluidity of the production process, another sphere in which they are conceived of as fundamentally different from their adult counterparts. Because child actors tend not to be professionally trained, especially when they are very young, their performances are difficult to control and predict; managing the child actor poses a particular challenge to the adult director and co-stars (146). “It is usually in this sense,” Lury notes, “that the much-quoted aphorism attributed to W.C. Fields that one should ‘never work with children or animals’ is often understood. Child actors increase the possibility that in relation to their performance they will do something unexpected and things will go ‘wrong’” (ibid.). Gimpera’s assessment on Cine de barrio that it is “always hard to act with a child”

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very much aligns with this observation, as do several of Mercero’s anecdotes about the process of filming with his child actor: “El niño era un problema general porque se ponía a jugar con el travelling y con lo que pillaba. Jugaba con todo. Hacer una puesta en escena con un niño es muy difícil. De hecho, no puedes hacer nada” (The child was generally a problem because he would play with the travelling [camera tracks] and anything he found. He played with everything. Staging is very difficult with a child. In fact, there’s nothing you can do) (Ángulo et al. 2001, 128). These narratives about García cast him as an impediment to the successful filming of the project, yet for precisely the same reasons (the child’s spontaneity, curiosity, playfulness) that he has been selected for the role and is essential to the film’s success. These ideas of spontaneity and of “being” rather than “acting” in cinema link the child to the animal, simultaneously accounting for the appeal of both and the challenges they pose onscreen. For Lury, their spontaneous “being” before the camera in this sense sets both child and animal apart from the majority of adult human actors, who are, in contrast, distinguished by their intentionality, purposeful acting, easier management, and clearer boundaries between the actor and character. Noting that child actors “may be more valued for who or what they are … than what they can do,” Lury analyses the ways in which the child is characterized by a lack of self-awareness, “naturalness and spontaneity,” leading to difficulty in discerning where the child’s performance of the character he or she is playing stops and the child’s simply being a child begins (150, 152; emphasis in the original). The procedural anecdotes of García’s co-star and director touch on several of these aspects to suggest that he is somehow fundamentally different from the adult: a “mimetic animal” who can imitate words and intonations he cannot actually comprehend and who performs by simply presenting his own natural spontaneous self for the camera. It is not only this extra-filmic or behind-the-scenes dimension but also the films’ diegetic treatment of the child’s body and its scatological functions, however, that align García’s protagonist more with a trained animal than with an adult subject. Here it is worth considering that the human subject is socially demarcated from the animal by language, by the mastery of what might be considered “animal” functions such as urination or defecation, and by the impropriety of the naked body. In this sense, the child can be seen in the terms set out by Joanne Faulkner (2011), who, drawing from Agamben and Rancière, links the child with the animal to mark a limit of the human, or what must be left behind in order to achieve full human status. Suggestively glossing Agamben’s writing on the animal, Faulkner begins by examining his reading of

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the well-known biblical passage from Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf shall live with the sheep, and the leopard will lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, and a little child shall lead them” (Agamben 2004, 3). Agamben’s focus in analysing the passage is on how the reconciliation between human and animal is possible only at the end of days, as the human has necessarily had to suspend what he terms its “anthropophorous animality” as a means of differentiating the human from the animal (2004, 12). Faulkner crucially notes that, although Agamben’s work urges a reconsideration of the human’s relationship to the animal, this reading of Isaiah fails to foreground the particular centrality of the child in connection with the animal: both are cast in a messianic potentiality together, demarcating the bounds of the nothuman-adult, the not-political-subject (J. Faulkner 2011, 73). Faulkner goes on to note several elements that link the child and the animal in terms of “anthropophorous animality” and bare life, considered by Agamben as the foundation of biopolitics. Among these, she notes that the child and animal share a similar relationship to what she terms “our bestial corporeality – nutrition, defecation, and generation – conceived of after the ‘properly human’ has been distilled and put aside” (76). Likewise, the child and animal also lack access to language, both in literal and political terms: “Present organizations of the human and the political exclude those understood to be without voice: most notably, children (in-fans) and non-human animals” (75). In both of Mercero’s films, and especially La guerra de papá, where the actor is younger, the small child’s non-disciplined scatological bodily functions and lack of access to language are key elements of his representation, suggesting consistently that he is not like the adult – that is, not a social or political subject – but rather much more like an unpredictable and adorable, yet only partially domesticated, animal. If the child’s non-humanity begins to emerge in La guerra de papá’s behind-the-scenes framework, it is diegetically writ large in Tobi, where the protagonist troubles the limits of the human as both a child and mysterious winged creature, either angelic or avian – a point never fully resolved by the film (despite the general consensus in reviews at the time that the child is an angel, itself a telling supposition). Here we might suggestively think of the Spanish word criatura, frequently employed as a term of endearment for a small child, and its secondary meaning, “creature,” which suggests a common ground of non-humanity, or notfull humanity, between creature and child; Tobi is called a criatura on two occasions, once by his father and later by a man interviewed on the street. From its outset, Mercero’s second film with García links the child protagonist to the animal world, especially birds, despite his more

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immediate legibility as an angel.28 Tobi opens with what might initially seem a non-sequitur: an aerial shot of migrating birds flying in large flocks against the backdrop of a colourful sky as the sun begins to set. The striking pink stork-like birds wing their way through several long shots, their loud squawking dominating the audio track as the film’s credit sequence (including its eponymous protagonist’s name) appears superimposed over their image, foregrounding quite literally the child protagonist’s connection to the non-human animal kingdom. As the intense sound of the birds slowly fades out, the camera pans down from the sky and across a poplar grove, where it comes to rest on an idyllic picnic scene, shot in the golden-hued light of the imminent sunset. Tobi’s parents María (María Casanova) and Jacinto (Francisco Vidal) are wrapping up their afternoon in the country as their son comes running over and, in saccharine fashion, asks them about the source of his heartbeat. Here, as throughout the film, the child is shot with lighting and camera angles that emphasize his diminutive size and cherubic features, and the dialogue stresses his lack of knowledge to cutesy or comic effect (after his parents explain that the heart is like a watch, he remarks that he now knows what his belly button is for: to wind it). Despite its overwrought, sentimental tone, the scene also materially emphasizes the child’s discovery of his own bodily mechanisms as he makes a tactile connection to the heart pumping in his chest as well as his parents’ beating hearts. Tobi then runs off to a nearby open field, approaching a scarecrow to “whom” he reports that he will help to scare away the birds. The camera cuts back to his parents loading up the car to return to the city. The mother looks out of the frame with concern at Tobi and calls for the father to come running, at which point the image cuts back to the child protagonist, first in a long shot that zooms in on him from behind, showing him mimicking the scarecrow’s pose as he stands alongside it, and then with a medium close-up of his face and outstretched arms, which are covered with small birds that look to be sparrows – to which his parents have just presciently compared him with the nickname “gorrión” (figures 2.11 and 2.12). As the soundtrack’s sentimental piano score swells to a crescendo, dramatically incorporating string instruments, the child giggles with delight and cranes his neck backward to kiss the birds, illuminated by the golden light of the sun setting behind him (figure 2.13). The sequence’s overall saccharine framing might initially elide the troubling nature of this moment, as the music and lighting show the young protagonist in an idealized and bucolic communion with nature, suggesting his status as not-yet-spoiled by civilization. Yet the perturbed faces of his parents in the reverse shot cut short the fleeting pastoral interlude and foreshadow the child’s eventual suffering that results from his deep-seated connection to the non-human.

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2.11

2.12

2.13

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The bucolic opening sequence – which sharply contrasts with the rest of the film’s setting in the urban environment of Madrid – foregrounds Tobi’s alignment with the natural world and animal kingdom as he is shown to be not only fascinated with the birds but also engaged in a mysterious and unsettling communion with them. That the child is connected to the animal in such a direct way, immediately following the scene depicting his parents’ explanation of the function of his heart, is a simple way to anticipate his eventual transformation into a winged creature. However, the sequence also establishes the child’s not-quitehuman nature that the film underscores throughout: the scene centres on the material and corporeal essence of animal life (what Agamben might call zoe) in Tobi’s experience of the beating heart, suggesting that his own vital force is somehow linked with that of the birds with which he communes. On several occasions in the film, the child is affectively and thematically connected with birds in this fashion, especially in instances of violence or oppression: during his nocturnal ramble through the city following his escape from the laboratory, he urges statuary birds to likewise take flight from their confinement; after a school bully and several classmates threaten to cut off his wings with a switchblade, Tobi’s mother finds him crying in the courtyard beside a lifeless sparrow; and after his wings have been surgically removed at his father’s orders (in a kind of grotesque and fantastical circumcision), Tobi’s mother chastises him for claiming he hears chirping birds discussing a coming rainstorm. His avian experiences increase in intensity as an indication that his connection to them grows, foreshadowing the imminent return of his wings as a refutation of the human/non-human binary his parents, and especially his father, desperately seek to reify in excising them. Tobi’s status as not-quite-human is used throughout the film until this point to objectify him as media fixation, scientific curiosity, and commercial commodity by adults seeking to exploit him for their own benefit, all in the service of the film’s morality tale. In all instances, the way the child’s body is represented onscreen emphasizes his diegetic status as an object of the adult gaze, exposed for the profit of others. Tobi is first seized upon by Professor Burmann (Andrés Mejuto) to be exploited for scientific knowledge and is swiftly locked away in the laboratory of the Centro Nacional de Biología Molecular, an ominous compound on the outskirts of the city. Here, the mise-en-scène is complete with futuristic laboratory installations composed of glass and gleaming white surfaces, including a room where Tobi is initially put on display via a one-way mirror, and an operating theatre where doctors later gaze down at him through glass panes. In these instances, the child is held up

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2.14

2.15

as an object for scrutiny: inert, small, stripped of humanity (figures 2.14 and 2.15). After his wings fully sprout, the scientists reveal him to his unsuspecting parents by dramatically drawing aside a curtain and flipping a series of switches that activates the dais bed on which the sleeping child lies naked, first facing the camera and then, as the mechanical platform slowly turns to reveal him, with his winged back and naked buttocks to the viewer (and his parents) (figure 2.14). Both within the diegetic reality and in the screen image, in these instances, the child is rendered an inert object for the adult gaze, which he cannot even diegetically return, given that he is not only sleeping but is also behind one-way viewing glass. A similar dynamic occurs

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in the later operating theatre scene, where the doctors stare down at the surgery to remove Tobi’s wings (figure 2.15). In both scenes, but especially the dais moment, the protagonist is represented as a kind of angelic child-object: motionless and unconscious, he is bathed in pastel light from above, lying naked but without his genitals exposed, the mise-en-scène suggesting his innocence via the pristine white decor that surrounds him, and his tiny red tricycle that sits behind the bed. The shots alternate between depicting the increasingly aghast viewing adults and the blissfully oblivious viewed child, culminating in his mother’s fainting from shock. The sequence stresses their scrutiny of his body, for example in a point-of-view shot from the parents’ perspective as they take in his new appendages, the camera zooming in to his back, which rises and falls with Tobi’s sleeping breaths before he wakes up, stretches, and hops on his tricycle for a ride. While in this initial scene the child is rendered an object for the alternately curious and horrified adult gaze, the film moves quickly and logically from scientific scrutiny to media appropriation and capitalist commodification. After Tobi escapes from the lab and has a nocturnal frolic through a strikingly deserted Madrid, he is at last found by an adult who seems to express concern for his well-being (after an intoxicated older man mistakes him for a hallucinated statue come to life from atop a fountain). The second man approaches the child with seeming kindness, but this is soon shown to be motivated by self-interest, as the man comments “no te preocupes, ahora te llevo a casa. Pero …,” with an abrupt change of tone from concern to enthusiasm, “… esto es sensacional!” (Don’t worry, I’ll bring you right home. But … this is sensational!). He then produces a camera with which he frantically photographs the winged child; Tobi wipes tears from his eyes as he looks up, perplexed, at the photographer (figures 2.16, 2.17). The child protagonist’s immediate conversion into another kind of object, this time of media sensation, is telegraphed via a montage of the period’s top newspapers’ front pages emblazoned with his photograph, superimposed on a whirring printing press that suggests the rapidity with which news of the child – as well as the circulation of his image as a kind of fetish object – circulates. After the montage shows tongue-in-cheek yet realistic headlines of period newspapers – El País, “Un ángel en la ciudad” (An angel in the city); El Alcázar, “¿Un ser sobrenatural?” (A supernatural being?); Diario 16, “El niño pájaro de Madrid” (The bird-child of Madrid); and ABC, “Un ángel en el siglo XX” (An angel in the twentieth century) – the image cuts to a television studio. Here the shot is framed from behind the rolling news camera, highlighting the image’s mediated nature, and the speed of its circulation, as Televisión Española anchor

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2.16

2.17

Manuel Martín Ferrand delivers the fictional news of the miraculous child to a home television audience including Tobi and his parents, whom we see in a later shot watching the program in a meta-spectatorial loop.29 Once news of Tobi reaches the media, his commodification by the capitalist forces of the advertising industry is not far behind. After several magazines call for exclusive rights to the child’s story, to no avail, his factory-worker father, Jacinto, eventually caves on his promise to his wife that they will not sell Tobi’s story for any sum, as the film’s sexy villain Marga O’Sullivan (Silvia Tortosa) makes him an offer he cannot refuse. The hapless Jacinto fails to read the fine print that promises a year of Tobi’s exploitation in exchange for a considerable sum, and the child is soon filming commercials for deodorant with a full cupid costume to match his wings (figure 2.18).

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2.18

A lengthy slapstick sequence ensues, where, much to his handlers’ dismay, the child cannot get his lines right or keep his eyes open in the same take, art imitating life and uncannily mimicking onscreen a failed version of the process Mercero had successfully employed in the earlier film. The buffoonish Argentine director of the commercial becomes increasingly frustrated with Tobi’s unwillingness to cooperate, eventually losing his toupee from a misdirected wind machine and being struck in the behind as Tobi fires the arrows from his cupid quiver. (It is noteworthy that the forces of exploitative capital are marked as foreign by their last names and accents, suggesting that the external influences of the global market, rather than autochthonous industry, are to blame for the child’s mistreatment.) Striking less for its exaggerated slapstick tone than for its depiction of an adult’s inability to coax a “proper” performance from the child – which stands in sharp contrast to Mercero’s own extensively documented easy rapport with and success in directing García – the sequence foreshadows another one later in the film, where Tobi is more literally commodified as a kind of fetish object at the grounds of the parque de atracciones. Here, he is trotted out as the main attraction in an elaborate sideshow tent, emblazoned with his name and the tagline “el ángel del siglo XX.” Fair goers file by to see the child, who is kept on a pedestal roped off from the unending stream of passing customers, who have purchased themed merchandise – imitation wings and T-shirts printed with Tobi’s name in the same stylized text used on the tent (and in the film’s credits and promotional materials, it bears noting, in a seemingly unacknowledged irony). As the strains of Handel’s Messiah play within the tent, its lofty tones contrasting with the angel-child’s vulnerable commodification, customers are told that it is forbidden to speak to the child or get his autograph. Some of them, however, have paid

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extra for the privilege of touching his wings, including an older man in a wheelchair over whose lap Tobi is held to have his feathery appendages stroked while the man breathes heavily, lecherously imploring the “little angel” to intercede with God on his behalf. If the dark side of the child’s exploitation was not already evident, this troubling scene at the film’s conclusion hammers it home for the spectator, demonstrating how the child has been commodified and fetishized, stripped of bodily agency and forced to perform for, and offer up his body to, a seemingly endless procession of paying customers. This trajectory eerily mirrors the extra-filmic exploitation of the child García by Mercero himself, an irony not lost on some of the film’s critics (though surprisingly unremarked upon in the majority of press treatments at the time). An unsigned review in the far-right daily El Alcázar traces the duality thus: Es un film populista, un poco ñoño y ‘con trampa,’ que parece ir más allá de lo que realmente va, que critica y denuncia una serie de cosas en las que también cae – desde la manipulación del pequeño a la sátira del mundo de la publicidad, que contrasta con el descaro con que el propio film hace propaganda directa de una serie de productos y hasta de unos grandes almacenes. (“Tobi” 1978, n.p., emphasis mine) (It’s a populist film, a little dull and “gimmicky,” which seems to go further than it actually does, which critiques and denounces a series of the very things of which it is also guilty – from the manipulation of the child to the satire of the advertising world, which contrasts with the film’s own shameless propaganda for a series of products and even major department stores.)

Not usually the source of critical insights to films of the period, El Alcázar here hits upon the striking parallelisms of the child commodified both within and by means of Mercero’s film, which, along with La guerra de papá, led to the trotting out of García on a variety of television programs and specials, mirroring the child’s representation in the latter film when confronted with the press.30 In both instances the child is prompted by his interviewers to narrate his experience but performs (or simply expresses) a timid reticence to speak that contrasts with his exuberant performance “in character,” troubling the supposed lack of boundaries between the child being and acting.31 Finally, at the film’s conclusion, Tobi fully embraces the non-human in order to elude those who seek to commodify him. In the climactic final scene, the child escapes his handlers and climbs the spiral stairs of the iconic platillo volante (flying saucer, a building that housed a cafeteria

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with a panoramic view) in Madrid’s Casa de Campo amusement park, where he is on display, with his parents and the advertising team following in hot pursuit.32 Labrador Méndez, who reads Tobi alongside other youthful figures of the Transitional counterculture for whom Icarus is the “patron saint” (given the mythological figure’s simultaneous symbolism of real potential for radical liberation and the price paid in his inevitable fall), notes the significance of Tobi’s taking flight from this particular point of departure as demonstrating how “los jóvenes de la democracia eran como extraterrestres en su propio mundo” (the young people of the democracy were like extra-terrestrials in their own world) (2017, 361).33 As the adults look on aghast, the child steps up to the tower railing, the camera lingering on his small feet poised to jump, with the amusement park crowds far below (figure 2.19). In point-ofview shots, Tobi looks deliberately at his parents, then at his captors, inviting the spectator’s moral condemnation of the adults who have allowed or encouraged the child’s radical commodification; he then lifts his gaze to the migrating birds flying overhead, visually juxtaposing them in a clear moral hierarchy with the humans he is about to leave behind. Tobi then, at last, uses his wings for the first time in the film. The bird-angel-Icarus-child takes flight (figure 2.20), his aerial escape depicted by a subjective camera shot as he floats away (figure 2.21), looking backward towards the tower where the parents and the advertising agents stare agape, and then turning to the birds once more. As Tobi slowly drifts upward, accompanied by the same sweeping music from the avian encounter at the film’s opening, the lack of a reverse shot leaves ambiguous whether his flight is that of a bird or an angel (or something else entirely), refusing in this sense to resolve the central mystery of the film’s fantastical conceit. This ending is perhaps most indicative of the aspects of Tobi that led Daniel Bataller to deem it “a film for all audiences that did not satisfy any of them” (2017, 1). Fernando Trueba, writing in El País, attributed the ambiguity to Mercero’s insistence on reproducing his habitual plot structure, which the critic defined as “el fantástico introducido en lo cotidiano … Un elemento absurdo es introducido en la realidad, y las repercusiones de ello son desarrolladas posteriormente, pero sin cuestionarse nunca las causas, pretendiendo justificar el absurdo por sí mismo” (the fantastic introduced into the everyday … An absurd element is introduced into reality, and its repercussions are subsequently developed, but without ever questioning the causes, seeking for the absurd to justify itself) (1979, 23). José Luis Guarner, in Fotogramas, preferred to blame the poor quality of the costume wings for what he called a deus ex machina ending, noting that the wings’ rigidity “impide aceptar, por puro sentido común, la

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2.19

2.20

2.21

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solución final de que Tobi se echa a volar” (hinders our accepting, out of pure common sense, the ending’s resolution that Toby takes flight), and relating that the poorly helicoptered shot’s narrative meaning had to be explained to a child sitting behind him in the audience who didn’t believe the boy could possibly fly (1979, 34). Although these critiques are well-founded, given the scene’s technical failings, we might nonetheless more generously read the final sequence as one whose ambiguity is productive, leaving opaque the precise nature of the child’s not-quite-humanity as well as what is to become of him. In this final moment, Tobi’s fundamentally non-human condition (whether animal, angelic, Icarian, or otherwise) is set in contrast to the objectifying and commodifying impulses of the adults surrounding him, perhaps idealizing the child’s innocence but also underscoring his connection to nature or the divine. This final ambivalence, which Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns deems Tobi’s systematic denial of classification, rejects a fixed position in the social order for the protagonist as “neither a fairground oddity nor a scientific experiment” (2015, 43). The child-animal-angel in this film straddles many divides as not-quitehuman and not-quite-animal, mortal and divine, allegorical and material, refusing classification in one binary category or another, but rather remaining in an undefined in-between. Along these lines, Tobi invites a reading alongside Deleuze and Guattari, who entwine the child and the animal in their conceptualization of the becoming-animal, giving the child a privileged place in a zone of indistinction: “It is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings, ‘other contemporaneous possibilities’ that are not regressions but creative involutions bearing witness to ‘an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such’” (1987, 273, emphasis in the original). In the final shot, as Tobi’s line of flight takes him ever upward and away from the social sphere that commodified and fetishized his hybrid and indefinable body, the spectator is not shown his destination, his body, or his fate; rather, the film’s ending suggests multiple “contemporaneous possibilities” for the winged child. This final ambiguity – in a film marked by contradiction, as it enacts the very commodification it critiques while seeking sympathy for the criatura at it centre – leaves Tobi’s future quite literally suspended, as we only see his backward glance as he drifts away. Perhaps, like Benjamin’s angel of history, he “would like to stay … But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”

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(1968, 257). In Mercero’s morality tale of the dangers of commodification in the nascent democratic state, this image is particularly apt: the storm of neoliberal capitalism propelling the angel-bird-child backward into the future integration in a globalized Europe as he stares back at the pile of ruins supposed by the recently closed platillo volante (an icon of the amusement park that was at the time of filming a public space owned by the ayuntamiento but was destined for eventual privatization under José María Aznar in the 1990s). While the child’s escape is, on the one hand, an emancipatory movement, allowing him liberation from those who seek to profit from his difference, it is also one that requires him to leave his humanity, and the social order, behind. In the context of the film’s production in 1978, as the nation took its own leap towards constitutional democracy (and neoliberal capitalism), this gesture now reads as a pessimistic one for the child, the subject, and the social.

Chapter Three

Oscillating Encounters: Alignment and Foreclosure in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and El sur (1983)

Víctor Erice (b. 1940) is perhaps the Spanish filmmaker most iconically linked to the figure of the child. Almost all of his films deal in some capacity with childhood, but it is his 1973 masterpiece El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) that established an enduring model for the child onscreen in Spanish cinema and beyond.1 Speaking of this film, Erice commented that he wanted El espíritu de la colmena to show “how a child looks at history, without knowing really who Franco was, or the motives of the civil conflict. The only thing that remains for a child is that one should not talk about some things. That was really the approach that interested me – the primitive way of seeing reality” (Ehrlich 2007, 12).2 The director’s words exemplify how the child in film is both a privileged and a problematic figure, one whose gaze and subject position can be simultaneously nuanced and essentialized. His use of the term “primitive” positions the child as a pre-subjective other whose difference from the adult is fetishized as pure, innocent, or as-yet uncomplicated by politics, what we might call the art-house version of Mercero’s innocent-child-as-commodity from the previous chapter. Yet at the same time, Erice also attempts to cast this alterity in positive terms, noting the child’s capacity for interrogating the past and the present from a position of difference, potentially illuminating new realities that go unnoticed by the adults around her. Privileging the relationship between child, knowledge, and history, in Erice’s formulation the child’s perspective is simultaneously conceived as lacking critical information and offering a pure vision, deficient and insightful at the same time. This dual nature of the child’s perspective – knowing and not knowing at once – comes to the fore in El espíritu de la colmena and the director’s next feature-length film, El sur (The South, 1983). Made at opposite chronological endpoints of the Long Transition period, both

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films centre on female child protagonists in the years following the Spanish Civil War, as these young girls negotiate their limited access to forbidden knowledge about their parents’ past and, in parallel, the historical past of the war years. Throughout, the viewer is cast in a partial alignment with the child protagonist as the films navigate between two poles of a duality: the viewer’s alternate alignment with and rupture from the child onscreen. Both formally and at the level of plot, Erice’s films approximate the adult viewer to the filmic child while simultaneously acknowledging her difference, constructing oscillating dynamics of identification and distance that, I will argue in this chapter, situate the spectator in an ethical relation to the child onscreen. On the one hand, the films bring us closer to the child, align us with her perspective and experience, or invite identification with her understanding of characters, relationships, and events, for example through the use of children’s songs and drawings and emphasis on the child’s imaginative world. Yet on the other, this alignment is consistently foreclosed, interrupted, or cut short, reminding the (adult) viewer of the child’s subjective difference and the impossibility of fully aligning the viewer with her or, for that matter, of representing her subjectivity. This chapter shows how these shifts in alignment with the two films’ child protagonists, whom the spectator alternately looks with and at, point towards the un-knowability of the child’s subject position. This oscillation works alongside the child’s desire for knowledge of the equally inscrutable mysteries of the adult world, and the prohibition on her accessing this knowledge. This partial understanding and foreclosed identification sets up a parallel relationship between the viewer’s engagement with the child and the child’s engagement with the past – what Erice problematically terms the “primitive way of seeing reality” – demonstrating how the films raise not only ontological questions of the (im)possibility of accessing or comprehending the child’s subjectivity but also epistemological concerns regarding the (im)possibility of accessing the past. Looking at and with the Child The release dates of Erice’s only two full-length fictional films to date bracket the end of the dictatorship and transition to democracy, the chronological gap between them bridging crucial changes in terms of censorship and what could be shown onscreen as the socio-political landscape of the nation was radically altered. Perhaps as a result, the later El sur is less abstract and metaphorical than its iconic predecessor,

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El espíritu de la colmena, which has long enjoyed privileged status in the world cinema canon (and is the only Spanish film to be explored consistently in broad transnational treatments of children in cinema).3 El sur, on the other hand, is often cited as an example of directorial failure and frustration and is not as frequently examined in its own right.4 Both feature female child protagonists of similar ages, growing up in the aftermath of the Civil War: Ana (Ana Torrent) in El espíritu de la colmena is about six, and, for the bulk of the film, Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren) in El sur is around eight, though in the second portion (which I do not address, given the advanced age of the protagonist) she is a teenager played by Icíar Bollaín.5 The two films employ loose, lyrical, episodic plot structures and feature families that are physically and emotionally isolated and fractured, where the children know little about their parents’ past that would illuminate their emotional distance in the present. Both also feature female child focalizers, which, as Isolina Ballesteros (1996) notes, politicizes their gaze as non-hegemonic, given the protagonists’ doubly marginal position as child and female. El espíritu de la colmena is set in 1940, a year after the close of the Civil War, in a small Castilian village called Hoyuelos. It depicts a family on the losing side, focusing on the parents’ estrangement and children’s imaginative capacity to fill the void left by their absence. Its narrative follows the young protagonist, Ana, as she seeks the titular spirit, a mysterious figure that her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) invents based on Frankenstein’s monster after the girls watch James Whale’s 1931 film at the town hall. Isabel tells Ana that the figure is not a monster but rather a spirit who can take on material form; Ana’s imaginative search for it is staged in slow cinematic time amid family silences, honey-coloured light, and abstract imagery, and she eventually incarnates the spirit in the figure of a wounded Republican fugitive she encounters sheltering outside of town in an abandoned hut. The child brings him food and her father’s overcoat, in whose pocket he has left his watch, which becomes a key signifier when the fugitive finds it. The runaway is soon found and killed by the Francoist Civil Guard, who find the watch and summon the father, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), to claim it. When he returns home and Ana sees he has recovered the watch, she flees to the abandoned hut, where she finds traces of blood and the fugitive gone. Soon afterward, her father’s rebuke there leads Ana to suspect his involvement in the fugitive’s death. She runs away from Fernando and has a mystical (imagined?) encounter with Frankenstein’s monster in the woods; she is found the next day, traumatized by the entire experience

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and unwilling to speak. The film closes with the family doctor stating that she will eventually recover, by forgetting what has happened to her; then Ana then emerges from bed in the night to speak the words Isabel has taught her for summoning the spirit: “Soy Ana” (it’s Ana; I am Ana) – both identifying herself as the summoner and reaffirming her existence in the wake of devastating loss. El sur, based on the 1985 novella by Adelaida García Morales, Erice’s one-time partner, depicts protagonist Estrella’s coming of age, driven by more standard milestones such as her first communion. But the film is indelibly coloured by the shadow of her father’s (Omero Antonutti) detachment and eventual suicide – a result in part of his losses in the Civil War but perhaps more so of his continued pining for a former flame, Laura, who has become a film actress named Irene Ríos. Estrella struggles to make sense of her parents and the world around her, and the representation of her childhood shares many common threads with the first film’s depiction of Ana’s. In addition to portraying families haunted by the past, both films are set in houses that are not quite homes: places that are cold, dark, or barren, where children are frequently told to be quiet or to stop playing and the light of the outside world barely filters in through the opaque windows.6 In the first film, Ana and Isabel skip through the long empty hallways of their crumbling seigniorial house, which is dilapidated and holds few possessions save for their father’s books and radio, the out-of-tune piano that their mother wistfully plays in one scene, and the beehive outside that occupies more of the father’s attention than his family does. In the second film, enigmatic father Agustín locks himself away in the attic for days at a time and teaches his daughter the magical arts of the divining pendulum. Rob Stone notes that both films feature a “young girl struggling to understand the complexity of her relationship with her parents, who, during the long years of the dictatorship, are barely able to reciprocate her tentative gestures of affection” (2002, 85). Indeed, in El sur, as in El espíritu de la colmena, we know little of the parents, except their losses: the father has left his ancestral South following a political rupture with his own father, and the family has had to relocate numerous times because of their affiliation with the Republic; Estrella’s mother, Julia (Lola Cardona), suffered reprisals as a former Republican schoolteacher and no longer can work. They finally settle in a small city in northern Spain where the film takes place, living in a large house on the outskirts of town, “situada en tierra de nadie” (located in no-man’s land), as Estrella’s voice-over narrates.

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The critical tendency, especially in the initial years after the films’ release, was to read the family structures in these films in allegorical terms as standing in for the broken nation.7 Beyond a political allegory, however, the films’ ruptured families also provide an invitation to the viewer to feel for or with these children. The adult spectator is frequently aligned with the child’s perspective, particularly as concerns the mysteries of the parents’ past: we do not know much more than the child does and can therefore share her curiosity as to what happened in the time preceding the diegetic present. At the same time, however, this plot-based identification is also predicated upon the adult viewer’s difference from the child: we feel for her because we can see the ways in which her parents have been damaged by their experiences of the war, something off-limits to the child’s epistemological reach, as these experiences are never discussed or explained. Likewise, the adult spectator frequently has access to illuminating information the child character does not: recognizing the face of Unamuno in Ana’s father’s photograph (but not knowing what the connection to him is), hearing in the voiceover the content of her mother Teresa’s (Teresa Gimpera) letter to an unidentified loved one who has perhaps escaped from Spain, or the text of a letter from Irene Ríos/Laura (Aurore Clément) to Estrella’s father. Even at the simplest level of plot, the recurrent alternation between the spectator sharing the child’s perspective on events and being privy to information beyond her grasp underscores the complexity of representing the child’s perspective and subjectivity in film.8 As recent critical work on the child in cinema has shown, the child’s particular otherness runs the risk of being elided, given that children are often the focalizers of films that are intended for adult spectators; likewise, children rarely make films. Writing on the child in Spanish and Latin American cinema, Eduardo Ledesma observes that a potential ethical pitfall of using the child as cinematic focalizer is that “the adult narrative might be construed as forcing an adult identification on the child character, collapsing adult and child perspectives in a way that effaces the child’s subjectivity and the profound differences between children and adults” (2012, 153; emphasis in the original). The all-too-easy slippage between viewer identification with and objectification of children in film is frequently critiqued in the burgeoning critical conversation on children in cinema.9 These engagements with the cinematic child stress how the very illusion that the spectator can see through the child, or even with the child, runs the risk of eliding the important subjective

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differences between children and adults, or reifying children as fundamentally different from adults in a way that is nonetheless familiar, and therefore accessible, to them. Ledesma’s comments distil well how the collapsing of adult and child perspectives into the illusion of identification can lead to the erosion of the cinematic child from subject (possessing thoughts, feelings, experiences) into object (of the spectator’s gaze and projection), as we saw in the previous chapter. This shift is problematic in that the child can become co-opted for adult ends and deprived of subjectivity and agency, her difference elided. Along these lines, I would like to connect writings on the child in film, many of which are explicitly or implicitly framed from an ethical standpoint as concerns representation, to the broader emerging field of cinema ethics. This latter area of scholarship has begun using interdisciplinary frameworks to rethink dominant film studies approaches, asking what film can illuminate about ethical relations between self and other as well as the ethical dimensions of film spectatorship itself (Choi and Frey 2014, 1). In their work in this sphere, Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton propose that “in a society increasingly saturated with images, the visual, rather than the written word, becomes a privileged locus of exploration of the ethical” where “what is at stake is the encounter and the act of interrogating the self about its relationship to the other” (2010, 1). In this chapter, I develop a reading of how the child other might be ethically approached through dynamics of oscillating identification, resisting the transformation of the onscreen child into an object (as we saw in chapter 2), yet, crucially, showing that the child’s subjectivity cannot be fully represented onscreen by an adult and reminding the viewer that such a depiction is necessarily incomplete, partial, and adult-made. Despite the dangers of collapsing the subjective differences between adults and children, focalizing the events of a film through a child’s perspective can also lead adult spectators to consider from an ethical or empathetic standpoint the child’s difference in agency as well as his or her bodily or emotional realities, and how these are different from the adult’s. Emma Wilson has noted how certain concrete techniques can encourage this effect: for example, holding the camera at the child’s eye level, using shots that stress movement and proximity, presenting the child’s tactile reality, and refusing to fix filmic children as stereotypical images of innocence, showing their subjective perceptions instead (Wilson 2005, 329, 335, 340). For Wilson, these strategies of approximating the viewer to the child, through a focus on her sensorial or emotional experience, can serve to move

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the viewer towards the child’s position while emphasizing the ways this position is different from the adult’s: “In moving the adult, in disarming her through the involuntary seizure of the emotions, in restoring momentarily an awareness of helplessness, works of art may sensitize the viewer to the experience (and suffering) of children and so engage her more voluntarily, changing her perspective on childhood” (2005, 330). Erice’s films consistently stress the child’s reality in this way by representing the child characters’ sensorial interactions with the world around them. However, this approximation is limited and fleeting, as these scenes tend to be abruptly cut short or employ a change in perspective away from the child’s. In both cases, the effect is to remind the spectator of the difference between the child and the adult: although we can approach the child’s tactile reality, we cannot be fully immersed in it. In El espíritu de la colmena especially, the child is represented as both sensing subject (of the world around her) and sensed object (of the viewer’s gaze), with both child protagonists’ sensory experiences foregrounded throughout. The sense of touch is especially important and a frequent focus of long-duration shots. We can think, for example, of the tactile intensity of Isabel applying her blood as lipstick after being scratched by the cat (whose plush fur she strokes while tightening her grip on its neck), Ana shaking her face in the wind on the desolate plain as she makes her way to the abandoned hut, the two girls applying their father’s foamy shaving cream to their faces, or the many moments in which Ana interacts with pivotal objects through a sustained touch on which the camera intently lingers – the Don José figurine’s eyes, the mushroom in the woods, the family photo album, the fugitive’s blood on the floor of the hut after he is killed. In many cases these sensory and especially tactile encounters also stress the child’s bodily difference from the adult. In the scene where Ana first visits the abandoned hut alone in search of the “spirit” whom she later incarnates in the fugitive, she is transfixed by a footprint she finds in the dirt; the camera shows her kneel beside and slowly place her own foot within its much larger contours (figures 3.1, 3.2). The juxtaposition of the child’s foot and trace of the footprint stresses the smallness of her foot and shoe by contrast to the larger impression an adult has left behind. In emphasizing her childbody and sensory interaction with the footprint, the shot straddles simultaneous proximity and distance, showing the viewer the child’s bodily reality but in doing so reminding us how she is unlike the adult, whose footprint dwarfs hers.

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3.1

3.2

Oscillation and Opacity as Ethics This imposition of distance from the child’s bodily reality or sensory experience occurs more overtly on several occasions in El espíritu de la colmena, when a moment of approximation to the child’s physical experience is foreclosed or reversed by a shift in perspective or an abrupt cut. Such is the case in one of the film’s most emblematic scenes, where Ana and her sister, Isabel, play on the railroad tracks. I will examine this sequence at some length to illustrate in formal terms the oscillating dynamic of approximation and foreclosure that both films employ. This scene moves several times between intimate close-ups and wide shots of the two children. The latter framing sets their smallness in contrast to the seemingly infinite landscape and the imposing train that barrels

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towards and then past them. The sequence begins with such a juxtaposition: the now-iconic image (which features on several DVD cases and book covers) of the railroad tracks centred in the frame and stretching towards the horizon’s vanishing point, with Ana standing between the rails and looking into the distance with her back to the camera, the Castilian plain extending on both sides beyond the tracks where her sister is crouched (figure 3.4). As the sequence begins, Isabel is hunched over one of the rails and shouts to her sister that the train is coming. Ana joins Isabel at the track, and a shot lingers on her face for a few seconds as she presses her cheek to the rail and looks down at it; the girls then exchange slow smiles in close up (figures 3.3 and 3.5) as the soundtrack announces the approach of the distant locomotive. Ana and Isabel’s multi-sensory perception of the train – through sight, hearing, and especially touch – seems to bring them a moment of pleasure and complicity as they court danger beside the rails, their cheeks pressed tightly down. Although it lasts only a few seconds, this sequence of shots suggests the children’s tactile experience – the cold hard metal of the rail on their cheeks, its rumbling vibrations rendering perceptible the oncoming train – and frames this experience in the intimate terms of a close-up shot. As the train draws near, this proximity is suddenly broken as Isabel runs away from the tracks and calls her sister to follow. Ana lingers a moment longer, and we see a point-of-view shot of the train approaching her position, too close to the tracks, before she joins Isabel at a safer distance. Once the girls are safely removed from the path of the oncoming train, we see them in a tight shot again as they wait for it (figure 3.6); this is followed by a cut to a much wider shot showing them in contrast to the enormous locomotive that thunders by (figure 3.7). After the train passes, the girls clamber back up to the tracks, and a final long shot shows them standing on the empty track after the train has passed (figure 3.8). As we move from proximity to distance in terms of the camera capture, the diegetic soundtrack crescendos with the roar of the train and its high-pitched whistle, drowning out any other sound. The sequence moves the viewer from alignment to distance in just a few frames, shifting from the intimate, sensory moment the two girls share on the tracks to an increasingly depersonalized frame where they are set in contrast to the enormous train (which has been read by critics as symbolizing history, modernity, or the world outside Spain), and finally rendered as tiny figures in a desolate landscape. Over the course of the scene, the child characters appear to grow smaller, become more vulnerable, and shift from sensing subjects to

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3.3

3.4

3.5

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3.6

3.7

3.8

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sensed objects. This movement occurs on several levels, most overtly in terms of the decreasing proximity to the child characters offered by the camerawork, but also due to the violent and imposing presence of the train, whose threat to cause the children harm moves from the implicit (figure 3.4) to the imminent (figures 3.3 and 3.5) before leaving them in its wake (figure 3.8). The sonic and visual dominance of the train as it rumbles by, belching smoke, might provoke a number of affective responses in the spectator: fear for the children’s safety, a desire to protect them, or simply a reflection on how dangerous the children’s play appears to be. What interests me more in this sequence, however, is the way in which the train’s arrival not only cuts across the screen with an unanticipated violence but also severs the spectatorial alignment with the child characters that had been established by the earlier shots’ proximity to their emotional and physical realities. The sequence lets the spectator into the child’s world, showing her viewpoint, affective response, and sensory perception, but this in is quickly closed out by the train’s careening through the frame, rendering the child instead a small, distant, vulnerable object of the gaze. Throughout both films, this type of camerawork and editing not only emphasizes the child protagonist’s subjective experience but also invites empathy with her perspective, aligning the spectator with the child and her view of the adult world she inhabits. Yet at the same time, these moments of identification with or proximity to the child onscreen alternate with instances of distance, incomprehensibility, or denials of identification that remind the spectator of the child’s difference, enshrining her as subject and not merely object of the gaze. Despite the tactics of sensorial proximity Wilson enumerates as being able to meaningfully approximate adult viewers to children onscreen, she also notes that a risk of such mechanisms is that they may create the illusion that “the emotions of a child, her experience, her subjectivity, can be known retrospectively because we have all inhabited changing, shifting, impulsive child bodies” (Wilson 2012, 281). Building on Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Wilson develops Butler’s concept of opacity (as opposed to the supposed transparency we saw centrally in the previous chapter) as an ethical means of approaching the other in the concrete context of the child onscreen. For Butler, acknowledging the “partial transparency” or incomprehensibility of the other to the self is rooted in the recognition of the very opacity of the self to the self, the fact that “there is that in me and of me for which I can give no account” (2005, 40) – an opaque self not unlike the child of memory discussed in chapter 1. Butler proposes that this un-narratable

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or illegible part of the self might be the beginning of a mutual relation or encounter with the other: “An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution” (2005, 41). Wilson summons Butler’s mode of ethical engagement into a concrete cinematic context, exploring recent French films by director Mia Hansen-Løve that depict girl protagonists; for Wilson, these films “reflect on what it is to be a subject and what it can be to know, or not know, the other” (2012, 275). More specifically, Wilson argues that, in focusing on the precarious nature of the child characters’ experience and emphasizing the opacity of certain relational networks in which they exist, Hansen-Løve “draws us to appreciate all that we cannot see and know of others” (279). In the case of Erice’s two films (and El espíritu de la colmena in particular), although the child’s inscrutability might also lead to a fetishization of her innocence or to her becoming the object of the gaze, it also potentially opens up an ethical relationship to the child other that acknowledges her unknowability as a subject, thus acknowledging the limits of comprehending the experience of the (child) other. Erice’s films, much like Hansen-Løve’s, illustrate “the way in which knowledge of the other is always ungrounded, is always only projective, that our apprehension of another’s subjectivity is the more acute, the more ethical in Butler’s terms, the more we acknowledge what we cannot know of her experience and indeed what we cannot know of ourselves” (ibid., 281). Drawing from these approaches, in what remains of the chapter I first trace the ways that Erice’s two films approximate the spectator to the child’s perspective while also employing foreclosures and denials that allow her subjectivity to remain partially opaque or inscrutable, in an ethical approach to representing the child’s difference. I then build on this oscillation between proximity and distance that the films construct to show how they forge a comparable relation of inscrutability to the child of the adults around her. In both El espíritu de la colmena and El sur, the protagonist alternately gains insight into the lives of her parents, especially their pasts, and is denied knowledge of them, demonstrating that the opacity of the other flows both ways, adult to child and child to adult, placing the spectator and child in parallel relationships concerning both the opacity of the other and the mysteries of the past. The Child’s Eye View and Empathetic Identification As we have seen, Erice’s two films employ concrete formal cinematographic strategies of approximation towards and distancing from the child, as in the railroad track scene. The films make frequent use of what

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we might call a “child’s eye view,” framing shots from the child’s perspective and aligning the spectator with her view of the (adult) world, but they also find ways of foreclosing or limiting this alignment, thus underscoring the child’s opacity to the viewer. As a result of the films’ privileging of the visual, critical treatments of both El sur and especially El espíritu de la colmena have consistently fixated upon – and at times fetishized – the power of the child’s gaze.10 More recent readings of the films approach the protagonists’ perspectives in more complex terms than did their earlier counterparts, which tended to read the child’s gaze in terms of an allegorical or idealized imaginative function.11 Due in no small part to the centrality of vision to the film, we could even at this point speak of a meta-critical stance regarding the reception of the eyes of child actress Ana Torrent, who was discovered for the part of Ana.12 While El sur’s protagonist receives less critical attention than her seminal counterpart, Estrella’s gaze nonetheless informs much of the film’s representation of events, in particular her father’s mysterious past and present. El sur likewise privileges the child’s observation of the world around her and generally “highlights acts of observation and of being observed, and makes abundant use of mirrors and windows to frame acts of reflection and reduplication” (Compitello 1993, 76). Clare Nimmo has noted that El sur “communicates the close father/daughter bond described so elegantly in García Morales’s story by some precise camera work” and that “through such use of the point-of-view shot, interspersed with close-ups of Estrella’s face, Erice manages to suggest the process of recognition which occurs in the young girl’s mind” (1995, 44).13 Nimmo’s comments are indicative of the double-edged sword supposed by critically exploring the child’s gaze in film, or, as Vicky Lebeau asks in her exploration of the cinematic privileging of the child’s gaze: “What does a child see and know? What of a child’s world can be represented to and for adults as well as other children?” (2008, 44). Through camera angles, shot–reverse shot patterns, and emphasis on the child’s gaze, filmmakers can attempt to construct a visual representation of child subjectivity. Reading these cinematographic techniques, adult viewers and critics can then suppose to know, understand, or analyse what is being telegraphed as the child’s interior subjective reality. But while camerawork, sound, or mise-en-scène can serve as a means of bringing the spectator closer to the child’s position, it can also obscure the ways children are indeed different from, and incomprehensible to, adults. In examining in more detail how Erice’s films both provide and deny the spectator access to this “child’s eye view,” I establish the cinematographic mechanisms by which these films approach the child’s interiority or subjective experience, but also – perhaps more crucially – suggest

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that the plethora of critical interpretations of the child’s gaze might in fact gesture towards the ways in which the child figure is finally inscrutable and not fully accessible to the adult viewer. In El espíritu de la colmena, subjective camerawork frequently appears to portray Ana’s perspective, beginning with the much-remarked scene in which she watches Frankenstein. The sequence alternates between scenes of Frankenstein (from Ana’s viewpoint) and shots of her watching it. This shot–reverse shot sequence establishes not only the central relationship of the film (between Ana and the Frankenstein monster/ fugitive) and the centrality of cinema to the film, but also the importance of Ana’s gaze in constructing this intersubjective tie via cinematic spectatorship. Yet while this moment might be seen as foundational to the film’s “child’s eye view” framework – the viewer watching the child as she watches the film, seeing her and what she sees – even here, the spectator of the film is not entirely aligned with Ana. While Ana’s character is seeing Frankenstein (and perhaps any film at all) for the first time, it is unlikely that an adult viewer shares her position of astonishment and the “firstness” that several critics have attributed to the scene, further enhanced by the fact that Erice captured the child actress herself actually watching the film for the first time, a point much remarked by critics.14 Indeed, as Lebeau notes, a central aspect of “what The Spirit of the Beehive is struggling with at this point is how to represent to and for the adult spectator the young child’s experience of cinema” and its profound effect on the young protagonist (2008, 54). Ana’s experience of cinema around which the film pivots is, of course, fundamentally rooted in her child’s subjectivity: her wonder and terror at the images she sees onscreen, her incomprehension of the film’s narrative and its relation to reality, and her imaginative engagement (via Isabel’s explanation) with its central character. Although the child protagonist’s perspective might lead the adult spectator of Erice’s film to interrogate processes of cinematic perception, it does so precisely by underscoring the child’s difference in comprehending cinema and processing its connection to the real. In several similar moments throughout the film, subjective camerawork inviting the spectator to align with Ana’s perspective or telegraphing her thought process subtly oscillates with denial of such alignment or understanding, refusing complete identification with the child. This movement forges a spectatorial relation with the child onscreen akin to what Lisa Cartwright has called “empathetic identification” in her work on spectators’ relationship to disabled (and especially deaf) characters in film, many of them also children. Moving beyond the standard model of filmic identification where the spectator “feel[s] what the other feels, imagining oneself to be the other,” in Cartwright’s model

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of empathetic identification spectators acknowledge their difference from while nonetheless feeling for filmic subjects, so as to “recognize and even facilitate the otherness of the other” (2008, 2, emphasis in the original). Cartwright’s ethics-inflected paradigm proposes that identification need not mean erasing the differences between the spectator and the filmic focalizer by collapsing them into a single perspective, but rather that these differences can be precisely recognized through a connection based in empathy rather than mastery or full understanding. If, as she writes, “The concept of filmic identification may be reworked by shifting the discussion to a related term: empathy” (ibid., 23), then viewers might be able to feel with or for the child without necessarily making claims to know what exactly it is the child feels. As an example of how oscillating identification with the child onscreen might be read in terms of empathetic identification, I turn to the scene at the family breakfast table. This sequence has often been analysed as one that underscores the family members’ isolation from one another, given that they are filmed individually, head-on, without any two members of the family sharing the frame at the same time.15 To add to the sense of solitude and alienation suggested by the cinematography, there is no music or dialogue during the entire two-minute scene. The amplified diegetic sound – Isabel coughing, spoons clinking in coffee cups, church bells in the distance – seems to further amplify the verbal silence that hangs in the air. The quotidian soundscape builds in intensity, leading to the metallic creaking of Fernando winding his watch (recently recovered from the Civil Guard who took it off the body of the fugitive). As he winds the watch and it chimes out a tinny melody, the sound cue calls Ana’s attention to her father, and she raises her eyes bashfully or perhaps fearfully to look at him above the edge of her bowl (figure 3.9).

3.9

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Here we see how, despite each character’s confinement in a solitary frame, the family members nonetheless interact across the invisible lines separating them through an interplay of gazes captured in shot– reverse shot clusters, crafting a wordless conversation: Teresa looking at Isabel giggling/coughing, Ana smiling back at her sister, and then the culminating exchange between Ana and Fernando over the watch. This last interaction sets into motion the troubling events of the film’s conclusion, as Ana realizes the fugitive has been found, and presumably killed, because Fernando is in possession of his watch once more. After she hears the sound of Fernando winding the timepiece, Ana and her father exchange a series of meaningful looks regarding its reappearance (figures 3.10–3.12). The camerawork subtly aligns the viewer with Ana by breaking from the previous framing of her, in a shift towards (but not fully into) her perspective. Initially (figures 3.9, 3.10, 3.11) we see both Ana and Fernando in medium close-up, just as we have seen all the family members throughout the scene: the camera framing them from elbow level at the table upward to the top of their heads. This meticulously identical framing helps create the effect of isolation, each character in his or her own cell of the beehive. Yet not only do the characters visually interact across the “walls” of these cells, but also in the final shot these walls are broken in perspectival terms, as we see something more akin to Ana’s view of her father, looking down and to his right to interrogate her wordlessly (figure 3.12). This shot is tighter, showing Fernando from about shoulder level up, heightening tension and suggesting an intensified gaze on Ana’s part as she realizes he knows she was involved in the fugitive’s acquisition of the watch. This break from the previous framing, however, is not quite a point-of-view shot, as it depicts Fernando from above Ana’s position, more capturing a disembodied third-person observer’s view of the intensity of their exchange. The shift partially aligns us with Ana’s gaze at Fernando as we look with her at him; but at the same time we do not look through her perspective but rather, quite literally, alongside it. The adult spectator is thus positioned as a kind of ally to Ana, denied her full viewpoint and instead placed into empathetic identification with the child protagonist that does not erode her difference: seeing with or beside her rather than through her. The sequence suggests that she recognizes that the watch’s reappearance means Fernando has discovered that she stole it, and perhaps by extension knows of her dealings with the fugitive; but at the same time the sequence does not project a facile explanation of what she thinks, knows, or understands. Just as throughout the film Ana’s conflation of the fugitive/espíritu/Frankenstein figure

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3.10

3.11

3.12

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is gestured towards without ever being explicitly articulated or parsed, here too the film strikes a balance of empathy without total understanding. Rather than telegraph what exactly Ana thinks or feels, the sequence instead shows that she does immediately understand the significance of the watch’s reappearance (in the following scene we see her running to the abandoned house, where Fernando confronts her), while employing silence and non-subjective camerawork to leave her thought process opaque. In El sur, although there are many shots from the child protagonist’s perspective, the camerawork similarly refuses any complete identification with Estrella. It often shows the viewer what the child is not able to see or know, or makes use of an almost-aligned perspective like the breakfast table scene in the earlier film. In one of El sur’s opening sequences, for example, as the family travels by train to their new home in the North, we see an exchange of gazes between Estrella and her father that functions in much the same fashion as the breakfast table shots in El espíritu de la colmena, albeit with happier emotional valences. In this scene, setting the stage for the film’s characters and geography, the adult Estrella’s voice-over narration describes how the family moved from place to place as her parents, Republican sympathizers, sought work in postwar Spain. We see the three family members in a train carriage, parents Agustín and Julia seated across from Estrella, who lies sleeping on the bench opposite. Estrella wakes up and exchanges a series of smiles with her father. When the camera cuts to shots of Estrella’s face, we see her at her eye level, inviting empathy or alignment from the viewer. However, the reverse shots of Agustín, rather than being filmed from Estrella’s perspective, are shot at a slightly higher level, showing him looking down at her and smiling. Although the emotional content is quite different in the two scenes, the similarity in editing and spatial positioning in the shot reverse–shot between child and adult draws attention to the fact that, again, we do not quite share the child’s perspective, but rather see alongside her, empathetically aligned with and privy to the smiles she exchanges with her father (figures 3.13 and 3.14). In addition to this kind of perspectival camerawork, both films use the visual field to construct the spectator’s position as one that at times aligns with the child’s access to knowledge or information but subsequently distances the spectator from the child by providing information she does not possess, demonstrating that the child’s knowing/not-knowing is a key way in which the adult spectator might alternately be placed in the child’s position and stand outside

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3.13

3.14

it. Throughout the films, we know more than the child does, but only so much; the enigmas of the parents’ lives or the historical past are not fully resolved even when diegetic information to which the child does not have access is provided to the viewer. In a pivotal scene of El sur, for example, Estrella follows her father to the cinema one night, and the spectator shares Estrella’s “child’s eye view” through camerawork filmed from her position, as we have seen elsewhere. However, this scene is one in which the viewer is gradually granted access to information about the adult world that the child character does not possess, compromising this shared perspective. At this point in the film, Agustín has begun to descend into melancholy, and Estrella has

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discovered the existence of a woman from his past, Irene Ríos, whose name and image she finds repeatedly scrawled on an envelope in her father’s desk. The father, whose mystery used to be an appealing source of shared experience – in scenes such as their divining of water together using his magical pendulum – has now become enigmatic, for reasons Estrella can’t fully comprehend. One winter night on her way home from school, Estrella passes by the town’s cinema, where a film starring Irene Ríos is currently playing. The child notices her father’s motorcycle parked outside and takes evident interest in his whereabouts, looking around for him on the street. A sequence of shots then shows Estrella perusing the film’s poster and publicity stills and approaching the ticket window, where she is denied entry but given a handbill by the cinema attendant. Throughout, the shots emphasize Estrella’s child’s stature as she looks upward at the images, filmed both from her height looking up or in high angle down at her. These shots are interspersed with closeups of pieces of the film’s poster and publicity stills, implicitly showing her perspective and what visual elements catch her eye. That is, we see both how Estrella sees (figures 3.15–3.17) and what she sees (figures 3.18–3.20). The first sequence of images (figures 3.15–3.17) shows Estrella looking at the cinema entrance, at a poster for Irene Ríos’s film Flor en la sombra, and then at publicity stills from the film through the cinema door. Throughout the film, shots follow the model shown here in that they mostly show Estrella from camera angles at her own height (figures 3.15 and 3.17) or emphasize her small stature in contrast to objects and architecture (the motorcycle, poster, or doorframe). These shots at the child’s eye level alternate with images of what Estrella sees, as the examples in figures 3.18–3.20 show. This mechanism of shot–reverse shot alternation between the child looking and what she observes initially aligns the viewer with Estrella’s perspective in the scene. We know as much (or more to the point, as little) as she does about the identity of the mysterious Ríos and her connection to Agustín’s past and present. Estrella’s deep interest in this shadowy figure (the fictitious film’s title – Flower in the Shadow – is hardly coincidental) not only manifests in her intense gaze upon the images of Ríos and her printed name but also emerges via a subtle visual and thematic connection between the two of them: the star motif that echoes the protagonist’s name and also frames her perspective through the door (figure 3.17) and the stars scattered across Ríos’s face in the movie poster (figure 3.19) as she looks on from the shadows (or beyond the grave) at the embrace of the protagonists of the filmwithin-the film.

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Up to this point, the spectator is aligned with the child’s lack of information about Ríos and discovers the images of the actress alongside Estrella in a position of empathetic identification. This alignment breaks, however, as the scene progresses and the spectator diegetically “enters” the cinema to which Estrella has been barred for being underage, underscoring not only her lack of pertinent information but also the child’s limited mobility and agency. While she waits across the street for her father to emerge, spying through the window of a parked car, the filmic frame cuts to the interior of the cinema, where Agustín’s gaze recalls his daughter’s as he intently watches the image of Ríos – now moving onscreen rather than still in a photograph or poster – his face marked by emotion (figures 3.21–3.23). The viewer witnesses the father’s filmic encounter with his past, while Estrella is left outside, quite literally in the dark, and denied access to it. Agustín then emerges from the cinema, clearly affected by the film, whose diegetic music (Ríos humming “Blue Moon”) continues to play in the outside world, suggesting that his subjective frame rather than Estrella’s is guiding the diegesis for the first time in the film. We view him through Estrella’s perspective on the opposite side of the street, watching from behind a parked car as her father approaches his motorcycle, hesitates, and then appears to change his mind and heads into a nearby café. Unbeknownst to Agustín, Estrella follows him, and looks in through the window. In the next shot, he sits at a table having a drink and writing a letter to Ríos, the letter’s contents audible in his voice-over. In perhaps the film’s most complex moment of empathetic identification, which deploys simultaneous alignment and foreclosure, the viewer partially shares Estrella’s point of view: looking in at her father, seeing him writing. However, the spectator is at the same time privy to additional information the child is not, in hearing the letter’s contents and discovering that the father is writing to his former lover. When Estrella knocks on the window and Agustín notices her outside, we see her look at him through the window, and then a reverse shot of his lingering gaze at his daughter: he is caught in the act of something she does not comprehend. Finally, Agustín joins Estrella on the street, the camera filming them from within the café. The child’s facial expressions suggest that she intuits that something is wrong, based on her father’s expression and odd behaviour, but she cannot know, as the spectator does from Agustín’s voice-over, what the letter contains. This double valence of the scene is underscored in the voice-over, as the retrospective adult Estrella (who

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presumably is now privy to the same information as the viewer) comments: Nunca olvidaré la cara que puso mi padre cuando, sentado en el interior del Café Oriental, levantó los ojos de las cuartillas, y me vio al otro lado del cristal de la ventana … Ahora comprendo que él reaccionaba como si yo le hubiese pillado en falta; pero en ese momento no fui capaz de darme cuenta. Únicamente advertí que estaba escribiendo lo que me parecía una carta. (I will never forget the face my father made when, sitting inside the Café Oriental, he lifted his eyes from the sheets of loose-leaf paper, and saw me on the other side of the windowpane … Now I understand that he was reacting [guiltily] as if I had caught him in the act; but in that moment I wasn’t capable of realizing this. All I noticed was that he was writing what seemed to be a letter.)

These slippages between adult knowledge and child intuition and sensing, further complicated by the adult voice-over, highlight the doubleedged relationship to the child onscreen. Aligned with the child, and sharing her perspective to a certain degree, the viewer also knows things that the child can only intuit. This mechanism parallels the framing of Espíritu’s pocket-watch breakfast scene, where the spectator (and not Ana) knows that Fernando had been called to the town hall to collect his watch from the body of the murdered fugitive, whose death we have “seen” in a shot of the abandoned hut at night lit up with the explosions of machine gun fire. In both cases, the spectator/adult character has access to key information the child characters do not possess, although they sense or intuit the gravity and complexity of the situations beyond their epistemological grasp, a tension communicated to the viewer via subtle dynamics of camerawork, sound, and editing. Bringing the Child to Light Although this scene from El sur demonstrates the complex dynamics of empathetic and partial identification with the child protagonist in terms of her perspective and access to knowledge, it also highlights another more problematic aspect of the film’s approach to representing the child protagonist’s subjectivity: its deployment of the retrospective voice-over narration of the remembering adult Estrella, which highlights the difference between the knowledge and understanding she lacked in the moment but has subsequently acquired as an adult,

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further emphasizing the epistemological differences between adult and child. This was to have been the framing device for El espíritu de la colmena as well, as early drafts of the script featured the adult Ana returning from the city where she lived to the provincial town where she grew up, in the process struggling to make sense of the childhood past that shaped her as an adult (Smith 1999, 109). The framework was subsequently scrapped. In El sur, however, the voice-over noted in the original script – “una voz, su voz de mujer adulta nos cuenta su historia, desde hoy, desde 1981” (a voice, her adult woman’s voice, tells her story from the present day, from 1981) – remains in the final version (El sur n.d., 4). El sur’s reliance on voice-over is logical inasmuch as it is based on Adelaida García Morales’s 1985 novella, which is narrated by the adult protagonist looking back to childhood. However, in the film adaptation it telegraphs the protagonist’s subjective reality to the viewer in at times heavy-handed terms that generate a problematic rupture with the embodied child onscreen. In contrast to El espíritu de la colmena’s largely inscrutable child protagonist, El sur’s Estrella is in a sense rendered hyper-legible by the film’s use of voice-over, imposed onto the moving image of the child actress. The voice-over’s narration frequently intervenes between the child protagonist and the spectator to explain Estrella’s feelings, motivations, or perceptions of the events and people around her. Often used during scenes in which the child Estrella does not speak (or does so sparingly), the adult voice retrospectively ventriloquizes her interior state for the viewer as the camera shows the child onscreen, often staring into the camera, gazing into the distance, or intently focused on whatever activity she happens to be engaged in. The voice-over accompanies the child character from the film’s outset, narrating how the family has had to move from one place to another because of the parents’ Republican sympathies; it reappears throughout, at times making obvious what the viewer likely already understands from the diegetic present scenes themselves. One example among many is Estrella’s discovery of Irene Ríos’s existence. While rifling through her father’s papers, she sees the envelope on which her father has repeatedly scrawled Ríos’s name and image and stares at it intently. The adult voice-over then asks a series of questions that might have been implicitly gleaned from the performance of child actress who is materially onscreen, who instead stares into the camera with an inquisitive face (figure 3.24): “¿quién podía ser Irene Ríos? ¿Existía de verdad? ¿O era un personaje imaginario? ¿Por qué papá había escrito tantas veces seguidas su nombre?” (Who could Irene Ríos be? Did she really exist? Or was she an imaginary character? Why had Papa written her name so many times in a row?).

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In instances such as these, where the voice-over provides the viewer with a retrospective adult view of Estrella’s thought process, I would argue that rather than bringing us closer to her emotional or subjective reality (as would seem to be its purpose), the voice-over narration in fact distances the spectator from Estrella. This rupture stems largely from the way this external narration is aurally superimposed from without, temporally and spatially detached from the child we see onscreen. This imposition is, at best, distracting; at worst, it serves to break the empathetic identification that its predecessor Espíritu better cultivates. It is worth noting that, at least in part, this retrospective voice-over’s strangeness or jarring nature stems from the fact that the voice of the “adult” Estrella – a figure we never see onscreen – is performed by actress María Massip, rather than the more logical choice of Icíar Bollaín, who plays the character during her teenage years in the final portion of the film. This third voice, which does not correspond to an onscreen embodied or visual version of Estrella, appears to be employed in an attempt to soften or smooth over the differences between the child character and adult spectator, simplifying the child’s perspective into a neatly comprehensible set of statements or questions that are then imposed on her image. Such a movement is the opposite of what we saw in the films discussed in chapter 1, where the representation of childhood filtered through adult consciousness serves to underscore the challenges in – or impossibilities of – accessing the child self through memory. Here, on the contrary, access to the child’s subjective experience by the disembodied future vocal adult self serves a simplifying function, eliding the differences in subjective

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experience between the child onscreen and the adult who speaks for her, essentially explaining away her difference and rendering her more accessible. In this sense the voice-over of future adult Estrella serves the contrary function to what Kaja Silverman (1988) identifies as the emancipatory potential of the disembodied female voice, which is liberated from the patriarchal gaze by no longer being linked to a physical (and visual) body, thereby enabling more complex representations of female subjectivity. Rather than granting deeper understanding of the child’s subjective or interior life, the adult voice-over in El sur gives the illusion of proximity or greater understanding but in fact imposes distance or opacity. Here the voice-over’s effect is more akin to what Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright have noted (following Steven Shaviro) regarding the dubbed voice in foreign language film as a “spectral, uncanny presence … that resides [in] someone else’s body, upset[ting] the spatial relationship between inside and outside, subject and its Other,” given that here an adult dubs a child to whose body the voice clearly does not belong (2017, 4). The exception to the distancing function of the disembodied adult voice is the one (significantly more interesting) moment in the film where we hear Estrella’s thoughts in the diegetic present spoken in a voice-over employing the child actress’s voice as opposed to the dubbing adult’s. This occurs in a moment of a key rite of passage, Estrella’s first communion, which she had doubted her atheist father would attend. After she steps down from the altar and greets her other family members, the father’s childhood housekeeper, Milagros (Rafaela Aparicio), informs her that Agustín indeed has come, although he hangs back in the shadows at the rear of the church rather than sitting with his wife, mother, and Milagros. After Estrella greets him, she returns to her place in the pew, kneeling in a pious position and illuminated by the flickering light of a candle. She looks directly into the camera with her mouth unmoving (figure 3.25), as the voice-over, in the child’s voice, whispers: “Lo ha hecho por mí! Lo ha hecho por mí!” (He did it for me! He did it for me!). The introduction of the child’s voice-over, which speaks her thoughts in the present moment as an interior monologue, is rather unexpected at this point in the film, where the voice-over had heretofore exclusively been that of the retrospective adult. Its (perhaps unintentional) effect is precisely to draw attention to the distanced nature and distancing effect of the dominant retrospective adult-voiced reflections about what Estrella was thinking or feeling, shifting instead to the child’s own voice expressing her emotional response to what is happening in the present. Her response to her father’s arrival thus appears as a more

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genuine and emotionally direct expression of Estrella’s subjective reality, in contrast to the adult-voiced posterior attempts at narrating what the child had been feeling or thinking. In this instance, then, the voiceover enacts proximity more than distance, achieving what the adult voice-overs could not: a child-centred approach to the protagonist’s inner life. Of course, in formal terms, the voice-over of child Estrella is as much constructed and mediated as its adult counterpart. Yet taken together, these two instances of voice-over – or, perhaps more productively, what Britta Sjogren (2006) has called “voice-off” – illustrate in aural terms the oscillating dynamics of empathetic identification and the imposition of distance we have seen elsewhere in visual contexts. In contrast to (but in conversation with) foundational critics such as Silverman or Mary Ann Doane, Sjogren resists drawing hierarchical distinctions between different types of voice – such as embodied synchronous, off-screen but spatially proximate (the traditional “voice-off”), narrative voice-over, interior monologue – and instead groups these together as “voice-off.” This multiple and hybrid category (which would include both the adult Estrella’s narrative voice-over and the child’s interior monologue) allows for “the introduction of heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible perspectives or points of view in a film – perspectives that, moreover, do not necessarily cancel each other out in their contradictoriness” (Sjogren 2006, 15). In the case of El sur, these “heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible perspectives” – the feeling child’s and the remembering adult’s – work along the lines delineated by Sjogren in writing on female subjectivity. She proposes that this heterogeneity works in

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“a paradoxical, dialectical sense: not by obliterating difference, but in accounting for the existence of contradiction” (ibid., 14). This contradiction or multiplicity in terms of the voice-over in El sur parallels the partial identification in visual and epistemological terms deployed by both of Erice’s films. Although the retrospective adult voice-over spells out Estrella’s thoughts and feelings in a manner that, paradoxically, runs the risk of their erasure by rendering her excessively legible, the sudden and striking introduction of the child’s interior voice-over highlights the distinction between the adult voice-over and that of the child Estrella, underscoring the ways that spectatorial access to the child’s interiority is necessarily mediated, yet again foreclosing alignment with the child onscreen. Both of Erice’s films frequently signal this play of opacity and insight in visual terms as well as aural ones, in particular playing with light and darkness as a visual means of gesturing towards the child’s (in)accessibility or (il)legibility. This visual motif often entails partially lighting the child while leaving her surroundings in darkness – as in the case of the two voice-over instances captured in figures 3.24 and 3.25. We can think of some of the most iconic shots of Ana from El espíritu de la colmena immersed in darkness, light emanating from her face: in the cinema, the abandoned hut, her bedroom at night summoning the “espíritu,” or the final confrontation with Frankenstein’s monster in the forest. This last scene is particularly striking. At the climax of the film, the fugitive has been shot and Ana’s father has discovered her involvement with him, though not the specifics of its nature; Fernando confronts her at the empty house, prompting Ana to run away to the woods, alone. Ana sits in the cold dark night, by the side of a lake or pool, much like the one in Whale’s film, gazing at her own reflection as she has on several other occasions in the waters of the well by the abandoned house. The water quivers and ripples, blurring and distorting the reflection of the child’s face, which is ringed in darkness. When the waters settle once more, we see that Ana’s face has been replaced by that of Frankenstein’s monster (figures 3.26 and 3.27). This sequence has generated a plethora of often-contradictory critical interpretations that point towards the ultimate illegibility of the child’s interiority, both in the film at large and in this pivotal scene in particular.16 Here, Ana sees her own face, reflected in the darkness of the lake, blur and become the monster’s, and he subsequently appears behind her in embodied form. The question of what the image suggests – Ana’s embrace of monstrosity, identification with the outcast “espíritu” in one of several forms, succumbing to an unknown traumatic encounter she sublimates in the form of the monster – is never resolved. The presence

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of the figure from Whale’s film in Ana’s subjective frame raises several possibilities for interpretation, in part because, as Dominique Russell notes, the figure of the monster itself is “by nature polysemic, and however much [monsters] are corralled into singular signification, they inevitably escape their creators’ designs, meaning more, and often contradictory things” (2007, 181). By the same token, Vicente Molina Foix (1985) notes that the film is not concerned with the spectator determining what is, or is not, real in this instance and others. The very challenge of reading or interpreting Ana – her resistance to legibility – is framed by the ambiguities of her connection to the monster, and the film’s use of illumination to isolate each of their faces in darkness draws a stark

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parallel between them, highlighting their shared inscrutability. Just as the film’s structure and content pose an epistemological challenge to the viewer’s comprehension of its protagonist, visually it also keeps the viewer largely “in the dark” about what Ana might be thinking or feeling in these moments, while (as critical attention would attest) at the same time inviting attempts to understand her. This play of darkness and light mirrors the opacity of the child and the intermittent approximations to her subject position offered by the film on several occasions. In another pivotal moment that provides a turning point in terms of Ana’s subjective experience, earlier in the film we see her face in flickering firelight as she sits deliberately apart from several other children who dance and jump around a San Juan bonfire. In the film’s narrative, this moment signals a rupture between Ana and her heretofore ally Isabel, as it immediately follows a scene earlier the same day in which Isabel cruelly tricks her sister into thinking that she is dead, wounding Ana in a betrayal of her good will as she rushes to her sister’s aid. In the next outdoor scene, over the course of a series of shots, Isabel and several other children leap across the fire, their shadows flickering over Ana’s face as they move in the opposite direction from her as she walks to take her seat at a remove from them. The mise-en-scène highlights Ana’s distance from the group, including her sister, and the child’s facial expressions suggest she might feel sad, angry, or alone as she sits and watches the other children; Ana’s perspective, however, remains largely inscrutable. The other children’s scale is magnified by the distance at which she sits from them, and their shadows dancing across Ana’s face underscore that her thoughts and emotions are perceptible to the viewer only in flickers. In the next shot, the film’s most radical formal departure from realism, we see from Ana’s perspective as she watches Isabel’s form, which freezes in midair over the flames as the shot drains of colour, the music on the non-diegetic sound track rising to a discordant crescendo (figures 3.28 and 3.29). The freeze-frame might represent some aspect of Ana’s interior life – a fantasy of condemning Isabel to death in the fire, a fixing of her at a permanent emotional distance, a signalling of how this moment is permanently committed to her memory – but the images resist such clear explication, despite being formally set apart from the remainder of the film’s cinematography via the freeze-frame. The striking sequence of shots quite literally illuminates Ana’s outsider status, approximating the viewer towards her position of marginalization and betrayal. Yet it also ultimately resists interpretation, especially in its climactic moment of formal rupture, keeping the viewer at a distance from the child.

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El sur also plays with darkness and light in framing its child protagonist: Estrella is frequently shot in chiaroscuro, especially when the scenes deal with her curiosity regarding the secrets of her father’s past or the transmission of knowledge, such as when she learns to use his divining pendulum, itself an instrument that is shrouded in mystery, despite its symbolizing knowledge. On several occasions, Estrella’s face visually suggests the interplay between knowledge and mystery, as she is frequently both literally and figuratively “in the dark” about her parents’ lives as well as the historical past. The cinematography plays with illumination and darkness throughout, and especially underscores their mirroring of the child’s relationship to (often forbidden) knowledge, for example in the scene where Estrella asks Milagros about the taboo pasts of both her father and the nation. The scene begins with a long shot of the house enveloped in darkness, with only a single

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window – Estrella’s – illuminated (figure 3.30). As she converses with Milagros, the scene’s focus on illumination is not only literal, as the two characters are bathed in warm lamplight that contrasts with the dark night outside (figure 3.31), but also figurative, as Milagros enlightens Estrella (in rather simplistic terms) regarding the parallel conflicts of the Civil War and the father and grandfather’s falling out over national politics. Inscrutability of the Child, Inaccessibility of the Past This scene between Estrella and Milagros and many like it emphasize the ways in which the viewer’s relationship to the child in these films mirrors the filmic child’s relationship to the historical and personal

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past. Both El espíritu de la colmena and El sur demonstrate the child’s curiosity regarding the past, and in particular the past of the parents, which is riddled with gaps and silences. Erice has said of his own childhood in the postwar that “para quienes en su infancia han vivido a fondo ese vacío que … heredamos los que nacimos inmediatamente después de una guerra civil como la nuestra, los mayores eran con frecuencia eso: un vacío, una ausencia” (for those who, in childhood, have fully experienced that void that… those born after a civil war like ours inherit, adults were frequently that: a void, an absence), commenting that despite being physically present, the parents of his generation were never quite there in emotional terms (Erice and Fernández Santos 1976, 144). This absence or void leaves the adult characters in both films largely mysterious to both the child protagonist and the viewer.17 Yet the child’s curiosity draws her towards understanding this past, as evidenced by the questions she asks, or affective connections she seeks – for example, in comparable scenes from both films where the protagonist makes a multi-sensory connection to the parents’ photographs and postcards, looking at and touching these family artefacts and speaking their inscriptions aloud in her own voice. Scenes such as these forge a parallel relation to the opaque or not fully comprehensible. In the child protagonist’s case, the parents and their past provide this inscrutable material; in the adult viewer’s case, the filmic child does. Yet at the same time, the viewer oscillates between being positioned with the child vis-à-vis the incomprehensibility of the parents, and in parallel to her in terms of the child’s own inscrutability. Thinking along these lines we might return to Cartwright’s concept of empathetic identification. Just as the child’s desire to know more about her familial past is born out of an affective bond with her mysterious parents, the films might encourage the viewer to reflect empathetically on the parents’ inscrutability and its effect on the child character, serving to “interpellate a full range of viewers or listeners in ways that, in some cases, elicit moral responses that are deeply felt as personal, sentimental, and inner-directed, but which elicit a sense of responsibility for an other” – in this case, the child (Cartwright 2008, 4). The analogous inscrutability of the child figure (to the viewer) and the historical/parental past (to the child) emerges from a parallel gap in time that separates each pair. In temporal terms, the position of the spectator in relation to the child is marked by the same belatedness or temporal lag as the child’s position in relation to the parents’ past, marking out another form of oscillation in the films between presents and pasts of the moment of production/setting and the diegetic

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present/past. That is, spectators in 1973 and 1983 (and beyond) watch child characters in the 1940s/1950s past search for answers about the even further past of the pre–Civil War period – a temporal layering that accounts for the films’ enduring interest (particularly with respect to El espíritu de la colmena) during the debates regarding historical memory of Francoist and Civil War Spain.18 In the parallel context of more recent Latin American cinema of post-dictatorship, David Martin-Jones has drawn from Deleuze to note how this lag in time, and more specifically the diegetic temporal positioning of filmic children in a prior moment situated in the aftermath of disruptive or catastrophic historical events, might serve a critical function for spectators’ engagement with the past, given that the child character’s future is the adult filmmaker or viewer’s past (2011, 80). In the films Martin-Jones explores, set in a prior (but recent) historical moment vis-à-vis their production, the child character does not completely comprehend the political crisis going on around her, while the adult spectator in the moment of production/release to a greater extent does. In this sense the child character does not show the present spectator “what is happening” but rather “what has happened,” “comment[ing] on the interaction between past and present, and thereby reconsider[ing] this moment of transformation in national history in a virtually reconstructed form, that may yet inform the actual present” (ibid., 76, emphasis mine). This belatedness of the Deleuzian child seer, especially in films that “locate child protagonists in a recreated past under military rule,” invites spectators to interrogate the historical past and “to meditate on … the manner in which such lost pasts can be reconstructed by the generation who were children at that time” (ibid., 70).19 Martin-Jones, along with other critics such as Sarah Wright (2013) and Paul Sutton (2005), have illustrated how the child seer’s position can bridge gaps in collective and personal memory in post-dictatorship societies, aligning the child focalizer, as I have elsewhere (2015), with the concept of prosthetic memory or postmemory.20 A common thread emerging from these diverse approaches to the complicated matrix composed by the child, the past, and the spectator is this idea that the child figure can somehow facilitate the spectator’s access to the historical past or aid in the reconstruction of collective memory that has been ruptured or disrupted by civil conflict, dictatorship, and the silence of previous generations. In drawing to a close my analysis of Erice’s films, I would like to shift this critical conversation, suggesting that these films’ representation of childhood also raises questions of the very (im)possibility of comprehending the historical past, while stressing the importance

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of attempting to do so. Based on the parallel relationship between the inscrutable (yet empathetically identifiable) child and the irrecuperable (yet vital for the present) past, I read the films as pointing both to the epistemological gaps separating us from the historical past and the ontological ones foreclosing us from fully knowing the child. That is, in these films we can move beyond seeing the child’s function as merely connecting spectators to the historical past of crisis and conflict. Rather, the films point to the ways this past cannot be completely recuperated or understood, in a parallel gesture to the spectator’s relationship to the filmic child, who cannot be fully known. In the context of the filmic child’s relationship to the spectator and to history, I would like to return to the ethical dimensions of opacity laid out by Wilson and Butler with which this chapter began. The child’s ontological opacity, oscillating as it does with moments of alignment, empathetic identification, and understanding, can be fruitfully put into dialogue with what Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton identify as an ethical possibility offered by cinema. For Downing and Saxton, ethics stages an encounter between self and other “while suspending the meaning of the subject-object relation, with its implicit dynamic of dominance and subordination” (2010, 3). They note that many theories of spectatorship are far from ethical, “since the subject-object relation of looking and being looked at are the active-passive mechanisms assumed by almost all theoretical models (especially those of Metz and Mulvey) to underlie spectatorship” (92). In positing an ethical spectator position, they ask whether “ethics as an optics [might] disrupt the neat subject-object relationship of the gaze,” denying the spectator mastery over the subject-rendered-object onscreen (91). In this sense the oscillating dynamics of identification with, and foreclosure from, the child that I have analysed in this chapter can be seen to frame the adult spectator’s relationship to this child onscreen in an ethical fashion, resisting mastery of her subjectivity or elision of the realities of the child’s difference in terms of bodily experience or access to knowledge. Reading the parallel movement of viewer to child, child to past, we can also detect in the films an ethical imperative not to silence the past, or render it overly legible, but rather to acknowledge its partially irrecuperable nature. We can return here to Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, where she writes that “to acknowledge one’s own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgement is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to experience the very limits of knowing” (Butler 2005, 42). The adult spectator’s relationship to the child protagonists of Erice’s films undertakes in this sense a second kind of oscillation, an

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epistemological one that at times reminds the adult spectator of how little we know of the child – and, in parallel, of the past – while empathetically aligning us with the child in identification that acknowledges the limits of fully understanding this figure. The oscillating dynamics of alignment and distance, empathy and opacity, draw the spectator towards the filmic child while underscoring the impossibility of truly standing in her shoes.

3.2

Chapter Four

Betwixt and Between: Liminal Adolescence in Jaime de Armiñán’s El amor del capitán Brando (1974) and El nido (1980)

The cinema of Jaime de Armiñán (b. 1927) from the Long Transition period is full of odd couples, impossible romances, and misunderstood protagonists, struggling for connection in a society that does not comprehend their identities or desires. His characters also frequently bear the scars of the nation’s violent past of Civil War or of the repressive culture of Francoism. The films I examine in this final chapter, El amor del capitán Brando (Captain Brando’s Love, 1974) and El nido (The Nest, 1980) are no exception: in slightly different configurations, they tell the impossible (and frequently disturbing) love stories of an adolescent child and an adult, odd couples to say the least. In the case of the first film, protagonist Juan’s (Jaime Gamboa) relationship with his teacher Aurora (Ana Belén) is mostly a schoolboy crush, despite what the narrow-minded residents of the fictional provincial village of Trescabañas think to the contrary. In the second film, the entanglement of adolescent protagonist Goyita (Ana Torrent) with middle-aged don Alejandro (Héctor Alterio), though likewise sexually chaste, takes on more troubling undertones in terms of its gender configuration, the stakes and intensity of the characters’ relationship, and its dire consequences: Alejandro commits suicide after their impossible romance is impeded by the Civil Guard and the girl’s parents. Much like the other couplings of a single director’s films explored in the three preceding chapters of this book, Armiñán’s films share common elements of structure, aesthetics, and plot that mark them as a pair: in this case, a romantic attachment between an adolescent and an adult; the setting in a provincial town whose traditional mores are set in sharp contrast with those of more metropolitan urban areas that connote modernity and change; the presence of a young free-thinking schoolteacher who challenges old ideas; and the gesture towards the contested political past embodied in the figure of an aging Republican

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exile who returns to Spain after decades abroad. The configuration of these common elements, however, is revised from the first to the second film. In El amor del capitán Brando, the adolescent protagonist, Juan, falls in love with his young schoolteacher Aurora, and the Republican exile Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) serves as the foil to their romance and unlikely father figure to Juan. Returning after thirty-five years abroad, fifty-something Fernando begins a sexual relationship with Aurora, instantiating a new odd couple on the opposite end of the age spectrum. In a somewhat ironic twist, Aurora, in her twenties, is much closer in age to Juan, but it is their relationship that causes much more scandal despite its chaste nature. In the second film, the child character is recast as a girl, shifting the adolescent/adult romance to situate it between the adolescent Goyita and the returned Republican exile Alejandro. The later film mostly cuts out the triangular structure, employing the schoolteacher Marisa (Patricia Adriani) as the foil but without a sexual relationship between her and the older man – she instead intervenes out of concern for her pupil’s involvement with him. In part because of the gender reversal, and in part because of its more erotic undertones and violent end, the relationship between Goyita and Alejandro is more troubling than its predecessor, and the second film much darker than the first. Unlike the films analysed in the previous chapter, these two by Armiñán offer little in the way of oscillating identification or perspective. Yet they both privilege a different kind of in-between: the liminal state of adolescence, which in the films is cast as a kind of oscillation between child and adult subject positions. Each film’s protagonist resists binary classification as either strictly a child or not-a-child, their status shifting depending on who assigns it and for what reasons. These adolescent characters insist on transgressing and inhabiting the borders separating the adult from the child, challenging the divisions between the two. In the case of El amor del capitán Brando, made one year before the end of the dictatorship, protagonist Juan’s subjectivity is cast as a hybrid of childlike imaginative play (centred around his invented heroic alter ego, Captain Brando) and adult romantic desire and disappointment (as concerns his relationship with Aurora). At the same time, this male adolescent frequently appears as a pawn in the conflicts of the adults surrounding him, as his chaste love for his teacher – who indulges his romantic entreaties though she seems not to requite them – stirs up controversy in their small town. Juan’s multiple categorization thus serves as a fulcrum for the clash of cultures between tradition and modernity, dictatorship and its potential substitution by a democratic regime. In the case of El nido, made towards the end of the Transition

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and following the 1977 abolition of censorship (but before a 1981 coup attempt that tested the precariousness of the nascent democratic state), we find something more complex: a female adolescent whose liminality is cast as ominously threatening and ultimately violent and tragic. The shift between the films from a more innocent and straightforward towards an increasingly troubling and erotically charged adolescent/ adult relationship can be accounted for in part by the removal of censorship and end of the regime, as the second film would not have been possible under the censorship apparatus of even late Francoism. Yet despite its subversive potential, even El nido ends with the restoration of normative order in strikingly traditional fashion (a frustrated duel), showing that the old order ultimately prevails. Drawing from classic theories of liminality formulated by Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep, as well as more recent contributions theorizing the liminal from film studies, this chapter traces how these adolescent figures are presented as “betwixt and between” childhood and adulthood, to use Turner’s formulation. It proposes that their alternate categorization as one or the other leads to a kind of hybridity also embodied in their intertextual connections to liminal figures and spaces: Lady Macbeth (in the case of El nido) and the Wild West (in El amor del capitán Brando). These figures resist the dichotomy of child and adult in a rather different way than was seen in chapter 1 with the childand-adult of recalled childhood experience. Here, the child-and-adult presented by the adolescent is a figure of flux and change, straddling a boundary between two subject positions it has not yet fully left behind or adopted. The adolescent characters’ resistance to easy categorization emphasizes that the liminal position they occupy refuses binary positions of child or adult, creating a hybrid subject position and casting the protagonist instead as child-and-adult. This multiple, hybrid nature of the adolescent figures in these films, this chapter argues, emerges in response to anxieties about the changing social and political landscape of the nation. Armiñán’s adolescents might seem compliant with social norms in contrast to other liminal teenagers who appeared in films during the Long Transition period – for example, the quinqui protagonists of Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry, 1981) or Gutiérrez Aragón’s Maravillas (1981), who inhabit the margins of the urban landscape or the social sphere.1 But in their representations of these more normative subjects’ oscillation between the child’s position that they no longer quite inhabit and the adult’s that they have yet to fully attain, the films underscore the troubling potential of even these more normative adolescents’ hybrid subjectivities. In addition to allegorizing the historical period’s own liminality, the films construct the transitional itself as both

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generative and destabilizing. The fleeting nature of this dual subjectivity, as well as a return to normalcy and normativity at the end of both films, however, suggests an inevitable return to codified separation of adult and child – and, implicitly, present and past, in an uncanny doubling of the Transition’s faulty narratives about a break with the prior regime. In Transition: Context and Reception Jaime de Armiñán was a key filmmaker of the Long Transition years, although he has not enjoyed the lasting legacy or international fame of compatriots such as Erice and Saura. In a recent argument for Armiñán’s recuperation, Paul Julian Smith cites Catalina Buezo’s treatment of his work (which, he notes, is the only scholarly account of Armiñán’s full career) to suggest that a “broad-brush dismissal of late Francoist culture by critics has meant that Armiñán’s importance as an intermediary or bridge between dictatorship and democracy (a function that is at once political, social and cultural) has not been recognized” (Smith 2009, 42). Born in 1927 into a prominent family of politicians and writers, Armiñán began his career as a playwright in the 1950s and went on to work for decades as a director and scriptwriter in Spanish film and television, making his directorial debut in 1969 with the Pepa Flores (“Marisol”) vehicle Carola de día, Carola de noche, a flop that was billed as her first adult role. Armiñán went on to contribute several noteworthy films to Spain’s cinema of the Long Transition period, including 1972’s Mi querida señorita and the two films under consideration here. The director’s oeuvre itself treads several kinds of in-betweens, as he navigates not only the liminal period between dictatorship and democracy but also the space between popular and art cinema in what is frequently referred to as the tercera vía (third way), a middlebrow alternative to both. Although many of his works might be seen to aspire to art film status, Armiñán’s relationship to auteur cinema in the period was complicated in part by the more popular or mainstream character of his work and the fact that critical attention was often directed elsewhere, and especially at Saura.2 Armiñán himself occasionally critiqued the auteur directors of the New Spanish Cinema for the inaccessibility of their more opaque offerings, commenting in El País, for example, that “yo pienso que una película no debe hacerse en clave y para un grupo de amigos” (I think that a film shouldn’t be made in code and for a group of friends) (“Estreno,” 1980, n.p.). Yet like those of directors with whom he felt in competition, Armiñán’s films critique Spain’s society as it stands on the brink of political

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change yet still beholden to the repressive ideas of the past. Both of Armiñán’s adolescent films weave together their unlikely love stories, political themes, and the complex categorization of their pubescent central characters, Juan and Goyita, while critically reflecting the social realities of their respective historical moments. El amor del capitán Brando was one of the highest-grossing films of 1974, and second only to Borau’s Furtivos in revenue for 1975 (Gubern et al. 1995, 353; Deveny 1999, 172). José Enrique Monterde contends that it is one of the most emblematic films of the late Franco period, noteworthy for breaking taboos in what historical/political material can be touched on in cinema in a tercera vía fashion that “entrecruza política, historia, actualidad y sexo” (intertwines politics, history, current events and sex) (1993, 61). The film was generally well-received by critics, though unsurprisingly less so on the extreme Right; even some farright publications, however, took the time to praise the film’s technical aspects, especially Luis Cuadrado’s cinematography, and several compare it favourably to Mi querida señorita, noting an improvement likely connected to subject matter, given that the earlier film focused on confused gender identity in a male-identified protagonist who had been raised as a woman until middle age.3 Much press coverage of the time focused on the snub of El amor del capitán Brando at the Berlin film festival in 1974, where it was awarded the “audience favorite” prize bestowed by the Berlin Morning Post newspaper but given none of the festival’s official awards. Released in the same year as La prima Angélica, the film was not nearly as controversial as Saura’s flashpoint offering, though it too became an icon of possible cultural liberalization in the uncertain period of Franco’s decline, especially given Ana Belén’s appearing nude in an early scene, considered by some as the first instance of destape cinema. In no small part due to the difficulties faced by La prima Angélica, Armiñán’s film led the director to be questioned regarding possible future political and cultural liberalization or openness (it should be noted that Prima’s premiere at Cannes in May 1974 preceded El amor’s in Berlin by only a month). Following the Berlin film festival, Armiñán was asked in an interview in the newspaper Pueblo whether he believed in cultural apertura; he replied that he would believe it when he saw it, though he had some hopes that his film might serve as its beginning, commenting that, “Cuando en una rueda de prensa, los informadores alemanes me dijeron que con cuántos cortes se iba a proyectar la película en España y contesté que con ninguno, que se iba a ver tal como estaba aquí se pusieron a aplaudir” (When on a press junket the German journalists asked me how many cuts would be

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made in order for the film to be shown in Spain and I answered none, that it would be shown as it was here [in Germany], they began to applaud) (Amilibia 1974, n.p.). It is indeed surprising that the final cut was shown as is, given that it contains not only nudity and age-inappropriate couplings but also a thinly veiled parodic critique of the regime in the form of a children’s strike against the authoritarian mayor. Peter Besas, quoting Armiñán, relates that the script failed to pass muster with the censors three times and that “the censors were much tougher than they had been with Mi querida señorita,” insisting some scenes with the mayor be cut because he “talked a little like Franco did … talking of the JudeoMasonic conspiracies and so on. There’s also a scene in which the mayor steps out on the balcony of his house and urges the children not to strike … We tried to tell a little parable of what Franco Spain was at that time” (1985, 144–45). Likewise, the film casts the fictional town of Trescabañas in a less-than-flattering light as a retrograde conservative stronghold, “hint[ing], with a censor-demanded diffidence, at the extraordinary backwardness of provincial Spain” (Hopewell 1986, 93). Perhaps most surprising is the candour with which the film presents Republican exile Fernando as he returns to the nation for the first time since 1939, discovering that his old haunts and customs have been replaced by modern ones that disorient him.4 Thomas Deveny asserts that the film is, in this respect, “the first to favorably treat a returning exile,” although he also notes that Armiñán perhaps “went too far in stripping Fernando of any political or ideological attributes” (1999, 172; 175).5 The character’s deflated, apolitical nature, however, might also suggest the trauma of the past and the devastation of exile, as one reviewer of the period notes, writing that the character “encarna todo el dolor de una mutilación que debe ser entendida no al nivel individual de ese viejo héroe cansado, sino de todo el heroísmo inútilmente derrochado fuera, de toda la capacidad de acción perdida en el destierro” (embodies all the pain of a mutilation that must be understood not just at the level of this tired old hero, but of all the heroism uselessly squandered abroad, all the capacity for action lost in exile) (López Sancho 1974, 74–5). Although these more surface-level political critiques at the level of plot were, in their censor-approved incarnation, perhaps deemed not too challenging to the regime, a more complex message arises from the deeper structure of the film and its reflection of social reality. Writing in Triunfo, Diego Galán noted that the film could be seen to provide a sort of document of the time, a portrait for the unknown future of what had been the 1974 present, especially its tensions between tradition and

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modernity, authoritarianism and its possible replacement by something more democratic: No estamos ante una obra maestra, ni falta que nos hace. No estamos tampoco ante un análisis riguroso y científico de la realidad de nuestro país. Simplemente (y no es poco) nos encontramos ante una obra de una sinceridad elogiable, en la que se nos cuenta cómo somos y algunas de las razones de lo que nos ocurre, que de la mano hábil y sensible de Armiñán, se transforma en un documento que hoy es capaz de enternecer y hacer meditar, y que posiblemente más tarde (si “la gente” cambiara, dándose, por supuesto, los medios para ello) nos servirá para conocer algo de lo que ha sido nuestro presente. (1974, 87) (We are not looking at a masterpiece, nor do we need one. Nor are we faced with a rigorous and scientific analysis of our country’s reality. Simply (and it’s no small feat) we find ourselves before a work of praiseworthy sincerity, which tells us what we’re like, and some of the reasons for what’s happening to us, which in Armiñán’s capable and sensitive hands becomes a document that today is moving and thought-provoking, and that perhaps later (if “people” were to change, assuming, of course, that the circumstances permit it) will help us to know something of what has been our present.)

Galán’s characterization is noteworthy in that it anticipates a possible – yet uncertain – implicitly democratic future in which the film might serve as a reminder of what had been. It makes no claims on behalf of the film’s critical capacity but does gesture towards its potential future use as historical artifact, contingent on social change that is still embryonic or hypothetical at best. The film is itself cast in a liminal position, suspended between the ancien régime and its possible substitution by something more utopian, the present cast as in flux and torn between opposing currents that pull backward and forward in time. It is striking how many critics engage in this kind of reading of the film as on a cusp between present and past in a moment that seems to alternately deny and promise future change. Such readings are facilitated by the three main characters’ status within different generations: the defeated returning exile standing in for the lost hope of a past leftist project; the “maestrita progre” (little lefty schoolteacher), as several reviews condescendingly christen her, emblematic of a recently-comeof-age generation, struggling for change in the present; and the pubescent protagonist on the brink of more radical potential for change (or, alternately, maintenance of the status quo). By the same token,

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the characters’ age differences and the ensuing impossibility of both romantic relationships take on evident symbolic meaning in the context of late Francoist Spain, as several critics address. Lorenzo López Sancho writes in ABC that: El niño será demasiado niño para su amor. El viejo, demasiado viejo. Experiencia doblemente fallida en la que es legítimo ver a lectura más profunda que la de las simples apariencias. A nuestra España de hoy, cercada por jóvenes que todavía no pueden imponer su amor, por viejos cuya hora de amar y de actuar ha pasado. (1974, 74) (In the end, the child is too much a child for his love. The old man, too old. A doubly failed experience in which we can legitimately see by reading beyond simple appearances. [See] our Spain of today, besieged by young people who cannot yet impose their love, by old people whose time for loving and acting has passed.)

Alfonso Sánchez takes a similar tack in Informaciones, writing that beneath its naive and enjoyable façade, the film conceals the “la amargura de los que deben renunciar, unos por jóvenes, otros por viejos, otros porque sucumben al boicot de una sociedad varada en un tiempo que se aferra al pasado, sin resquicios por el que entre el futuro” (the bitterness of those who must give up, some because of youth, others because of old age, others because they succumb to the boycott of a society stranded in a moment that clings to the past, with no cracks through which the future might enter) (1974, n.p). In these allegorical readings, the stress on the temporal and political liminality of the period comes clearly to the fore, as critics again pose it as a kind of “untimely present” between the authoritarian past and possible democratic future.6 In this matrix, the adolescent character is allied with both the potential of adult futurity and the incapacity of childhood, straddling a boundary between the im/possibility of change and continuance of the status quo. El nido was made six years later, following a number of radical political and social changes: Franco’s death in 1975, the abolition of censorship and the first general election since the Civil War in 1977, and the ratification of the new democratic constitution in 1978, to name just a few. In large part precisely due to these milestones, El nido is a less overtly political film than El amor del capitán Brando. Armiñán nonetheless has underscored in several interviews that the film would have been impossible to produce under censorship for several reasons, including the nature of Goyita and Alejandro’s relationship, Alejandro’s

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eventual suicide, and the negative representation of the Civil Guard. Had the film been produced under Francoism, Armiñán claims, much of this would have been excised by the censors and “it would have been turned into a pure, angelic love story between an elderly man and a girl. It would have lost its erotic edge” (quoted in Besas 1985, 220). Yet the film nonetheless portrays a Spain very much still in transition (and whose nascent democracy would be plunged into crisis by an attempted coup d’état in February 1981, just months after the film’s release the previous September), particularly as concerns the tension already seen in El amor del capitán Brando between the traditional conservatism of the pueblo culture and the introduction of “modern” outsiders, in this case embodied in another returning exile, Alterio’s don Alejandro. He is less the defeated exile of the previous film, but rather what Besas describes as “an aging hidalgo living in an elegantly rustic house near Salamanca. His subdued and somewhat boring existence is filled by computer chess, horseback riding, hunting, bird-watching, and classical music” (1985, 219). Alejandro, we eventually discover, spent time in a concentration camp after the war. The film obliquely implies that he returned at some point between Franco’s death and the present day, having lived abroad with his now deceased wife, whose estate he inhabits – outside yet another provincial pueblo. Goyita, the daughter of a Civil Guard stationed in the town, takes notice of him as an odd outsider like herself, and the two begin an intense but chaste friendship that both, especially the adolescent girl, clearly want to take further. Goyita eventually asks Alejandro to kill her emasculated father’s domineering boss, the Civil Guard sergeant, in vengeance for his having released her pet hawk. After challenging the sergeant to a duel that he declines, don Alejandro eventually commits suicide by shooting at Goyita’s father and the sergeant with blanks, effectively ensuring his own death when they return fire. El nido garnered more international attention than its predecessor – including a best actress win for Torrent at the Montreal Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, Armiñán’s second after Mi querida señorita (neither film won). At home, the film received generally positive reviews in the Spanish press, with the exception of extreme-right papers, as was again to be expected, and many critics hailed it as Armiñán’s best film to date. El nido’s formal elements and especially acting were praised more highly than El amor del capitán Brando’s, in part because the more overt allegorical frame had been removed with the elimination of censorship, enabling more multifaceted characters. Alterio and Torrent both generally received accolades for their performances (though some critiqued Torrent’s delivery of her lines), and

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many critics could not help but remark on how changed Torrent was from the child she had played in the films of Erice and Saura that had established her acting career. Jesús Fernández Santos’s review in El País seized upon the particular effect created by seeing an adolescent (if not to say pubescent) Torrent, writing, “Ana Torrent es algo más que una actriz. En esa edad incierta, en la que las promesas vacilan entre el saber colmar de humanidad unas excepcionales condiciones o caer en la monotonía, la intuición de que hace gala en cada imagen puede llevarla mucho mas allá de premios y otras glorias mayores y menores” (Ana Torrent is something more than an actress. At that uncertain age, where promises vacillate between knowing how to bestow humanity upon some exceptional conditions or fall into monotony, the intuition which she displays in every image can take her far beyond prizes and other major and minor glories) (1980, n.p., emphasis mine). Fernández Santos hits upon the actress and character’s liminal status – “edad incierta” – as one that simultaneously holds the potential for change and runs the risk of falling back into the status quo, the central tension of both Goyita’s subject position and the political landscape of the moment. At the same time, however, his assessment of the actress’s liminality fetishizes the adolescent – and especially the female adolescent, I would argue – as a figure always on the edge of something great or mysterious, but who may fail in her potential by falling into the monotony of normative adult womanhood. Approaching the Liminal Beyond allegorizing the uncertain potentiality of the Transition period, however, these films and characters also emerge from a liminal historical moment to privilege yet another kind of in-between: the subject position of adolescence. Not only do the films focus on adolescent characters (who are by definition positioned between childhood and adulthood), El amor del capitán Brando and El nido also consistently demonstrate the ways in which the figure of the adolescent resists binary classification in one category or the other. In this respect, the films tap into a key feature of adolescence: its position in a border zone whose boundaries are rarely clear. David Sibley lays out how we can situate the figure of the adolescent astride a porous, blurry, and ever-shifting boundary between adult and child, especially given that where childhood ends and adulthood begins varies across cultures, time periods, and social groups, and the very notion of adolescence is a relatively recent social construct. “The boundary separating child and adult,” he writes, “is a decidedly fuzzy one. Adolescence is an ambiguous zone within which the child/ adult boundary can be variously located according to who is doing the

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categorizing. Thus, adolescents are denied access to the adult world, but they attempt to distance themselves from the world of the child” (Sibley 1995, 34). Sibley’s observation is relevant to both films, in which the protagonists prove difficult to categorize as either children or adults, their status as one or the other shifting frequently depending who assigns it and for what reasons. Juan and Goyita consistently push the boundaries that lie between adults and children, especially resisting this division when it is imposed by an adult who classifies him or her as (only) a child when the protagonist wants to be taken seriously as an adult or peer. This occurs most evidently but not exclusively in terms of romantic or sexual relationships, where the child attempts to insert him- or herself into the relational space of adulthood (and the adult at times acquiesces). The adolescent’s transgressive border-crossing into this intersubjective space mirrors what Sibley writes about adolescents’ liminality in physical spaces: “Adolescents may be threatening to adults because they transgress the adult/child boundary and appear discrepant in ‘adult’ spaces. While they may be chased off the equipment in the children’s playground, they may also be thrown out of a public house for under-age drinking” (1995, 34–5). Likewise, the adolescent characters in Armiñán’s films do not quite belong in the spaces of either childhood or adulthood. Juan seems both a little embarrassingly too old to be playing at Wild West hero with his imagined Captain Brando by his side and laughably too young to smoke and drink wine while adopting a masculine swagger at dinner with Aurora; Goyita, by the same token, seems out of place both in the schoolroom with her giggling younger classmates (in a scene reminiscent of Torrent’s earlier role in El espíritu de la colmena) and at the formal dinner table at Alejandro’s estate, where he instructs her how to use her silverware properly and the maid remarks with raised eyebrows that “la niña bebe tinto” (the little girl will have red [wine]) after Goyita is asked what she would like to drink. In both films the protagonists inhabit a hybrid position as they move through a coming-of-age ritual that is completed over the course of the films, at whose conclusion the children have unquestionably “grown up” into adult positions they do not fully occupy until the films’ ritual passage is complete. Since its conceptualization, the liminal has been linked to adolescence: anthropologist Arnold van Gennep included puberty as one of four rites of passage around which humans have created ritual processes that include a liminal phase. As is well known, contemporary theories of liminality such as Sibley’s are indebted to Victor W. Turner’s revival and expansion of van Gennep’s foundational theories of the liminal as the intermediary stage in such rites. Van Gennep established in Les rites de passage (1908; English translation 1960) the existence of

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three major types of rites and phases within the rituals marking key life-phase shifts: preliminal (rites or periods of separation), liminal (the transitional rite or stage), and postliminal (rites or stages of reincorporation). For van Gennep, in those moments marked by ritual (birth, puberty, marriage, and death), ceremonies focus to varying degrees on one or more of the phases; some pass through all three (1960, 11). Victor Turner, in his 1964 “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” took up van Gennep’s work anew and brought it to a wider audience, especially concerning the liminal phase and its features and potential. Turner’s focus is on liminality as it emerges in rites of initiation, which occur during adolescence and young adulthood. He stresses that the liminal or transitional, in contrast to the other stages bookending it in Van Gennep’s process (separation/reincorporation), is a stage of becoming or transformation, which shares few or no attributes with the prior or the oncoming state (2000, 46–7). Perhaps most worthy of interest is Turner’s description of the subject of the rite of passage as structurally invisible: “A society’s secular definitions do not allow for the existence of a not-boy-not-man, which is what a novice in a male puberty rite is” (ibid., 47, emphasis mine). This not-boy-not-man / notgirl-not-woman is precisely what both films depict in their categorization of their adolescent protagonists, who alternately disavow each position as not-quite-children, not-quite-adults. The role of such figures is complex: Turner notes that the liminal subject is often considered a contaminated or polluting force (48ff), although there exist “certain positive aspects of liminality” as well (49) – for example, the fact that it at least partially constitutes a “stage of reflection” or a “fruitful darkness” (2000, 53, 55). This last conception is particularly suggestive in the case of both films (and especially El nido), where the adolescent figures are inscrutable or threatening yet suggestive of the potential for change. Subsequent theorizations of liminiality in disciplines as varied as sociology, feminist theory, and film studies have shown how beyond simply describing human ritual, certain aspects of the liminal – transitional, destabilizing, at times threatening, and potentially productive in their “fruitful darkness” – apply across modes and allow us to consider a variety of liminalities beyond those established by these earlier theorizations. As Anna Backman Rogers notes, the liminal need not be limited to the “defined and finite period of time and space of an actual ritual” but rather can be seen “as a moment of profound crisis from which it may or may not be possible to progress” – not unlike the Spanish Transition itself (2015, 2). Although the concept’s definition (relating to the threshold or limen) connotes the spatial, Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts note that since “the liminal is also … the ‘initial stage of a process,’ it therefore

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exhibits temporal qualities” (2012, 1). The liminal thus aligns with periods of flux, in this case not only of Spain’s Long Transition period but also the transitional phase of the protagonists’ subject positions, which refuse to remain neatly in one category or another, casting the boundary itself as a troubled and troubling intermediary zone that is not quite one or the other category but exhibits elements of both. As Sibley writes, “for [those] socialized into believing that the separation of categories is necessary … the liminal zone is a source of anxiety. It is a zone of abjection, one which should be eliminated in order to reduce anxiety, but this is not always possible” (1995, 33). The link between liminality and abjection, with its indistinction between inside and outside and the blurring of bodily boundaries between self and other (Kristeva 1982), is particularly evocative of the “fruitful darkness” of adolescence, somehow threatening and repulsive at the same time as generative and appealing. In this sense liminality provokes anxiety or threat, but it also can serve as what Terrie Waddell terms a “conduit for transformation … a means of cultural regeneration, enabling society to reflect upon itself” (2010, xii). By way of their liminal protagonists, caught between childhood and adulthood in a moment when the nation had the potential for becoming other, Armiñán’s films prompt precisely this kind of reflection. Betwixt and Between: Liminal Protagonists Both El amor del capitán Brando and El nido consistently stress their protagonists’ liminal status as not-children-not-adults, depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. In the case of El amor del capitán Brando, thirteen-year-old protagonist Juan is established from the narrative’s start as situated between two positions: childlike in certain situations and a burgeoning adult in others. This opposition is most notable in the primary poles of his subjectivity that the film presents to the viewer: his rich imaginative life, on the one hand, and his nascent sexuality, on the other. The film’s opening credit sequence immediately establishes his hybrid subjectivity through its interplay of sound and image, serving as a kind of preview of the in-between status in which the protagonist will be anchored throughout the film. In these opening images, drawings of an imagined Old West landscape and characters are immediately recognizable as the work of a child, yet simultaneously marked by their sophistication: the marker-pen lines suggest that these are not professional story-boards or pages from a graphic novel (which they almost resemble), but rather the result of a diligent (young) hand’s hours of work. They are, of course, likely the work of a real-world adult masquerading as the work of a fictional child (who is aspiring to the work of an adult) (figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).

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4.1

4.2

4.3

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While the images appear onscreen with the film’s credits superimposed upon them, the soundtrack plays a western theme that alternates between the deep baritones of men singing the bass line “oohs” and a chorus of higher children’s voices, which sound to be boys’, chanting “capitán Brandoooo!” in a campy style. The music rather overtly enacts the tension between boy and man that will take centre stage in the film’s plot, using the voice – a central and especially evident aspect of the transition the adolescent male undergoes from boy to man – to navigate between the two positions, just as the film’s protagonist will likewise be forced to do. Given the importance of Juan’s imaginative capacity (employed as an escape mechanism from his unhappy home life) where he fashions himself as the heroic imagined Captain Brando, assisted by right-hand man Major Mitchum in two Hollywood-inspired casting choices, the song would seem to suggest his own navigation of these two positions, the lower voices how he imagines his idealized heroic alter ego and the higher ones the actuality of his real-life self. Indeed, at the age of thirteen, Juan is poised between childhood and adulthood, a position that is frequently stressed by the adult characters in the film, who alternately characterize him as a child or adult, boy or man, largely depending on their own motives. An emblematic example among many: early in the film, his mother (Amparo Soler Leal) discovers his diary, from which the title images are presumably drawn. In addition to his drawings, it also includes musings on the father he believes to be dead (but who in reality has abandoned Juan’s mother, who hides the letters he writes to Juan) and his fantasies of escaping the provincial town and riding off into the sunset with his teacher la señorita Aurora, by whose side he will faithfully stay. Among several causes for maternal concern, including the fact that throughout his journal Juan has imitated his father’s handwriting, his controlling single mother takes most umbrage at a crude sketch of his teacher naked, in which she has breasts but no genitals, suggesting the protagonist’s simultaneous sexuality and innocence (as well as lack of proper sexual education under Francoism, which the teacher attempts in another scene to rectify in her classroom).7 After confiscating the journal, Juan’s mother reads it aloud to her younger sister, Juan’s much more sympathetic aunt Kety (Verónica Llimerá) in a condescending tone, remarking “escucha las barbaridades que dice tu sobrinito … Este niño está loco” (listen to the nonsense your little nephew is spouting … That child is crazy). The aunt replies, “Ya no es un niño, tiene trece años. Es un hombre” (He’s not a child anymore, he’s thirteen. He’s a man).

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Throughout the film, Juan is classified as (only) a child by several adults, particularly his mother, whose desire for him not to grow up is perhaps too clearly rooted in her abandonment by Juan’s father; her response to Kety at the close of the conversation about his diary is “¿Quieres que se parezca a su padre?” (Do you want him to be like his father?). To his mother, Juan’s becoming a man seems inevitably to suggest his becoming like the man who rejected her, and thus his eventual separation from her, following in his father’s footsteps. Becoming notchild is in this sense deeply gendered, as evidenced by Juan’s mother’s comment later in the film that, if he had been a girl, he would better understand her position (“si hubieses sido niña nos entenderíamos mucho mejor” (if you’d been a girl we would understand one another/ get along much better)), to which he replies, “Pero soy un hombre” (But I’m a man). In this sense Juan (who has been caught smoking just before his diary is confiscated) resembles the adolescents mentioned by Sibley who appear equally out of place on a child’s playground as in a bar.8 El amor del capitán Brando demonstrates throughout that the protagonist believes himself to belong in the latter kind of space (both physically and metaphorically) while the authority figures in his life (his mother, the mayor, the head teachers) wish to place him in the former. At several moments in the film, Juan’s adult allies Aurora and Fernando respond in similar fashion to his desire to be seen or understood as an adult, vacillating between treating him as such and recalling his child status, casting him in a liminal position where he can at times be a child, at others a man, but somehow simultaneously both and neither – Turner’s not-boy-not-man. The precise appeal of these adult misfit outsiders is that they allow Juan to reside in between, rather than confining him to the child position as the normative order represented by the school, mayor, and Juan’s mother do. Aurora and Fernando humour the protagonist’s aspirations to be taken seriously as an adult, and in some cases they genuinely engage with him as a peer, despite implicitly banishing him to a separate category, for example, when they initiate a sexual affair from which he is necessarily excluded. Aurora and Fernando are appealing companions to Juan not only because they on occasion take him seriously as not (only) a child but also because they are both outsiders to the established social order of fictional pueblo of Trescabañas in which the story is set, perhaps playing into Juan’s fantasies of the Wild West, where he can cast them as outlaws in opposition to the conservative townspeople, as I will discuss in a later section of the chapter. “Maestrita progre” Aurora is viewed as multiply suspicious by the town’s establishment, because she has come not just from the outside but also

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from the cosmopolitan urban sphere – the capital city of Madrid – and has brought with her all kinds of modern ideas about education, sexuality, and equality. Fernando arouses further distrust on the part of the townspeople, as he has just returned to Spain for the first time since the close of the Civil War and has multiple strikes against him: as Aurora’s fellow teacher warns her, “Es catalán, tiene un pasado político … y además es casado. No te conviene” (He’s Catalan, he has a political past … and on top of that he’s married. He’s not a good choice for you). In both cases, the townspeople’s disapproval only heightens Juan’s interest in these “outlaws” who have come to his village. The scene where Juan meets Fernando, for example, is undercut with tension as he jealously fears that the older man and Aurora are an item, and he aggressively asks Fernando a series of questions, which the latter answers honestly as an attempt to gain Juan’s trust, frequently underscoring his advanced age as a means of allying himself with young Juan – neither is of “normative” age, both are excluded from power. In his study of Spanish cinema’s representations of age and disability, Matthew Marr (2013) situates both old age and adolescence as two nonnormative identity positions; in the first film especially, this idea breeds a kind of solidarity between the two characters – one too young for his love and the other too old. Both of Armiñán’s older male characters in these two films evince a great deal of anxiety about their aging as a factor that undermines or threatens their masculinity and sexual identity, casting them outside normative age just like the adolescents to whom they are drawn. In El amor del capitán Brando, this group of outsiders who do not fit the expectations or social mores of the small, conservative town quickly become established as a kind of “odd triple” – one of the odder “odd couples” common to Armiñán’s filmography – consisting of three dyads: the two possible (and unconventional) heterosexual romantic pairings and the two male rivals/friends.9 In a dinner party scene that cements their group status, these latter two clink their glasses, the older man humours the boy’s interest in Aurora and (in jest?) states “may the best man win,” as the two look at one another and exclude Aurora as the third to their dyad (figure 4.4). Aurora, triangulated as the object of both their desire, asks to be included in the toast, at which point they turn their gaze in unison to her (figure 4.5). In the first image, Aurora is barred from inclusion in the homosocial toast that not only excludes and objectifies her but also deprives her of a voice as her male counterparts toast (literally and figuratively) over her, reminiscent of the dynamics Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) describes, following René Girard, wherein two male rivals for a woman

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4.4

4.5

have a more intense and intimate bond than either one’s relationship with the woman herself. When they do include her in the subsequent toast, it is again as the object of mutual interest rather than as a peer. Her two companions’ exclusionary bond is then cemented as Juan brags to her of Fernando’s exploits in fighting the Nazis in Stalingrad and Berlin (implying that, as a young man, Fernando was a communist who volunteered with the Red Army), war stories that have evidently been told before she arrived. These narratives underscore Fernando’s political affiliation while initiating Juan into the patriarchal bond of wartime masculine camaraderie as he insists Fernando was a hero and even boasts that he “didn’t rape anyone,” as if this were a great achievement. Here, the camera shoots from behind Aurora’s head, denying her a point-of-view shot and further stressing her exclusion from their

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4.6

4.7

“couple” (figure 4.6). Despite her position at the head of the table, the mise-en-scène here, as throughout the scene, subtly suggests that she is an interloper at the dinner, when in fact it was originally planned in her honour by Fernando, and it is the adolescent Juan who has intruded on it. Following the toast and the exchange of knowing gazes and chivalrous nods between Fernando and Juan, the older man leaves the room to prepare coffee and glances back at his “rival” Juan who (in a similarly jocular tone as Fernando’s earlier) assures him, “No te preocupes, soy un caballero” (Don’t worry, I’m a gentleman). The two appear to be in on the same macho joke, playfully competing in antiquated fashion for the affections of Aurora, whose bemused manner belies a palpable sense of hurt at being excluded by her two male companions, whom she has reprimanded as “complete idiots” a moment before.

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As Fernando leaves the room, a shot from the older man’s point of view reveals the triangular play of gazes among the group: before promising to be a gentleman, Juan looks at Aurora with a kind of proprietary interest as she, in turn, stares coyly at Fernando, whose gaze takes in the two of them in the perspectival camera capture (figure 4.7). After Fernando leaves the room, the dynamic shifts once more as Aurora indulges Juan’s fantasies of adulthood, lighting him a cigarette along with her own. With affected swagger, Juan sings Fernando’s praises, calling him “fantastic” for marching on Berlin, and Aurora dismissively says he is “just a cook” so as to undermine their bond. Then the clock chimes one and the mood of levity is burst. Aurora recalls that their game has real consequences and asks Juan if his mother knows where he is; Juan’s physical bearing immediately changes as he drops the masculine swagger and performs the child’s role once more, bashfully shaking his head in the negative. She tells him he has to leave. Fernando returns, offering after-dinner drinks in the library, and Aurora announces that Juan is just leaving; Fernando escorts him out the door, where Juan asks with concern whether Fernando will be up late (evidently worried about the potential amorous encounter between the two adults once he departs); Fernando reassures him that he will claim he has a headache. This is, somewhat surprisingly, what indeed happens when Aurora attempts to kiss Fernando moments later; she then departs under the watchful gaze of Juan, who stands in the shadows, the protagonist reassured that his friend has not “betrayed him.” I have described this scene at length because it illustrates the subtle yet deeply gendered dynamics that occur throughout the film in terms of Juan’s shifting classification as an adult and a child, included and excluded. The outsider triad formed by Aurora, Fernando, and Juan takes on different iterations and alliances throughout the film, and when the two adults do indeed begin a sexual relationship, it is doomed from the start by Fernando’s concerns that he is too old a lover for the young teacher, the impossibility of their relationship mirroring the impossibility of Aurora and Juan’s – although this latter duo is in fact much closer in age. Aurora, especially, treats Juan by turns as an adult (toasting his friendship and lighting his cigarette) and a child (effectively enforcing his curfew out of concern for his mother’s reaction, as she herself remembers her place as his teacher). Although the tone of the scene is light – in characteristic Armiñán fashion – the adults’ treatment of Juan is more complex than meets the eye. They engage with him by turns seriously and playfully, humouring him but seeming to be genuinely invested in their affective connection to their younger counterpart. Fernando, in this sequence, seems more allied with Juan than

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he is interested in Aurora, who shifts her mode of relating to Juan in a kind of push-and-pull dynamic that will later be writ large in El nido’s adolescent/adult romantic pairing. On several occasions, Aurora meets Juan at his level, taking part, for example, in his imagined narratives of Captain Brando’s romantic exploits when she finds him playing alone in an open field, but she alternately spurns him when his attentions become too much to bear. The categories of child and adult, centred on the figure of the adolescent protagonist, are fluid and flexible but are determined by the adults surrounding him (and the gender expectations of patriarchal society) rather than by the protagonist himself. In the case of El nido, the adolescent’s liminal position is similarly regulated or defined by others, rather than by Goyita herself. In contrast to Juan, who is depicted as being more naïve, Goyita is represented as more manipulatively seeking adult treatment in a very different triangle of adolescent / young female teacher / older returning Republican exile. Here it is Héctor Alterio’s don Alejandro who has returned from exile abroad at some point in the recent past, implicitly at some point in the years between Franco’s death in 1975 and the film’s diegetic present of roughly 1980. He continues to wear the military tags from his internment in an unnamed concentration camp following the Spanish Civil War, eventually giving them to Goyita as a token of his commitment to her. The teacher character, Marisa, is far less central in this second film: she serves as the foil to the protagonists’ romantic relationship rather than forming a part of it. In a large part because of the shift in the adolescent’s gender, however, in El nido the triad is less pronounced than it was in El amor del capitán Brando. The second film is far more dyadic in its focus on the romantic relationship between Goyita and Alejandro, and the same-sex friendship of Juan and Fernando is replaced by the teacher’s concern for her favourite pupil, the film taking a patriarchal turn that avoids female-female friendship or finds little interest in solidarity between women. Likewise, in this second film, it is striking that the female adolescent is more mysterious, inscrutable, and threatening than the male adolescent in the first. She is also not quite the film’s protagonist, as the viewer does not have the same degree of access to her subject position as in the earlier film, where sound and image cues of the imagined Captain Brando universe, and material from Juan’s diary, granted the viewer access to the adolescent character’s inner life. In terms of viewer alignment, the film’s protagonist might more easily be considered to be Alejandro, though it is Goyita who – much like her intertextual double, Lady Macbeth – drives its plot and Alejandro’s actions. In El nido, the film’s formal elements align more closely with Alejandro’s subjectivity and perception, as, for example, in the film’s

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opening scene, where he conducts an imagined orchestra while seated on horseback in the woods. Here, the soundtrack, diegetic to his own internal reality, plays the symphony that only he – and, by extension, the viewer – can hear. Goyita’s opacity, too, might be considered a reflection of Alejandro’s own difficulty in comprehending his feelings towards a figure who is by turns child and woman, attractive and repulsive to him. In this film, in contrast to its predecessor, the liminal adolescent is more opaque and ambiguous, more threatening and abject, as Goyita is shown to resist the separation of categories that upholds normative order. El nido constructs the adolescent character’s hybrid, liminal subjectivity in a fashion that is at once more insistent and more complex than in its earlier counterpart; the relationship between Goyita and Alejandro is also far darker and more destructive than Juan’s comparatively naive crush on Aurora. While this shift can be accounted for in part by the end of the regime and the removal of censorship, which allowed for content in the second film that was not possible for the first, in the change in the adolescent protagonist’s gender and its more somber tone, El nido represents a darkening and sharpening of the relationships presented in its earlier counterpart. Perhaps because there is more at stake, the push-and-pull dynamic also present in El amor del capitán Brando takes centre stage, as Alejandro alternately takes Goyita seriously as a romantic partner and pushes her away as (just) a child. Several scenes evince this dynamic at the level of verbal sparring: when Alejandro becomes frustrated with or threatened by Goyita, he refers to her scornfully as a pispajo (a derogatory term signifying a small and valueless person), forcing her into the category of a (devalued, unknowing, inexperienced) child who is defined as fundamentally other to his own subject position as a (valid, knowing, experienced) adult. While the concept of pispajo is not itself gendered, in relegating Goyita to this category Alejandro also plays into a broader gender dynamic by belittling Goyita just when her female sexuality poses a threat to his own ego or comfort; this is a very different scenario from Aurora’s bemusement at Juan’s naive attempts at masculine swagger and charm. Because Goyita is particularly invested in being taken seriously as an equal and not relegated to child status, pispajo becomes a discursive weapon deployed by Alejandro to distance himself from the dangers posed by his attraction to her. The first scene (of many) where such a dynamic occurs is when, early in the film, Goyita secretly escapes to Alejandro’s estate, arriving unannounced. He invites her to lunch, and she tells his groundskeeper to inform her parents that she is at “a school friend’s house.” The lie clearly doesn’t sit well with Alejandro – given that it underscores the serious and threatening nature

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of their relationship, which Goyita feels compelled to lie about – and he takes a paternalistic stance, condescendingly instructing her not to lie to her parents or, really, to anyone, especially when there is no reason to (“sobre todo cuando no hay motivo”). Goyita then tests his limits by asking if he ever lied to his dead wife, and how he knows there isn’t a good reason for her to lie. In his frustration he tells her (twice, in an increasingly snarling, condescending tone) that he knows “porque yo soy una persona mayor, y tú, un pispajo” (because I’m a grown-up, and you, a pispajo). Goyita then abruptly bids him farewell and moves to leave; he runs after her, his resolve crumbled and his tone completely changed, and implores her to stay, saying she’s right that there is a good reason, that they should indeed be cautious. This push-pull exchange is typical of several that take place throughout the film, where the power relations between Goyita and Alejandro shift based on whether he treats her as a child (as a means of distancing himself from her when he perceives a threat) or an adult (as a means of forging an intimate bond).10 In this scene and many like it, part of Alejandro’s motivation is the need to perform adult-ness and relegate Goyita to child-ness while they are in the view of others – in this case, the groundskeeper, whose presence reminds Alejandro of his moral transgression, holding up a mirror that leads him to reify the boundary between adult and child to restore normative order and neutralize the threat posed by Goyita’s nascent sexuality. In this way the liminal position of the adolescent figure is shown to be malleable between the poles of child and adult, depending on what is convenient for those doing the categorizing – usually, adults. In this film especially, adolescence’s resistance to a position framed in binary categories leads to a grey zone that demonstrates the fluidity of the seemingly fixed categories of child and adult that it destabilizes. Much like in El amor del capitán Brando, the relegation of the adolescent to a child’s position tends to occur when the adult character feels threatened by the adolescent or by the feelings she elicits. Throughout the film, Alejandro and Goyita’s relationship functions along these lines, as she seeks to be taken seriously as an adult and potential romantic partner to the much older widower, who is willing to play along until Goyita pushes things too far, as, for example, in a scene where she commands him to burn all of his dead wife’s belongings if he wishes to continue having contact with her. In these examples of the push-and-pull power dynamic between Alejandro and Goyita throughout the film, her position troubles both the idea of child and adult and enables her to be alternately woman and child, appealing and repulsive; in a parallel movement, Juan is alternately included and excluded in the outsider

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triad that shifts him between a position of equal with and inferior to his two adult counterparts. Because of its nature as a liminal stage of passage from one life phase to another, as Rachael McLennan has noted, adolescence “has no binary other, no exact opposite … In its abject, in-between state, adolescence troubles all identity categories,” as we see in the recurring categorization of these characters (2009, 27). For McLennan, in the context of contemporary American fiction, the lack of a binary opposition to set against adolescence leads to its use as “a figurative container for the uncontainable” (ibid.). The “uncontainable” liminal subjectivity does not remain firmly in the position of adult or child in the case of either film – especially that of the female adolescent, whose disturbing nature is amplified by the challenge she (and her nascent sexuality) pose to the normative patriarchal order. In her seminal work on the “monstrous-feminine” and especially her reading of the witch figure in the film Carrie, Barbara Creed notes that the film’s protagonist enacts such a challenge as she shifts between girl and woman. Creed writes that “this movement – from child to woman and woman to child – is crucial to [films’] representation of woman as abject” and, as a result, threatening to the symbolic order (1993, 81). Goyita is, of course, not cast in the same unequivocally monstrous terms as Carrie’s protagonist. However, especially in light of the connections drawn throughout the film between her and Lady Macbeth (which I discuss below), we might see the “fruitful darkness” of Goyita’s liminality in similar terms: an uncontainable abject subject position that alternately repels and attracts her much older paramour, troubled and troubling especially as concerns the constant tension as to whether her relationship with Alejandro will be physically consummated. Drawing the Line This tension – Alejandro’s pull to become a “monster” (by initiating a sexual relationship with the thirteen-year-old) rather than just an “imbecile” (who is besotted with her), as he puts it to his friend the priest – also underscores Goyita’s status as woman–not-woman, capable of actively pursuing Alejandro as a romantic interest while remaining uninitiated into the sexual realm. As Patricia Meyer Spacks notes, adolescence is in many ways delimited by the subject’s relationship to sexuality, “designat[ing] the time of life when the individual has developed full sexual capacity but has not yet assumed a full adult role in society. I emphasize sexuality because real and imagined sexual energy, crucial in the teen-age years, accounts for much of the imaginative power

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implicit in the idea of adolescence” (Meyer Spacks 1981, 7, emphases mine). In both films, the (implicit or explicit) boundary that leads to the protagonists’ shifting between adult and child resides in the realm of the sexual, whether real or imagined; although in neither case does the adolescent protagonist consummate physically a romantic relationship with an adult, both skirt the boundary in unnerving ways, often to the horror of adults’ imaginations. El amor del capitán Brando’s central controversy arises from a night where Aurora and Juan sleep together in the same pensión bed after being stranded in Segovia on a school trip – an in fact relatively innocent incident that leads the judgmental townspeople to suspect the worst, demonstrating the power of even the imagined contours of the adolescent’s sexuality, let alone its realities. Following an outing to see a movie, where Juan takes Aurora’s hand in his, and a dinner where she slips him money to pay the bill, letting him play the part of the adult man, they check in and go up to their room. In a dynamic much like El nido’s pispajo, Aurora chastises Juan for acting strange, telling him she has lied on his behalf (claiming he was her brother when checking into the hotel) and that it is meaningless that they sleep in the same bed since he is a child; then, upon seeing his hurt face, she apologizes, saying “la culpa es mía” (it’s my fault) as the camera moves in for a close-up on her remorseful expression. The scene then fades out to black and back in to the room in morning light as the phone rings for a wakeup call from the front desk; Aurora looks over at the sleeping Juan (figure 4.8a) in a shot that was adapted to provide the more provocative image that featured prominently in the film’s promotional materials (figure 4.8b, courtesy Impala Producciones), but that never actually appears in the film. The contrast between the two images is telling: in the one drawn from the scene, Aurora, her hair neat and shirt fully buttoned, looks with concern at Juan while receiving the phone call. In the image from the poster, where more of Juan’s sleeping and innocent-looking face is visible, Aurora’s blouse is open and her hair tousled, and her gaze appears to be one of regret. Along with the poster’s text, “El amor empieza a los 13 años y no termina nunca” (Love begins at 13 and never ends), the image would seem to suggest that something untoward occurred the previous night. The poster might then serve as visual representation of the power of imagination: the fantasy of the townspeople (and perhaps the spectator as well) as to what occurred, suggesting Juan’s initiation into adult sexuality by the mere sharing of a bed with his teacher – something must have happened. In El nido, although Goyita and Alejandro’s physical relationship extends only to a chaste kiss, the intimate vows she demands of him are by turns childish and very adult (mixing his blood with hers after carving each other’s names on their

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4.8a

4.8b

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hands; destroying his dead wife’s belongings; killing the Civil Guard sergeant in vengeance to prove his love for her). The specter of the sexual hangs over the odd couples in both films, and the townspeople in each imagine that the relationships have transgressed the boundary of sexual propriety even though in reality they have not. Perhaps because of the wider age difference and genders of the characters, the stakes are higher in El nido; the film’s underlying tension is Alejandro’s aforementioned struggle between being “a monster or an imbecile.” The troubling undertones of the two relationships, and especially the latter film’s, mirror what Deborah Martin has identified in Lucrecia Martel’s films as the female adolescent’s ability to position “the spectator in a new relationship to the disavowed zone of indistinction, thematically and aesthetically embracing the ambiguous, the in-between, and thus, like the child, unsettling the reified boundary” (2013, 156). In El nido especially, the adolescent pushes the boundaries between child and adult not only by inhabiting the liminal zone in between subject positions, but also by “unsettling the reified boundary” of sexuality that separates adults from children. Although, in the first film, Juan’s attachment to Aurora has shades of ambiguity (Is the teacher merely flattered by his attentions or might she actually reciprocate them? Did anything happen when they shared a bed in Segovia?), the latter film shows a much more threatening relationship between the adult Alejandro and the liminal child-and-adult Goyita, not just because its consequences are more dire but also because of the more blatant erotic undertones and young actress’s characterization as the one controlling the relationship.11 As Meyer Spacks notes, in the patriarchal model, “Woman on the brink of adulthood evokes special perplexity – particularly about her power,” given that she is a sexual being not yet possessed by a husband and who may partake of her father’s power (1981, 19). The symbolic power of the father is a particularly resonant concept in the case of El nido, where the protagonist’s father is a member of the very embodiment of patriarchal law in Spain, the Civil Guard (even though he himself is consistently emasculated by his wife and his sergeant), and former exile Alejandro has to return Goyita to her home in its barracks on several occasions, under the watchful eye of authority that threatens him for real and imagined transgressions both political and sexual. Yet the dynamic of power is constantly shifting in the “special perplexity” described by Meyer Spacks, as Goyita appears preternaturally adult for her age, yet at the same time retains traces of the child she has not fully outgrown, both in bodily and emotional terms. These traces would have been especially evident to the spectator of the time, given that, as a child, the same actress, Ana Torrent, played the

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iconic protagonists of both El espíritu de la colmena and Cría cuervos, films that marked her as an integral part of oppositional cinema under Franco, if not its poster child. With El nido, spectators would now see the familiar child actress playing an adolescent not-quite-woman, involved in a romantic relationship with a late-middle-aged man played, in a particularly perverse turn, by the actor who played her father only five years before in Cría cuervos.12 El nido thus captures on film the transitional body of an emblematic cinematic child who, in the moment she is filmed, is in the very process of ceasing to be a child; at the same time, she is not quite yet a woman either. Sarah Wright has traced a parallel trajectory in the filmography of perhaps the most iconic cinematic child in Spain’s history, the actress Pepa Flores, known as Marisol, whose changing body was culturally interpreted in Spain as she transitioned from her role as the saccharine, wholesome child star Marisol (who was, however, also the victim of sexual abuse by high-ranking regime officials) to an adult actress appearing onscreen naked in sexualized roles during the destape following the dictatorship’s end.13 Noting how Marisol’s body served as an object of near-constant scrutiny on and offscreen, Wright argues that it became a kind of figurative archive of the changes the nation itself was simultaneously undergoing during the Transition: “Commentators writing from the vantage point of the 1970s and 1980s also saw in Marisol’s naked body the opportunity to reflect on Spain’s difficult transition to democracy, framing the passage of history through her apparent shift from docility to rebellion” (2013, 61). Marisol’s bodily transition, however, was not especially smooth. Puberty posed a particular challenge to the actress’s career, as her handlers sought to conceal the biological changes she was undergoing to keep her in the category of “child” as long as possible, even when her approach to the category of “woman” was undeniable; the end result was that “anxiety and ambivalence over a child’s progress into puberty translated into the (libidinised) scrutiny of her growing body” (ibid., 65). Torrent was fortunately not subjected to the same level of scrutiny (or abuse) as Flores, but her iconicity and role as object of scrutiny as a child on the Spanish screen is undeniable. With El nido, her transition to adulthood via the liminal phase of puberty is writ large for spectators, as the child familiar from El espíritu de la colmena and Cría cuervos is still visually recognizable and, I would argue, intertextually referenced in allusions throughout, as for example in Goyita’s devotion to the care and feeding of her pet bird of prey, winkingly referencing Ana’s relationship to her guinea pig in Cría cuervos but here with a far more menacing pet to match her more threatening subject position. Critics of the time frequently allude to Torrent’s previous roles in their assessments

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of the film; a review from Cambio 16 exclaims “¡Cuánto nos creció esta muchacha desde los inolvidables días de El espíritu de la colmena!” (“How [our] little girl has grown up since the unforgettable days of The Spirit of the Beehive!”) (“Lolita” 1980, n.p.), while Javier Parra remarks sardonically in Ya, “No es de extrañar que a Ana Torrent, la enigmática niña de ‘El espíritu de la colmena’ y ‘Cría cuervos,’ le hayan concedido ese premio de interpretación en Montreal por su papel en la película” (It’s no surprise that they’ve given that acting prize in Montreal to Ana Torrent, the enigmatic little girl from “The Spirit of the Beehive” and “Raise Ravens,” for her role in the film) (1980, n.p.). Yet Torrent’s transition to adulthood is marked in El nido in several ways that denote difference from her iconic childhood performances. In visual terms, she is linked to her earlier film incarnations – for example, through the costume choice of a red turtleneck sweater for her first two extended appearances in El nido, crucially including her recitation of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy (figure 4.10), recalling the red turtleneck she wears for much of Cría cuervos, especially its darker scenes, as when she threatens her aunt with a loaded gun (figure 4.9). At the same time, her nearly adult stature, pubescent body (just barely legible through the film’s costume choices), and much longer hair (figure 4.11) immediately signal a difference from both Cría cuervos and El espíritu de la colmena, in which she wore her hair in a young child’s shorter style. In Armiñán’s film, unlike in Erice’s and Saura’s seminal counterparts, Torrent’s character does not share the actress’s first name, a gesture that perhaps enables viewers to disentangle the actress from the character to a greater degree than in the earlier films. Famously, much of Torrent’s performance in these first productions was not strictly “acting,” as, for example, in the much-cited Frankenstein-viewing scene in El espíritu de la colmena, where the child actress watches the film for the first time and her “authentic” emotional reactions are recorded on screen as the character’s (discussed in chapter 3); this led to a critical tendency to see the Ana characters in the earlier films as more inseparable from the child actress playing them. By the same token, their shared first name invites such a conflation of Anas – the protagonists of Erice’s film, Saura’s, and the actress herself – which necessarily shifts with the introduction of a different character name in the role of Goyita.14 Most radically differentiating Goyita from these other characters, however, is her pubescent body and her character’s burgeoning sexuality. Following not only her coming of age but also the nation’s transition to democracy, Eric M. Thau notes, Torrent’s “incipient sexuality would still be put to use in testing the patriarchal models of Spanish society” in Armiñán’s film, which he writes “in a sense carried the child Ana into maturity, her

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screen personality crystallizing as her control of her sexual potency came to fruition” (2011, 136). While her new-found sexual maturity is undoubtedly what sets Torrent’s Goyita apart from her earlier roles, I would argue that part of what makes Armiñán’s film so darkly powerful is the fact that her potency has precisely not fully emerged, her fruitful darkness retaining traces of childhood subjectivity and appearance that subsequent roles in Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996) or Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992) will find erased. Instead, this earlier film endows its adolescent protagonist with multiplicity, situating her in a liminal, non-binary thirdspace of girl-andwoman, not-girl-not-woman: simultaneously the recognizable child from previous films and, at the same time, on the brink of becoming someone else as she enters adulthood – and, crucially, womanhood. The space in between these positions is precisely what makes the central relationship between Goyita and Alejandro compelling and disturbing – on the one hand, believable as the genuine interest of two kindred-spirit outsiders in one another’s company and, on the other, a deeply troubling and erotically charged affair between a sixty-something man and a thirteen-year-old girl. Goyita’s duality as child-and-adult locates their relationship in a border zone that constantly oscillates between opposing poles: romantically charged yet chaste; intense yet playful; emotionally intimate yet simultaneously infantile. An idyllic courtship montage early in the film demonstrates the discomfiting nature of their relationship’s combination of adult intimacy and childlike play. Here, with the melodious strains of Haydn’s Creation symphony as a soundtrack (evidently Alejandro’s favourite piece of music, as it is the one he conducts for an imaginary orchestra at the film’s opening, training Goyita to do the same in this sequence), we watch as Goyita and her much older paramour embark on a series of activities together, their affection for one another growing as the montage and their courtship progress. By turns almost laughable in its depiction of their burgeoning romance and disturbingly reminiscent of the frolicking of a father and daughter, the sequence begins with a long shot of the two conducting the imagined symphony (figure 4.12) and then shows a variety of activities combining the child and adult spheres: circling each other on bicycles, beaming as they dance to the imagined music’s beat, climbing trees to find birds’ nests (figure 4.13), playing leapfrog, riding horses (figure 4.14), and Alejandro teaching Goyita to shoot a rifle after she releases a skeet from the slingshot for him to fire at (figure 4.15). The sequence provides a string of clichéd images of both adult romance (dancing, horseback riding) and childhood diversion (climbing trees, playing leapfrog, riding bicycles) and hints at the violence to come (shooting rifles). Goyita’s practice at horseback riding and shooting (the former with suggestive potential and the latter with no shortage of phallic/ejaculatory

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undertones) mirrors the way her relationship with Alejandro too forms a kind of “practice,” for the real thing: the adolescent training in a kind of initiation to heterosexual patriarchal relationships, with her benevolent father figure all too happy to oblige. In this respect, the montage also links up with La prima Angélica’s similarly unsettling coupling of the adult man and adolescent girl, whose romance was depicted largely via the man’s memory of his childhood self, but equally perturbing in visual terms. While El nido’s montage sequence can certainly be read as parodically juxtaposing childish and adult images as a means of highlighting the absurdity of the relationship and its inherent role reversal – a child acts like a woman and a man is rendered childlike – it is also profoundly unsettling. Marsha Kinder has written of the film that, “Although it reaffirms the ennobling power of the romance, [it] acknowledges all of the other possibilities inherent in the material, which creates a rich mixture of tones – comic, tragic, romantic, and ironic” (1981, 34). The courtship montage is emblematic of this mixing of registers, seeming to portray the earnest emotional connection between the two characters while also underscoring the absurd or perturbing nature of this connection. We might read the sequence’s images in Deleuze’s formulation of the visual cliché as offering immediately legible or familiar images that function as a means of telegraphing concepts or actions. Here, the cliché enables the spectator to understand, through a series of images, that Goyita and Alejandro are falling in love and deepening their bond with one another. But beyond merely providing an indexical shortcut to what the images seek to convey or condense, for Deleuze the cliché also serves a destabilizing function, wherein the viewer might discover “something unbearable, beyond the limit of what she can personally bear” (1989, 2). As Anna Backman Rogers writes, following Deleuze, in her analysis of the cliché’s deployment in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, beyond mere “cultural shorthand,” the cliché in certain crisis moments might also “intimate a darker reality underlying this initial representation. Instead of being drawn toward the surface of the image, we wonder what it is concealing” (2015, 27). In this sense, the El nido sequence is very much in keeping with the film’s toeing of the line between compelling and disturbing, comic and tragic; it is not just Goyita’s adolescent subjectivity that is liminal but also the relationship she forges with the much older man, which vacillates between tender and perturbing. The viewer immediately grasps the fact that the montage is meant to telegraph the couple’s experience of a romantic idyll (despite looking more like a father and daughter), but the reminders of one member’s

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childlike state – playing leapfrog, climbing trees – provide an uncomfortable undertone to the light-hearted images and triumphant musical accompaniment. At several moments in the film when Alejandro and Goyita interact in such intimate (though never explicitly erotic) terms, this clichéd undertone works in this contrary, troubling fashion. Some of the montage’s images reappear later in the film, as Alejandro revisits them in memory while struggling with whether to acquiesce to Goyita’s command that he kill the Civil Guard sergeant. This second time around, the shots are slightly altered, ending mid-action in freeze-frames that block the montage’s actions from completion, much as the romantic relationship they depict is denied consummation. While in their first appearance, the images telegraph (in exaggerated terms) vivacity, enthusiasm, and movement, the second time they appear, they are frozen into stasis that gestures towards several imminent deaths: of the relationship, of Alejandro, and of Goyita’s liminal phase. If, as Tommi Römpötti suggests, “The freeze-frame is a mediating element [that] has the ability to bring together the spectator’s world and the film’s world” as a “device of selfconscious narration,” then the repetition of the montage in freeze-frame also requires the spectator’s critical interrogation of these clichés and the dark underside they contain (2011, 36, 35). From Lolita to Lady Macbeth: Liminal Intertexts An understanding of how these films can be seen to invite such a critical reading of their liminal adolescent characters and central relationships is enriched by an exploration of their respective intertexts. In the case of El nido, many critics of the time read Goyita and Alejandro’s courtship as an odd combination of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote – in Alejandro’s chaste and chivalrous but deluded pursuit of his modern pubescent Dulcinea – and the most seminal adolescent girl / adult man text, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (of which the protagonist’s diminutive name is reminiscent), alongside the figure of Lady Macbeth, whom Goyita is playing in a school production.15 Typical of several assessments, a review in the culture magazine Cambio 16 is entitled “Lolita o Lady Macbeth,” while Menene Gras Balaguer describes Goyita as “esa Dulcinea de trece años disfrazada de Lady Macbeth” (that thirteen-year-old Dulcinea disguised as Lady Macbeth) in the newspaper La Calle (1980, n.p.). The Lolita and Lady Macbeth intertexts, especially, bear further examination. Although El nido’s narrative is in several key ways different from Lolita’s – in Armiñán’s film the relationship has no sexual component, is reciprocal, and is driven by its female adolescent

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character (though critics in the 1970s may have read Lolita’s central relationship as having been instigated by the young female character) – the implicit comparison perhaps derives from Lolita’s enduring presence in the cultural imaginary, which Karen Lury has detailed: “The narrative complexity of the novel and the detached playfulness of Kubrick’s film [adaptation thereof] reverberate in a manner which informs, confuses and contaminates the understanding of any and potentially all adultchild relationships in the twentieth century and beyond” (2010, 74).16 Not unlike Nabokov’s novel and its subsequent cinematic adaptations by Kubrick (1962) and Lyne (1998), El nido’s version of the Lolita story is focalized largely through the perspective of the adult man, leaving the adolescent girl’s subjectivity largely opaque and inscrutable to the viewer/reader.17 In this sense, Goyita fits Simone de Beauvoir’s critical description of the Lolita figure as problematically attractive because of her mystery, a mystery that adult women no longer possess, especially following social modernization that rendered them the (theoretical) equals of men. In critiquing what she terms the “Lolita syndrome” epitomized by Brigitte Bardot, de Beauvoir writes: “The adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man, but the child-woman moves in a universe which he cannot enter. The age difference reestablishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire” (1960, 10). Indeed, Goyita’s initial appeal is based largely on her mystery, as she begins their relationship by leaving Alejandro a trail of enigmatic clues; after he discovers her identity, Goyita, much like Lolita, appeals to the older man because of her impish dark side – a key aspect that Nabokov’s narrator convinces himself that Lolita possesses. In the novel, narrator Humbert Humbert’s description of the nine-to-fourteen-yearold “nymphet” as a category stresses that this figure’s appeal does not derive from simple beauty or charm but rather a “demoniac” quality (Nabokov 1991, 16).18 This, for Humbert, sets the “nymphet” apart, to the discerning older man’s eye: “The little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power” (ibid., emphasis in the original). While Alejandro is not portrayed as having quite the same pathological fixation or delusion as Nabokov’s protagonist (at least on the surface, as he struggles guiltily against becoming “a monster”), Goyita’s appeal to him stems from a strikingly similar un-wholesomeness yet childlike status that sets her apart from other girls and women. Unlike Lolita’s, Goyita’s impishness is represented as real within the diegetic frame (though evidently a construction of the filmmaker). This quality is established at the film’s outset by the elaborate and mischievous trail of clues she leaves Alejandro to lead him to her, each hint wittily crafted

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around references to birds. The final clue sends Alejandro to the theatre, where he finds Goyita rehearsing the role of Lady Macbeth, her primary intertextual double, for the school play. Following this early sequence, the film will repeatedly go on to underscore Goyita’s demonic quality in its intertextual deployment of Lady Macbeth as her doppelgänger; this intertext is one that simultaneously grants her power and agency while rendering her demonic and threatening. The boundaries between art and life break down as Goyita increasingly resembles the Shakespearean (anti)-heroine she is portraying on stage, although she is eventually removed from the production after her parents take her away from the town. Alejandro, willingly stepping into his corresponding role opposite her, at one point adopts Macbeth’s line “blood will have blood” (la sangre sangre pide) as he offers his hand for Goyita to carve her first initial with a penknife, sealing their union in a ritual that reinscribes a childish tradition with a darker undertone provided by the Shakespearean intertext. Here yet again the film positions their relationship in the liminal space between innocent childhood romance and adult intimacy. The incorporation of Macbeth’s lines about violent retribution, spoken by Alejandro in a wistful tone, imbues a seemingly trivial act with the severity of their relationship’s potential (and eventual) consequences, in simultaneously parodic and earnest terms. It also cements Alejandro’s casting as the Macbeth to Goyita’s Lady Macbeth; true to form, Goyita will later emulate her theatrical double in inciting the more cowardly Alejandro to violence – violence that, as his line from their ritual presciently foretells, will result in his death. Mirroring their intertextual forebears, Alejandro’s role as Macbeth serves largely as a weaker foil to Goyita’s association with Lady Macbeth, a complex figure who likewise straddles binaries between femininity and masculinity, agency and compliance, power and lack thereof. Cristina León Alfar notes that “Lady Macbeth’s place in critical history is one of almost peerless malevolence,” as the character has been “scapegoated in Shakespearean criticism as the source of violence in the play” (1998, 180; 184). Though El nido is a good deal less bloody than Macbeth, the viewer of Armiñán’s film might be tempted to attribute the same responsibility to Goyita, who sets in motion the chain of events that culminates in Alejandro’s suicide. It is Goyita who actively (and aggressively) pursues Alejandro from the beginning, and always she who forces him to raise the stakes of their relationship, or his commitment to her, as in a scene where she forces him to acknowledge that he desires her as a woman (“¿Te gusto como mujer?” she insists after he initially avoids the sexual undertone of the question). Yet at the same

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time Goyita is not fully presented as the villain of the film – even though her teacher explains she was given the role because she possessed “suficiente maldad para entender el papel” (enough wickedness to understand the role) – in keeping with the ambiguities and ambivalence of her Shakespearean counterpart addressed in feminist criticism. Alfar, tracing what, after Butler, she terms Lady Macbeth’s “gender trouble,” puts forth a reading of the character that re-conceptualizes her critical interpretation from “an anomaly of female evil too gross to be imagined” to “a woman whose actions conform to a masculinist culture of violence,” arguing that she behaves as a model and mirror for her husband’s violent desires for political advancement, counter-intuitively fulfilling the expectations of a good wife as she provides an example for her husband to follow (1998, 186). Yet this figure’s enduring power resides in her transgressive nature. Catherine E. Thomas writes that, since the play’s initial publication, “Lady Macbeth’s cultural value has generally included the sense that she is monstrous – she not only has crossed the boundaries of appropriate behavior for a wife and subject, but she has called on demonic forces to help her achieve her goals” as, in perhaps the most well-known speech of the play, she summons the spirits to “unsex her,” thus linking her with ideas of disorder and the unnatural, as well as with the play’s witches (2012, 81).19 Thomas notes how the characterization of Lady Macbeth across time has been rooted in this iconic soliloquy – which, it bears noting, Goyita is reciting when Alejandro finds her in rehearsal, following the perfectly calibrated scavenger hunt that she has left for him. Critics disagree, however, as to whether Lady Macbeth’s command to be “unsexed” means she wishes to be de-sexualized or masculinized (Thomas 2012, 83). This ambiguity – whether her desire is to be removed from the realm of the sexual or be assigned the characteristics of the opposite gender – stems in large part from the ways in which the play at large, and Lady Macbeth in particular, “problematizes binary oppositions of king/tyrant, legitimate/illegitimate, good/evil, active/passive, and male/female” (Alfar 1998, 195). The Lady Macbeth intertext works so well in the film because Goyita is characterized along similar hybrid, in-between lines that simultaneously transgress and reify certain boundaries of the uncontainable. As we have already seen, the figure of the adolescent in general, and the protagonist of El nido in particular, can be seen in her own way as “unsexed” – not quite belonging to the realm of the sexual yet not entirely excluded from it either: not-girl-not-woman but rather abject in-between. Goyita’s first appearance in the film, reciting Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy, is perturbing in part because of the image it provides of a

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not-quite-child impelling the spirits to come to her pubescent “woman’s breasts” and take their milk for gall, in a moment not unlike her insistence that Alejandro acknowledge his attraction to her as a woman, itself a threatening element throughout the film. As Karen Lury addresses, writing on the film Man on Fire, the representation of such desire on the part of the female child is complex and utterly taboo, noting that “there is a sense that the little girl’s wanting – which is both more and less than a silly crush – is the real something that cannot be expressed yet remains a powerful, disruptive force” (2010, 104). This unexpressable “powerful, disruptive force” underlies much of Armiñán’s film as well, where Goyita consistently pushes Alejandro farther in a relationship where she simultaneously holds the power as not-quite-woman and is placed in the vulnerable position of notquite-child: desiring and needing to be protected from her own desires, which are themselves conditioned by the powerless position of the female child in the social world of heteronormative patriarchy. Goyita’s simultaneous marginal and powerful status also links her with another central female figure from Macbeth: the witch, a key “abject figure” in Creed’s formulation of the monstrous feminine, which she classifies as “an implacable enemy of the [patriarchal] symbolic order … thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary” (1993, 76). Like her Shakespearean alter egos, Armiñán’s protagonist also inhabits an abject liminal space, unsettling several reified boundaries as she toes the line between villain and protagonist, good and evil. She is presented as at once invested with agency yet constrained by social norms from acting as she would like, powerfully transgressive but only to a certain point, as after Alejandro’s death she is shown to conform to codified social norms, having exorcized her demonic tendencies during the liminal phase of adolescence and passed successfully into patriarchal femininity (not unlike Dolores Haze at the conclusion of Lolita). The Macbeth intertext also underscores the recurring theme of performance in the film, and particularly of gender performance, as Goyita’s other primary behavioural role model is provided by her mother (Amparo Baró), a castigating and castrating authoritarian who is constantly berating the kinder, gentler, emasculated father (Ovidi Montllor, known to audiences for a similarly sheepish role as a son who kills his castrating mother in José Luis Borau’s 1975 Furtivos) for his lack of masculine resolve, in yet another mirroring of the inverted normative gender roles of Lady Macbeth and her husband. While

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critics such as Kinder have read Goyita in a patricidal or Oedipal light, I would like to argue for a more complicated and hybrid characterization; while she incites Alejandro to violent ends and sees in him a malleable male figure not unlike her father, there is also genuine tenderness and affection in both of these paternal relations that simple patricidal readings miss.20 Borderlands: The Wild West It is worth noting that neither of Armiñán’s films cast maternal figures in a particularly positive light, as Juan of El amor del capitán Brando also struggles against the strictures of his overbearing single mother, who is still deeply affected by her husband’s abandonment of the family. In this film, the father is actually (rather than just symbolically) absent, and it is clear that part of Fernando’s appeal to Juan is his function as a surrogate father. Yet Juan resists what Nicole Marie Keating has described as the “mamma’s boy” type that frequently appears in films featuring sons raised by women on their own, “passive, odd, and ill equipped to deal with life’s challenges” (2005, 246). Instead, as a counterbalance to his complicated family life, Juan retreats into the fantasy world of his alter ego, Captain Brando, the fictional hero he has created after watching westerns. He explains to Aurora that the captain is the protagonist of one of the many films he invents in his diary, casting Marlon Brando in the role; yet when Juan plays at Captain Brando he himself embodies the part, clearly incorporating Brando’s macho swagger not only in his imaginative play but at times in his real-life interactions, as in the dinner party scene. In this sense, much like Goyita with Lady Macbeth, Juan incorporates an imaginative identification with a performed fictional character as a means of consolidating his identity as a liminal subject. Captain Brando’s appeal for Juan is clear: while the adolescent protagonist feels limited in his autonomy, longs for a male role model, and is struggling with his first experience of romantic love, Captain Brando provides a hero figure who is brave and tough, makes his own rules, and saves the day for the damsel in distress – everything Juan would like to be and do. In his seminal treatise on the genre of the western, The Six-Gun Mystique, John G. Cawleti observes that the western is likely to appeal to adolescent boys precisely because its “narrative pattern works out and resolves the tension between a strong need for aggression and a sense of ambiguity and guilt about violence,” an intermediary position not unlike Juan’s own as he alternately adopts Brando’s macho swagger and retains his own more sensitive mien

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(1984, 42). Beyond the identification with his heroic idol, the Wild West intertext provides Juan an ample mythology into which he can insert his own experiences; much as in the case of the Lady Macbeth intertext in El nido, these myths resonate with the liminal in-between embodied by the protagonist. It is not coincidental that narratives in westerns take place on the frontier, a liminal border-space that, in the colonizing formulation of American Wild West mythology, serves as the threshold of pioneer “civilization” as it encroaches on the domain of the “savage,” situated at the limit of the “known” and “unknown” world. However, as several critics (Kitses, Neale, Cawleti, among others) address, the frontier is also a place of ambivalent readings and dialectical yet shifting oppositions such as order/chaos, good/evil, civilization/savagery, individual/community, which reach a conflict or crisis point but are also frequently upended or hybridized in the western’s narrative. Steve Neale summarizes the mythological dimensions of the western and its relation to US identity and culture as follows: “This frontier served to distinguish and to mark the meeting point between Anglo-Americans and their culture and nature and the cultures of others, and between the Anglo-American West and the Anglo-American – and European – East” (2000, 134). Frontier existence, Neale notes, “was characteristically marked by opportunity and danger, hardship and bounty, adventure and violence,” as well as instantiating the concept of “Manifest Destiny,” which sought to establish white Anglo-American racial and cultural superiority (ibid.). Given that El amor del capitán Brando is set in a fictitious village in Segovia province, the mythology of the American West may seem rather out of place. It is worth noting, though, that Juan’s interest can be traced to the wide distribution and spectatorship of westerns in Spain, many of which, including co-productions, were frequently shot there as well, although usually in Almería province. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the autochthonous “paella western” was a top popular cinema genre (Lázaro-Reboll and Willis 2004, 12), so Juan’s interest perhaps best speaks to the likelihood that westerns might have been one of the easier forms of cinema to access in a provincial town.21 The film’s setting in a small Spanish village in fact provides a variation on the western’s isolated outpost that becomes a liminal meeting place between two cultures, albeit in a very different historical and social conjuncture. In the town of Trescabañas, the cultures that encounter (and clash with) one another are not Anglo-American and Indigenous, or West and East, as in Neale’s formation, but rather exemplify the recurring Spanish trope of conflict between traditional conservative mores and modernizing

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left-wing ideas, as embodied by the townspeople on the one hand and the outsiders Aurora and Fernando on the other. Juan shifts not only between child and adult, as we have already seen, but also between these two poles, moving rather seamlessly from the more normative “insider” sphere of the town to the “outsider” realm occupied both literally and figuratively by his “odd triple” – with both Aurora and Fernado living in houses at the town’s edge. Both “maestrita progre” Aurora, for her liberal, youthful, metropolitan ideas, and “rojo” Fernando, for his eccentricity and older (but more damning) left-wing affiliation, pose a threat to the status quo of the town; Juan’s multiple categorization as “of” both worlds thus rather overtly casts him as caught between these opposing forces, his liminality allegorized and politicized. In this respect, the film’s structure also mirrors the western’s, which features three central roles: “the townspeople or agents of civilization, the savages or outlaws who threaten this group, and the heroes who are above all ‘men in the middle’” (Cawleti 1970, as cited in Neale 2000, 131).22 Juan, as hero figure in his own imagined western tale, very much fills this “middleman” role as he navigates between the excitement (and threat) posed by the outlaws and the normative structures reigning among Trescabañas’s townspeople. It is worth noting that El nido presents a strikingly similar structure, with the morally suspect yet barely tolerated outsider Alejandro (also residing physically outside the town itself on his estate), and Goyita as a rather literal go-between who moves between “civilized” spaces of the town (and especially her residence in the Guardia Civil cuartel, the symbolic and real space of discipline par excellence) and the wilder realm of the estrafalario outlaw’s estate. At one point the comparison is made explicit as the young teacher Marisa warns Goyita, telling her “ya sabes cómo son los pueblos” (you know how it is in small towns) and advising her that “si esto fuera una película del oeste, puede que los del pueblo quisieran lincharlo por tu culpa … Ya sé que no es una película de oeste, Goya, pero ten cuidado. Ten en cuenta que él es mucho más viejo que tú, y más débil” (if this were a western, the townspeople might want to lynch him because of you … I know it’s not a western, Goya, but be careful. Remember, [Alejandro] is much older than you, and weaker). Order Restored: The End(s) of the Liminal Following the formula of a western film narrative, normative order indeed prevails in the end in both films, as the adolescent’s liminal phase comes to a close, the rite of passage complete and his or her troubling or hybrid nature resolved. Both films hew surprisingly

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4.16

4.17

close to the anthropological structure of the rite of passage at their respective conclusions, enacting a striking break with the adolescent protagonist’s liminal phase. In El amor del capitán Brando, after Aurora is dismissed from her post and leaves the town, Juan completes his liminal phase in two ways, symbolic and material: first, he goes out into the wilderness, the mise-en-scène showing a rocky landscape resembling a Wild West desert, but with traces of the Civil War past in the sniper holes cut into the rocky outcropping (figures 4.16 and 4.17). Here, he enacts Captain Brando’s death by firing squad for an unnamed treason against his country, imploring his right-hand man Major Mitchum to “dile a ella … que no reniego de su amor, aunque ella me delatara” (tell her [Aurora] I don’t renounce her love, even if she informed against me).

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Then, in the following scene back at home, his mother gives Juan his father’s pipe and the letters she has been hiding from him, telling him that he is now old enough to have them (“ya eres mayor”), and informing Juan that it was she who gave the pipe to the father, in essence allowing her son to graduate to a kind of incestuous Oedipal manhood. Captain Brando, the alter ego of Juan’s liminal phase – embodying adult masculinity, albeit via a child’s imaginative capacity – dies so that Juan can come into his own as a man, no longer requiring an imagined heroic fantasy self. The film ends with a sequence that finds Juan waiting at the town bus stop, implicitly hopeful that Aurora will arrive from Madrid; she doesn’t, and his voice-over provides an imagined conversation between the two of them as he brings her up to date on the events since her departure. “Aquí todo sigue igual,” he narrates. “Bueno; hemos vuelto a clase. Y han fusilado al capitán Brando” (Everything remains the same here; well, we’ve gone back to class. And they’ve shot Captain Brando). The pueblo has returned to what it once was (todo sigue igual) as the children return to class (and their disciplinary regime) after striking in response to Aurora’s ousting, bribed back to their desks with an offer of free vacation from the caricatured authoritarian mayor. The martyrdom of Captain Brando is implicitly connected to this restoration of the status quo – Juan’s putting away childish things, as symbolized by murdering his ludic double. While Juan’s imagined conversation in voice-over reports what has taken place, the sequence of shots likewise cements the protagonist’s embracing of the normative order, as it shows him approach the walled pueblo from outside as he walks up from the bus stop, gateway to the wider world (figure 4.18), pause on the liminal space of the threshold (figure 4.19), and then enter into the closed space of the walled town (figure 4.20). Following this sequence of shots, as Fernando (who also has embraced the town’s moral order and prioritized his homosocial relationship with Juan over his sexual relationship with Aurora by breaking off their affair in Madrid) closes the large town gate behind the protagonist, we see a shot that alters the stereotypical image of the western hero riding off into the sunset, as Juan had once hoped to do with Aurora. Instead, the adolescent protagonist walks in: to the centre of the provincial town, turning inward and embracing the moral order of the townspeople rather than escaping out into the capital city’s moral wilderness as an outlaw. El nido ends with a more fully realized sacrifice, in the form of Alejandro’s death. In a canyon landscape likewise reminiscent of a western, Alejandro retreats to the rugged banks of a river to lie in wait

Betwixt and Between  189

4.18

4.19

4.20

190  Inhabiting the In-Between

4.21

for the Civil Guard sergeant who has declined his challenge to a duel (figure 4.21). After a last moment smiling and clutching the scarf Goyita gave him as a token, he proceeds to shoot at the sergeant and his patrol mate, Goyita’s father, from above them in the canyon. The guards return Alejandro’s fire, killing him, and upon examining his body discover he was shooting blanks to draw their bullets, in effect committing suicide. After a horse-drawn cart is wheeled through the town to retrieve his body, in the next scene we cut to some time later when a slightly older Goyita returns to the same platform on Alejandro’s estate where they once frolicked together in their courtship montage (figure 4.22). Its broken pillar has now become a cross, repurposing the site as Alejandro’s grave in a powerful image of (Catholic) order efficiently restored as the colour scheme moves from the transitional light of sunset to an almost exaggerated painterly blue sky at midday (figure 4.23). The threat posed by Goyita and Alejandro’s relationship has been neutralized not only by his death but also Goyita’s passage out of adolescence into adulthood. Her appearance is visibly altered: at Alejandro’s graveside she looks like a picture of traditional femininity, with her hair carefully styled, her face made-up, and much more fashionable clothing (figure 4.24), markedly different from the not-girl-not-woman of her Lady Macbeth days. Goyita renews her pledge of love to him, blushing as she confesses he has taught her what love is, and carves her hand with his initial in the shadow of the towering cross. Their relationship itself thus takes on a kind of ritual quality, enabling Goyita to make the passage from child to woman, assisted by Alejandro’s death as a sacrifice that anoints her in normative (and non-threatening) femininity. Yet despite the appearance of having moved on from Alejandro and into traditional expectations

Betwixt and Between  191

4.22

4.23

of womanhood, Goyita has returned to his grave and reinscribed their transgressive relationship in quite literal terms on her body. She presses her palm into Alejandro’s gravestone (in lieu of his hand) and then rises to stand triumphantly on its pedestal, conducting the invisible orchestra as he had once taught her to do, with seeming liberation and abandon (figure 4.25). While on the one hand Goyita embraces the position of traditional womanhood in her appearance, she also inherits the position of the eccentric estrafalario, who himself represented an alternative political project as atheist, returning exile, and man of letters. Her burgeoning adult subjectivity thus retains some elements of the transgressive and outsider elements that drew her to Alejandro in the first place, despite appearing within the trappings of the normative.

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4.24

4.25

If the adolescent is marked, as Meyer Spacks notes, by simultaneous efforts to resist and integrate into the adult world (1981, 15), then it would appear that both Juan and Goyita have begun to shed this liminal phase and initiated their process of integration. For all the transgressive potential the liminal phase posed in its unsettling of social norms, creation of multiplicity and hybridity, and denial of binary classifications, in the end this phase is fleeting at best, partial in what is retained. In the context of the Long Transition period in Spain, it is quite clear that these adolescent figures emerge in response to the destabilizing nature of changing political and social realities. It is perhaps more surprising in retrospect, however, that both under Francoism and in nascent constitutional democracy, this transgressive potential of the adolescent’s liminality in many ways presciently mirrors the nation’s trajectory, a ritual passage in the service of the restored social order of the ancien régime. An allegorical reading of the films might suggest that the liminal

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potential of Transitional Spain results in a likewise brief moment of flux and change that is finally replaced by re-integration into the social and cultural order with which it sought to break. Yet, perhaps more illuminating is the way in which these films emerge from the failed or faulty narratives of a break with the prior regime to engage in nuanced representations of the adolescent’s fruitful darkness, his or her ability – albeit fleeting – to break down the divisions between child and adult and interrogate the limits placed on each.

Coda

In the summer of 2017, as I was in Madrid completing final work on this book, Carla Simón’s film Estiu 1993 (Summer 1993; in Castilian, Verano 1993) began screening in art cinema venues in Spain. It had premiered several months before at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the GWFF Best First Feature Award. Several friends and colleagues brought the film to my attention, given that it was clearly up my research alley: the story of a six-year-old girl, Frida (Laia Artigas), who in the titular summer of 1993 moves from Barcelona to a small country village in Girona province following the death of her mother, Neus, from AIDS; the same cruel illness had taken her father a few years before. Based in part on Simón’s own childhood experience and featuring some of her family members, the film follows the newly orphaned protagonist Frida as she navigates the shift from tragedy to its aftermath, city to pueblo, and her old family to her new one, which is composed of her maternal uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), his partner, Marga (Bruna Cusí), and their daughter, Frida’s four year-old cousin Anna (Paula Robles).1 This transition is not always an easy one, and the film’s loose and impressionistic structure of episodic scenes shows Frida by turns acting out, rejecting affection, seeking solace and companionship, and eventually settling into something resembling a family routine, not without sadness, as summer comes to an end. By turns sympathetic and unflinching, joyful and perturbing (as Frida’s darker games result in her cousin’s broken arm and near-drowning), the film provides a compelling glimpse of a child in transition, mourning profound loss and beginning to forge ahead. I was deeply moved by the film and knew I wanted to include it, somehow, in this book, as its exploration of childhood is rich, nuanced, and thought-provoking in a way that immediately struck a chord, recalling several of the films I examine.

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On first glance, Estiu 1993 may not seem to have much in common with the films I have explored in the pages of this book. Unlike them, Simón’s film does not explicitly place its child protagonist against the backdrop of political turmoil, the aftermath of civil conflict, or social upheaval and change. Although there are subtle allusions to the previous year, 1992, as a key moment for Spain (and Catalonia/Barcelona in particular), the crisis that can be seen to seethe beneath the surface of this summer snapshot is of another nature altogether: the global AIDS pandemic and its devastating effects.2 The illness is never explicitly named in the film, though the viewer quickly pieces together the cause of Neus’s death after several scenes: Frida and Anna play-act as the mother and daughter, Anna imploring Frida to play with her and Frida saying her whole body hurts; Frida’s several visits to a doctor for blood tests, where the adults speak in hushed tones not quite out of the protagonist’s earshot; Frida scraping her knee in a children’s game and another mother frantically telling her daughter not to touch her (the protagonist is not, in fact, HIV-positive); and a final heartbreaking scene where Frida asks Marga about how her “previous mom” (mama d’abans) died, and her aunt/now mother explains that she had a new virus that was very strong, from which the doctors could not save her. Thus while not as overtly political as several of the films discussed here, Estiu 1993 hones in on the human impact of the greatest public health crisis of the twentieth century – whose effects were felt deeply in Spain – and those it left behind. In this sense the film indeed serves as a powerful political statement, humanizing the victims of AIDS beyond its stigma, as Simón has addressed in an interview: A los doce años, cuando me lo explicaron, tardé un poco en aceptarlo y asumirlo. Tuve un momento de enfadarme, incluso de dudar de mis padres adoptivos, de replantearme mi opinión sobre mis propios padres biológicos. Luego ya entendí que ellos no habían hecho nada malo, que fue un contexto muy concreto de España, en el que no se conocían las consecuencias de la heroína, se vivía como un tabú. Tardé un tiempo en aceptar que lo que había pasado no era su culpa, es absurdo pensar eso, es el estigma. Es algo que hemos hecho todos o incluso mala suerte. Finalmente lo comprendí. (Pacheco 2017, n.p.) (When I was twelve and they explained it to me, it took me a little while to accept it and come to terms with it. I had a moment where I became angry, even doubting my adoptive parents, reconsidering my opinion of my own biological parents. Later I understood that they hadn’t done anything bad, that it was a very particular context in Spain, where people

196  Inhabiting the In-Between didn’t understand the consequences of heroin, it was lived as a taboo. It took me a while to accept that what had happened wasn’t their fault, it’s absurd to think that, it’s the stigma. It’s something we’ve all done or just bad luck. Eventually I understood.)

While on the surface the film is not really about HIV/AIDS, but rather the young protagonist’s experience of mourning, it nonetheless prompts viewers to contemplate the crises that lie beyond the frame in addition to the losses writ large within it, sharing the child’s view of her immediate bereavement and also sensing the broader socio-political implications of her loss. It is perhaps in this sense that many critics, and Simón herself, have noted the film’s connection to two child-centred cinematic predecessors, El espíritu de la colmena and Cría cuervos. Frequently asked in interviews about her debt to, or inspiration by, these earlier films, Simón has tended to acknowledge that she had them in mind while making her film and simultaneously to stress the several differences between them and her film in terms of tone, acting, and plot.3 Estiu 1993 certainly shares certain common features with its iconic forebears. Its protagonist most clearly resembles Ana from Cría cuervos, in her darkly imaginative and poignant navigation of mourning and loss, although at the same time the film’s techniques for representing the child’s sensory experience and perspective engage in the kind of ethical practice explored with reference to Erice’s films in chapter 3. Yet, crucially, while Estiu 1993 is undoubtedly to some degree the heir of these Transition-era offerings (and Cría cuervos especially), it is also a very different film: made in Catalan, by a young female first-time filmmaker, well into the twenty-first century, after Spain had weathered several other political, social, and economic crises, and the Transition’s narratives had unravelled for many. The inbetween that its protagonist navigates, too, is not so epistemologically fraught or temporally destabilizing: Simón’s autobiographical protagonist is depicted as positioned between her family “from before” and after, her parents’ death and her future life with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, which is shown to be fundamentally one of hope and optimism. Although the film ends with Frida weeping for the first time since her mother’s death, she is surrounded by her new family in an intimate and loving embrace, closing one chapter and beginning another and finally able to engage in a cathartic expression of her emotions. In this sense Estiu 1993 contrasts with the ambiguity of the Transitionera films I have explored in these pages, including its clearest counterpart, Cría cuervos. That film, which also takes place over the course of a summer in the lives of its recently orphaned child protagonists, ends on

Coda 197

C.1

C.2

a notoriously ambiguous note, as Ana and her sisters Irene and Maite (Conchita Pérez and Mayte Sánchez) return to school, setting out from the family home and into the Madrid cityscape as summer officially concludes. Critics have read its final scene with strikingly opposing interpretations and varying degrees of optimism. On the one hand, the girls finally escape from the shadowy confines of the oppressive family home: emerging from a door in its high perimeter wall, Ana in the lead (figure C.1), they walk freely, independently, and in solidarity with one another through the sunny and bustling urban landscape (figure C.2). On the other hand, their walk – past enormous and brightly coloured billboards that telegraph capitalist modernity and dwarf the protagonists in long shots where they appear distant and almost unidentifiable in their matching uniforms – is towards a space of equal if not greater repression

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C.3

C.4

and discipline, a Catholic school likely to indoctrinate them with the values of Francoist Spain. Along the way, the three sisters pass by several graffiti texts emblazoned on the high stone wall, the only direct representation of the political sphere in the film: many are effaced (presumably by the authorities) but in one instance “libertad” and “traidor” (“freedom” and “traitor”) can be deciphered, with “Viva el Rey Juan Carlos I el Rey de España viva el Rey Católico” (“long live King Juan Carlos I King of Spain long live the Catholic King) in another (figures C.3 and C.4). The film ends, then, by tracing yet another series of in-betweens: the children’s passage from the anarchic time-outside-time of summer to the regimented time of the school year – this final sequence begins with the maid, Rosa (Florinda Chico), waking them up for their first day – as they too become accustomed to their new parental figure, their

Coda 199

imperious aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall), who bursts in shortly after Rosa does to break up their playful morning and impose order. Given the fact that the film is the product of an utterly liminal moment in Spanish history (filmed as Franco lay dying and released just after his death), the replacement of the authoritarian father with the domineering aunt seems a prescient commentary on the possible disappointments of the future king, past whose name the children walk. More than any other moment in the film, it captures the uneasy tensions of this moment in time, opposing poles of “liberty” and “traitor” uncannily anticipating the retrospective readings of the Transition that have seen it as a betrayal of the hopeful potential for true freedom or a radical break with the authoritarian past. The three girls walk down the busy Madrid streets, first against the automobile traffic zooming past them and then in synchronicity with it, as singer Jeanette’s infectious pop anthem “Porque te vas” plays for the third time in the film, and the first time as non-diegetic music. Its insistent chorus, “Todas las promesas de mi amor se irán contigo / Me olvidarás, me olvidarás” (All my love’s promises will go away with you / You’ll forget me, you’ll forget me), takes on new meaning as the girls enter the schoolyard with its imposing basilica looming in the background. The spectator wonders what they might forget: their dead parents, the fleeting freedoms that summer briefly allowed, their rebellious and imaginative connections to the realms of memory and fantasy that will be replaced by discipline, structure, and order in their new life at school and with their aunt? Once they reach the schoolyard, movement gives way to stasis as the camera that had followed Ana then remains fixed on the entrance staircase after she disappears into the school and passes out of the frame, never to return; the song continues to play as a stream of schoolgirls floods by, out of focus, anonymous in their identical uniforms. We then cut to an aerial shot of the school, which moves into a slow and deliberate pan of a hazy Madrid, its high angle emphasizing the crowded nature of the urban landscape with the horizon at the top of the frame and buildings filling in completely below, as the closing credits roll and the song draws to an end (figures C.5 and C.6). The sequence’s final movements – from the three girls on the street to the schoolyard filled with their classmates and then (unexpectedly in a film predominantly set in cramped domestic interiors) to an aerial shot that is somehow both expansive and claustrophobic – suggest a shift from the personal to the collective, the individual to the generational, and to the community or polis at large. It seems a fitting sequence with which to close this book, given that it demonstrates the central role and ambiguous nature of the cinematic child in this unsettled and unsettling

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C.5

C.6

place and time that is Spain’s Long Transition. Here, Ana and her sisters, like the other children explored in these pages, are literally and figuratively placed against the backdrop of political crisis and change, emerging as multi-valenced and ambivalent figures that resist a clear reading of the subject, or of history. Instead, these children, like their counterparts throughout this book – remembered and imagined, animal and fantastical, opaque and liminal – gesture toward the ambiguous and the multiple, the possibility of liberation and its foreclosure, approaching an uncertain future and inhabiting the in-between.

Notes

Introduction: Inhabiting the In-Between   1 The film was released in May 2016 on DVD by FNAC’s Filmoteca FNACional series alongside representative and classic films from Spain’s national cinema.   2 In addition to its chilling depiction of violent clashes between children and adults, the film can be read as a commentary on the uneven economic development of the desarrollismo years in Spain, which encouraged tourists, especially from northern Europe, to flock to sun-drenched Spanish beach towns such as Benavís; Tom’s prior trip would have been in the first boom years of the “Spanish miracle” in the early 1960s.   3 In the novel on which the film is based, Juan José Plans’s El juego de los niños (The Children’s Game), their psychosis is the result of a yellow pollen; as Nacho Jarne Esparcia notes, the film leaves the cause ambiguous, which “hace que la historia resulte mucho más intrigante” (makes the story much more intriguing) (Jarne Esparcia 2008, 39).   4 The films explored in this study, which themselves determined its chronology, span the period 1970–83, exceeding the strict bounds of the Transition per se on either end: the most clean-cut periodization used by many scholars is November 1975 (Franco’s death) to October 1982 (the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in general elections). However, there is not a critical consensus on the Transition’s dates. For example, Gregorio Morán, strict in his use of these dates, nonetheless writes that “Caben dudas sobre su inicio pero su final hay que circunscribirlo a octubre de 1982” (there can be some doubt as to its beginning but its end must be circumscribed in October 1982) (2015, 18). Studies have become increasingly broad in their temporal framework, in keeping with recent re-evaluation of the Transition period and its lasting effects, as well as a broader understanding of

202  Notes to pages 9–13 what might constitute transitional culture and time. Mariano Sánchez Soler extends the end point of the Transition to December 1983, basing his chronology (in a study on political violence) on the emergence of the paramilitary group GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación). Teresa M. Vilarós’s seminal study El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1998) spans the twenty years between the assassination of Franco’s chosen successor Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973 and the 1992 signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which marked the “definitiva y efectiva inserción de España en la nueva constelación Europea” (definitive and effective insertion of Spain into the new European constellation) (Vilarós 1998, 1). Germán Labrador Méndez’s recent Culpables por la literatura: Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (2017), on the other hand, spans the period 1968– 86, delimiting the period with the events of May 1968 and the 1986 referendum regarding Spain’s continuing in NATO.   5 A few representative examples include Secretos del corazón (Armendáriz, 1997), La lengua de las mariposas (Cuerda, 1999), El espinazo del diablo (del Toro, 2001), El viaje de Carol (Uribe, 2002), or El laberinto del fauno (del Toro, 2006). I have written elsewhere (2017) on the contrast between childcentred films from both periods.   6 See, for example, Labanyi (2000 and 2007), Labrador Méndez (2009 and 2017), Martínez (2012), Medina Domínguez (2001 and 2015), Morán (1991 and 2015), Moreiras-Menor (2002, 2008, 2011), Resina (2000), Song (2016), Subirats (2002) and Vilarós (1998), among others.   7 In the previously cited quotation, Labrador Méndez builds on Eduardo Haro Tecglen’s concept of the “generación bífida” (forked generation), drawing from his poignant words upon his son Eduardo Haro Ibars’s death that “unos llegan al poder, otros a la muerte” (cited in 2017, 156). Labrador Méndez does write that the cinema of the period melancholically looks back to childhood under the dictatorship (173) and notes, following an unpublished 2010 text by Ángel Loureiro, that in the period “Lo niño liberado se convierte así en un emblema poderoso de la nueva sensibilidad antifranquista que encarnan las chiquillas que filman Carlos Saura – Cría cuervos (1975) – y Víctor Erice – El espíritu de la colmena (1973) – , despiertas, decididas, insobornables” (“The ‘liberated child’ motif thus becomes a powerful symbol for the new anti-Francoist sensibility incarnated by the little girls filmed by Carlos Saura – Cría cuervos [1975] – and Víctor Erice – El espíritu de la colmena [1973]: alert, resolute, incorruptible) (2017, 194).   8 It is worth noting that critics tend to read this future Ana in very literal terms, calling her the “Ana of 1995,” because at one point she mentions that twenty years have passed since the childhood days the film depicts, though in my view the film troubles precisely this kind of strict chronology.

Notes to pages 15–19  203   9 Lacan writes, “What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming” (1981, 63). 10 For a parallel reading of childhood and queer temporality in this film, see Noble (2017). 11 In the far-right newspaper El Alcázar, film critic (and military man) Félix Martialay spent eight consecutive days (with the exception of Sunday, from 16 to 24 February 1976) dedicating the “Imágenes y gentes” column to an indignant critique of the film entitled “Tendrás más” (You will have more), providing an alternative to the saying on which the film’s title is based (“Raise ravens and they will pluck out your eyes”; here, “raise ravens and you will have more”). One of the installments, from 17 February, is devoted entirely to dissecting the erroneous representation of the two military men not only in behaviour but also in style of uniform and insignia, the likelihood of their having met in Burgos, and the impossibility of the claim that Anselmo served in both the Civil War and the Blue Division (Spanish troops fighting for Hitler on the Russian Front in the Second World War). 12 I would like to thank Teresa Vilarós for suggesting the idea of the Spanish Civil War as intertext to several of these films, in a comment on a paper I presented at the 2016 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association based on material from chapter 1 of this book. 13 Other key titles include Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2002); Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (2008); Erica Burman, Developments: Child, Image, Nation (2008); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009); David Martin-Jones, “The Child Seer in and as History: Argentine Melodrama,” from Deleuze and World Cinemas (2011); Ellen Handler Spitz, Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film and Drama (2011); Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill’s edited volume Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema (2012); and Karen J. Renner’s edited volume The “Evil Child” in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2013). 14 For example, two volumes from 2012 and 2014 edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet examine children and adolescents, predominantly in films from Latin America, though the first volume also includes Spain: Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (2012) and Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema (2014). See also Sophie Dufays’s 2014 El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura (1983–2008): Alegoría y nostalgia and Rachel Randall’s 2017 Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency.

204  Notes to pages 20–8 15 Two doctoral dissertations from 2011 also treat the topic: Erin K. Hogan’s “La patria es la infancia: The Vocalization and Ventriloquism of Spanish Civil War and Postwar Children in the Cine con niño and Nuevo cine con niño (1973–2010)” and Anna Min-Hee Proffit’s “Representing the Child in Spanish Film from El pequeño ruiseñor to El laberinto del fauno.” In late 2018, Hogan published another very promising survey and the first genre study of the child in Spanish cinema, The Two cines con niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955–2010). 16 Moreiras-Menor is here writing on Antonio Muñoz Molina and Julio Llamazares. 17 One pairing which was not included in the book’s final form as it lay too far outside the theoretical scope is Manuel Summers’s 1971 Adiós, cigüeña, adiós (Goodbye, Stork, Goodbye) and 1972 follow-up El niño es nuestro (The Child Is Ours). These quirky, lighthearted dramas follow a diverse group of children of various ages who form a tight-knit community of friends. After a pubescent couple among their ranks accidentally fall pregnant (as a result of lack of access to sexual education), in the first film the children band together to aid in the young mother’s delivery and raise the baby communally in a utopian vision of childhood that sets the child characters in contrast to the authoritarian, absent, or scandalized adults surrounding them. In the second installment, they stage an elaborate rescue of the baby, who has been placed in a foundlings’ home, with the rallying cry that gives the film its title: the child is ours. 18 “Tercera vía,” a term that came to be widely used in this period, refers to cinema that strikes a mid-way point between popular film and intellectual or art-house cinema. For a detailed description of competing labels, see Sally Faulkner (2013), 6–7. 1. Impossible Returns: The Child as Self and Other in Carlos Saura’s El jardín de las delicias (1970) and La prima Angélica (1974)   1 Gerrard’s phrase comes from a 1997 Observer review of Lorrie Moore’s edited Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood. Owain Jones (2003) has taken up this phrase as a means of interrogating the possibilities of memory and imagination in the adult’s understanding of the child.   2 I would like to thank Rosi Song for referring me to Soja’s work following my presentation of an early version of this chapter at the Cine-Lit conference sponsored by Portland State University, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State University, in February 2015.   3 Critical treatments of the film, as well as interviews with Saura, underscore how the film speaks to an entire generation. Saura stated, of his co-writer Rafael Azcona and himself, “We grew up in similar worlds, in a way, and in relation to La prima Angélica, a film that is very representative of our

Notes to pages 29–33  205 generation – of those in their forties and fifties – it so happens that we have had similar experiences. Any Spaniard of our age group, from the middle class, who has had a strong religious upbringing and remembers all this well, will relate to these experiences” (Willem 2003, 18).   4 Although Saura has insistently downplayed the autobiographical dimensions of the film, he was sent from Barcelona to Huesca during the war to live with his conservative and religious maternal family. Of the time he has commented, “I was an exile, I felt like a foreigner: my infant universe, everything I learnt, the planes I sketched bombing Barcelona, my education in Catalan in a state school – all that had nothing to do with what was being forced on me now … I remember these years with sadness, and I never fully understood why, in the space of a night, the ‘good’ became ‘wicked’ and the ‘wicked,’ ‘good’” (Hopewell 1986, 85).   5 One censor, however, was quite generous in his appraisal of La prima Angélica: “La película, en cuanto a sí misma, me parece conmovedora como esfuerzo dentro de nuestro cine, con sus limitaciones. Conmovedora como algo que nos toca, como algo nuestro, real, doloroso o placentero, pero nuestro … lo que es de agradecer entre los estultos, insípidos y falsos tipos que nos suministra con abundancia el cine español” (The film, in and of itself, seems to me a moving effort in our cinema, with its limitations. Moving as something that touches us, something that is our own, real, painful or pleasurable, but ours … something to be thankful for among the foolish, insipid and false types that Spanish cinema provides us with in abundance) (cited in Sánchez Vidal 1994, 131).   6 Casanova and Gil Andrés note that the “crisis and decline of Francoism may be considered to have dated from 1969, with a major acceleration point in December 1973 with the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco” (2014, 271)   7 Late in his life Franco would go fishing and, unbeknownst to him, an underwater associate would place a dead fish on his hook to much the same effect (Hopewell 1986, 78).   8 For a thorough and succinct account of the particulars of the censorship, see José Jurado Morales (2011). Among the material slated to be eliminated: Luis’s uncle’s comment to him “ahora van a saber lo que es bueno tu padre y los de su ralea” (now your father and his ilk will know what’s right); the imagined scene of Luis’s father being shot by a firing squad; Luis as a child seeing his Aunt Pilar naked; and the image of the uncle in the blue shirt of the Falange. All these were included in the final version except the nudity (Jurado Morales 2011, 358).   9 Despite these tensions within the Francoist establishment, and within the aperturista side itself, the continuance of Francoism was little questioned. Cristina Palomares explains that “some historians have observed a division among the regime moderates between aperturistas and reformistas,” noting that the differences were largely generational and that

206  Notes to pages 33–42 “both aperturistas and reformistas were only prepared to reform the political system by means of procedures sanctioned by that system” (2007, 121). 10 It is worth noting that the term “cuneta,” or ditch, is the same term used for the roadside ditches where those killed in summary executions during the Civil War were buried. 11 This is the first Spanish film to use direct sound, which, as Tom Whittaker has pointed out, allowed for a great deal of vocal nuance on LópezVázquez’s part. Whittaker relates that “in an interview from the 1970s, Saura enthused about the advantages of direct sound, commenting that it not only allows for a far greater nuance in the tone of the actor’s voice, but that it also informs their style of gesticulating” (2016, 106). 12 Perhaps as a means of marking the difference between this scene and the rest of the film, Saura outsourced its direction to Emilio Sanz de Soto, which accounts for what many critics call the “Paramount style” of the past in contrast to the present. Sanz de Soto stated in an interview that, after collaborating with Saura on a number of earlier films, “Carlos me hizo un regalo maravilloso, me dejó concebir, escribir, amueblar y dirigir una escena de la película, la de la tía que interpretaba Lina Canalejas entrando a ver a su sobrinito en la cama, López Vázquez con su cara de mayor, mientras se oye la música de Recordar, que también elegí” (Carlos gave me a wonderful gift, he allowed me to conceive, write, furnish and direct a scene of the film, the one where the aunt played by Lina Canalejas comes in to see her little nephew in the bed, López Vázquez with his adult face, while the music of Recordar plays, which I also chose) (Molina Foix 1997, 257). 13 Sánchez Vidal, among other critics, links this mechanism across the two films, given that they feature the same actors: “los dos recursos fundamentales de La prima Angélica (el salto espacio-temporal sin recurrir al flash-back técnico habitual y las distorsiones de la memoria) ya habían sido empleados en El jardín de las delicias y, curiosamente, con los mismos actores que desarrollarían el primer procedimiento en La prima Angélica, Lina Canalejas y José Luis López Vázquez” (the two fundamental devices in La prima Angélica (the spatio-temporal leap without recourse to the habitual technical flashback and the distortions of memory) had already been used in El jardín de las delicias and, curiously, with the same actors who would carry out the first instance in La prima Angélica, Lina Canalejas and José Luis López Vázquez) (1994, 84). 14 Soja, working predominantly on postmodern architecture and space more broadly, draws from the work of Henri Lefebvre, particularly his insistence on “a third term that disrupts, disorders, and begins to reconstitute the conventional binary opposition into an-Other that comprehends but is more than just the sum of two parts,” which Soja

Notes to pages 45–57  207 denominates “thirding-as-Othering” (Soja 1996, 31). I trace a conceptual debt to Soja, as I hew more closely to his conception than to its predecessor, the postcolonial third space outlined by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). 15 Pérez Simón notes that Saura’s violation of raccord, or the positioning of characters relative to the camera, in the shifts between temporal frames makes these shifts particularly disconcerting for the spectator (2007, 168–69). 16 From “Le cinéma selon Carlos,” interview from 2–3 November 1990 at the International Festival of Mediterranean Cinema in Montpellier, France. Interview by Monique Carcaud-Macaire, Henri Talvat, and Luis de la Torre in Talvat, Le mystère Saura. (Lorsque j’écrivais La Cousine Angélique et j’essayais de reconstruire des moments de mon enfance, je ne me voyais pas comme un enfant; j’avais la mentalité d’un enfant, j’avais ou essayais d’avoir les mêmes idées, les mêmes pensées, les mêmes sensations que celles que j’avais eues lorsque j’étais enfant à un moment déterminé, vingt ou trente ans plus tôt. Mais je me voyais toujours avec l’âge que j’avais au moment ou j’écrivais, comme si j’étais une sorte d’intrus qui, à mon âge, participait au monde de mon enfance: je n’en n’étais pas si éloigné puisque c’était le mien.) 17 Eduardo Haro Tecglen aptly describes the relationship between the two as one where “el espectador libre puede llegar a no saber si es el presente el que evoca el pasado, o el pasado que evoca el presente” (the free spectator cannot come to know whether it is the present that evokes the past, or the past that evokes the present) (1976, 20). 18 In the original registered script (dated 20 July 1973) in the Spanish National Library, the character is referred to only as “Anselmo,” in both temporal planes, placing the reader within Luis’s perspective, as he is the one (incorrectly, we later discover from a photograph of Miguel) who equates them with one another. 19 This scene replicates an experience Saura had in school himself, which impacted him profoundly, as he once commented: “Es posible que al ser unos años tan verdaderamente extraordinarios para un niño, con el paso del tiempo adquieren todavía más fuerza. Supongamos, y es un ejemplo un tanto banal, que si para Proust su infancia es una serie de detalles más o menos poéticos en torno a un ambiente familiar, para mí esos recuerdos son mucho más violentos: es una bomba que cae en mi colegio, y una niña ensangrentada con cristales en la cara. Y eso no es una invención literaria, es un hecho real. Por eso yo creo que esa atmósfera de la guerra de alguna forma gravita, o debe gravitar, sobre mí, y por consecuencia tiene que gravitar sobre las cosas que hago” (It’s possible that in being such truly extraordinary years for a child, with the passage of time they take on even

208  Notes to pages 64–7 more intensity. Let us suppose, and it’s a rather banal example, that if for Proust childhood is a series of more or less poetic details around a family milieu, for me those memories are much more violent: it’s a bomb falling on my school, and a blood-soaked little girl with glass shards in her face. And this isn’t a literary invention; it’s a real fact. That’s why I think that this atmosphere of war in some way has a pull on me, and it has a pull on the things that I make) (cited in Haro Tecglen, 1976, 15). 20 Among others, see Besas (1985), Colmeiro (2001), D’Lugo (1990 and 1991), Edwards (1997), Haro Tecglen (1976), Hopewell (1986), Lara (1976), PérezSimón (2007), Vernon (1989). 21 Although in the present work I often read against allegory, which is his focus, I find Idelber Avelar’s term “untimely present,” drawn from Benjamin, evocative in the context of Spain’s post-dictatorial landscape, and it emerges at several points in the present study (Avelar 1999). 2. Innocent Creatures: Child as Commodity and Animal in Antonio Mercero’s La guerra de papá (1977) and Tobi, el niño con alas (1978)   1 Although several Internet sources list García’s year of birth as 1970, press materials and interviews from the period all list his age at the time of filming as three and half, the same as the film’s protagonist, which would more likely make his birth year 1973.   2 The police force shifted from the Francoist Policía Armada to the (current) Policía Nacional. Labrador Méndez goes on to note that this critique of the only surface-level change is a pivotal example of alternative radical projects entertained by civil society during the period: “Son dos formas contemporáneas de entender qué debía significar la transición y qué tenía la democracia: una – la del estado posfranquista – pasa por el color de los uniformes, otra – la de los ciudadanos en transición – quiere disolver la policía. Que la primera se haya acabado imponiendo sobre la segunda, convirtiéndose en la normalidad democrática, no implica que la segunda no existiera, que no hubiese quien se negaba a aceptar que una verdadera democracia pudiera darse sin desmontar la estructura represiva del franquismo” (These are two contemporaneous forms of understanding what the transition should mean and what democracy entailed: one – that of the postfrancoist state – has to do with the colour of uniforms while the other – that of a citizenry in transition – wants to dissolve the police. That the first ended up prevailing over the second, becoming democratic normalcy, does not imply that the second didn’t exist, that there weren’t people who refused to accept that a true democracy was possible without dismantling the repressive institutions of Francoism) (2017, 62, emphasis in the original).

Notes to pages 67–71  209   3 In the Catholic Church’s colour-coding system of film rating, “white” was a film suitable for all audiences (i.e., totally inoffensive). Even after the demise of state censorship (to which the church rating system was parallel), the terminology of its colour coding stuck.   4 Both of García’s protagonists can be read as inheritors of the tradition Alberto Mira has called the “spectacular object” child, a trend that he notes had its “golden period” in Spanish cinema of the 1950s and 1960s (2010, 77ff). Tracing the tradition of these children in Spain’s comedy, musical, and melodrama cinema, including key figures Marisol (Josefa Flores), Pablito Calvo, and Joselito (José Jiménez Fernández), Mira considers Lolo García to be the “last important exponent of this type of child star,” noting that such actors’ fame is inevitably short lived, usually lasting for only one or two films (78–9). Such was the case for García, whose ventures post–La guerra de papá were commercial flops, and who chose to leave acting for other pursuits, studying economics at university.   5 Julio Pérez Perucha and Vicente Ponce note that the year 1977, when the first film was made, “puede ya considerarse como inicio de la transición democrática” (can now be considered as the beginning of the democratic transition), not only in political terms but also in the content of the nation’s cinema (1986, 34).   6 Although Mercero’s film career is markedly less political than that of a director such as Saura, and he insistently disavowed political allegiance of any kind, his life was indelibly marked by the war, as his father was killed in its first days by anarchists who targeted him for his position as a personnel manager at the Michelin factory in Lasarte. Mercero grew up largely ignorant of the war, which came to interest him later in life; he went on to tackle it more directly two decades later in La hora de los valientes (1998).   7 Asked whether the film’s context was meant to be understood in reference to these historical events, Mercero confirmed that “No se cita, pero es así” (It’s not explicit, but it’s the case) (Ángulo, Heredero, and Rebordinos 2001, 127).   8 The street would not be renamed until 1980.   9 Arocena notes that the civil war was “uno de los temas predilectos del Cine de la Reforma” (one of the favorite topics of the cine de la reforma), which generally shows it from a centrist perspective (1997, 771). 10 Marías does not confine his critiques to the focus on the Civil War intertext’s more central role but also takes issue with the overly faithful adaptation of Mercero and Valcárcel in transposing the novel’s language to the screen, attesting that it is literary and not meant to be spoken aloud: “está escrito para ser leído, sin voces ni rostros ni gestos ni escenarios” (it’s written to be read, without voices or faces or gestures or backdrops) (Marías, 1977, 13, emphasis in the original).

210  Notes to pages 71–8 11 Ángulo likewise notes a resemblance between the Mercero film’s patriarch and La prima Angélica’s repressive uncle Miguel – though neither character is exactly free from what might be called “dramatismo.” 12 Although censorship had yet to be fully dismantled when the film was produced, its last days saw a weakened incarnation, where the appeal of the child star (and author Delibes’s clout) distracted from the film’s political elements, though these were not lost on audiences and in fact likely contributed to the film’s success. As Thomas Deveny notes, “Aside from the fact that Spaniards generally adore children, and the fact that one could characterize the child actor Lolo García as ‘cute,’ the incredible box-office success of the film can only be attributed to the empathy that Spaniards felt toward the socio-political theme of the movie” (1999, 231). 13 The presence of workers’ organizing efforts and labour unions in the public sphere (especially in street protests or massive demonstrations such as the 1977 Jornadas Libertarias de Barcelona organized by the CNT) features in several films of the period, both those that treat the topic directly and those that include it as a feature of the backdrop. A few examples include fictional films such as El diputado (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1978) and Asignatura pendiente (José Luis Garci, 1977), as well as documentaries like Informe general (Pere Portbella, 1976), Ocaña, retrat intermitent (Ventura Pons, 1978), Numax presenta (Joaquim Jordà, 1979), among others. 14 Despite the link of Comisiones Obreras to the Communist Party, Paloma Aguilar Fernández notes that the union also had ties to progressive Christian groups, making the irony of the angelic child somewhat more nuanced than the film’s several jokes would have the viewer believe (2008, 243). 15 Philippe Ariès’s seminal study, Centuries of Childhood, discussed below, also bases a large part of its argument on visual evidence in iconography and portraiture. 16 On ventriloquism within Spain’s child-centred cinema as plot point and biopolitical project, see also Hogan (2013). 17 Much the same seems to be the case in Mercero’s films, where few commentators even address the child’s dubbing by Vilariño, save for a negative review of La guerra de papá in the far-right Arriba, which uses it as a cause for complaint, calling García’s acting “abrumadoramente abrumadora y complicada además por el doblaje” (overwhelmingly overwhelming and further complicated by the dubbing); Arriba likewise attributes Tobi’s voice to Villariño, uniquely among reviews held in the archive of the Filmoteca Española (Arroita-Jáuregui 1977 and 1979). 18 See for example Deveny (1999) and Mitchell (2004).

Notes to pages 82–5  211 19 Mercero had to convince Frade that “una película ‘blanca’ como aquella podía provocar una respuesta positiva del público, como respuesta al cine de ‘destape’ que campaba por sus respetos en el cine comercial español de la segunda mitad de los años setenta. Aunque, probablemente, lo que seguramente le convenció fue el escaso presupuesto necesario para sacarla adelante” (a “white” film such as this could garner a positive audience reaction, as a response to the “destape” cinema that aimed to please commercial Spanish cinema audiences in the second half of the 1970s. Although, probably, what surely convinced him was the miniscule budget needed to carry it forward) (Ángulo 2001, 29) 20 Wright relates that not only did an exaggerated representation of the child’s genitals feature prominently on the cover of the magazine Interviú on 4 January 1979, he was also eventually eliminated from the running for mascot of the 1982 football World Cup hosted by Spain, despite Mercero’s best efforts to broker the deal, because, as an interviewer put it to Raimundo Saporta, head of the World Cup Organizing Committee, “dentro de cuatro años, la colita de Lolo, que ahora es tan bonita y mostrable en una revista, crecerá y será impublicable” (in four years’ time, Lolo’s penis, which is so beautiful now and printable in a magazine, will grow and be unpublishable) (cited in Wright 2013, 82–3; Wright’s translation). Saporta is alleged to “like children” and be convinced that “the angelical Lolo García, the child with the magic penis, could be the ideal mascot” (ibid., 82). 21 However, this conception of the child does not prevent the adult from seeing the child in sexual terms; in fact, as Higonnet argues, precisely this idea of innocence is what may appeal to the pedophile’s or abuser’s gaze, as it “runs the danger of becoming alluringly opposite, enticingly off-limits. Innocence suggests violation” (1998, 38). In terms of gender, it seems unthinkable that a girl child’s genitals could be showcased and discussed for comic effect in remotely the same fashion. 22 Freud, of course, destroyed the myth of childhood innocence by arguing that, from infancy, the child is driven by libidinal urges. The seminal work in this context was Freud’s “Essay on Infantile Sexuality” of 1905. 23 I will further complicate the child’s alleged transparency by arguing for an opposing and more ethical model of opacity in the next chapter. 24 In this respect, and especially from a political standpoint, Mercero’s film bears a resemblance to Saura’s films discussed in the previous chapter, as (albeit in a very different tone and genre) it shows how the child’s experience is easily ruled by faulty knowledge, influenced by religious fanaticism or political zealotry. Young Quico’s fears of the devil are not unlike those La prima Angélica’s protagonist suffers, as an older child, in the presence of the monja mortificada portrait hanging in his bedroom, and

212  Notes to pages 88–103 the damaging effects of La guerra de papá’s patriarch on his children are reminiscent of Antonio Cano’s family dynamic in El jardín de las delicias. 25 Mercero told the child actor from behind the camera that Femio was really hitting and biting Vito and that he should go to her aid; looking back several years later, Delibes described the filming thus: “El niño se lanza contra él a puntapiés y puñetazos, con sus modestas fuerzas, pero con auténtica furia” (the child throws himself upon him, kicking and punching, with modest force but authentic fury) (Delibes 1987). 26 Arriba’s review of the film overtly compares the child to a monkey, while complimenting his handsome looks, noting that the film is “apoyada en las monadas – derivado de simio – de un niño muy guapo” (based on the cuteness [in Spanish related etymologically to the word for monkey] – derived from the simian – of a very handsome child) (Arroita-Jáuregui 1977). 27 In the same interview, from the La guerra de papá episode of Cine de barrio (2014), she noted it was likewise difficult to work with Ana Torrent, whom she refers to as “la niña de El espíritu” (the little girl from El espíritu). 28 When he is discovered, the headline in ABC reads “Un ángel en el siglo XX” (an angel of the twentieth century), the same title under which he is commodified in a fairground at the end of the film. 29 From 1977 to 1979, Martín Ferrand was host of the news and culture program Hora 15, to which the footage is likely meant to allude. 30 This commodification of the child star is nothing new in Spanish cinema, as the Fotogramas “niño 300 millones” article attests by inserting García into the long tradition of Spanish child stars; perhaps the most radical and lasting example of the child star as commodity is Marisol; see Wright (2013, 62ff) for an in-depth study of child star as living doll and commodity. 31 The Cine de barrio episode on Tobi features a montage of several of the sensational child’s press appearances (usually with Mercero), including the Televisión Española end-of-year special of 1978. Throughout, the child appears shy and unenthused, quite the opposite of his film persona. 32 Perhaps not coincidentally, the film was made in precisely the year the platillo volante closed to the public, to remain in disuse until its demolition in 2010. http://elpais.com/diario/2010/04/07/ madrid/1270639467_850215.html 33 The Icarus figure thus occupies a parallel duality to the child’s: “Volando ilusionado, o en caída libre, representa la encarnación del espíritu romántico en la lucha antifranquista, el triunfo provisional de las fuerzas de la imaginación sobre los límites biopolíticos, y el trágico castigo subsiguiente. En la transición algunas veces aparece Ícaro triunfante, pero predominan las descripciones de su caída, conectadas con la experiencia

Notes to pages 107–10  213 de los jóvenes de la contracultura” (Flying inspired, or in free fall, [the Icarus figure] represents the incarnation of the romantic spirit in the antifrancoist struggle, the provisional triumph of the forces of imagination over biopolitical limits, and the tragic subsequent punishment. In the transition, Icarus sometimes appears triumphant, but descriptions of his fall are more prevalent, connected with the experience of countercultural youth) (Labrador Méndez 2017, 358). 3. Oscillating Encounters: Alignment and Foreclosure in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and El sur (1983)   1 While the two films under discussion here are his only two full-length fiction films, and were made several decades ago, more recently Erice has made short films that evince an enduring preoccupation with childhood, such as Alumbramiento (2002) and La morte rouge (2006). Sarah Wright traces the influence of El espíritu de la colmena in subsequent decades of Spanish cinema through multiple genres, including art house and horror, in chapter 3 of The Child in Spanish Cinema (2013).   2 Quoting interview of Erice by Alain Philippon, “Víctor Erice: Le détour par l’enfance,” Cahiers du cinema 405 (March 1998): vi, translation by Martine Thibonnier.   3 See, for example, Vicky Lebeau’s Childhood and Cinema (2008), where it provides the book jacket cover image, or Karen Lury’s The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales (2010).   4 In part this is because the film is, in Erice’s eyes, only half completed, as a result of his producer Elías Querejeta’s having shut down production halfway through due to budgetary constraints. In the novella by Adelaida García Morales on which it is based, the teenage Estrella journeys to the South in the second half; this portion was never filmed, and thus ironically we have a film entitled El sur that takes place only in the North. Although not having the intended structure, the film can nonetheless be read as a complete piece, and in fact the absence of the South in the film makes it in many ways more present – in the mind and fantasies of Estrella, especially.   5 In the typescript of El espíritu de la colmena housed at the Spanish National Library, the girls are six and nine. The first two-thirds of the El sur takes place while Estrella is a child, while the final portion portrays her as a teenager, around fifteen years old. Unless otherwise indicated, reference to the film is to the first section, which (in part because of the film’s having been cut short) makes up the bulk of the finished product.   6 For more on the symbolic resonance of the house, see, among others, Evans (1982), Lomillos (1998), Molina Foix (1985), Neuschäfer (1994), Perriam (2008).

214  Notes to pages 111–20   7 For a succinct summary of such criticism, see Lomillos (1998).   8 Pereira Zazo (2002) problematizes several critical approaches that suppose that the entire film is presented from Ana’s point of view, placing it alongside Secretos del corazón to explore the protagonist’s movement from more passive to more active spectatorship, ver to mirar.   9 This recent work shows how the child’s perspective in film offers a particular set of representational challenges and possibilities. For example, the facility and comfort with which viewers can slip into alignment with the cinematic child’s gaze can also obscure the possibility of understanding it, as Sarah Wright has pointed out: “The direct access purportedly offered by the child’s gaze is in fact a partial view which arguably reproduces the unrepresentability of trauma” (2013, 93). Karen Lury addresses the many pitfalls awaiting adult viewers and critics who, because they “can not, or choose not to understand what the children on screen are really thinking or feeling,” might develop the “contradictory belief that the child can be other (innocent and vulnerable) while at the same time acting as a screen for the projection of adult emotions and fears” (2010, 106–7). For Lury, the danger is that the child becomes a reified or fetishized other, but one that is at the same time comfortably just like the adult. 10 Critics have focused – with varying degrees of objectification – on the child’s gaze, and Ana Torrent’s in particular. See, for example, Arata (1983), Perriam (2008), Hopewell (1986), Kinder (1983), Deveny (1999), D’Lugo (1991). Their comments frequently look at the child’s gaze as object, interpreting it symbolically rather than subjectively in relation to the regime or Spanish society under dictatorship; see, for example, Peter Evans’s comment that “many have singled out Ana Torrent’s baleful presence in two of the most richly textured films of this period: El espíritu de la colmena and Cría cuervos. Her silent glare as she surveys the moral squalor of the adult world around her manages more powerfully than words to condemn the regime’s autocratic values” (1995, 307). 11 Sarah Wright, for example, notes that “Torrent’s ‘look,’ fetishized by the camera – as it will later be by critics who are entranced by her dark Goyaesque eyes (Smith 2000: 36) – ushers in the notion of the child’s gaze but as Joe Kelleher has written, the word ‘gaze’ will not quite do, [for] we need to speak of the child as looked at, looked for, as much as looking” (2013, 89). On Smith see the following note. 12 Paul Julian Smith provides a succinct summary of the prevalent ways of looking at the child Ana Torrent as a kind of fetishized object from her performance in El espíritu de la colmena onward, including a particularly lecherous encounter with Francisco Umbral (2000, 35–7). Rob Stone likewise notes that, following Torrent’s early roles in Erice’s and Saura’s

Notes to pages 120–43  215 films. her eyes “would become wholly emblematic in Spanish cinema” (2002, 71), and Eric M. Thau has dedicated an article to the topic, noting that “Ana Torrent has been haunted throughout her career by this incessant discussion of her eyes, and of her magnetic impact on Spanish cinema from the late days of the ‘Cine de oposición’ [opposition cinema], through to recent times” (2011, 132). Wright masterfully reads Torrent’s gaze as a key reference point in Spanish cinema by exploring its revisions and reiterations by a wide range of “art-house horror” films connected to the memory of the nation’s contested past, especially post-Franco films that might “refer back to Ana’s gaze as the acknowledgement of the burdens of history” (2013, 94). Wright notes that, “through the re-enactment of Ana’s dark-eyed gaze,” diverse films of the democratic period such as Secretos del corazón or El laberinto del fauno demonstrate how “Torrent’s performance is, at times, a spectral presence in these films” (ibid.). 13 This supposed legibility of the child via her face or gaze is a recurrent critical stance. See, for example, Arata: “[Ana Torrent’s] big soft black eyes seem to be open windows into her mind where much of The Spirit of the Beehive actually takes place” (1983, 29); or Kinder: “with a brooding sensitivity that captures every nuance of emotion and perception within their field of vision, [Torrent’s] luminous dark eyes confront us with a bold knowing gaze, conveying a precocious intelligence, passion and intensity that seem almost ominous in their power” (1983, 59–60). 14 See, among others, Lebeau (2008), Lury (2010), Smith (1999), and Wright (2013). 15 See, for example, Lomillos (1998) and Molina Foix (1985). 16 See, among others, Deleyto (1999), Egea (2002), Labanyi (2000), Lomillos (1998), de Ros (2005), Smith (1999), Willem (1998), and Zunzunegui (1998). 17 Chris Perriam addresses the shadowy nature of the parents as fundamental to the emphasis in El espíritu de la colmena on memory and trauma, writing that, “For the viewer, reconstructing the substance of these characters is, like the double act of memory itself (conscious and unconscious), a difficult, unpredictable, and discontinuous piece of emotional labor” (2008, 69). Sally Faulkner notes that “the aftermath of the Civil War that causes the slaying of the maquis remains a mystery to Ana, while the viewer may begin to comprehend it by bringing to bear their historical knowledge of the post-war reprisals in the period. Likewise, her parents’ world remains impenetrable, though viewers may partially comprehend it through references to the father’s intellectual past” (2013, 254). 18 See, for example, Gavela Ramos (2011) and Labanyi (2000), among many others.

216  Notes to pages 143–50 19 Martin-Jones asserts that “the child seer represents someone at once politically powerless, and yet with a remarkable capacity for historical (hind)sight. They are a figure who illustrates how film can fill in the gaps in our collective pasts, reconstructing events which we cannot have experienced personally” (2011, 70). 20 Writing on Italian cinema, Paul Sutton argues that the child’s perspective “allows the spectator to share in the child’s witness of the irrationality of the adults’ actions and behaviour while at the same time the pace and historical context of the drama enables the spectator to reflect upon the political and social implications of these events” (2005, 359). Applying Alison Landsberg’s articulation of prosthetic memory to Spanish childcentred cinema, Wright notes that “the potential of these films to create memories for the viewer of a time which (due to temporal or geographical restrictions), may or may not have been part of a spectator’s archive of experience” (2013, 15). 4. Betwixt and Between: Liminal Adolescence in Jaime de Armiñán’s El amor del capitán Brando (1974) and El nido (1980)   1 For an excellent treatment of the liminal protagonists of Deprisa, deprisa and their positioning between childhood and adulthood as situated in the urban periphery, see Whittaker (2011). It is also worth noting the changing state relation to young people during the Transition era, as Labrador Méndez addresses: “En apenas cinco años el estado pasa de otorgar galardones a la natalidad a familias de más de 15 miembros a cazar a adolescentes quinquis a tiro limpio por los suburbios de las ciudades” (In barely five years the state goes from awarding birth-rate prizes to families of over 15 members to hunting down quinqui adolescents in shootouts in the city suburbs) (2017, 69).   2 Paolo Antonio Paranagua wrote in Positif in 1988 that “l’écriture et la mise en scène des films d’Armiñán restent plus classiques que celles des œuvres les plus connues de Carlos Saura. Pendant une période de valorisation des vertus de la mise en scène et des ruptures narratives, cet art des nuances a pu rester dans une ombre discrète, surtout lorsque l’arbre Saura a caché la forêt du cinéma espagnol” (the writing and mise en scène of Armiñán’s films remain more classic than those of Carlos Saura’s most well-known works. During a period that valued the virtues of mise en scène and narrative ruptures, that art of nuance has been able to remain within a discreet shadow, especially as the Saura tree has concealed the forest of Spanish cinema) (52).   3 Despite sarcastically critiquing (as well as misunderstanding) several political plot points, M. Arroita-Jáuregui wrote in the far-right Arriba:

Notes to pages 151–62  217 “Vaya por delante también que Jaime de Armiñán ha mejorado considerablemente como director cinematográfico desde Mi querida señorita, que era la última película suya que yo había visto (porque con Un casto varón español, la verdad, no me atreví)” (Well let’s just say that Jaime de Armiñán has improved considerably as a director since Mi querida señorita, the last film of his I had seen (because honestly, I didn’t even dare try with Un casto varón español)) (1974, n.p.).   4 When the character first arrives in the town, he asks at the tavern for a porrón of wine and is told no one drinks out of the traditional vessel anymore; later, in Madrid, he inquires about newspapers and cafés that have long since ceased to exist.   5 Deveny notes that the film also provides “the first reference in Spanish cinema to the brutality of those related to the Nationalist cause,” as the character recounts his father’s death as having occurred on a paseo after he was dragged around the town tied to a horse’s tail (1999, 173). Perhaps because the side the father was on is not overtly mentioned, censors (much like reviewer M. Arroita-Jáuregui in Arriba) might have assumed the father was killed by rojos, although the opposite is implied in the film.   6 For more on this concept, see Avelar (1999).   7 This is a running theme in Armiñán’s work since Mi querida señorita, where implicitly it is the lack of even the most basic sexual education that enables the protagonist to be raised as a woman despite possessing male genitalia.   8 This occurs in almost literal fashion in an episode where Aurora and Juan are stranded in Segovia during a school trip and end up in the tavern below their hotel room; after Aurora tries to stop him from serving himself more wine, he replies, performing adult masculinity and swagger, “Yo aguanto mucho” (I can handle a lot), at which she smiles, letting him win.   9 Other odd couples in Armiñán’s filmography include the protagonist of 1972’s Mi querida señorita, who falls in love with her/his maid, with lesbian desire turned acceptably heterosexual as Adela/Juan (José Luis López Vázquez) realizes she is actually a man who had been erroneously raised as a woman, and the protagonists of Nunca es tarde (1977). In the latter film, an elderly spinster (Madeleine Christie) falls in spiritual love with her decades-younger neighbour (José Luis Gómez), and after watching through the window as he and his wife (Ángela Molina) have sex, she becomes pregnant with his child. His film Jó, papá (1975), which is not focused on an odd couple, does explore the intergenerational transmission of memory of Spain’s violent past, as an aging patriarch, Enrique (Antonio Ferrandis), takes his family on a road trip across Spain to show his daughters (one of whom is also played by Ana Belén) where he experienced the Civil War while fighting on the Nationalist side.

218  Notes to pages 168–80 10 In this scene, for example, the tone immediately shifts again once he acquiesces, as Goyita turns imperious and insists on seeing the room where Alejandro’s wife died, becoming jealous that he has maintained her possessions as they were and belittling her to him (and again stressing that the only relationships between women in the films are based on jealousy in contrast to the homosocial bonds enabled between men). 11 In this particular sense, a closer analogue to the darker side of El nido might be Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s Camada negra (Black Brood) of 1977, which features an adolescent boy protagonist (José Luis Alonso, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jaime Gamboa of El amor del capitán Brando) belonging to a far-right fringe group. He pursues a sexual relationship with an adult woman (Ángela Molina), whom he ends up bludgeoning to death after a sexual liaison, repeatedly striking her head with a rock and shouting “España! España! España!” 12 Wright notes that the “repressed eroticism of the child-woman [embodied by Marisol] would be played out in Ana Torrent’s case by the film El nido (Jaime de Armiñán, 1980) where she played a thirteen-year-old temptress (Goyita) to Héctor Alterio’s sixty-year-old retired widower, who will eventually commit suicide” (2013, 80) 13 On Marisol’s grooming as child star, see Pavlović (2011) and Wright (2013); on the use of her voice, see Pavlović (2011) and Hogan (2013); and, on the importance of Marisol in the Transition, see Wright (2013), chapter 2 and Vilarós (2005). 14 It is also worth noting that the character in the original script of El espíritu de la colmena was named Delia and was re-christened once Torrent was cast; the part in Cría cuervos was written for her and the character also given her name. In both films, the protagonists’ sisters are also given character names to match those of the actresses, presumably as a means of blurring reality and fiction, allowing the children to slip more seamlessly into character. 15 Matthew J. Marr notes the similar deployment of the character name “Laurita” in Salvador García Ruíz’s film Mensaka, páginas de una historia (2013, 21). 16 Lury notes that the Lolita story has become itself a formula: “A melodrama in which the ‘pure love’ of an adult male for a little girl allows for a brief interlude of joy but which then ends violently is a narrative arc which informs many of the films I will discuss” (2010, 59). See also Lebeau (2008) on Lolita and the (filmmaker’s and spectator’s) pornographic gaze at the filmic child (108 ff). 17 It should be noted that Nabokov’s novel itself bears a certain intertextual resemblance to Don Quijote, which Nabokov was lecturing on at Harvard while he wrote Lolita, given the older male protagonists’ fanciful projection onto their unwilling female objects of desire. For more on the similarities between Humbert Humbert and Don Quijote, see Krabbenhoft (1996).

Notes to pages 180–94  219 Although he did not go so far with Torrent in his comments cited above, Sarah Wright notes that Francisco Umbral, “one of the journalists [Marisol] related [her confessionals of sexual abuse by high-ranking Francoist officials] to, cast her as Lolita to his Humbert – ‘a los doce era una adorable criatura y a los catorce una lamentable anciana’ (at twelve she was an adorable creature and at fourteen an unfortunate hag)” (Wright 2013, 60, Wright’s translation). 18 Humbert’s extended description is as follows: “Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’” (Nabokov 1991, 16). 19 The well-known speech, from Act I scene 5 of Macbeth reads (in part): “… Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. / Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers” (lines 47–55). 20 See Marsha Kinder’s seminal “The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema,” where she reads the film’s narrative as emblematic of the postFranco Oedipal narrative: “Both the incestuous and parricidal desires of the precocious child are liberated from the imaginary realm and acted out with a vengeance” (1983, 66). 21 Kinder notes that Erice and Armiñán “dramatized very concretely in El espíritu de la colmena and El amor del capitán Brando how Hollywood films and stars were culturally reinscribed by Spanish spectators living under Francoist repression” (1993, 7). 22 The second edition of Cawleti, to which the present study refers, recast this “tripartite division of characters” thus: “The townspeople hover defensively in their settlement, threatened by the outlaws or Indians who are associated with the inhospitable and uncontrollable elements of the surrounding landscape. The hero, though a friend of the townspeople, has the lawless power of movement in that he, like the savages, is a horseman and possesses skills of wilderness existence” (1984, 67). Coda   1 Simón has commented in interviews that, while the basic circumstances (of the parents’ deaths from AIDS and her adoption by her aunt and uncle in the village) are based on her life, the individual events of the film are largely fictionalized.

220  Notes to pages 195–6   2 The year 1992 was a watershed for Spain on the neoliberal globalist stage: not only was the year marked by (quite problematic) quincentenary celebrations of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, and by the signing of the Maastricht Treaty constituting the European Union (which would go into effect in 1993), it also saw Barcelona host the Summer Olympics and Seville host the six-month Expo ’92. While these events are unmentioned in the film, the context is very much present: for example, in one scene Frida wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the figure of Cobi, the Catalan sheepdog mascot of the 1992 Olympic Games.   3 For example, in an interview with Abycine (9 May 2017) where she was asked how her film overlapped with Erice’s and Saura’s, Simón replied:

Yo creo que en realidad no se le parece en nada, en el sentido de que a nivel visual son películas absolutamente distintas, a nivel de tono también, a nivel de las niñas tampoco se parece, pero sí que me inspiraron en cómo retratan la psicología de los niños, que ves que el niño puede ser inocente pero también puede tener una parte muy oscura, y creo que eso es algo que se ve bien en las dos películas y en el caso de Cría cuervos, el tema de la pérdida, también. Sobre todo, tratar al niño como alguien inteligente que tiene todo un proceso psicológico complejo como lo tiene un adulto. También hay algo que me interesaba para “Verano 1993,” que es la sutileza en el contexto: algo que es muy importante en el contexto, de lo que no se habla, pero que sí que está ahí acompañando a la historia.



(I think really they aren’t alike at all, because on a visual level they’re absolutely different films, in terms of tone as well, in terms of the girls they’re also not alike, but what did inspire me was how they portray children’s psychology, where you see that a child can be innocent but also have a very dark side, and I think that’s something you get a good sense of in both films and in the case of Cría cuervos, the theme of loss, as well. Above all, treating the child like an intelligent person who has a complex psychological process just as an adult does. There’s also something that interested me for “Verano 1993,” which is the subtlety of the context: something that’s very important in the context but that isn’t mentioned, but it is indeed there accompanying the story.) (http:// www.abycine.com/noticias/cat/noticias-blog/post/entrevista-Carla -Simon/).

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Index

abjection, 158, 167, 169, 182 Adiós, cigüeña, adiós, 204n17 adolescence, 24, 25, 146–93, 203n14, 204n17 Agamben, Giorgio, 93–4, 97 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS allegory, 8, 10, 13, 18, 19, 25, 30, 65, 105, 111, 120, 148, 153, 154, 155, 186, 192, 208n21 Almería, 185 Alterio, Héctor, 18, 69, 79, 146, 154, 166, 173, 218n12 Amenábar, Alejandro, 176 amnesia, 34, 36, 40 amor del capitán Brando, El, 24, 146–8, 150–5, 157–8, 160–8, 170–2, 184–9, 192–3, 218n11, 219n21 Ángulo, Jesús, 67, 71, 85, 92–3, 209n7, 210n11, 211n19 Antonutti, Omero, 110 Aparicio, Rafaela, 135 apertura, 30, 33, 150, 152, 205n9 Aranguren, Sonsoles, 109 Archibald, David, 39–40 Ariès, Philippe, 83, 210n15 Armendáriz, Montxo, 202n5 Armiñán, Jaime de, 9, 20, 22, 24, 146–54, 156, 158, 162, 165, 174, 176, 179, 181, 183–4, 216n2, 217n3, 217n7, 217n9, 218n12, 219n21.

See also El amor del capitán Brando; Mi querida señorita; El nido Arocena, Carmen, 70, 71, 84–5 Asignatura pendiente, 210n13 Atocha massacre, 67, 72 authoritarianism. See Francoism Avelar, Idelber, 18, 208n21, 217n6 Azcona, Rafael, 28, 204n3 Bachelard, Gaston, 55 Backman Rogers, Anna, 157, 178 Ballesteros, Isolina, 109 Balmes cinema bombing, 32 Barcelona, 32–3, 43, 59, 194, 195, 205n4, 210n13, 220n2 Bardot, Brigitte, 180 Baró, Amparo, 183 Barthes, Roland, 17 Bartolomé, Cecilia, 21 Beauvoir, Simone de, 180 Belén, Ana, 146, 150, 217n9 Benjamin, Walter, 105, 208n21 Bergson, Henri, 51–2 Berlin International Film Festival, 150, 194 Besas, Peter, 30, 151, 154, 208n20 Bhabha, Homi K., 207n14 Bollaín, Icíar, 109, 134 Bond Stockton, Kathryn, 17–18, 41, 64, 203n13

234 Index Borau, José Luis, 150, 183 Brando, Marlon, 184 Brasó, Enrique, 37 Buñuel, Luis, 30 Butler, Judith, 118–19, 144, 182 Calvo, Pablito, 9, 89, 209n4 Camada negra, 218n11 camino, El (film adaptation), 21 Canalejas, Lina, 38, 51, 206nn12–13 Cannes Film Festival, 13, 30, 33, 150 Caparrós Lera, J.M., 71 capitalism, 23, 67, 68, 72, 99–106, 197. See also child, as commodity Carrero Blanco, Luis, 29, 31, 202n4, 205n6; assassination of, 31, 202n4, 205n6 Cartwright, Lisa, 121–2, 142, 203n13 Castañeda, Claudia, 40–41, 203n13 Catholic Church, 33, 58–9, 72, 190, 198–9, 205nn3–4, 209n3 censorship, 13, 19, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29–31, 33, 67, 70, 71, 82, 108, 148, 150–1, 153–4, 167, 205n5, 209n3, 210n12, 217n5; abolition of, 82, 148, 153, 167; and El amor del capitán Brando, 150–1, 217n5; and La guerra de papá, 70; and El nido, 153–4, 167; and La prima Angélica, 28–33, 205n5, 205n8; and shooting scripts, 31, 70 Cervantes, Miguel de, 179 Chaplin, Geraldine, 13, 15 child: abuse of, 28, 36–7, 92, 102; agency of, 36, 40, 63, 102, 112, 130, 181; and animal, 66, 68, 88, 91–7, 105, 212n26; as blank slate, 68, 73–5, 83–5, 90–1; bodily difference of, 67, 68, 73, 78–80, 82, 91, 97, 105, 108, 112–13, 118, 120, 127, 144; and cinema, 121, 127, 130, 137, 160, 170, 185; as commodity,

23, 66, 68, 91, 97, 99–107, 212n28, 212n30; and death, 6–7, 58–9, 61, 83, 85, 87, 88, 195–6, 199; and disability, 36; and education, 59, 84, 90, 147, 156, 160, 162, 166, 199, 204n17, 205n4, 211n24; and emotion, 112–13, 118, 139, 214n9; and epistemology, 19, 20, 24, 27–8, 64–5, 73–4, 85–88, 95, 107, 108, 111, 119, 125–7, 132–3, 137–40, 143–5; and ethics, 24, 108, 112, 118–19, 144–5; exploitation of, 85, 97, 100–2; and futurity, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 67, 68; and gaze (at), 23, 97–9, 111, 113, 118–21, 125–30, 144, 170, 214n10, 214n12, 218n16; gaze/perspective of, 15, 84–5, 111–13, 115, 118–23, 125–30, 133, 135, 137, 139, 214nn8–11, 215n12, 216n19; identification with, 24, 27, 84–5, 108, 111–14, 118, 120–2, 125, 130, 132, 136–7, 142, 144–5, 214n9; and imagination, 13, 14, 17, 108, 109, 120–1, 137, 139, 158, 160, 166, 184, 188, 195, 199; and innocence, 4, 67, 68, 69, 73–5, 78, 80, 82–5, 91, 105, 107, 112, 119, 160, 170, 211n21, 214n9, 220n3; and knowledge (see child, epistemology); and language, 36, 66, 67, 68, 73, 77, 88–94; in memory, 14, 15, 17, 22, 26, 27, 34, 37, 39–40, 43–66; and monstrosity, 3–7; murder of, 4, 6, 7; as murderer, 3–4; nakedness of, 67, 78, 82–3, 89, 93, 98, 211n20; and non–human, 23, 67, 68, 82, 91, 93–7, 102, 105; and nostalgia, 28, 73–5; as other, 7, 9, 22, 23, 24, 40–43, 49, 63–4, 67, 68, 73–4, 88, 92, 95, 107, 111, 112, 119, 121, 214n9; of the past, 17, 22, 41–2, 55, 59, 63, 66; and performance, 68, 91–3

Index 235 (See also child, and spectacle); and politics/history, 8, 10, 12, 18, 25, 28, 56, 62, 85, 88, 90, 107, 108, 126, 140–5, 186, 198, 200, 214n10, 215n12, 215n17, 216n20, 220n3; and profanity, 72, 89, 90; and the scatological, 67, 78–80, 93–4; sexual abuse of/pedophilia, 39, 82–3, 211n20, 211n21, 218n16; and sexuality, 39–40, 73–4, 78, 80, 83, 85–7, 158, 160, 167–76, 204n17; and spectacle, 9, 23, 67, 68, 80, 99, 101–2; and subjectivity, 13, 19, 24, 25, 74–5, 85, 108, 111–12, 119–21, 134–9, 144, 158, 160, 176, 191, 214n9, 220n3; as symbol, 7, 12, 20, 80; and temporality, 11, 13–14, 19, 22, 202n8, 203n10; as witness, 9, 86–7, 90, 216n20 Cine de barrio, 66, 91, 92, 212n27, 212n31 cine de la reforma, 23, 68, 70, 209n9 cine de la ruptura, 70 Civil Guard, 4, 109, 122, 146, 154, 172, 179, 186, 190 Colmeiro, José F., 36, 208n20 Comisiones Obreras, 72, 210n14 Compitello, Malcolm Alan, 120 Communist Party, 67, 72, 210n14 constitution of 1978, 10, 22, 23, 67, 153 Coppola, Sofia, 178 coup attempt (23-F). See 23-F Cría cuervos, 12–18, 25, 173, 174, 196–200, 202n7, 203n11, 214n10, 218n14, 220n3 Creed, Barbara, 169, 183 Cuadrado, Luis, 57, 150 Cuerda, José Luis, 202n5 de la Iglesia, Eloy, 210n13 del Toro, Guillermo, 202n5 Deprisa, deprisa, 148, 216n1 desarrollismo, 70, 201n2

desencanto, 10–11 destape cinema, 67, 82, 150, 173, 211n19 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 51–4, 57, 62–4, 143, 178, 216n19; and Félix Guattari, 105 Deleyto, Celestino, 215n16 Delibes, Miguel, 21, 69, 91, 210n12, 212n25; El camino, 21; El príncipe destronado, 69, 209n10 Deveny, Thomas, 150, 151, 210n12, 210n18, 214n10, 217n5 dictatorship. See Francoism diputado, El, 210n13 D’Lugo, Marvin, 27, 29, 35, 60, 208n20, 214n10 Don Quijote, 179, 218n17 dubbing. See sound Edelman, Lee, 18 Egea, Juan, 215n16 embodiment, 26, 27, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 46, 48, 51, 55, 59, 61–4, 77, 133–4, 136, 137, 148, 151, 172, 185 Erice, Víctor, 9, 20, 22, 23, 24, 69, 107, 108, 110, 113, 119–21, 137, 142–4, 149, 155, 174, 196, 202n7, 213nn1–2, 213n4, 214n12, 219n21, 220n3. See also El espíritu de la colmena; El sur espinazo del diablo, El, 202n5 espíritu de la colmena, El, 23–24, 107–10, 113–25, 132–4, 137–40, 142–5, 156, 173, 174, 196, 202n7, 212n27, 213nn1–3, 213n5, 214n10, 214n12, 215n13, 215n17, 218n14, 219n21, 220n3 Estiu 1993, 25, 194–6, 219n1, 220nn2–3 ethics, 24, 64, 108, 112, 118–19, 122, 144–5 Evans, Peter, 213n6, 214n10 exile, 147, 151, 152, 154, 162, 166, 172, 191, 205n4, 217n4

236 Index face, 4, 6, 34–7, 39, 44, 53, 55, 61–2, 89, 95, 115, 120, 125, 127, 130, 132, 133, 137–40, 170, 190, 206n12, 215n13; facial expressions, 35, 37, 39, 43, 44, 48, 54, 55, 56, 61, 90, 139 Falange, 31, 32, 69, 205n8 Faulkner, Joanne, 73–4, 93–4 Faulkner, Sally, 69, 204n18, 215n17 Fellini, Federico, 52–3 Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 109, 147 Fernández Santos, Jesús, 142, 155 film festivals. See Berlin International Film Festival; Cannes Film Festival; Montreal Film Festival; San Sebastián Film Festival flashback, 13, 15, 22, 27, 38, 39, 44, 50, 51, 61, 206n13 Flores, Pepa. See Marisol Forqué, Verónica, 75, 86 Franco, Francisco, 11, 13, 21, 30, 31, 33, 64, 69, 70, 107, 150–1, 153–4, 166, 173, 199, 201n4, 202n4, 205n7; death of 8, 11, 13, 22, 64, 153–4, 166, 199, 201n4; illness and decline of, 12, 28, 32, 33, 150, 199 Francoism, 8, 21, 22, 27, 28–31, 34, 57, 64–5, 67, 68, 71–3, 100, 109, 143, 146–51, 153–4, 160, 167, 192, 198, 202n7, 205n6, 205n9, 208n2, 219n17, 219n21; Amnesty law 23; factions within, 29–30, 205n9; former Francoists, 70, 72; inmovilistas, 13, 29; Opus Dei technocrats, 29–30; “25 años de paz,” 69, 70, 91. See also censorship; Falange Frankenstein (1931 film), 109, 121, 123, 137–8, 174 freeze frame, 6, 139–40, 179 Freud, Sigmund, 211n22 Furtivos, 150, 183

Galán, Diego, 151–2 Gamboa, Jaime, 146, 218n11 Garci, José Luis, 210n13 García, Lolo (Víctor Manuel), 23, 66–9, 72, 73, 77, 80, 82–3, 91–4, 101–2, 208n1, 209n4, 210n12, 211n20, 212n25, 212n30 García Morales, Adelaida, 110, 120, 133, 213n4 gaze, 9, 14, 15, 43, 59, 60, 62, 84, 86, 135, 165. See also child, gaze at; child, gaze/perspective of generations/generationality, 8, 12, 51, 62, 142, 143, 28, 71, 91, 152, 199, 202n7, 204n3, 205n9, 217n9 Gimpera, Teresa, 69, 91–2, 111, 212n27 Guardia Civil. See Civil Guard Gubern, Román, 32, 150 guerra de papá, La, 23, 66–71, 75–82, 84–91, 94, 102, 209n4, 210n17, 212n24, 212n27 Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel, 148, 218n11 Hansen–Løve, Mia, 119 Haro Tecglen, Eduardo, 28, 29, 202n7, 207n17 Higonnet, Anne, 74–5, 82–3, 211n21 HIV/AIDS, 194–6, 219n1 Hogan, Erin K., 204n15, 210n16, 218n13 home/house, 13, 34, 50, 51, 75, 78, 80, 110, 140, 160, 172, 197, 199, 213n6 Hopewell, John, 31, 151, 205n4, 205n7, 208n20, 214n10 horror genre, 8, 213n1, 215n12 Humbert, Humbert (character), 180, 218n17, 219nn17–18 hybridity, 9, 23, 24, 25, 27, 41–2, 49–50, 55, 57, 63, 65, 67, 136, 147,

Index 237 148, 155, 158, 165, 167–8, 172, 176, 178, 182, 185–6, 192–3 Ibáñez Serrador, Narciso, 3, 8, 9 identification, 50, 51, 56, 166. See also child, identification with indexicality, 14, 58, 64, 82, 178 infans, 88–90, 94 Informe general, 210n13 innocence. See child, and innocence intertextuality, 18, 25, 72, 148, 166, 173, 179–85, 203n12, 209n10, 218n17 jardín de las delicias, El, 22, 26–8, 30, 34–43, 44, 50, 51, 56, 206nn12–13, 212n24 Jones, Owain, 48–50, 204n1 Jordà, Joaquim, 210n13 Joselito (José Jiménez Fernández), 9, 209n4 Juan Carlos, Prince (later, King), 29, 32, 198 Jurado Morales, José, 31–2, 205n8 Kinder, Marsha, 55, 178, 184, 214n10, 215n13, 219nn20–1 Kovacs, Katherine S., 29, 51 Kristeva, Julia, 158 Kuhn, Reinhard, 83–4 Labanyi, Jo, 19, 202n6, 215n16, 215n18 laberinto del fauno, El, 202n5, 204n15, 215n12 labour unions, 30, 33, 67, 72, 210nn13–14. See also Comisiones Obreras Labrador Méndez, Germán, 10–11, 12, 67, 68, 103, 202n4, 202nn6–7, 208n2, 213n33, 216n1 Lacan, Jacques, 14–15, 202–3n9 Lady Macbeth. See Macbeth, Lady

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, 7–8, 185 Lebeau, Vicky, 19, 87, 88, 120, 121, 213n3, 215n14, 218n16 Ledesma, Eduardo, 111–12 Lefebvre, Henri, 206n14 lengua de las mariposas, La, 202n5 Levinas, Emmanuel, 48 liminality, 9, 11, 24, 25, 146–93, 196, 198–9 Locke, John, 74 Lolita (character), 179–80, 219n17 Lolita, 179–80, 183, 218nn16–17 Lomillos, Miguel Ángel, 213n6, 214n7, 215nn15–16 López Vázquez, José Luis, 22, 26, 28, 35, 38, 39, 44, 46, 51, 59, 61, 206nn11–13, 217n9 Lury, Karen, 19, 56, 92–3, 180, 183, 213n3, 214n9, 215n14, 218n16 Maastricht Treaty, 202n4, 220n2 Macbeth, 181–3, 219n19. See also Macbeth, Lady Macbeth (character), 181–3 Macbeth, Lady, 148, 166, 169, 174, 179, 181–5, 190 Madrid, 13, 28, 32, 43, 69, 70, 72, 80, 97, 99, 103, 162, 188, 194, 197, 199, 217n4 Maravillas, 148 Marcelino, pan y vino, 89 Marías, Julián, 71, 209n10 Mariscal, Ana, 21 Marisol (Pepa Flores), 9, 149, 173, 209n4, 212n30, 218nn12–13, 219n17 Marr, Matthew J., 162, 218n15 Martel, Lucrecia, 172 Martin, Deborah, 172 Martín Ferrand, Manuel, 100, 212n29 Martin-Jones, David, 62–3, 143, 203n13, 216n19

238 Index Martínez, Guillem, 202n6 masculinity, 156, 162–3, 165, 167, 181–3, 188, 217n8 Medina, Alberto, 11–12, 202n6 melodrama, 23, 36, 68, 69, 71, 75, 209n4, 218n16 memory, 22, 26, 40, 43, 45–6, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 61, 64, 134, 216n20; of childhood (see child, in memory); postmemory, 143 Mercero, Antonio, 9, 20, 22–4, 66–77, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90–4, 101–2, 106, 107, 209nn6–7, 209n10, 210n11, 210n17, 211n19, 211n24, 212n25, 212n31. See also La guerra de papá; Tobi, el niño con alas Mi querida señorita, 149, 150, 151, 154, 217n3, 217n7, 217n9 Mira, Alberto, 20, 209n4 mirror, 40, 52–4, 62, 119, 120, 168, 182 mise-en-scène, 15, 18, 34, 39, 48, 85, 97, 99, 120, 139, 164, 187 Mitchell, Philip, 88, 210n18 Molina, Ángela, 217n9, 218n11 Molina Foix, Vicente, 138, 206n12, 213n6, 215n15 Moncloa Pacts, 67, 72 monstrous-feminine, 169, 183 Montllor, Ovidi, 183 Montreal Film Festival, 154, 174 Morán, Gregorio, 201n4, 202n6 Moreiras-Menor, Cristina, 11, 18, 20, 202n6, 204n16 music: in El amor del capitán Brando, 160; in Cría cuervos, 199; Jeanette, “Porque te vas,” 199; in El espíritu de la colmena, 122, 139; in La guerra de papá, 75, 95; in El jardín de las delicias, 34, 35, 38, 206n12; Imperio Argentina, “Recordar,” 35, 38, 206n12; in El nido, 176, 179; in La prima Angélica 38, 57, 59; in El sur, 130; in Tobi, 80, 103

Nabokov, Vladimir, 179–80, 218n17, 219n18 nido, El, 24, 146–8, 153–5, 157–8, 166–70, 172–93, 218nn11–12 niño es nuestro, El, 204n17 Noble, Fiona, 203n10 Numax presenta, 210n13 Ocaña, retrat intermitent, 210n13 orphan, 18, 194, 196, 199 Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). See Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party Pavlović, Tatjana, 34, 218n13 perception, 13–14, 44, 51, 53, 62, 85, 112, 115, 118, 121, 133, 166, 215n13. See also sensory perception Pérez Perucha, Julio, 70, 209n5 performance, 23, 26, 34–6, 38, 40, 43, 46, 50, 63, 77, 87, 91–3, 101, 102, 133, 154, 174, 183, 184 Perriam, Chris, 213n6, 214n10, 215n17 perspective, 9, 34–6, 44–5, 56, 58, 85, 99, 112–14, 118–19, 123, 125–30, 132, 136, 139, 147, 165. See also child, gaze/perspective of; pointof-view Philo, Chris, 46–7 photographs/photography, 15, 17, 52, 56, 57, 80, 82, 99, 111, 113, 130, 142, 207n18 platillo volante (Casa de Campo), 72, 102–6, 212n32 point of view, 14, 34, 35, 36, 38, 43–4, 48, 52, 59, 99, 103, 115, 120, 123, 130, 163, 165, 214n8. See also child, gaze/perspective of; perspective; shot–reverse shot Ponce, Vicente, 70, 209n5 Pons, Ventura, 210n13 Portabella, Pere, 32, 210n13

Index 239 prima Angélica, La, 22, 26–7, 28–34, 38, 41, 43–65, 71, 150, 178, 204n3, 205n5, 205n8, 206n13, 207n16, 210n11, 211n24. See also censorship príncipe destronado, El. See Delibes, Miguel Probyn, Elspeth, 42–3, 56 Prout, Ryan, 37 Querejeta, Elías, 29, 31–2, 213n4 ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?, 3–9, 201nn1–3 Randall, Mónica, 199 Randall, Rachel, 203n14 Republican. See Second Republic Resina, Joan Ramon, 202n6 Rocha, Carolina, 203n14 Ros, Xon de, 215n16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83 San Sebastián Film Festival, 70 Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, 13, 205n5, 206n13 Saura, Carlos, 9, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24–33, 34, 38, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 62, 64, 66, 69, 71, 148, 149, 150, 155, 174, 202n7, 204n3, 205n4, 206nn11–12, 207n15, 207n19, 209n6, 211n24, 214n12, 216n2, 220n3. See also Cría cuervos; Deprisa, deprisa; El jardín de las delicias; La prima angélica Second Republic, 29, 30, 69, 109, 110, 125, 133, 146, 147, 151, 166 Secretos del corazón, 202n5, 214n8, 215n12 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 162–3 Segovia, 28, 43–4, 46, 53, 56, 59, 170, 172, 185, 217n8 Seminet, Georgia, 203n14

sensory perception, 53–5, 89, 112–13, 115, 118; tactility, 77, 95, 112–13, 115 sexuality. See child, and sexuality Shakespeare, William, 181–3 shot–reverse shot, 4, 34–5, 44, 47, 95, 103, 120–3, 125, 127, 130. See also gaze; point of view Silverman, Kaja, 135–6 Simón, Carla, 25, 194–5, 219n1, 220n3 Sjogren, Britta, 136–7 Smith, Paul Julian, 69, 133, 149, 214nn11–12, 215n14, 215n16 Soja, Edward W., 23, 27, 42, 206–7n14 Song, H. Rosi, 10, 202n6, 204n2 sound, 14, 15, 43, 44–5, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57–61, 63, 75, 77, 92, 95, 115, 118, 120, 122, 132, 139, 158, 160, 167, 176, 206n11; dubbing, 15, 77, 88–9, 92, 135, 210n17; voice, 45–6, 61, 75, 77–8, 90, 92, 133–6, 142, 160, 162, 206n11, 218n13; voice-over, 14, 15, 46, 77, 125, 130, 132–7. See also music; Vilarriño, Matilde space, 15, 26, 27, 42, 43, 44, 46–51 Spanish Civil War, 8, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 43, 57, 59, 64, 69, 70, 71, 78, 90, 91, 107, 108–10, 141, 143, 146, 153, 162, 166, 187, 203nn11–12, 206n10, 209nn9–10, 215n17, 217n5, 217n9 Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), 201n4 Spirit of the Beehive, The. See El espíritu de la colmena Steinberg, Samuel, 7 Stone, Rob, 110, 214–15n12 Subirats, Eduardo, 202n6 subjectivity, 13, 17, 19, 27, 38, 42, 44–6, 49–51, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 166, 167. See also child, and subjectivity suicide, 110, 146, 154, 181, 190, 218n12 Summers, Manuel, 204n17

240 Index sur, El, 23–4, 107–10, 119–20, 125–37, 140–5, 213nn4–5 sympathy, 29, 37, 105, 111 tactile. See sensory perception Tellería, Isabel, 109 temporality, 9, 11, 12–14, 17, 19, 20–2, 27, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48–52, 54–5, 57–64, 207n15, 207n18 tercera vía, 22, 24, 149, 150, 204n18 Thau, Eric M., 174, 176, 215n12 theatricality. See performance Tobi, el niño con alas, 23, 66–8, 72, 78–80, 82, 85, 89, 90, 94–106, 210n17, 212n31 Torrent, Ana, 13, 109, 120, 146, 154–6, 172–6, 212n27, 214nn10–12, 215nn12–13, 218n12, 218n14, 219n17 trains, 114–18, 125 Transition to Democracy, 3, 7, 9, 10–12, 18–21, 22–5, 26–7, 67–70, 72, 82, 103, 107, 108, 146–54, 155, 157–8, 173, 174, 192–3, 196, 199–200, 201n4, 202n4, 208n2, 209n5, 212n33, 216n1, 218n13 trauma, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 36, 40, 44, 61, 78, 109, 137, 151, 214n9, 215n17 Triana-Toribio, Nuria, 70 Turner, Victor, 148, 156–7, 161 23-F (coup attempt), 10, 148, 154 Umbral, Francisco, 214n12, 219n17 Unamuno, Miguel de, 111 Unión del Centro Democrático (UCD), 70 unions. See labour unions Uribe, Imanol, 202n5

Vajda, Ladislao, 89 Valcárcel, Horacio, 72 Valverde, Fernando, 86 ¡Vámonos, Bárbara!, 21 van Gennep, Arnold, 148, 156–7 ventriloquism, 46, 77, 133, 204n15, 210n16 Verano 1993. See Estiu 1993 Vernon, Kathleen M., 38, 208n20 viaje de Carol, El, 202n5 Vilarós, Teresa M., 10, 11, 202n4, 202n6, 203n12, 218n13 Vilarriño, Matilde, 77, 89, 210n17. See also sound, dubbing violent past, 8, 10, 11, 18, 23, 27, 28, 62, 64–5, 69, 91, 140–5, 146, 153, 195, 199, 217n9 Virgin Suicides, The, 178 voice. See sound voice-over. See sound western (film genre), 160, 184–8, 219n22 Whittaker, Tom, 28, 35, 135, 206n11, 216n1 Wild West, 148, 156, 158, 161, 184–7, 219n22 Willem, Linda, 205n3, 215n16 Wilson, Emma, 19, 36, 112, 118–19, 144 Wright, Sarah, 7, 20, 68, 72, 77, 80, 82, 91, 135, 143, 173, 211n20, 212n30, 213n1, 214n9, 214n11, 215n12, 215n14, 216n20, 218nn12–13, 219n17 Zunzunegui, Santos, 215n16

TORONTO IBERIC Co-editors: Robert Davidson (Toronto) and Frederick A. de Armas (Chicago) Editorial board: Josiah Blackmore (Harvard); Marina Brownlee (Princeton); Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley); Justin Crumbaugh (Mt Holyoke); Emily Francomano (Georgetown); Jordana Mendelson (NYU); Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford); Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomás (U Michigan); Kathleen Vernon (SUNY Stony Brook)   1 Anthony J. Cascardi, Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics   2 Jessica A. Boon, The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Method   3 Susan Byrne, Law and History in Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”   4 Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas (eds), Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain   5 Nil Santiáñez, Topographies of Fascism: Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain   6 Nelson Orringer, Lorca in Tune with Falla: Literary and Musical Interludes   7 Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-Century Spain   8 Javier Irigoyen-García, The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain   9 Stephanie Sieburth, Survival Songs: Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror 10 Christine Arkinstall, Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879–1926 11 Margaret Boyle, Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain 12 Evelina Gužauskytė, Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the diarios of the Four Voyages (1492–1504): A Discourse of Negotiation 13 Mary E. Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe 14 William Viestenz, By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination 15 Michael Scham, Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes 16 Stephen Rupp, Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War 17 Enrique Fernandez, Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain

18 Susan Byrne, Ficino in Spain 19 Patricia M. Keller, Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture 20 Carolyn A. Nadeau, Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain 21 Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain 22 Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain 23 Ryan D. Giles, Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature 24 Jorge Pérez, Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain’s Development Years, 1960–1975 25 Joan Ramon Resina, Josep Pla: Seeing the World in the Form of Articles 26 Javier Irigoyen-García, “Moors Dressed as Moors”: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia 27 Jean Dangler, Edging towards Iberia 28 Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal (eds), Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 29 Silvia Bermúdez, Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music 30 Hilaire Kallendorf, Ambiguous Antidotes: Virtue as Vaccine for Vice in Early Modern Spain 31 Leslie Harkema, Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura 32 Benjamin Fraser, Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference 33 Robert Patrick Newcomb, Iberianism and Crisis: Spain and Portugal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 34 Sara J. Brenneis, Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940–2015 35 Silvia Bermúdez and Roberta Johnson (eds), A New History of Iberian Feminisms 36 Steven Wagschal, Minding Animals In the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis 37 Heather Bamford, Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 38 Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomás (ed), Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain 39 Marina Brownlee (ed), Cervantes’ “Persiles” and the Travails of Romance 40 Sarah Thomas, Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition