ABSTRACT
The memory boom that characterized the first years of the twenty-first century in Spain, known as the recovery of historical memory, has generated a significant film production. Since 2000, the cinema of memory has attempted to recover the realities of the Civil War and the Francoist repression traditionally obscured, neglected, or denied by historiography, political discourse, and the mass media. The drive to reveal forgotten episodes of the past has fueled a form of cinematic historical fiction that attempts to break with the pact of silence, also known as oblivion of the past or refusal to let the past determine the future. Although the idea of the pact of silence has been nuanced and even criticized by some authors (Juliá 1999, 11-54), an all-too-facile use of the phrase has led people to think that society did not engage with the violence of the Civil War and Francoism at all during the first years of democracy. In addition to this drive to remember, which was codified in the Law of Historical Memory of 2007, producers and directors have received external incentives as well, particularly during the Zapatero years (2004-2011). These incentives encouraged filmmakers to pursue “quality projects,” such as Civil War historical dramas, that were appealing to government-funding bodies invested in the recovery of historical memory (Triana-Toribio 2014, 69).1 In this context, much of the recent film production can be described as “realist,” i.e., grounded on a largely realist mode of representation that, as Jo Labanyi has rightly argued, compulsively reenacts the trauma of the past (Labanyi 2007b, 439). Based on the assumption that the past can be unproblematically recovered, realism has, however, proven itself to be unable to provide acceptable aesthetic solutions, resulting in a sort of narrative fatigue. In this essay, I would like to argue that there is not one, but two consolidated trends of historical cinema in the twenty-first century. Together with realist movies, a number of recent fiction films offer markedly different representations of the past grounded on experimental aesthetics. Rejecting the most commonly used type of representation, these alternative historical films rehearse innovative “anti-realist” narrative strategies. If the first trend that we associate with mainstream historical fiction is anchored on verisimilitude as appearance or semblance of truth, the second represents the voices of its discontents.
