ABSTRACT
Children, so the dictum goes, should be seen and not heard; but the problem with rendering them mute witnesses is that the adult world forgets they are there, watching. Perhaps for that reason Spanish film-makers have frequently couched their dissidence through the alternative viewpoint of children, often ignored and frequently frightened, but always observing, always questioning and aware. Far from wallowing in Hollywood-style condescension and sentiment, the four films that are discussed in this chapter have shown how the natural wonderment of childhood was transformed into a distressful fear of the unknown and the unknowable: a parent’s past and a child’s own future. Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) relates the trauma of a childhood in post-Civil War Spain – the vulnerability of little Ana, growing up on the losing side in a world in which communication is impossible; while the same director’s El sur (The South, 1983) continues the theme into adolescence, with the 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. But there is also evidence of hope for the future in Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1975), which follows the child through the political transition of the 1970s, and especially in Montxo Armendáriz’s Secretos del corazón (Secrets of the Heart, 1997), in which a nostalgic view of childhood in the 1960s identifies an optimism that was ignored by adults, but which came to define the generation that would be responsible for reconstructing Spain in the 1980s.
