ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the place of radical politics as part of an imaginary of the past absorbed and repurposed by a contemporary middlebrow cinema. Radical politics is an inherently international theme shaped by local histories. Salvador is representative of the political turn in a European heritage cinema largely identified with a middlebrow aesthetic. The phrase ‘cinema of consensus’ is apposite in the context of modern Spanish cinema, which, in some ways not unlike post-Wende Germany, has been marked by the need to confront the legacy of a traumatic totalitarian past and the effects of full if uneven assimilation into global Western capitalism. Salvador deals with a traumatic episode of the national past within the accessible structures of the biographical docudrama. The film covers these historical facts through a linear narrative focused on its hero’s plight during the short period between his detention in September 1973 and his execution on 2 March 1974.
