“You are the Ones who Have no Memory!”

Mercedes Álvarez and Víctor Erice's Autofictional Cinema in Times of Crisis

Abstract

This article explores two autofictional films that reflect upon the ongoing Iberian crisis and its interconnections with the alleged decline of personal memory. First, Víctor Erice’s Cristales rotos (2012) and Mercedes Álvarez’s Mercado de futuros (2011) are placed within the category of autofictional cinema produced from Spain in times of crisis. Grounded in a widespread sentiment of uncertainty, these films illuminate the impossibility of documenting absolute origins, be it the origins of capitalism as it was lived by the first working class, or the origins of the current financial recession. While both autofictions are self-referential films that point at their own fictional ways of writing, they remind the viewer not only of their status as text, or art, but also of the need to move beyond the text, notably, when they call out for practices of counter-memory of the crisis that have to do with the creative appropriation of space by citizens. Ultimately, the full memorializing power of Cristales rotos and Mercado de futuros lies in the original modes of artistic and social resistance that they not only document, but also at times enact, within the context of the Iberian crisis.