Autofictions Faced

Intimacy against History in Current Spanish Cinema

Abstract

For several years now, Spain has witnessed a veritable explosion of products that rescue the country’s history from the realm of memory. The relationship between historical and personal memory is a fraught one. Historians, narratologists and even neurobiologists are discussing the best way to access the traumatic past composed of events like the Civil War or the subsequent Franco dictatorship. This inflation of titles is the result both of an interest in recovering the memory of the increasingly older survivors, and of a legitimate attempt to rewrite chapters that some wanted closed forever, if not outright forgotten. Making its own the ethical imperative of unstinting search as a means of self-exploration, this article will analyze different documentaries that undertake this recovery of the past from the personal and intimate realm. This article studies some of the strategies used to set the scene in the following works: Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo (2017), El muro de los olvidados (2008), Retrato (2005), Nadar (2008), Pepe el andaluz (2012), Soldados anónimos (2009), Los materiales (2010) o Dime quién era Sanchicorrota (2010). Its aim is to sketch an overview of the different approaches to this traumatic past of current productions that may be analyzed from a post-memory perspective. This will enable reflection on the processes of mediatization of the past, which is always affected by the rigors and inaccuracies of personal memory and by the filter imposed by the cinematic medium.