1.

The shift away from fixed sites of memory to memory’s cultural dynamics allows theorists of ‘postmemory’ (Marianne Hirsch), ‘prosthetic memory’ (Alison Landsberg), ‘the locatedness of memories’ (Susannah Radstone) and ‘multidirectional memory’ (Michael Rothberg) to stress the importance of remembering traumatic histories across cultural boundaries.Reference Rothberg¹ As Andreas Huyssen describes, the Holocaust, for example, guided ‘us to read other texts, other histories.’Reference Huyssen²

Memory Studies acknowledges the hierarchy of history over memory. As an intellectual/analytical/critical discourse, the first ‘belongs to everyone and to no one’.Reference Nora³ Memory, on the other hand, is sectorial – the channel for ethnic minorities, families and groups with reserves of memory but little or no historic capital. The hegemony of history is intersected by sectorial memories’ links to life – as transformative, emotional social practices, sensitive to dialectics of remembrance, forgetting and appropriation. This distinction allows the field of memory to accommodate testimonial and fictional reappraisals of the past, since memories are rooted in individuals’ emotional and bodily materiality. Also relevant to this article is Rothberg’s vision of memory as a multidirectional/heterogeneous series of interventions through which social actors bring multiple traumatic pasts from different cultural positions, thus, dissolving the boundaries between memory and identity – what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be an adaptation from ‘a history that initially might seem foreign’ (Ref. Reference Rothberg1, Rothberg, p. 5).

2.

Analysing the documentaries Els nens perduts del franquism (The Lost Children of Francoism) and Les fosses del silenci (The Spanish Holocaust) (Montse Armengou Martín and Ricard Belis, 2002 and 2003 respectively) on Spanish grassroots movements’ appeals to unearth mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (SCW), Sebastiaan Faber cites the emotionally charged remarks of an interviewee:

The woman’s dramatic plea to remember Spain’s traumatic past stands in stark contrast with the Transition’s self-righteous culture of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of pleasure’,Reference Smith⁵ shaped not only by the unmistakable management of the former state apparatus. Thompson describes it as an ‘implicit and problematic oblivion ergoutopia scenario’,Reference Thompson⁶ to which Jo Labanyi would add the Socialists’ international marketing campaign for a new Spanish identity – for example, Pedro Almodóvar’s promotion of Spain ‘as a young, brash, ultramodern nation that outdid its European neighbours in its iconoclasm’.Reference Labanyi⁷

This article examines the re-elaboration of memories concerning the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Franco regime (1939–1975) and the Transition to democracy. I identify the current intersecting memory war as a crucial mark of Post-Transitional Spain. Not by coincidence, this period stems from the belated high visibility of multi-sectorial memories concerning the country’s past and present, the creation of the Association of Recuperation of Historical Memory (2001) and the Law of the Recuperation of Historical Memory (52/2007) regarding the rehabilitation of those who suffered persecution or violence during the SCW and the dictatorship. The latter was initiated by Judge Baltasar Garzón, but fuelled by the strong support of public mobilisations and an impressive interdisciplinary and multisectorial body of testimonies, memory studies, documentaries and fictional re-elaborations of the past exhibitions, legal, forensic and archival inquires, along with other cultural/political manifestations and human rights activism emanating from the civil society. Post-Transitional Spain became an unyielding flow whose breaking point was the 15 May 2011 multidirectional and trans-generational movements of the civil society, known as the M-15 (‘the indignados’). Its protagonists were reacting (and indeed continue to react) not only to the draconian austerity plans demanded by the European Union and the current severe economic/financial crisis, but also to the declining legitimacy of democratic institutions and the Monarchy, government corruption, and autonomic claims for independence.

According to Paloma Aguilar, the ‘history as magistra vita’ approach was fundamental to the Transition’s strategy for quelling fears of radicalisation.Reference Aguilar⁸ Its major lesson, again, as during Francoism, turned the Second Republic into a negative model for peaceful transition. An article in El País (12/4/1990) describes the events between 1975 and 1982 as heavily conditioned by the perception of the errors, omission and excess ‘during the period between 1931 and 1936’ (Ref. Reference Aguilar8, p. 151). Thirty-nine years after Franco’s death, Spain finds itself evaluating the fallouts of re-democratisation, its integration to the EU, the euphoric high-end consumption of the free-market economic boom of the 1990s, as well as the current excruciating social costs of its neoliberal policies with alarming rates of unemployment and fading State-support for the elderly, the disabled and the younger generations. Moreover, Spain contends with the bitter aftertaste of the Transition’s ‘pact of silence’,Reference de Diego⁹ which granted immunity for political crimes committed by Franco’s fascist rebellion and dictatorship.

The deceiving reconciliatory pact of the Transition and its 1977 Amnesty Law (10/77) managed to achieve a political consensus to bypass the extra-juridical status of the Franco rebellion and the dictatorship’s criminality by creating, Aguilar explains, a complex ‘general sense of collective guilt’ (Ref. Reference Aguilar8, p. 150). Only recently (in 2012) was the law repealed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for its complete lack of compliance with international laws. While the law was in effect, the general consensus was ‘forgetting the resentment of the past’, avoiding it at all costs in order to build a future of democratic harmony projected to EU audiences as an exemplary model of political transition. Nonetheless, following rhetorical models, forgetting political crimes, violations of civil/human rights and the victims thereof does not seem to bode well with Latin American filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

3.

Released during the height of the Transition, Del Toro’s films closely follow children who fight an atrocious war for life – not merely to survive, but to show an alternative memory. Focusing on the locatedness of memory (memory-versions placed in different cultural contexts), this article analyses the ways in which Spanish films are in dialogue with The Devil’s Backbone (2001, Devil) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Pan) in addressing a major event in European history: the SCW. As I will illustrate, Del Toro’s films not only depict sectorial memories rooted in ‘otherlands’, but also constitute blurred transnational borders of memory-emotional involvement with victims. I analyse his films as the interventions of a social actor who actively participates in and contributes to the ongoing construction of Spanish Post-Transitional memory-culture.

One of the most powerful features of Del Toro’s memory of the SCW is the need to reclaim and to recuperate the feeling of the dramatic pain emerging from the long-felt traumatic wounds of the SCW and Francoism, coupled with the fresh wounds opened by the Transition’s Amnesty Law. This combines with the compelling status of the transformative power (agency) conveyed by Del Toro’s protagonists, steadfastly committed to memory, truth and justice – three civil/human rights still denied to the victims (and their relatives) not just by Franco’s dictatorship, but also by the Transition’s politics of oblivion.

Francoist and transitional films represent Republicans through defeated, powerless elderly male figures; mothers are either neglectful, sedated, (un)dead or agonising, withdrawn parental figures. Whispering and tremulous children are helpless and uncared-for orphans. In Pim, Pam, Pum (Pedro Olea 1975), the Republican father is a disabled old man confined to his bed, as is the paralysed grandfather in Secrets of the Heart (Montxo Armendáriz 1997, Secrets). In Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Spirit), the father (Fernán Gómez) reacts to the retributive violence of the first post-SCW phase by retreating in silence. As for the children, in José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly (1999), Moncho (Manuel Lozano) betrays his much beloved Republican teacher/father-figure who is taken by the National Army to become another SCW ‘disappeared’. The boy will ultimately give in to the massive recruitment of Franco’s politics of forced amnesia. The same can be said of Ana (Ana Torrent) in Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976). The young girl remains silent as to her mother’s painful agony and unbearable secrets; she contends with the appearances of her mother’s ghost, tries to poison her aunt, and even attempts suicide. Nonetheless, Ana leaves the pains of the past untouched when she escapes, as Labanyi suggests, to a ‘sunny, modern outside world leaving the past behind’ (Ref. Reference Labanyi7, p. 98). Hence, trauma finds its cure in the ‘happy ending’ of modernisation (Ref. Reference Labanyi7, p. 98). The claustrophobic first-Francoist Spain/Ana’s house is then re-shaped by a modern late-Francoist Spain, geared up to forget the traumatic memories of agonising mothers: where Ana flees might be modern, but it will also be amnesic, like the Transition.

In Secrets, Javi (Andoni Erburu) returns to his family home and senses the scattered traces of his father who died in questionable circumstances. His brother assures him that he can hear the secrets of the dead, and thus to hear those of his father, he must search for them ‘on the sofa where our father died’. Javi sits on the sofa – still imprinted with the contour of his father’s body – and his body coalesces with that of his father. Skin with skin, the father’s secrets are transferred to the son to reveal the family’s obscure web of impunity, entrenched within the Francoist culture of concealment. The film underscores the naturalisation of the new Spanish family, rebuilt through the disappearance/oblivion of the victims. However, what history cannot alter, memory can. Javi (and the audience) is left with onerous emotions: although forced into oblivion, his family (and national) secrets will remain in the heart forever. Released two decades into the Transition (1997), Secrets of the Heart refers to Francoist politics of impunity, but also addresses the Transition’s amnesic memory while claiming both bodies and emotions as unambiguous archives of the victims’ pain.

4.

Del Toro’s Devil achieves the same piercing resonance of Secrets’ double chronological reading. Nearing the victory of the Fascist insurrection, Devil’s Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives at an orphanage of Republican children who will soon be deprived of all living caregivers as the SCW enters the Santa Cecilia Orphanage. Before long, he is haunted by the ghost of Santi (Junio Valverde), an orphan who was killed and forgotten. Carlos manoeuvres between distancing himself from his disintegrating corpse and listening to the calls for justice of an unknown, unclaimed other.

The victim’s disregarded memory/emotions are ultimately transferred to Carlos when he sleeps in Santi’s bed, touches drops of his blood with his fingers and enters the water tank that contains the spectre’s undead-cadaver. As in Secrets’ transference from father to son, he who is touched also touches. The victim manages – physically and emotionally – to touch Carlos, thereby transforming his body from a passive recipient into one whose memory and emotions adopt an otherness that will eventually be multiplied, as more children are killed by perpetrators linked to the executions of Republicans. But what the orphans do with Santi’s and the new victims’ pain is what makes Devil an alternative memory to a number of Francoist and post-Francoist films: embracing the victims’ human rights, Carlos leads the orphans to seek justice despite knowingly exposing themselves to execution. One of the film’s emotional markers is a disturbing camera-panning of a dark, macabre room filled with hanging knifes, scissors, and countless piercing metallic tools – all instruments belonging to a torture chamber. In Pan, similar instruments are viciously exhibited, one by one, by the stepfather of young Ofelia (Ivana Vaquero), Capitan Vidal (Sergi López), to a soon-to-be-tortured Spanish Maquis. Violence surrounds Del Toro’s children as it blurs all borders that separate the outside from the inside.

In their commitment to the radical others, Del Toro’s orphans are not alone but well accompanied by other brave children, such as Imanol Uribe’s Tomiche (Juan José Ballestra) in Carol’s Journey (2002), an orphan of a Republican who is murdered by police while trying to protect a refugee. As for Carlos in Devil and Ana (Ana Torrent), the little girl and protagonist in Spirit, Thompson argues that they not only seek out ghosts or monsters/Maquis, but they actively invoke them and even become their accomplices. They do this not without navigating the intense emotional risks in memories initially foreign to them, never hesitating to embrace death-defying missions that would be hazardous even for adults. Pan’s courageous Ofelia does not stay behind either: a child who ‘gets down and dirty’ with sneaky fauns and monsters defies ‘a deeply disturbing, unreadable world’Reference Clark and McDonald¹⁰ where she confronts a dreadful Saturn-Pale Man who, like the war in which she finds herself, voraciously devours children leaving behind carefully placed piles of shoes, which take the audience back to the most iconic image of European history’s transnational memory – the piles of clothes and shoes left behind by the victims of the Holocaust.

In order to save their own lives, the Devil’s orphans execute bloodthirsty perpetrators with unrepentant brutality. Violence shown throughout persistent cinematic flashbacks and close-ups – at its extremes, with blood-soaked, dying bodies – is Del Toro’s aesthetic commitment to the physicality of the wounded body and the disturbing nature of the legal claims of those who are suffering. Killing is a nefarious act, but it is particularly disquieting when performed by children. Thus, I view Del Toro’s aesthetic violence as a solid commitment to regain the circulation of pathos and emotions, thereby allowing the audience to be emotionally moved by the materiality of violence.

What Del Toro’s characters do with the wounded memory-body of the victim makes us search for alternative meanings. In Devil, the orphans work courageously to draw attention to legal issues fundamental to human rights: victims’ rights to truth and justice, and citizens’ rights to fight for unclaimed victims and to struggle for preventive laws against further victimisation. By endorsing the ius natural (natural rights unaccounted for by the order of law), the orphans’ actions also rebel against the extra-judicial nature of a soon-to-be-implemented state of exception (Franco’s dictatorship). Their choice is a political one. They are driven by the rights to resistance/civil disobedience while their defensive-offensive justice compensates for the impunity not only of Francoism, but also of the Transition, as neither judiciary system will provide justice for the victims. In this way, the film addresses the always conflictive and asymmetrical relationship between natural rights and the order of the law – between law and justice, the law of the conquerors and the right to resistance – an agency that takes the orphans to unchartered territories and exposes them to extreme violence. As Pan’s faun warns Ofelia: ‘You are going to a very dangerous place, so be careful. The thing that slumbers there it is not human’.

5.

Devil’s children kill with their own hands in order to save their lives while remaining loyal to the unclaimed victims in a way that is not paralleled in films on the topic. And through it all, Del Toro actively illustrates the brutal and uneven disproportion between the forces involved: ferocious criminals committed to exterminating the nascent generation of the Second Republic. Because wartime children are bare and exposed, the violence in Del Toro’s films is both visual and highly dramatic, hitting the audience with extremely graphic close-ups of mangled and mutilated bodies, as in the case of Pan. Just before commencing an amputation procedure, the doctor explains to a wounded French Maquis: ‘I will try to [amputate] in as few cuts as possible’. This is followed by a close-up of a hacksaw cutting into the man’s flesh. Another highly graphic scene depicts Ofelia’s stepfather, the Falangist Captain, killing a suspect by using a broken glass to stab his eye sockets and slash his face and throat. The audience is not the only witness to this savage cruelty: what matters here is that a nine-year-old child is surrounded by this extreme violence. Violence takes a more gruesome turn when children are involved – and at war, they all are. And in Devil, children not only die before their time, but they do so with shattered bodies. Del Toro’s aesthetic violence may very well be the only way to represent such pain, which belongs to all of us.

A number of Spanish films from this period depict children alternating between infantile games, storytelling, school and household routines, caressing pets and wandering around the countryside until, at same point, their whereabouts is intersected by the horrors of the SCW. In these cases, the war acts as a lurking background. But Del Toro’s children are wholly placed at the centre of a battlefield. They are spoils of war, as were the ‘stolen lives’ of the children of Republicans who during the regime suffered kidnaping and illegal adoption. As with them, the orphans must be broken in order to recruit Franco’s future generations. In Pan, Del Toro carefully places young Ofelia in 1944 at a Northern Spanish military camp set to eliminate the Maquis still fighting the dictatorship, as the SCW and Antifascist resistance had not yet ceased in that region at that time. That is, war is not a background in Pan, but rather an appalling battlefield in which Ofelia is an active participant.

Likewise, in Devil, the orphans become an improvised army of Republican children fighting to keep themselves alive in the long-lasting night that is Fascist Spain. Thus, Del Toro’s children are not simply bystanders to combat. When confronting the predators, they become a sort of guerrilla: they may have entered into combat by a sinister chance but before long they become well aware of whom to side with. According to Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, in victimology the victim appears ‘as an idealized and inoffensive social entity whose peaceful agency is suddenly constrained by hostile, powerful “evil” forces’.Reference Gómez López-Quiñones¹¹ Far from being diminished individuals, Devil’s children are neither inert nor innocent, but rather struggle for life with a resourcefulness that parallels that of an effectual fighting force. It may be said that Del Toro risks alienating an audience who will be challenged by the orphans’ startling strength, but nonetheless he portrays his fighters as overcoming their assailants with strong-minded violence.

6.

Imanol Zumalde Arregui sees Del Toro’s violence as ‘a powerful commercial claim’, a ‘crudeness close to exhibitionism’, where ‘the haemoglobin flows generously’.Reference Zumalde Arregui¹² But if his aesthetic of violence is seen as pure excess, perhaps it may be because the critic has in mind representations of the past that bypass the physicality of violence, due to the political sensitivity of the issues at hand and/or the Transition’s Strategic obliteration of the materiality of the victims’ bodies. However, pains are eminently physical and wounds are inescapably material.

How is violence portrayed in other films on the topic? Butterfly, for instance, spares the audience the teacher’s horrendous ordeal, thus concealing the torments of the victim’s bio-political body. This parallels Spirit’s dark reality of pain and fear described by Salvador Díaz Coria Aguilar as ‘never exposed but suggested’.Reference Díaz Coria Aguilar¹³ Jan Baetens addresses similar erasure in Spirit, as reflected in how the film Frankenstein is shown: ‘only snippets of the film and the crucial scene of the killing of the girl remain absent’.Reference Baetens¹⁴ Again, in Carol, the shooting of Tomiche is another covered up ‘crucial scene’. Labanyi would add to this list several Post-Francoist films such as Jaime Chávarri’s Bicycles Are for the Summer (1984), Saura’s ¡Ay Carmela! (1990), Vicente Aranda’s Anarchist Women (1995) and Armendáriz’s Broken Silence (2000), which adopt a sanitised and nostalgic version of memory, and are more interested in displaying a meticulous attention to period costume and décor. This particular gestalt impedes the audience to experience a deeper contact with violence. Furthermore, in discussing Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamina (2001), Labanyi points out the film’s movement away from tackling the political crimes of the Falangist co-founder Rafael Sánchez Mazas, ‘veering off into an exploration’ of an unsung compassionate Republican (Ref. Reference Labanyi7, p. 105). Zumalde Arregui comments as well that You’re the One (José Luis Garci, 2000) and Spirit resort to ‘parabolic tactics’ when portraying the retributive violence of early Francoism: the films gloss over the punitive debts of the Regime, shying away from the depiction of violence.

Released throughout a fairly extensive and politically critical period (1984–2001), these films do not seem to revise the Transition’s closed-eyed approach to the violence of war. Labanyi finds it understandable after 40 years of censorship, but underscores the importance of capturing the resistances to narrativisation so that representations of the past can convey the emotional charges emerging from the past.

Not coincidentally, the critic stresses Spirit’s and Devil’s debts to the horror genre: because ‘they acknowledge the horror – that is, the “unspeakable”’, both are more successful in dealing with a traumatic past. In my view, Del Toro’s resistance to narrativisation is put to work for the bodies of the unclaimed victims beyond marketing strategies and negotiations. Del Toro’s ‘excessive’ memory-version may indeed be seen as anchored in some otherlands of memory, but it also dwells at the very edge of Post-Transitional Spain as a form of resistance to continuing Francoist and Post-Francoist reappraisals of the past.

While Zumalde Arregui acknowledges Pan – Mexico’s official entry to the 2007 Oscars – as ‘acquainted with certain Spanish cinematographic traditions’ (Ref. Reference Zumalde Arregui12, p. 197), he also points out its asymmetries with iconic films such as Spirit, thereby inviting us to note the revealing effects of the materiality from which this Mexican–US and Spanish production emerges: the hybrid space of the transnational film industry. The author also outlines the film’s transgression toward history by stating that its memory-formation constitutes a manoeuvre parallel to that of the Revisionists, who deny Francoism’s political accountability. In Pan, Del Toro goes to the extreme of extolling and magnifying the Republican lost cause by conferring the euphoric triumph of the Spanish Maquis, squashing their captain like an example of vermin. Such fictional episodes, unknown to history, represent a fragrant deformation that goes against documentary facts. Zumalde Arregui talks about history and not about memory. At the same time, he seems to view national borders in cinematic and memory discourse. This causes me to turn to Ofelia Ferrán’s comments about memory practices ‘as working against or even displacing those of another: failing to understand how they are often irremediably entangled’Reference Ferrán¹⁵ means failing to appreciate how, in different and complementary ways, otherland memories participate in the reconstruction of historical tragedies that concern all of us.

Relevant to this discussion is María de la Cinta Ramblando Minero’s extraordinary study of the Spanish Maquis (1937–1948),Reference Ramblando Minero¹⁶ represented as ferocious sociopaths by Francoist propaganda films such as Peace Never Begins (León Klimovsky, 1957). Post-dictatorship films such as Pim, Pam, Pum… Fire! (Pedro Olea, 1975) portrayed the unavoidable fate awaiting them, before a vindicating cinematography – from The Days of the Past (Camus, 1978) to Broken Silence (Armendáriz, 2001) – began to give the Maquis a voice. Nonetheless, as Merino argues, this voice did not go much further than stressing ‘the difficult survival of the defeated’ (Ref. Reference Ramblando Minero16, p. 191). They are a cut-off presence somewhere in the forest, marked by an inescapable destiny of oblivion, death and faceless corpses.

In The Days of the Past, a rural town woman, Amalia (Sonsoles Benedicto) identifies the Maquis as ‘those who are still at war’. The focus on them underscores the human right to resistance as the group continued to fight against European Fascism; for them, the war was not over. What surprises Ramblando Minero is that, re-released the year of the creation of the Association of Historical Memory (2001), Broken Silence bears a striking resemblance to The Days of the Past (1977) and Alfons Cervera’s Maquis (1996). This shows the Transition, not as a rupture with the previous regime, but rather as its evolution: there are no new angles for this powerful landmark of international antifascism – only a subtle re-vindication. Ramblando Minero stresses the need ‘to recuperate [its] presence in history/cultural representations’: ‘[the Spanish Maquis] are still there, as witness and protagonist of the past’ (Ref. Reference Ramblando Minero16, p. 196). Del Toro seems to agree: in Pan they are very much alive, as much as his other daring protagonists are, and embarked on a dangerous quest of never forgetting.

7. Conclusions

Reworking multidirectional memories of the SCW, Francoism and the Transition, Del Toro’s films migrate to others’ memories/bodies, and thus transcend national borders by joining Post-Transitional social forces against the past and present politics of impunity. Watching Devil back in 2001, against the backdrop of the reassurance brought on by access to both the neoliberal global economy and the EU, the viewer must have thought twice. The images of still-agonising bodies penetrate our skin: where is this memory coming from? And where should its claims/pains be placed once they have entered our skin/memory?

I will conclude by remembering that the Devil’s Carlos chooses to catch a runaway drop of the victim’s blood with his finger, as Ana in Spirit chooses to touch the fresh blood of the refugee just killed by Franco’s repression. With such actions, Del Toro’s protagonists adopt the victim’s memory in an unforgettable and cherished alliance. They both chose to inherit memories that are no longer foreign.