De aquí­ a allá, de ayer a hoy: posmemoria y cine documental en la España y Argentina contemporáneas

Abstract

Both in Spanish as in Argentina, there are several films that have tried to give an overview of what happened during the Civil War and the Franco’s regime and, in the case of the Latin American country, during the military dictatorship headed by Jorge Rafael Videla. Within this small group of films in the last decade there has been a not inconsiderable number of documentary films (Nadar, Entre el dictador y yo, Muerte en El Valle, El muro de los olvidados, Cosas raras que pasaban entonces, Pepe el andaluz or Tierra encima, in Spain or Los Rubios, M, En memoria de los pájaros, Encontrando a Ví­ctor, Papá Iván, or La fe del volcán, in Argentina) signed by the next or subsequent generation to those who were victims of torture, exile, repression or murder imposed by the two totalitarian regimes. They are, in all cases, young filmmakers and videographers who come to a past they do not remember but which they need to ask in order to define themselves as political subjects. The present paper pretends to dive into two cinematic corpus forged in countries geographically distant but made under a very similar look: that which is thrown from the ‘postmemory’, that is, from a generation gap regarding historical facts evoked that provides these tapes a voice politically critical but no less intimate and autobiographical than it can bear the survivor or the direct witness of the events. The ultimate purpose of our analysis is to be able to explain the points of convergence and divergence between a set of documentary productions that not only advocates for the transmission of memory between generations, but also implies the presence, for their idiosyncrasies, of gaps, silences, recreations and invented stories.