Quarterly Review of Film and Video Witness to War
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This article was downloaded by: [Heriot-Watt University] On: 30 December 2014, At: 06:38 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Quarterly Review of Film and Video Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gqrf20 Witness to War: Virginal Vicissitudes in Vicente Aranda's Libertarias (1996) Maria Van Liew a a West Chester University , Pennsylvania Published online: 02 Jun 2008. To cite this article: Maria Van Liew (2008) Witness to War: Virginal Vicissitudes in Vicente Aranda's Libertarias (1996), Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 25:3, 230-240, DOI: 10.1080/10509200601091508 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509200601091508 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 25: 230–240, 2008 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online DOI: 10.1080/10509200601091508 Witness to War: Virginal Vicissitudes in Vicente Aranda’s Libertarias (1996) MARIA VAN LIEW “Accepting a priori the assumption that women are best thought of as victims in any nationalist mobilization that has turned violent dulls the analytical curiosity. Ultimately, this dulled curiosity produces explanations that are naive in their descriptions of power and camouflage men as ungendered actors.” (Cynthia Enloe, 53). It is unlikely that the spectator of Vicente Aranda’s fictional reenactment of women’s active participation during the Spanish Civil War, Libertarias (1996), knows much about the conflict. Nonetheless, this film establishes a link between the spectator and the narrative witness as a means of engaging two historical points of discursive departure that bridge nearly sixty years of dictatorship and democratic recovery. The accountability of a diegetic witness and the contemporary spectator is established through the shared coordinates of witnessing a wartime shift in women’s social status, most notably among the Popular Front armies. Until the fall of General Franco’s regime in 1975, Spain’s counter-memories of the war had been censored, explored in exile, or interwoven into metaphorical allusion. Upon the outbreak of democracy, fictional women gained an increasingly significant role in dissident literary and film representations of collective and individual memories of the war and its aftermath. Most notably, images of a woman’s capacity for violence emerged as representative of the contradictions of the early democratic period and its relationship to changing notions of gender. By the 1980s, images of the modern Spanish woman were welcomed by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party’s campaign (1982–1996) to promote a European image welcoming an interplay of generic styles catering to the assumed universality of a female capacity Downloaded by [Heriot-Watt University] at 06:38 30 December 2014 for violence in a western market of “liberated” women (Van Liew, 214). By the 1990s, diverse images of the Spanish Civil War surfaced in commercial films and documentaries, contributing to revisions of representations of the political left officially shunned after their defeat in 1939. Decades of censorship prohibited discussion of the fact that some 200 women actually fought against the fascists on the Republican front lines. The revival of a cinematic consideration of the contribution of women anarchists has been turned over to the contemporary spectator, implicated as witness to a story loosely based on the historical Maria Van Liew is an Associate Professor of Spanish at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. She teaches topics in Spanish Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. Her publications on contemporary Spanish and Mexican cinema have appeared in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Praesidium: Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies,andQuarterly Review of Film and Video. 230 Witness to War: Virginal Vicissitudes in Vicente Aranda’s Libertarias (1996) 231 accounts of women heroes sternly put back in their place by neo-Catholic fascist decree. Mar´ıa Asuncion´ Gomez´ asserts that the use of archival footage, real people, events and other historical documents to legitimize Libertaria’s fictitious plot creates a false sense of the national appreciation of women’s military heroism (293–310). However, the film’s manipulation of historical material helps to successfully relate the struggles of working class women fighting on two fronts–against the rise of fascism in Spain and against the sexism exhibited by the majority of their comrades in arms. Despite an adversarial environment, this libertarian cadre perseveres in its efforts to “free” Spain from the injustices of social hierarchy and women from the confines of patriarchal design. Due to the duality proposed by the rhetoric of “salvation” their ideology shares with Franco’s Catholic revivalism campaign, which also proposes to “save “the country from itself, innocence is rendered an impossible virtue. Rather than the artifice of historical reconstruction in the film, it is Franco’s revival of the association of Spanish women with virtuous national icons such as Isabelle the Catholic and Saint Teresa of Avila that proves detrimental to clear consideration of real women’s participation in the war effort. During the civil war the political left also worked against women combatants, forcing them back to the rearguard by 1937 on the pretext that women were making men sick. The focal point of this study is the ideological bifurcation represented by Mar´ıa (Ariadna Gil), a Catholic nun swept up in the violence of war due to a Republican raid on her monastery. Exposed to radical theories of social reconstruction, rape, and the massacre of her comrades, she is ultimately captured by Francoist forces. While she initially occupies the role of innocent bystander, Mar´ıa quickly attains the status of narrative witness held accountable for her role in the conflict. Towards the end of the film, a Catholic priest is confounded by Maria’s monastic medallions, Republican uniform, and bloodied face: “My dear, God knows you only suffer in conjunction with your guilt.” Maria’s positioning as victim of the conflict does not exonerate her or the spectator, visually linked through numerous point-of-view shots, from complicity with existing social structures such as Catholic institutions riddled with centuries of social hypocrisy and the political injustices exacerbated by a disproportionate amount of private property ownership. In this manner, Mar´ıa becomes the key to the role of outsider made insider evoked by her paradoxical participation in the anarcho-syndicalist revolution. The spectator encounters several contradictions embodied by Mar´ıa, who must participate in the violence of the Spanish Civil War in an effort to survive the same. Namesake of the consummate image of virginal victimization, Mar´ıa’s role bears the masochistic tone of self-sacrifice for the common good; in this case by straddling ideological extremes in order to outlive and to transcend the experience of defeat as fictional counterpart to lived history. The act of Downloaded by [Heriot-Watt University] at 06:38 30 December 2014 witnessing invoked by Mar´ıa attests to the persistence of competing visions for the future of Spain undeterred by decades of dictatorship. Emphasizing the notion of innocence as the weak, vulnerable link in the historical chain of events represented in the film, the opening scene offers nuns’ habits twittering in a flurry of haste to vacate their monastery under Republican siege while the Mother Superior doles out coins to fund each woman’s possible escape. Turning to Mar´ıa, “the most innocent, the most vulnerable, the one furthest from her home,” she has her recite Saint Matthew: “Is life not more than nourishment, the body nothing more than vestments...” Our introduction to the terrified nun is to an interiorized conformity to traditional religious values now in danger of bodily harm. “God will never abandon you,” insists the Mother Superior as she thrusts ‘her flock’ into the street. Traditional Catholic continuity confronted by an explosion of militant resentment on the part of the working classes and women is rendered impossible in this opening scene. 232 Maria Van Liew Adding a carnivalesque tone to Mar´ıa’s vulnerability in the street, members of an Anarquist militia dressed as a bishop and other select clergy declare: “Little nun-comrades, don’t be afraid. The revolution respects women, even those of the clergy!” Witnessing this spectacle, Mar´ıa quickly sheds her habit and finds refuge in a brothel she has mistaken for a Catholic household due to a religious plaque of welcome on the door. The notion of appearances as disguise is soon clear when Mar´ıa is welcomed in and quickly stripped naked and the plaque removed by a scantily clad prostitute.