MIDDLEBROW CINEMA Salvador (Puig Antich) and the Search for a New Consensus

9 RADICAL POLITICS, MIDDLEBROW CINEMA Salvador (Puig Antich) and the search for a new consensus Belén Vidal This chapter investigates the place of radical politics as part of an imaginary of the past absorbed and repurposed by a contemporary middlebrow cinema. Radical politics is an inherently international theme shaped by local histories. The trope of student protest and youth subcultures in the so-called ‘long sixties’ and their radi- calization into the armed underground activism of the 1970s (Suri 2013, 105–8) reflect a history of dissent that is transnational and cosmopolitan in character and, at the same time, reverts into specific national narratives built on traumatic legacies of political violence. European films centred on historical figures engaged in radical action (e.g. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex / The Baader Meinhof Complex [Edel 2008]) or, alternatively, on fictional accounts of young adults’ experience of political (dis-) engagement (such as Mio fratello è figlio unico / My Brother is an Only Child [Luchetti 2007]) revisit the post-May ’68 moment as a formative period for political iden- tities through the popular memory of this era, channelled through the personal experience of political awakening. My main case study, Salvador (Puig Antich) directed by Manuel Huerga (2006), sits at the confluence of the above two trends. A biopic of the young anarchist who became the last political prisoner to be executed by the Spanish state under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1974, Salvador is a significant yet understudied example of the retrieval of the memory of the period of the transition to democracy in contemporary Spanish cultural production.1 In the context of the ongoing debates about the status of historical memory in democratic Spain, the film emerges as an important – if contested – example of ‘counter-heritage’ film (see Will Higbee in this volume), confronting its audience with the brutality of repression in the late years of the dictatorship, especially through its representation of capital punishment. Through discussion of Salvador’s mediated aesthetic in conjunc- tion with the forms of public discourse generated by and around the film, I argue for the function of middlebrow cinema as a compelling conduit into a radical political Radical politics, middlebrow cinema 157 imaginary. This mode of approaching the political past is, however, not without its tensions. In this respect, this chapter seeks to illuminate the key role of the middlebrow film in the negotiation of (nationally specific) divisive historical narratives within a European cinema emerging from (and for) a post-ideological moment. The return of politics as history in European heritage cinema Salvador is representative of the political turn in a European heritage cinema largely identified with a middlebrow aesthetic. Elsewhere I have noted a trend in post-2000 heritage films that draws on the popular memory of the twentieth century against the backdrop of national crisis (Vidal 2012, 68), including the incorporation of the iconography and soundscape of the 1960s and 1970s as the setting for new retro fictions. This cultural shift adopts rather than disrupts the accessible narrative styles, emphasis on character and agency, and preponderance of genre tropes (in particular, melodrama) that make up the ‘middlebrow-ness’ of the heritage film. If the heritage-film debates of the 1990s read the period film largely through the aesthetic and political vacuum of nostalgia (Vidal 2012, 7–35), conversely, this new European heritage cinema places the political past within living memory at the heart of its thematic concerns. Thus, as Sabine Hake has noted, the fictionalization of contested political pasts – the return of politics as history – raises questions about the ‘affective dimensions of the historical film and their contribution not only to the meaning of history and memory but also to the aestheticization and medialization of politics’ (2010, 7). Such re-articulation of the political becomes most apparent in popular media: for example, the Ostalgie (or nostalgia for the East) phenomenon in post-unification Germany presents intriguing parallels with the recuperation of the memory of the dictatorship period in Spain (1939–75). In this respect, the television series Cuéntame cmo pas / Tell me How It Happened, TVE 2001–present)2 and a film such as Good-bye Lenin! (Becker 2003) equally suggest the primacy of the emo- tional imperative over the social or political (Smith 2006, 23). Such imperative is highlighted by the material cultures, as well as the related habits that underpin the aspirations of the Alcántara family in the Spanish series, and the ‘social- ist commodity culture . construed by former East Germans as a paean to an extinguished national identity or a communal interdependence fostered by chronic shortages’ (Castillo 2008, 767) in the German film. In both cases, popular culture treads between memorialization and commodification, transforming a contested political past into a safe haven that provides familiar, if disputed, symbols of national identity. This parallelism in the debates on what are otherwise diverging political histories needs to be teased out if we are to avoid reverting to diffuse nostalgia as a post-postmodern explanatory model. Post-unification German cinema’s attempt at ‘normalization’ of the nation’s relationship with its past twentieth-century history produced a commercial cinema that has been described as ‘a repudiation of the social and cultural legacies of the ’68 generation and an affirmation of post-ideological 158 Belén Vidal society and its promotion of consumerism, materialism, and fun mentality’ (Hake 2008, 192). This ‘cinema of consensus’, as per the phrase coined by Eric Rentschler (2000), was the byproduct of a post-Cold War era in which former geo- political antagonisms and alignments had dissolved with the prevailing of Western capitalism. Rentschler retrospectively extends his condemnation of the ‘provin- cialisation of German film culture’ in the 1990s (c.f. 2000, 268–74; 2013, 245), to the New German historical films, which ‘provide conciliatory narratives that seem above all driven by a desire to heal the wounds of the past and thereby seal them, to transform bad history into agreeable fantasies that allow for a sense of closure’ (2013, 243). For Rentschler, international hits Der Untergang / Downfall (Hirschbiegel 2004) and Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck 2006) continue the normalization process advocated by a cinema of consensus devoid of the oppositional energy associated with the New German Cinema in the 1970s (c.f. Rentschler in Cooke 2012, 18–19). However, this holistic reading of the new heritage cinema of the 2000s has been questioned by less deterministic interpretations of the films. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ (to which I will return), Paul Cooke proposes a reading of the above films that is more atten- tive to the layering of different points of view as well as to the affective nature of cinema (2012, 103–22); these films aim at audiences who, due to temporal and/or cultural distance, have a ‘less fraught relationship with the past’ (2012, 104). The phrase ‘cinema of consensus’ is apposite in the context of modern Spanish cinema, which, in some ways not unlike post-Wende Germany, has been marked by the need to confront the legacy of a traumatic totalitarian past and the effects of full if uneven assimilation into global Western capitalism. In this context, ‘consensus,’ however, acquires an altogether different resonance. The Spanish democracy was built on the political consensus between parties across the political spectrum (generally referred to as pacto del olvido or ‘the pact of oblivion’), which curtailed the possibility of a radical break with the past to ensure a future of stability and national reconciliation through political reform. This meant giving up on fully dismantling the Francoist institutions and, although a general amnesty was granted to political prisoners and exiles, the regime’s crimes against the civilian popula- tion were not condemned (Vilars 1998, 1–21; Aguilar 2001). In this respect, the return of politics in the heritage film often signals the discontents of such consensus. National anxieties about the incompleteness of the transitional process are subsumed within increasingly transnational modes of filmmaking: the globally successful El laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro 2006) refers back to the strategies of 1970s dissident cinema (through the focus on a young girl’s gaze, reminiscent of El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice 1973), but the generic framework of the fantasy film addresses a spectator who did not live through or necessarily know about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Pan’s Labyrinth revises a (highly political) cinematic legacy and textualizes a traumatic national past but, like the abovementioned German examples, it circulated as a post-national popular art film in the global market (Shaw 2013, 67–92). Radical politics, middlebrow cinema 159 This double bind results in a European heritage cinema which, paradoxically, seems to unburden itself from the legacy of the past while remaining obsessed with its political iconography. Embracing a controversial subject matter (terrorist violence, political repression and capital punishment), Salvador engages frontally with the debates about the management of historical

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