THE CHILD’S GAZE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND MOURNING: SPATIALITY, SPECTRALITY AND SOUND IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish and Portuguese

By

Sophie Elizabeth Heller, M.S.

Washington, DC April 16, 2021

Copyright 2021 by Sophie Elizabeth Heller All Rights Reserved

ii THE CHILD’S GAZE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND MOURNING: SPATIALITY, SPECTRALITY AND SOUND IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

Sophie Elizabeth Heller, M.S.

Co-Advisors: Alejandro Yarza, Ph.D. and Tania Gentic, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

Forgetting has become for many nations an undeniable part of their social and political reality, and in cases like Spain, has even been deemed the key to a future free from the repetition of conflict. However, the elimination of memory from national political discourse has turned it into a topic whose treatment is now debated vehemently in not only political but social and fictional realms. Latin American nations post-national conflict such as Chile, Argentina and Colombia have also grappled with the recuperation and politicization of memory. Through an analysis of the child and adolescent’s gaze in contemporary Spanish and Latin American film, this dissertation examines hegemonic ideologies surrounding memory which attempt to repress or manipulate national narratives of trauma.

What does the child onscreen inevitably force us to ask about national identity, temporality and the place of memory in a century both connected and disconnected from war and trauma? How has amnesia manifested itself in post-dictatorship Spain and how may this treatment of memory differ on the other side of the Atlantic in Latin American nations also facing the aftermath of dictatorship or national conflict? This dissertation asserts that, across national cinemas from all of the aforementioned nations, it is the child who serves as a catalyst for the adult’s mourning process

iii and insists upon a post-dictatorial process of mourning characterized by what Idelber Avelar calls

“active forgetting”: when national trauma becomes part of a nation’s identity, rather than an unrecognized yet insidious burden.

In my first chapter I explore the role of the child in Spanish horror film as he reveals repressed adult anxieties produced by State-sponsored silence surrounding the Spanish Civil War and

Francoist dictatorship. I argue that the Spanish child onscreen defamiliarizes trauma. My second chapter examines the child’s role in Argentine, Chilean and Colombian cinema as it similarly problematizes and exposes buried national trauma through the manifestation of imaginative realms which exemplify the memory divide between adult and child. Finally, in my third chapter, I look at the adolescent experience in recent Latin American cinema as it explores sensory modes of reading the legacy of trauma.

iv This dissertation is dedicated to the life of Olivia Eve Wigon

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It a daunting task, trying to put into words what the last 5 years at Georgetown have meant to me and to my life, especially as the two have become decidedly one in the same. Over the last 5 years, I have met the mentors who have shaped me into the teacher and professional I am today. I have met friends and colleagues who have enriched my life beyond measure. I have spent time researching and traveling abroad in Spain and Colombia, two countries I am grateful to know the way I do. Georgetown is where I have come into my own as a scholar, and where my love of Spanish language and literature led me to discover the passions and pillars which I hope will continue to inform my life. There is a lot to be grateful for.

Above all, I would like to thank Dr. Cristina Ramírez Delgado. Cristina was my very first Spanish teacher at Mount Holyoke College back in 2008 when I was 18 and she was 22. Back then I never could have imagined the role our friendship would play in my life. From my first feria in Seville in 2011 to my years in Madrid to my time in Washington, Cristina has been steadfastly by my side, even if there were thousands of miles between us. She taught me what the truest form of unconditional love and friendship looks like; I aspire to her example every single day.

Next, I would like to thank my committee, Professors Alejandro Yarza, Tania Gentic and Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, whose wisdom, patience and rigor have carried me through this process. Most of all I would like to thank them for believing so strongly in my worth as a scholar and thinker, and for inspiring me to give to my students as wholeheartedly as they do.

Alejandro -- I wish we could share in this moment over a family sized bag of peanut M and Ms, but, since that doesn’t sound very Covid-friendly, I will just tell you here how much I appreciate how carefully and thoughtfully you have mentored me over these last 5 years. Thank you for entrusting me with your book and with Hispanic Cinema. The faith you have put in my abilities pushed me to grow immensely as a teacher, writer and scholar. You have always asked me to go just one step further than I felt I could; thank you for holding me to those high standards and believing so unwaveringly in my ability to meet them. Thank you for your humor and kindness. It has been a privilege to learn from you and I look forward to many more years of friendship.

Tania – I know I often joke that I ended up at Georgetown because of our coffee in 2016. That is actually not a joke, because after meeting you I knew immediately that at Georgetown I’d find the kind of mentoring throughout my PhD that I think every graduate student deserves. Your warmth and commitment to your students was overwhelmingly apparent to me on that day, and throughout the last 5 years. Thank you for listening so sincerely, and so empathetically, to all of your students, and for never doubting for one second the validity of our ideas. I know you have probably figured this out by now, but I look up to you not only as a scholar and teacher, but as a person in every regard.

vi Cecilia – When I met you on the cusp of the beginning of my doctoral studies, I could tell immediately that a warm, vibrant teacher and mentor you were. You inspired me to pursue studies of the child in Spanish cinema, and even more importantly than that you inspired me to dedicate myself to my students. I am so grateful that our paths crossed in 2016 and I look forward to continuing to aspire to your example.

I would like to thank my father, mother and sister for their support throughout the years. My father in particular instilled in me a love for language and learning at a young age. Thank you for sacrificing so much to make sure our education was always top priority. I love you guys.

To my aunt and uncle, Tim and Jennifer Wigon, and my cousins Dorothy, Sam and Olivia for being my support system on the east coast all of these years. From my undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke through every Thanksgiving and Spring Break during my years in Washington, I feel so lucky to have had you there always.

To Professors Emily Francomano, Molly Borowitz, Adam Lifshey and Gwen Kirkpatrick – each of you has supported and inspired me, both in and out of the classroom, in a different way. Thank you for forming an integral part of my time at Georgetown and some of the best memories I made in the Department.

To Kevin Murphy, without whom I would not have been able to finish this PhD. His friendship, patience and humor have kept me going at every turn, especially during this last year. As far as selfless, genuine and loyal friends go, he is the best there is.

To Meagan Driver, for always being there to lend a hand, regardless of her already overflowing schedule. Thank you for being a bright light of encouragement and kindness through this hectic year. I am so glad our paths crossed at Georgetown.

To Mercedes Ontoria – Ya sabes lo que te quiero. Gracias por siempre ser mi amiga, hermana y apoyo en los momentos más difíciles. Sé que nos espera una tarta de limón en Lateral para celebrar esto. Te admiro en cada sentido.

For an even longer list of friends and colleagues who have shaped my life in such important ways, I would like to thank Ashley Clark, Claire Kelly, Inés Corujo Martín, Adriana Reyes, Iván Espinosa, Leah Adelson, Timothy McCormick, Annie Ornelles, Xabier Fole, Valeria Meiller, Dean Allsopp and Nagore Sedano.

I would also like to the professors who came before Georgetown, both in the US, Spain and Colombia, who sparked my love of literature, film and, most importantly, teaching: Kate Singer, Patricia Rodríguez, Sara Rumbao, Carmen Dorado, Mercedes Fernández Isla and Antonio Carreño.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2. The ‘Monstrous’ Child in Contemporary Spanish Film: Driving the Transition from Melancholy to Mourning in Post-Dictatorship Spain ...... 33

Chapter 3. The 21st Century Latin American Child Protagonist and National Memory of Trauma: Imaginative Agency, Connection to the Earth and Transgression of Barriers in Infancia clandestina (2011), Los colores de la montaña (2010) and Machuca (2004) ...... 81

Chapter 4. The Latin American Adolescent Protagonist in Post-Conflict Film: Exposing and Altering a Nation’s Relationship with Trauma through Violence, Sound and Space in Cautiva (2003), La Playa DC (2012) and Alias María (2015) ...... 113

Concluding Thoughts ...... 147

Works Cited ...... 150

vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

According to Spanish cultural critic José Colmeiro, today’s postmodern global culture suffers from a form of pervasive amnesia. Forgetting has become for many nations an undeniable part of their social and political reality, and in cases like Spain, has even been believed to provide the key toward a future free from the repetition of conflict. In fact, upon the end of dictator

Francisco Franco’s brutal reign of terror in 1975, Spain’s Transition to democracy featured as its most crucial principle a politics of forgetting surrounding the Civil War and bloody dictatorship which followed. In her discussion of history and memory as part of the Spanish Transition,

Carolyn P. Boyd describes this attitude toward memory as stemming from Spaniards’ guilt in their own complicity and general desire to avoid “confrontation” with those responsible (135).

This resulted in a continued lack of recognition of the victims of Spain’s 20th century. Spain’s pacto de olvido, legally formalized in 1977 by the Law of Amnesty, prohibited the prosecution of all war criminals. Many Francoist state structures and officials remained in place with the

Spanish government, and the nation’s history was consciously transformed into a “collective tragedy” without an excess of blame, or really any blame at all, placed on a particular side or individual. Memory was thus reframed, and transformed selectively to suit a social and political purpose.

However, 45 years later, this tendency toward forgetting has simultaneously provoked what

Colmeiro terms an “obsession” with loss of identity (20). Past elimination of memory from national political discourse has actually turned it into a topic whose treatment is now debated vehemently in not only political but social and fictional realms. According to Pierre Nora, “we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). Some half-century after

Franco’s death, the Spanish Supreme Court’s long-debated and fiercely contentious decision to

1 exhume the bones of the dictator has become one of the most divisive, drawn out and prominent of its recent political history. The Valle de los Caídos, a national monument which, until October

24 2019, paid tribute to Francoism, also marks the site of a mass grave containing the bodies of thousands, many of them Franco’s political slaves who died during the monument’s creation.1

Along with Spanish socialist President Pedro Sánchez’s movement to exhume Franco’s bones, the Spanish government will now also support the identification and location of thousands of

Republican bodies left in ditches throughout the Spanish countryside, an effort which has been previously underfunded and even opposed by Spain’s conservative Partido Popular. 2

Latin American nations post-dictatorship or post-conflict such as Chile, Argentina and

Colombia have also struggled with the recuperation and politicization of memory. However, the creation of physical “memory sites” in these nations has notably incited far less controversy. In

Colombia there exists El Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación, El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chile and the Espacio Memoria in Argentina. These Latin American nations have also established long held commissions for truth and committees dedicated to the documentation of the atrocities committed throughout the armed conflict, dictatorship of

Pinochet and the Dirty War. According to Roberta Villalón in her book Memory, Truth and

Justice in Latin America, the 21st century has seen memory mobilization efforts grow exponentially in Latin American nations.

Truth, reconciliation and justice efforts have been revisited, trials of people involved with violence, torture, abductions, murders and disappearances have been (re)opened, and new interpretations and questions about what happened have been raised. The difficulties of coming to terms with not only the horrors of extreme violence of (dirty and civil) wars

1 Spain’s 2007 Law of Historical Memory, while intended to override the forgetting inherent to Transition ideology, included no stipulation requiring state funding for exhumation.

2 but also the precariousness of justice processes postwar have permeated ebullient memory mobilizations and reconciliation efforts. (1)

Latin American nations, according to Villalón, have also gained a certain resilience to threats posed to historical memory due to a shared “commonality of injustice, amnesty and impunity across borders,” a kind of “transnational awareness and collaboration” which opposes hegemonic ideologies which attempt to repress the preservation of historical memory.

Much of my analysis of national trauma and the treatment of historical memory depicted through filmic child protagonists in this dissertation will be based upon theories of mourning and melancholia. I will refer primarily to Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, in his essay of the same name, as he makes a stark distinction between the two concepts: “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition” (243). 3Melancholia, as opposed to mourning, is not a conscious state of being, and does not have a set duration which will eventually allow the ego to be free and once again uninhibited. Melancholia consists of a “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings,

3 In their book Loss, David Eng and David Kazanjian describe loss not as an individual but rather a collective process with an oftentimes cyclical nature. In other words, loss can be productive, anticipating arrival as well. However, “if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains” (xi). Instead of leaving room for selective interpretation of Spain’s history, films like El orfanato argue for Walter Benjamin’s notion that “to mourn the remains of the past hopefully is to establish an active and open relationship with history” (1). Reliving an era, therefore, is not to be limited by it but rather “to bring the past to memory” and to avoid a “hegemonic identification with the victor’s the victor’s perspective.”

3 and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244). In a melancholic state of mind,

“the object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love” (245). Through an analysis of contemporary Latin American and Spanish film I will demonstrate that the “lost object of love” in the case of these post-dictatorship societies is their own national histories, repressed because of the degree of the trauma inflicted and, in some cases, due to political motive benefitted by a streamlining of historical memory. The clarity of Freud’s demarcation between melancholia and mourning is crucial to my argument: melancholia leads to the

“fragmentation of certain narratives” and it is only through mourning that the past will

“uninhabit” post-conflict societies (Eng and Kazanjian 4).

The melancholic is often destined to remain tied to and trapped by the past, unable to avoid its repetition and overtaking of the present. Cristina Moreiras-Menor describes the melancholic subject as “linked to his experience from a deep lack of distinction between past and present because he remains stuck to a memory without an object…” (128). In other words, the melancholic is engaged in a timeless attachment to an unidentified object of loss, whereas mourning implies a temporal limit. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, and scholars like Judith Butler even assert that melancholia is a vital stage in the process of achieving mourning; fictional works such as Álex de la Iglesia’s Balada triste de trompeta present the melancholic ‘sad clown’ as crucial to opening the door to the mourning process (Yarza 223).

However, this dissertation will argue that melancholia, and in particular the dangers posed by a melancholic attitude toward national history and war, leads to the fragmentation of national identity, and that it is only through mourning that the past will “uninhabit” post-national conflict societies and allow for “active forgetting” to take place within these nations (Eng and Kazanjian

4).

4 But how does amnesia (as opposed to active forgetting, a concept I will later define) and its conscious manufacturing, particularly in post-dictatorship societies where a culture of forgetting has likely been most prominent, contribute to or derail a nation’s identity? How has amnesia manifested itself in a post-dictatorship society like Spain and how may this treatment of memory differ on the other side of the Atlantic in Latin American nations also facing the aftermath of dictatorship or national conflict? What are the transatlantic similarities, if any, and how does the child’s gaze onscreen problematize the concepts of mourning and melancholia in post- dictatorship society? This dissertation will interpret these political, social and historical questions specifically as they are occurring in Spain, Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and will use the mirada del niño in contemporary Spanish and Latin American film as the lens through which to understand the legacy of dictatorship and the treatment of historical memory in these nations today.

In Spain, it is child-driven horror film in particular which shows the connection between national identity and the dangers of a loss of historical memory in a post-Francoist society; many scholars have argued that the emergence of the horror genre in Spain is due to repressed anxieties produced by continued silence surrounding the country’s fascist past. Similarly, film from

Argentina, Chile and Colombia has also made use of the mirada del niño to interpret the role of memory in post-dictatorship or post-national conflict society. The child’s perspective in these films reveals how the legacy of dictatorship has affected the treatment and reception of memory politics in Spain and Latin America. It is the child protagonist, I argue, who drives the transition from what Freud deems a melancholic relationship to the “object of loss” to a mournful one, and who also simultaneously problematizes the notion of these concepts as unrelated; ultimately, in this dissertation I understand the mourning process as vital to the establishment of a post-conflict

5 national identity which seeks not to erase but rather to incorporate its past. As we will see, the

“terror” of the child protagonist or child ghost in Spanish film is tied directly to the adult’s resistance to mourning. I also examine the Colombian and Argentine adolescent’s relationship to national trauma as it resonates with, and differs from, the child’s. The adolescent, similar to the child in his or her attraction to memory spaces and uninhibited engagement with the mourning process, also possesses added agency due to his or her positioning on the precipice of adulthood.

Their modeling of the mourning process for the adult figures onscreen also projects the emergence of a new collective consciousness which, due to their position on the precipice of adulthood, not only reveals the importance of interaction with past national trauma in the present as is the case with the child, but actually becomes an active part of formulating a national outlook which embraces, rather than distorts, historical memory.

The child and adolescent protagonists whose portrayal of the legacy of trauma I look at throughout this dissertation engage directly with the concept of impunity on both sides of the

Atlantic, more often than not against the will of their adult filmic counterparts. While my analyses of contemporary film in this dissertation will remain fictionally based, I find it necessary in my introduction to consider the political contexts surrounding memory, impunity and transnational justice which inform my reading of the child/adolescent’s engagement with trauma versus the adult’s in contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema. Crises surrounding memory of trauma and its treatment have led to impunity in nations on both sides of the Spanish-speaking world. Spain’s 1977 Law of Amnesty dealt with the looming question of what to do with historical memory upon Franco’s death in one fell swoop, by institutionalizing

Transition ideology such as the ‘pacto de olvido’ or the ‘pact of forgetting’, and outlawing the prosecution of those who participated in Franco’s war crimes. Similarly, in Colombia, the

6 treatment of historical memory of the armed conflict has been at the center of the nation’s political stage, and has also culminated in impunity for both state agents and paramilitary groups.

As part of the nation’s 2016 peace treaty, human rights violations on behalf of the FARC as well as the State were forgiven in exchange for their cooperation in the “Commission for the

Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-repetition” and detailed explanations of the whereabouts of victims of massacres and mass disappearances. While Colombia’s decision to forego prosecution for war criminals differs from Spain’s in that, in doing so, the nation sought to end the cycle of violence and recover and preserve historical memory, both countries ultimately chose impunity as the solution to crises of memory.

In contrast to Spain’s pacto de olvido and resistance to memory sites, upon Pinochet’s death Chile immediately created what was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which dealt directly with disappeared or murdered victims of the dictatorship. Again in 2003 and

2011 more commissions were created to provide support, reparations and most importantly acknowledgment of the gravity of the 40,000 proven murders and disappearances. The Chilean courts overruled Pinochet’s amnesty laws, and war criminals were sent to prison, instead of left in power as in the case of the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Pinochet’s dictatorship is by no means hidden but rather ingrained permanently in a physical space which cannot be destroyed or denied. The dictatorship and the nation’s recent past are a deliberate part of Chilean national identity and for this reason the nation does not suffer from Spain’s “culture of amnesia” nor from the obsession with memory that has now resulted in Spanish society. In Chile, Argentina and

Colombia one can read about the fate of every (known) victim, either murdered, disappeared or exiled. These memory sites feature a legitimate focus on trauma in that they support the following:

7 nations or groups of people trying to come to terms with a history of violence suffered or violence perpetrated. But the transnational discourse of human rights may give us a better handle on such matters than the transfer of psychoanalysis into the world of politics and history. For it is precisely the function of public memory discourses to allow individuals to break out of traumatic repetitions. Human rights activism, truth commissions, and juridical proceedings are better methods for dealing with historical trauma. Another is the creation of objects, artworks, memorials, public spaces of commemoration…(Huyssen 9)

Upon the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Spain’s pacto de olvido “committed the government to the ‘desmemoria’, a policy that entailed avoiding anything that could awaken the memory of the past, such as the observation of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, in 1986; the creation of a truth commission to look into who bore ultimate responsibility for the Civil War; and the use of state funds to exhume the remains of thousands buried in unmarked Civil War mass graves, most of whom died fighting Franco” (Encarnación 1). The kinds of truth commissions and juridical proceedings which arose after a national trauma such as the

Holocaust, for example the Trials of Nuremburg, had an immense impact on the society in which they were occurring and the formation of Germany’s historical memory. But what happens when no such truth commissions are formed at all, or in the case of Spain’s pacto de olvido, the exact opposite is proposed?

In her book Los trabajos de la memoria, Elizabeth Jelin writes about the political and human issues involved in testimony relating to national war and trauma. The lack of construction of a narrative of trauma is often caused by an inability to tell the story due simply to the impossibility, the unfathomability, of the trauma. Jelin writes that the greatest impediment to memory, and more specifically to the members of a nation wrought with trauma, is the active denial and lack of space for the stories of said victims. Thus, the lack of memory sites in Spain, or the conscious, active forgetting of the Transition perpetuate the tyranny of the dictatorship and are the reason for the “distortions” resulting today. Testimonials of survivors, an effort to

8 document their experience and support that evidence in a concrete fashion is the only way to facilitate “the symbolic resources needed to account for and make sense of the events” (63).

Without “the social ability to convey and listen to testimony” or to “bear witness of testimony,” which implies the social ability to listen give meaning to the narrative of the survivors” a void is formed.

Here we encounter one of the paradoxes of ‘historical trauma,” which reveals the double void in the narrative due to the dialogical void – there is no subject, and there is no audience and no listening. When dialogue becomes possible, he or she who speaks and he or she who listens begin the process of naming, of giving meaning and constructing memories. Both are needed, each is indispensable to the other, interacting in a shared space. (Jelin 64)

A national narrative or collective consciousness is created, therefore, by the interaction between those who directly experienced the trauma and those who choose to listen. There is no historical memory without the presence and willingness of both parties. “Even if there are evidence and knowledge about the events, the narrative that is being produced and listened to is the location where and the process through which something new is being constructed. One could say that it is in this act that a new ‘truth’ is being born” (64). A new national truth is being born, or at least in the process of being born, in nations that embrace this attitude toward memory and which have recognized that in attempting to erase history they are recreating a concurrent, inescapable trauma. The child and adolescent protagonist, as I will demonstrate in this dissertation, reflect and insist upon this relationship to national trauma. A conscious effort must be made toward a recuperation of memory, as Paul Ricoeur writes:

el recuerdo de la cosa no se da ni siempre ni frecuentemente, es necesario buscarlo; esta búsqueda es la anamnesis, la reminiscencia, la remembranza, el recordar. A la pregunta inicial: ¿qué? – la que apunta al recuerdo --, se suma en adelante la pregunta ¿cómo?, que pone en movimento un “poder buscar”…testimonia es el abanico de los procedimientos de rememoración que los modernos han repartido entre la asociación y el esfuerzo del recordar…Con estas dos rúbricas: presencia del recuerdo, búsqueda del recuerdo, hemos establecido el marco general de una fenomenología de la memoria. (5)

9 Ricoeur says that the greatest issue with memory today lies in a problem “de confianza que puede enunciarse de la siguiente manera: si el recuerdo es una imagen, ¿cómo no confundirlo con la fantasia, la ficción o la alucinación?” (5). The solution, as memory sites have demonstrated in the aforementioned Latin American nations, is the physical documentation of the undeniable, factual testimony and historical events, which can never be erased nor fictionalized.

There has been a much greater attempt to assign meaning to the past in Latin America, not only through memory sites, but through truth commissions and extensive research projects on memories of political violence and the secondary effects of said trauma. But has that attempt actually materialized in justice? The Struggle for Memory in Latin America, edited by Eugenia

Allier Montaño, highlights the human rights culture created in Argentina, for example, through an outright denunciation of dictatorship, a transition to democracy which did not concede to any aspect of authoritarianism, trials for war criminals and an unwavering commitment to the discovery of those who had been disappeared. The book outlines how criminal justice frameworks, such as the overturning of the Pinochet regime’s amnesty laws, contribute to the creation of “a public truth regarding the past and the memory struggles themselves” (3). Allier-

Montaño’s chapter on memory struggle in Mexico, where currently voices of repression have far less public forum yet have still not received any judicial process. This point is crucial because

Allier-Montaño’s findings “reveal that seemingly democratic regimes can in fact be the force behind repressive processes and that the dominant memory is not necessarily translated into acknowledgment of and reparations for the victims” (3). Memory processes in democratic countries like Spain and Colombia, for example, are still very much ongoing and at the surface of

10 society and politics, but still, neither nation has yet to reach a firm narrative or conclusion about its violent history.

While the topic of historical memory has been debated in Colombia for much longer than in Spain, as previously mentioned, these two countries demonstrate most clearly the link between suffering at the hands of Huyssen’s concept of “hypertrophy of memory” while simultaneously lacking one singular, nationally recognized narrative of trauma. In contrast to Spain, Colombia’s focus on memory is not a new movement but rather began as its violent conflict unfolded. A call for truth telling and some form of documentation of the atrocities initiated in the 1970s. As

Catherine LeGrand writes in her book, Land, Justice and Memory: Challenges for Peace in

Colombia, many community-based or non-official attempts to document memory were enacted during the armed conflict (263). However, much like in contemporary Spain, debates surrounding historical memory have been shaped by a kind of social memory resulting from a society “fractured and divided by debates regarding the past itself” (264). “Memory does not simply emerge after the violence has been perpetrated or after a violent period, but is a critical social expression that informs how the conflicts themselves unfold. Memory is embedded in the ways in which various institutions and social groups consider how they can live together again and the possibilities and obstacles for reconciliation” (264). The existence of numerous commissions dedicated to historical memory in Colombia, of course, do not guarantee that all parties will come to a clear agreement about how best to treat memory on a national and political scale and, much like in Spain, a societal fixation on memory has not brought the nation any closer to resolve.

Different stakeholders struggle to participate in this contest over public memory. This situation is exacerbated by the fragility of the Colombian state, which is still in the process of stabilization. The Colombian state is still characterized by its lack of presence throughout the national territory. This situation requires a joint effort between the

11 different sectors that are committed to finding non-violent ways to solve political conflicts and to institute the political narratives that would make peace possible. (LeGrand 735)

Much like Spain’s current political debate surrounding the recognition and memorialization of a universal condemnation of its fascist past, political elites in Colombia have produced many versions of the events surrounding the armed conflict and hegemonic accounts of the past have been pushed. However, similar to Pedro Sánchez’s philosophy toward the new attitude Spain must take in regard to historical memory, in Colombia “a shared pedagogy of Colombian memory is necessary for Colombian political culture to change” (737). Camilo González Posso, founder of Bogotá’s Centro de Memoria y Paz, argues that the role of the preservation of historical memory is to “ser un puente entre la academia que investiga el horror y la acción social que la denuncia, planta cara y consigue acabar con ella” (“En Colombia la verdad y la memoria deben estar al servicio de la paz” El país). He considers the role of memory in contemporary society to be vital in the construction of a peaceful future. “Hemos necesitado construir un discurso mayor con un gran foco común, en el que remarcar que es posible superar la violencia, respetar los Derechos Humanos y construir el futuro en democracia. Ésta es la memoria que nos ha interesado, la que se vuelve intencionada con visión del futuro.” Political gains or interests,

Posso argues, must be left entirely out of a society’s treatment of memory, and the primary threat to said society is its own polarization in regards to a truthful account of the past. “Debe de haber un nuevo pacto de conciencia entre todos para entender que no se puede desaprovechar esta oportunidad para cerrar décadas de violencia en Colombia. Debemos dar espacio al diálogo para constuir una narrativa de esperanza a través de la memoria.”

Gonzalo Sánchez, Director of the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica en Colombia, in his article titled “Sobre algunas prácticas culturales de memoria en el contexto colombiano,”

12 writes, “en Colombia, la secuencia de antes, durante y después de la guerra hasta ahora ha sido reemplazada por la simultaneidad de un conflicto crónico y una negociación crónica, que parece corroborar la circularidad del relato que encarna esa disfunción de las temporalidades” (1).

Sánchez references the result of this dilemma as a kind of “inmovilización del presente”, “lo cual plantea desafíos enormes para la construcción de la memoria” (1). This immobilization of the present by an ongoing refusal to establish a concrete relationship with the past is exactly what I will establish the filmic child and adolescent protagonists in contemporary cinema challenge.

Both Pedro Sánchez and Gonzalo Sánchez describe the current political treatment of historical memory in their respective nations as crucial to ending a cycle of violence. The past must be examined and re-evaluated for a truthful re-telling, Gonzalo Sánchez continues, and is critical for the imaginary and place in the nation for victims of national traumas:

Sin embargo, en un contexto de negociación política del conflicto armado con las características del que hoy se vive en Colombia, las temporalidades se reinstauran de manera imperativa y controversial: lo que está en juego no es solo una reinterpretación de un pasado distante, sino la manera de contar un pasado reciente y en continuidad con el presente y el futuro inmediato. Estas temporalidades son objeto de disputa porque con ellas se definen roles e imaginarios sobre las víctimas, los actores y sus responsabilidades… Aquí se invierte el contenido de esta idea de Kundera: ‘Los hombres quieren ser dueños del futuro sólo para poder cambiar el pasado’ [El libro de la risa y el olvido]. La fórmula colombiana sería: los hombres quieren ser dueños del pasado para poder cambiar el futuro. Con ello nos referimos a la capacidad de intervención del pasado en el futuro, a diferencia de la idea que se tenía antes de un futuro que no está marcado ni intervenido por el pasado. (2)

The relationship between State and citizens in a post-war society, as stated above, depends greatly upon acts that not only acknowledge atrocity but those which make advances to incorporate this acknowledgment into a collective national identity or history. The treatment of memory, in other words, determines a nation’s relationship to democracy. According to the

Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, “when memory is turned into a hegemonic account, it becomes something close to totalitarianism. However, when memory is recognized in its

13 diversity, it is one of the practices with the most democratizing vocation” (16). The National

Center for Historical Memory, the Historical Memory Group and the National Commission for

Reconciliation and Reparation in Colombia all see reconciliation as impossible if facts about the nation’s history continue to be distorted, or simply neutralized as they were in the Spanish

Transition, in order to serve the interests of political elites.

Society has been victimized, but it has also participated in the conflict through its consent, silence, support, and indifference, all of which should provoke collective reflection. However, extending these responsibilities to society at large does not mean diluting those concrete and differentiated responsibilities into a statement of “we are all guilty.” The reconciliation or reencounter that we all yearn for cannot be based on distorting, concealing, or forgetting the facts, but only by clarifying them. We are all involved in this political and ethical call to action. (22)

While the Latin American nations in question have been much quicker to establish memory sites and truth commissions than Spain, all of these post-national conflict nations continue to struggle with the politicization of the memory of trauma and the formation of a post- dictatorship national identity. All of the films in this dissertation have made important contributions to public memory discourse through commentary on the effect or danger of its absence, and its relationship to collective national identity, particularly as presented through the role and perception of the child protagonist. Through an examination of the mirada del niño, one can understand the differing relationships to memory and resulting national conception of identity in post-dictatorship societies in Spain, Chile, Colombia and Argentina.

In her book, El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura (1983-2008): alegoría y nostalgia, Sophie Dufays explains how the child in Argentine film, from Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial (1985) on, has very frequently been used to provoke national consciousness of military tyranny and the future which has been left to the next generation (2). Between 1976 and 1983, among other atrocities committed during Argentina’s military dictatorship, over 30,000 people

14 were either murdered or disappeared, resulting in the “adoption” of thousands of children. “Estos niños, adoptados de modo ilegal, vendidos o abandonados en institutos con la complicidad de la mayoría de los juzgados y las organizaciones civiles de custodia de menores, han sido privados de la memoria de sus padres biológicos y, en su mayor parte, siguen ignorando su identidad” (3). Not dissimilar from the children stolen from Republican families during Franco’s reign, the subject of the Argentine child is important in a study of historical memory through film in large part because of the child’s unique place in relation to national conflict and an identity which was manipulated at birth. According to Gabriela Copertari in her book Desintegración y justicia en el cine argentino contemporáneo, contemporary argentine film aims to address various forms of disintegration occurring on a national scale, illusions or disillusions from the past which have been lost in the present. “Me gustaría proponer que esa contemporaneidad reside en la persistente puesta en escena de narrativas de desintegración (comunitaria, política, social, económica, cultural, moral, familiar, personal), que dan cuenta precisamente de una experiencia social de pérdida: una integración previa – o experimentada como tal – que se ha desintegrado” (11). These films also, according to

Copertari, provide national allegories which “dan cuenta de la desintegración de ciertas narrativas de identidad nacional (una desintegración que constituye una parte importante de esa experiencia social de pérdida), al tiempo que proponen, en su mayoría, alternativas de reconstrucción, reparación y/o negación de lo que se ha perdido” (14).

While Dufay’s work seeks to unpack the “la mirada y el lenguaje infantil con la idea de la nación y con la historia colectiva, examinando si esta mirada sirve para (re)construir nostálgicamente la nación como lugar de identificación, para idealizarla o para interrogarla,” my analysis establishes a similar goal, yet instead of solely tracing the child as allegory for nation and the treatment of trauma, my work seeks to reveal, through the teen’s added agency, how the child

15 serves to determine the role of a nation’s trauma in its present, and how that past must be treated through mourning (20). Tobias Hecht’s Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and

Society remarks upon the traditional depiction of childhood in Latin American memory as dealing primarily with education and welfare, or as existing only in very tangential forms, in spite of the fact that “in 1996, fully one third of Latin Americans were just fourteen or younger (UN 1998). A few decades earlier, those under the age of eighteen even represented a demographic majority in some countries” (12).

Viviane Green suggests that a child is inherently more able to mourn due to “an intrinsic part of developmental change as a newer self is formed and an older one shed” (76). It is often the child in these films, then, who, returning to Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, initiates or encourages a recognition of the past and thereby models or facilitates the process of mourning.4 According to Green, “…mourning occurs not only in the sense of missing – an absence – but with the letting go and the mourning of an aspect of the self that, through the imperatives of maturation, necessitates a process of decorporation or disidentification” (77).

This “disidentification” which Green references does not include a disassociation with the past, but rather an acknowledgment of it, so that one may be freed of an obsessive, unresolved attachment to it. During the Spanish Transition to democracy, national identity was derived from a kind of forgetting which essentially eliminated all recent Spanish history and attempted to establish the 1970s and 1980s as a new point of origin. According to Cristina Moreiras Menor,

Spanish national identity at this time held “la celebración, el goce y la desmemoria como sus

4 According to Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, without the ability to remember or recognize the lost object the melancholic subject “does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss which marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds (and conditions) its circuitry. Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution” (23).

16 rasgos identitarios” (153). Clearly, no mourning of past trauma is possible if “disidentification” defines itself by total forgetting and a total absence of re-telling. According to Stuart Hall, it is not so much a recovery of the past that matters, but how the narratives are retold. If this is the case, the narratives told by these films, through the eyes of the child, have the power to alter or create collective national identities moving forward.

If, as Benedict Anderson argues, national identities “se encuentran en las raíces culturales del nacionalismo”, then these films focusing on child protagonists look toward the formation of a new cultural relationship to the traumas of the past, in an effort to form a national identity amongst the new generation in Spain which will not accept an erasure of the past. Anderson cites

Ernest Gellner’s assertion that “’el nacionalismo no es el despertar de las naciones a la autoconsciencia: inventa naciones donde no existen’” (24). However, Anderson also points out that “lo malo de esta formulación es que Gellner está tan ansioso por demostrar que el nacionalismo se disfraza con falsas pretensiones que equipara la ‘invención’ a la ‘fabricación’ y la ‘falsedad’ antes que a la ‘imaginación’ y ‘creación’. En esta forma, da a entender que existen comunidades verdaderas que pueden yuxtaponerse con ventaja a las naciones” (24). In other words, according to Anderson, newly emerging national identities, such as those forming in present day post-dictatorship societies, need not be considered “inventions” or in any way falsified. In fact, contrary to what Gellner argues, national identity is comprised in post- dictatorship societies precisely of “el despertar de las naciones a la autoconsciencia”, and they should not be considered any less real purely because they stem from a newly imagined relationship with the past.

The treatment of memory in post-dictatorship societies in Spain and Latin America (as well as between specific Latin American nations) cannot be conflated; however, hegemonic

17 discourse left over from dictatorship almost universally seeks to end a fixation on the past in favor of forgetting. Idelber Avelar’s book The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American

Fiction and the Task of Mourning discusses post-dictatorship societies in Latin America and how they come to terms with the past through fictional works. The market “demands that the new replace the old without leaving a remainder” (2). But the mournful self must make “a rescuing operation of the act of remembrance. His/her melancholy stare detaches it from all connections”

(4). Instead of erasing the past, texts which support mourning “cling to the past in order to save it” even as they attempt to “produce an active forgetting of it” (4). The “active forgetting” Avelar proposes is exactly the ultimate goal of mourning in post-dictatorship society; the trauma becomes a part of a collective national consciousness, rather than an unrecognized yet insidious burden.

If the mourner does not achieve true introjection of the lost object, no healing of the loss will ever take effect without leaving behind an unassimilable residue, and mourning work will always preserve a dimension irreducible to the metaphorical operation proper to the market…it is due to that insistence of memory, of the survival of the past as a ruin in the present, that mourning displays a necessarily allegorical structure. (5)

Post-dictatorial mourning is the only way to excavate, quite literally in the case of present day

Spain, “the crypt of a love object buried alive within the ego” whereas melancholia “emerges as a reaction against a threat to the protective crypt, because the subject begins to identify with the love object as a way of protecting him/her from the possibility of being mourning” (8).

According to Avelar, the great challenge in post-dictatorial Latin American fiction now is to reestablish a connection between the individual and collective experience which is not defined by any tyrannical presence. Jelin agrees with Avelar’s assertion that mourning and storytelling are inseparable, and without the possibility of storytelling, historically suppressed by hegemonic

Latin American discourses, the “need to narrate can also fall into silence…in that case there is no

18 choice but to remain silent, to keep to oneself, or attempt to forget. Those who opt for that silence, however, do not necessarily find peace or calm in their life. The not telling of that story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny and often provokes deep distortions in memory…” (Jelin

63). Cultural insistence upon remembrance through the contemporary Spanish and Latin

American films covered in this dissertation attempts to rectify and re-open the dialogue Jelin deems necessary to create a society which is mournful rather than silenced, melancholic.

My discussion of Francoist Spain, as well as the country’s current political situation, at the beginning of this introduction reflects perfectly an example of the dangers of melancholy. As

Alberto Medina Domínguez points out in his article, “Teatro de posesión: política de la melancolía en la España franquista”, during his regime, Franco made propagandistic use of melancholy directed toward a “pasado mítico (el de El Cid, Los Reyes Católicos, Felipe II y el imperio en el que no se ponía el sol)” (44). This melancholy, stemming from the desire to resurrect some notion of a triumphant Spain, manufactured entirely by Franco, resulted in blind obedience. As Franco stated, “el pueblo, como los hombres, no inventa su destino, lo sirve” (44).

This form of melancholy is defined by a narcissistic relationship with the object of loss and certainly does not allow for mourning, as it permits no form of exteriority. “Aquél, anclado en un estadio infantil de ‘omnipotencia de las ideas,’ no hace sino asimilar su afuera, negar los límites del yo e interiorizar lo perdido para terminar identificándose con él” (44).

The past, viewed from a melancholic standpoint, does not seek to reconstruct the truth but rather, particularly in this case of political motive, “funciona como una efectiva tecnología del poder” (44). As long as the past has not been properly mourned, as long as the “object of loss” remains lost, as long as historical truth remains unrecognized, then the past can always be manipulated. El franquismo “explota sistemáticamente una determinada retórica de la deuda

19 histórica”, allowing Franco to link a betrayal or questioning of his ideologies with a betrayal to

God, the rhetoric upon which Domínguez points out Franco’s film Raza (1941) was built (45).

Instead of mourning the reality of the Spanish Civil War, the melancholic “la convierte en una patología hereditaria e interminable destinada a la compulsiva restauración de una útopica unidad perdida situada en un pasado histórico artificialmente construido por la historiografía del estado.

En suma, el gesto de restauración del melancólico no hace sino elaborar retroactivamente un origen perdido a través de una mímesis hereditaria” (46).

As Tony Judt emphasizes in his book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, “a nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it” (829). Judt also argues that the gravity of certain trauma renders “complete” memorialization impossible. “Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless” (830). Perhaps, then, memorialization itself should not be the primary goal, but rather seen as a contribution and necessary step toward the creation of a collective consciousness resulting in the ability to mourn, and ultimately in a national identity aware yet free of the trauma of the past.

In a discussion of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the persistence of neo-totalitarianism,

Roger Berkowitz and Jeffrey Katz, in their book Lying World Order: Political Deception and the

Threat of Totalitarianism, write about the possibility of a “reconstitution” of the event of totalitarianism and that there may be “unpredicted and unprecedented events of totalitarianism facing us today” (73). “…Arendt raises the issue of political deception, considering the difference between the ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality. She argues that while the ancient sophists were satisfied with ‘a passing victory of the argument at

20 the expense of truth,’ modern sophists want ‘a lasting victory at the expense of reality itself’”

(73). While a democratic government has prevailed in Spain and throughout the aforementioned

Latin American nations now for decades, the “events of totalitarianism facing us today,” can be seen in the insistence upon said victory at the expense of reality manifested in political narratives which seek to rewrite the past.

How can memory, and mourning, change this neo-totalitarianism bolstered by alterations made to reality in the present? In his book On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs writes that memory is just as much about the present as it is about the past; in other words, according to

Halbwach, remembering is heavily dependent upon the societal framework in which it is taking place. As he writes, “individuals always use social frameworks when they remember” (40).

Memory in contemporary society is formed by a collective reconstruction of the past heavily dependent upon present political and social circumstances. “Even at the moment of reproducing the past our imagination remains under the influence of the present social milieu” (49). National identity, which we have already established is formed upon a foundation of collective memory, therefore, is not formed solely through a concise, historical understanding of the past; it is formed through an understanding of said past as it affected a nation as a whole, and is often highly contingent upon conditions in the present, which may alter it in harmful ways.

Andreas Huyssen’s book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, aids in an understanding of the modern day phenomenon of a sort of blurring of the relation between a nation and its past, which he argues is due to a weakening bond between the past and present more generally.

In times not so very long ago, the discourse of history was there to guarantee the relative stability of the past in its pastness. Traditions, even though themselves often invented or constructed and always based on selections and exclusions, gave shape to a social and cultural life. Built urban space – replete with monuments and museums, palaces, public

21 spaces, and government buildings – represented the material traces of the historical past and present. But history was also the mise-en-scène of modernity. One learned from history. That was the assumption. (2)

What, then, does the absence of such monuments or museums dedicated to the historical memory of dictatorship, war and national trauma in Spain mean about its discourse of history in relation to Latin American nations such as Chile, Colombia, and Argentina which have all dedicated specific spaces to historical memory? Will Spain’s past stay outside the realm of pastness, as

Huyssen phrases it, and as much Spanish horror film chooses to demonstrate through its persistent trope of ghosts haunting the present, until it recognizes in physical form its historical past? Huyssen writes that “whatever the specific content of the many contemporary debates about history and memory may be, underlying them is a fundamental disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as objective and personal, but of history itself and its promises. At stake in the current history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures” (2). While there seems to be an excess of memory, or at least obsession with the topic, in our society, “as soon as we try to define it, it starts slipping and sliding, eluding attempts to grasp it either culturally, sociologically, or scientifically” (3). If memory becomes an undefined obsession, is it at risk of simply being discarded? “Saturation in the marketing of memory,”

Huyssen fears, can actually lead to its disappearance without ever even examining the past. As he says, “today we seem to suffer from a hypertrophy of memory, not history” (3).

Huyssen writes:

If the historical past once used to give coherence and legitimacy to family, community, nation, and state, in a discourse that Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘invention of tradition,’ then those formerly stable links have weakened today to the extent that national traditions and historical pasts are increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings, which are reorganized in the processes of cultural globalization. (4)

22 If memory is not given borders, specificities, then, Huyssen argues, modernity’s expansion of

“horizons of time and space beyond the local, national and even the international” could put our concrete conception of certain pasts at risk (4). Melancholia, again, as Freud defines it, is the reaction to a lost object of love or loss of some abstraction, “such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, so on” which is unable to fully identify said object of loss (“Mourning and Melancholia”

243).5 Without identification or consciousness of said object, there will be no set duration for the sickness of melancholia which, as mentioned, consists of “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244).

In my second chapter, titled The ‘monstrous’ child in contemporary Spanish film: driving the transition from melancholia to mourning in post-dictatorship Spain, I will focus on contemporary Spanish cinema’s trope of the ghostly or monstrous child as a reflection of national fears surrounding the mourning process. Many scholars have already established the child figure as intrinsically more capable of mourning than the adult; Sarah Thomas’s Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition and Sarah Wright’s The

Child in Spanish Cinema support my presentation of the ghostly child as being pre-disposed to mourn. Scholarly works such as Debbie Olson’s Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary

Cinema, have also already identified the child in post-dictatorship Spanish film as representative of the new generation of Spaniards, unaffected directly by the nation’s trauma and therefore less vested in its continued burial. However, in this dissertation I expand upon this finding by

5 Melancholia, as interpreted by David Eng and David Kazanjian in their book Loss, implies a regressive rather than productive relationship with loss, resistant to closure and resolution, “sustained by an empathy with history’s victorious hegemony” (2).

23 examining not only the mournful child but said child’s modeling of the mourning process for the adult and insistence upon the terror perpetuated by melancholia in democratic Spain specifically as it corresponds to the proper treatment of historical memory.

Though there are still no large-scale museums or monuments in recognition of the memory of the Civil War or the victims of Franco’s almost 40-year long reign of terror, the manifestation of this unaddressed trauma and desire to recuperate identity through “a recovery of memory,” as

Colmeiro describes it, can be seen in a wealth of Spanish cultural production. As Jo Labanyi argues in her article, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: the Difficulty of Coming to

Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” an attempt to leave the past behind has also “produced a significant body of cultural work based on the celebration and elaboration of memory” (92).

Though cultural production at the Transition to democracy was not yet focused on the trope of haunting (as it will later be represented in the boom of horror film which is to come), Labanyi points out that child-centered films such as Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and

Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (1976) dealt with the topic of unrecognized trauma and censorship through allegorical, though not exactly terrifying, representations of the memory of Francoist repression as very much alive within Spanish collective consciousness (98).

I will open this dissertation with a discussion of the child’s gaze in post-national conflict cinema in Spain, where the child protagonist has perhaps most often been used to interpret memory of trauma. In particular, I will examine the role of the child protagonist as the driving force behind the adult’s eventual ability to confront national collective trauma and as an allegorical catalyst for the work involved in recuperating both memory and identity in present- day Spain. Films such as J.A. Bayona’s El orfanato, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and

Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno depict the child’s

24 increased capacity to mourn the past, often themselves the model or catalyst for the beginning of the adult’s mourning process, and to imagine a national consciousness free of unrealized, melancholic trauma. Texts like Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the

Sociological Imagination and Jo Labanyi’s “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do

With Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period” link memory and haunting in a modern, post-dictatorial context; but how does the child protagonist specifically warn against the danger of melancholia toward Spain’s violent past? I argue that the ghostly child’s presence in these films manifests itself as threatening or as a

“haunting” only when perceived by the adult melancholic, and it is the child protagonist who insists upon a conscious uncovering of each film’s buried trauma. I will also develop this idea as it is demonstrated technically in the aforementioned films; through spatial positioning of the child ghost, oftentimes found in doorways and entryways, we see the physical manifestation of its simultaneous chronologies and refusal to leave an unrecognized past behind, of its inherent abstention from melancholia. The role of subterranean space in El orfanato (2007), El espinazo del diablo (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (2006) will also be analyzed as a metaphor for the need to mourn, and anticipatory of the memory debate surrounding exhumations occurring in present day Spain.

This chapter references the work of scholars like Sarah Thomas, Sarah Wright and Emma

Wilson (among others) who have already raised many key questions about the child’s interpretation of historical memory onscreen; however, I hope to build upon their work by looking at the child not only as a conduit for historical memory but most specifically as a guide or model of the mourning process for the adult melancholic. This chapter will draw on what separates the child protagonist’s experience with trauma and its remembrance from the adult’s:

25 namely, the child’s multiple temporalities or overlapping chronologies and ease of interaction with supernatural elements whose horror is meant to allegorize institutionalized forgetting and binary existence in between two worlds. 6 Yet, I look beyond the child as an embodiment of cultural memory in order to demonstrate how he or she actually models a process of remembrance of national trauma which the adult character cannot fully grasp on his own. It is my conclusion that the children featured in the films at which I will be looking in this chapter are far from indefensible; on the contrary, it is the child protagonist whose superior consciousness of underlying national trauma, manifested in the form of some fantastical element, be it ghost or monster, and the way to treat it properly opens doors or passageways (often in literal form) for the adult to be guided toward mourning. The child guides a process of re-birth for the adult character, which occurs in the films oftentimes through uterine spaces or homes which stand in as metaphors for Spain as a nation. Spain as “mother” still serves as the vessel through which this re-birthing occurs, but not without the child’s modeling of a recuperation of national trauma into national collective consciousness.7

In this chapter I clarify the use of the terms “mourning” and “melancholia” as they relate to Spanish national history and its legacy of forgetting through demonstrating what I argue is an explicit transition from melancholia toward mourning as laid out by the child protagonist in both

El orfanato, El laberinto del fauno, and El espinazo del diablo.8 In each of the former films, the

6 The films in this study depict the child’s natural navigation of both an above-ground actuality in the midst of war or said trauma’s after-effects, as well as a below-ground fantasy world which the adult cannot see or access, which represents buried, unrecognized trauma. 7 As Alejandro Yarza notes in his book, The Making and Unmaking of Francoist Kitsch Cinema: from Raza to Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro himself describes Ofelia as enacting a process of re-birth for herself (262). 8 In their book Loss, David Eng and David Kazanjian describe loss not as an individual but rather a collective process with an oftentimes cyclical nature.

26 child protagonist models the necessity of a literal descent within nation (allegorized by the trope of the home in El orfanato and the earth itself in uterine form in El laberinto del fauno). This, I argue, is not only a reference to the need for exhumation but a modeling of the initial stages of the mourning process; both Simón (and the ghost orphans) and Ofelia reveal the steps in a transition from a melancholic understanding of the past to a mournful one for their adult counterparts; in a step-by-step modeling, which requires one to revisit the past methodically, the child guides the melancholic adult away from amnesiac reality and toward a consciousness of their buried “lost object of love,” in this case the legacy of war, Francoism and forgetting.

Through a modeling of the mourning process for the adult, the child protagonist in film of the Memory Boom attempts to break the cycle of national trauma. While Erice and Saura’s filmic work of the Transition and del Toro’s productions from the early 21st century consistently present the child as troubled or emotionally burdened in some way by their inheritance of the legacy of trauma, I will demonstrate how their shifting temporalities, or ability to identify with both the present and the past as unbreakably intertwined, and their disruption of time as a linear concept (depicted in part through their spatial positioning), ultimately frees them from it.

The child, I concur, is “marked by his or her ability to embody contradictions and doublings as both subject and object, self and other, child and not-child” (Thomas 10). From

Cría cuervos and El espíritu de la colmena to the Memory Boom at the turn of the century, the child in Spanish film is caught between a generation implored to forget and one faced with the repercussions of such a decision. However, I hope to take that argument a step further in looking at the specific function of said allegory in the films I will examine, and what they suggest in regard to Spain’s treatment of historical memory of its 20th century in today’s current political climate.

27 My third chapter, titled The 21st Century Latin American Child Protagonist and National

Memory of Trauma: Imaginative Agency, Connection to the Earth, and Transgression of

Barriers, will also trace the legacy of national trauma as it is interpreted by the child protagonist in contemporary film in Chile, Colombia and Argentina. While each Latin American nation in question is confronted by a very different relationship to trauma and questions surrounding historical memory, I argue in this chapter that the process of mourning modeled by the mirada del niño in contemporary Spanish film occurs in a similar fashion in much Latin American post- dictatorship or national trauma film. My analysis will begin with Argentine film Infancia clandestina (2011), as evidence of the child protagonist’s insistence upon identifying and recognizing the missing pieces of their history and identity, in each case erased by Argentina’s dictatorship. The mirada del niño in the film presents a perspective on trauma not touched directly by violence, but instead strictly by the attempt to silence its occurrence. This chapter will also examine the child protagonist’s interpretation of national trauma as it is experienced and told directly in films like Chile’s Machuca (2004), and Colombia’s Los colores de la montaña

(2010). In these films there is a clear dichotomy set up between the child and the adult’s relationship to trauma and mourning; this separation, again reminiscent of the mirada del niño in contemporary Spanish film, is often expressed spatially through literal divides like doors or walls which separate the child from the adult, or through the child’s much greater imaginative capacity and willingness to confront the remnants of trauma directly.

The final chapter of this dissertation, titled The Latin American Child Protagonist in Post-

Dictatorship Film: Exposing and Altering a Nation’s Relationship with Trauma through Violence,

Sound and Space in Cautiva (2003), La Playa DC (2012) and Alias María (2015), focuses on the adolescent protagonist’s relationship to both urban and rural spaces as a means of unpacking and

28 mourning national conflict as it corresponds to their own identity formation. Like other chapters,

I look at the use of sound in these three films as it reflects different stages in the mourning process, and the adolescent’s transformation out of melancholia toward mourning. This section of my dissertation examines the adolescent’s closer relationship to adulthood, yet simultaneously

“childlike” ability to interact freely with trauma. It is my argument that the adolescent presents an active role in not only the modeling but the changing of a nation’s relationship to historical memory; teen protagonists not only bring memory of past conflict to the adult’s attention, as is typically the case with the child, but they outrightly question society. Given their increased emotional awareness and adult agency, the adolescent protagonists in these films challenge the

State-level legacies of national violence and conflict of which they have unwillingly been directly affected to varying degrees. I choose to look at space, in this case Bogotá, Buenos Aires and an unspecified region of the Colombian jungle, as they hold innate ties to the trauma in question.

Whether due to the city’s role as it has historically been home to a disproportionate number of

“street children,” or through reminders of dictatorship and its victims inscribed physically onto city walls and within its archives, this dissertation uncovers the reason why these adolescent protagonists appears to reach mourning of and through the city.

Much like the children of Spain’s Transition era cinema up until the Memory Boom, the adolescents in the films to be discussed here not only raise questions about the role of historical memory as it continues to be a heavily debated topic in Colombia after the country’s 2016 peace agreement, but also constantly calls the future into question. I disagree with the dichotomy often established in cinematic studies of the child which tends to place children in the role of nostalgic signifiers for historical memory and trauma and adolescents as addressing primarily the present moment. As Robyn McCallum writes in her seminal work on the portrayal of adolescents in

29 modern fiction, “concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dialogue with society, with language, and with other people, and while this dialogue is ongoing, modern adolescence – that transition stage between childhood and adulthood – is usually thought of as a period during which notions of selfhood undergo rapid and radical transformation” (3). Much of McCallum’s work, in fact, centers around the formation of identity during adolescence and the convergence of ideologies, both social and cultural, which come together to determine subjectivity. She writes that, in contemporary fiction, adolescent subjectivity is “constructed through interrelationships with others, through language, and/or in a relation to social and cultural forces and ideologies” (8).

Contemporary Latin American cinema deals directly with adolescent identity formation as a means of revealing a national consciousness which more readily accepts and incorporates a nation’s history, the specific construction of said subjectivity, which I determine through McCallum’s notion of social and cultural codes, is of importance.

I seek to use the depiction of the adolescent protagonist in these films as a means to not only understand the legacy of violent repression in Colombia and Argentina, but also to interpret the adolescent’s agency in incorporating that violent past into a nation’s future. How is the adolescent’s experience with poverty, violence or lack of education, a direct result of dictatorship and armed conflict? How are adolescents actually able to (instead of simply embodying adult anxieties) project a differing outlook over civic society? How are adult fantasies about the future, conscious or otherwise, construed through the adolescent?

Teen-driven film such as Héctor Olivera’s La noche de los lápices (1986), which depicts the true story of a group of Argentine teenagers brutalized by military authorities after striking for lower prices on bus tickets, and Victor Gaviria’s La vendedora de rosas (1988), which shows the realities of the poor classes in 1980s Medellín, demonstrate the effect of dictatorship or prolonged

30 armed conflict on children specifically. As I discussed in my previous chapter on the Latin

American child specifically, the Colombian armed conflict led to an unprecedented amount of street children, and the effect of very limited access to education which resulted is a topic of frequent debate in these films. Films like Gaviria’s Rodrigo D: No futuro (1990) (along with La

Playa DC and Alias María) actually feature non-professional teen actors who were recruited in particular for their ability to expose the reality of life on the streets of Bogotá amidst conflict.

Adolescents have also been screened in Latin American films to characterize the transitional period from the 1990s to the new century when globalization has intensified due to neoliberal policies that have been implemented in the region. In this period, the rite of passage, a central feature of adolescence, and the volatility it implies, mirrors the insecurity and instability of many Latin American societies as they veer away from stolid paternalist states to uncertain free-market economies. Thus, the transition from adolescent to adult in the films serves as a metonymy for the experiences of society as a whole. (Rocha and Seminet 10)

The teen-centered films to which I refer in this chapter tend to highlight poverty as a means of

“privileging the perspective of the working-class and lower-middle-class subjects and, in doing so, harshly indict societies riddled by mundane acts of violence, exploitation, and emotional brutality”

(14). In my exploration of these teen-driven films, I examine the role of their focus on topics such as drug use, urban violence and the national narratives which have often been based in corruption.

If the adolescent is more commonly used to revisit the past as a means of projecting the future, then one must focus on the reason behind the creation of a repository of cultural memory which centers upon giving “voice to those who were unjustly murdered, tortured, or disappeared by dictatorial regimes” (16). How does the teen protagonist’s role function as an allegory for nation in its emphasis on race, sex, ethnicity etc. within the context of histories of trauma? The study of the blending or urban and coastal sound in my reading of La Playa DC as well as María’s shifting aural experiences within the initially claustrophobic but ultimately soothing sounds of the jungle to which she begins the film enslaved are important markers for my assertion in this chapter that

31 the teen does in fact undergo and complete the mourning process. Much like in my previous chapters, this final section of the dissertation will also point to the adolescent’s spatial positioning, whether from above the city looking down upon it, or as a symbol of future generations as guidepost for a melancholic nation through frequent shots angled from the adolescent’s perspective. My discussion of the Argentine teen protagonist in Cautiva will be read through a similar vantage point. While the teen protagonist in Cautiva is not technically without her parental figures, a metaphor for nation, she is forced to come to terms with the violent, falsified nature in which their relationship was formed due to a manipulation of the past. Ultimately, this chapter, and the entirety of this dissertation, sets out to identify individual narratives of past trauma told through the adolescent and child perspectives which inform collective narratives about national identity in the present. It suggests that the child and adolescent gaze highlights the potential effect an individual modeling of mourning can have on collective narratives of historical memory, and the possibility for mourning which those collective narratives prescribe. This dissertation presents the child and adolescent protagonists in contemporary Latin American and Spanish film as vital actors and integral components in the formation of a post-conflict national identity which necessitates a mournful, sometimes horrifying and traumatic, direct engagement with violent legacies and national wounds.

32 CHAPTER 2. THE ‘MONSTROUS’ CHILD IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH FILM: DRIVING THE TRANSITION FROM MELANCHOLY TO MOURNING IN POST- DICTATORSHIP SPAIN

In her book Childhood and Cinema, Vicky Lebeau writes, “Whether in classic, ‘world’ or contemporary cinemas, children are everywhere on our screens, a ubiquity that turns cinema into an invaluable – in fact, potentially overwhelming – resource for reflecting on the cultural histories of childhood in the 20th century. But what is the child for cinema? What does cinema want of the child” (12)? According to my argument, post-Franco cinema has employed the use of the child protagonist with such frequency in order to work through national conflict and, as

Wright proclaims in her foundational text The Child in Spanish Cinema, “reassess our relationship to the past, and also to the present” because of the child’s enhanced capacity to mourn (18). These child protagonists come to stand in for all victims of the Spanish Civil War, of Spain’s fascist history and for those forgotten in unmarked mass graves. The child’s link to both the dead and the adult characters, something which I will explain in much greater detail in my direct analyses of the films in question in this chapter, allows them to take on the function of temporal connection between past trauma and present reality. What are the questions the child onscreen inevitably forces us to ask about national identity, temporality and the place of memory in a century both connected and disconnected from war and trauma?

As I will explore the concepts of trauma and the legacy of trauma displayed in these child-centered films, the inherently different relationship to the past held by the child figure vs. the adult is of primary importance. Transition films like Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 horror film ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? “cast children and adults in a mutually adversarial

33 relationship of us-versus-them across a boundary that is somehow clearly drawn…” (7).9 Part of my investigation of the processes of mourning vs. melancholy depends greatly on an understanding of this boundary between child and adult. Are children destined to repeat the violent legacy which has been left to them? And, even if they are not evil as in the case of

Serrador’s child figures, the film suggests they are also certainly not innocent, unwitting characters. I will reveal that the child, while certainly “bound up with anxieties about the nation, the future, and the afterlife of violence” is far more capable of engaging with the past and thereby overcoming its repetition. Is the child trapped between “the diegetic future annihilation of the adults but also the historical past victimization of children by adult conflict on Spanish soil” as films like Serrador’s could be read to imply (8)?

As Thomas so aptly points out, it is through their imaginative capacity that cinematic children break down the dichotomies present in the adult world: past as separate from present, and present from past.

In his writings on the uncanny, Freud comments that the unheimlich often arises when the divisions between reality and imagination are blurred; but the child’s imaginative perspective allows for the breaking down of such dichotomies, which is perhaps why, for Freud, that which arouses fear in adults often does not in children. The living children can tolerate the ghost children’s liminal status – between life and death, presence and absence – and mediate between the ghost and the viewer, gradually revealing the ghosts’ intentions to be less terrifying than we might think. The child and the ghost – both liminal others, both temporarily in flux – serve to draw the viewer into an uncanny engagement with the past, the living children leading us toward his ghostly counterpart. (105)

9 This film’s basic premise involves a British couple who arrive to a fictional Spanish island only to discover that its only inhabitants are a group of demonic children who mercilessly slaughter any adult in sight. The child figure in this film, far from the incarnation of innocence it has been perceived to represent, is calculated, vengeful, and bloodthirsty. While the works in my analysis of child-centered Spanish horror film only feature children who appear to be demonic (but are always revealed to have been victims of injustice themselves looking solely for recognition), the initial dichotomy Serrador establishes between child and adult in this film is important.

34 It will be my primary argument in my film analysis in this chapter that the child protagonist’s access to present “reality” and a parallel world of past trauma facilitates their mourning capacity; in fact, by making the child agent in the creation of portals between the worlds, one could argue that a bridging between a nation’s past and its present are not possible without the child. The

“horror” at the center of child-driven Spanish contemporary film can be read to signify the difficulty inherent in the process of unearthing trauma in order to effectively mourn.

The films of the Memory Boom in Spain coincided directly with the resurgence of the

Spanish horror genre. This convergence of child-centered horror film and an era in which leftover trauma from Civil War and dictatorship is first explicitly explored onscreen makes sense. Emma Wilson’s seminal work on the prominence of the figure of the missing child in film, Cinema’s Missing Children, explores the “personal loss, individual horror and mourning” which “intersect in a network of films haunted by the spectre of children at risk from abuse, abduction, accident and illness” (2). The notion of the missing child, pertinent in El orfanato, El laberinto del fauno and El espinazo del diablo, brings into question the past (a construct inherently associated with the nostalgia and safety of childhood) as well as the future (as mentioned, children symbolize all future generations to come).

The loss or disappearance of a child, or of many children as is the case in the aforementioned films set in orphanages, represents anxieties about the kind of future which will be left for the next generation, a question inevitably at the forefront of national consciousness at the time of the Transition. Child death, Wilson writes, is “unnatural and unredeemable” (10). It is also the clear result of the act of forgetting in many of the films to be discussed. In El orfanato,

Simón’s death in the basement of the film’s house is due to the forgotten orphans’ return for justice. Wilson writes that it is increasingly the child who represents “the lost object of desire,

35 origin and vanishing point” in contemporary cinema (15). I argue that it is not the child itself who represents the “lost object of desire” but rather the child who reveals it.

In this chapter I look at films such as El orfanato, El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno as they present the child protagonist as able and eager to engage with the supernatural world, which again serves as a metaphor for buried trauma lingering oftentimes just beneath the surface of the homes or orphanages where the film’s primary action takes place. In her article,

“La Guerra Civil Española: Entre Fantasmas, Faunos y Hadas,” Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel explains the significance of the alternate universes (for the most part subterranean) presented to the viewer by the child:

Del Toro, al igual que Víctor Erice con El espíritu de la colmena, o Andrés Wood con Machuca, proponen historias de crecimiento, una suerte de bildungsroman, en las que los protagonistas, niños inocentes, víctimas de la violencia de los adultos, se encuentran a sí mismos, crecen repentinamente y presentan una visión alternativa a esa realidad opresiva. Estas alternativas históricas se revelan dentro de una estética que abraza lo desconocido, lo extraño, ‘el otro’, y que motiva a sus espectadores a identificarse con los niños protagonistas. A través de la mirada de los niños, se demuestra finalmente que los Frankenstein, los faunos y los fantasmas, no tienen que darnos miedo; son los monstrous ‘reales’ o quizás los ‘fascistas’ arquetípicos los que constituyen una verdadera amenaza. (38)

The child is undoubtedly the site of penetration between present, amnesiac reality, and the buried, subterranean trauma which serves as its foundation, visible or not, in these films. The prevalence of uterine-shaped gateways between the adult world (where trauma is buried) and the often subterranean or hidden supernatural realms (where trauma plainly exists) which the child protagonists access with ease, must be understood as a metaphor for Spain as motherland.10

10 In their study of the representation of children in both Spanish and Latin American film, Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film, Rocha and Seminet assert that child-centered films’ purpose is often to “recover and preserve the ‘unofficial’ memories of horrific and violent events” which also coincides with “filmmakers eager to represent their own conceptions of the past and/or critique of the present” (13).

36 Enjuto-Rangel also points to the link between the natural world and the supernatural in child-centered Spanish film as a means of dealing with political allegory. “En El laberinto, la visión de la naturaleza incluye además a los seres fantásticos que surgen de ella. De hecho, del

Toro ya ha comentado que sus monstruos suelen ser bellos como la naturaleza misma” (40). A penetration of the earth in these films, of Spain as motherland, through the supernatural child figure’s guidance or modeling is presented consistently as the inevitable path toward “healing” a nation. The bond between the child and the natural world is perhaps emphasized more strikingly in del Toro’s work due to the more high-budget use of special effects, but this link is established from El espíritu de la colmena through Transition film and beyond.11

The significance of the persistence of the trope of the ghost or child ghost in films of the

Memory Boom has already received considerable attention in the scholarly community; for the purposes of this chapter, I will be focusing specifically on the notion of the ghost as it accesses and represents varying temporalities, an ability which enables mourning in response to the adult’s attachment to a melancholic view of the past. The climactic moment of almost all of the

Memory Boom films, the one in which some point of reconciliation is reached, hinges upon direct interaction with the ghost or supernatural element. It is not without importance, then, that the ghost embodies the coming together of the past, present and future as a crucial part of a national reality free from “haunting”. Notably, it is also the child protagonists who approach the ghosts without fear, while the adult characters can rarely see them without the child’s guidance.

11 “Del Toro evoca a esos fantasmas del pasado, literalmente dándoles voz, porque ellos representan esa línea de continuidad temporal y, a la misma vez, sugieren una estructura circular de la historia, en la que el futuro esperanzador del final de la película se ve ensombrecido por la falta de libertad en el orfanato. Éste se vuelve cárcel de fantasmas, microcosmos de ese paisaje estéril de la España de Franco al que se enfrentarán los niños” (Enjuto-Rangel 41).

37 The child embodies and even gravitates toward that which has been hidden and, as Enjuto-

Rangel writes, “las alegorías políticas de Guillermo del Toro nos proponen una salida, una búsqueda de una alternativa histórica, un abrazo a lo fantasmagórico y a lo fantástico” (50).

Whether found in subterranean spaces, or on either end of a hall or passageway or staircase, the child or child ghosts frequently occupy borders, thresholds, archways, and other liminal spaces.

Santi in El espinazo del diablo repeatedly appears in the arches of the orphanage kitchen or in the doorway leading to the basement, or looks at the living boys across windowsills; in Laura’s first encounter with El orfanato’s primary child ghost, Tomás, he pushes her across a threshold, slamming her fingers in the door and then staring at her ominously through its pane of frosted glass” (103). These direct confrontations between the past and the present which are initiated by the child challenge the adult’s melancholic attitude toward the past, and with the revelation of these alternative spaces the child exposes the sickness left by forgetting and the buried trauma which must be dealt with, rather than feared.

Spatial Positioning of the Child, Sound and Sight in Memory Spaces as Political Allegory for Mourning: El espíritu de la colmena, El orfanato and El laberinto del fauno

El espíritu de la colmena and Sound as it Represents Passage into Memory Spaces

As mentioned, the child protagonist featured prevalently in Spanish film of the early 2000s often confronts national collective trauma directly through fantasy in the form of labyrinths and subterranean spaces full of ghosts or monsters. The child figure pertains to an alternate reality in which imagination allows fear to be confronted head on, and past trauma welcomed instead of repressed. But how is the child’s unique relationship with this metaphorical, parallel universe manifested physically, visually, or even orally? Scholars like Sarah Wright and Antonio Lázaro-

Reboll have written about contemporary Spanish horror film’s success as it “gives voice to cultural anxieties at the turn of the 21st century” (Lázaro-Reboll 8). I argue that these national

38 anxieties in relation to the past manifest themselves physically through the child’s physical positioning. Originating with the character of Ana in Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena12, whose entire depiction of trauma is presented through her relationship with her physical surroundings, this tendency resurfaces through visual and oral echoes in films of the Memory Boom like El orfanato, El laberinto del fauno and El espinazo del diablo, Child protagonists like Simón,

Ofelia and Carlos’s disruption of linear time is demonstrated physically by their placement on either end of hallways or tunnels (often standing opposite the adult character), between present amnesiac reality and the horrors of the past. Their positioning in these oftentimes subterranean spaces is also frequently accompanied by the same oppressive, claustrophobic echo which surrounds Ana in El espíritu de la colmena. This section will explore how the child’s spatiality, orality (or lack thereof) and sight force us to examine the memory crisis at the core of Spain’s contemporary political climate and answer the question: how do space, sound and sight as the child experiences them come together in these films to reveal the way nation bears conflict?

In El espíritu de la colmena’s opening montage, a series of children’s drawings, we are introduced to the music which will return throughout the film, a simultaneously upbeat yet unsettling score which seems to reflect both the inquisitive nature of the child as well as his or her comfort with the uncanny.13 Shortly thereafter, we witness Ana and her sister Isabel’s father, tending to the beehives they keep on their property “somewhere in the Castillian countryside” in

1940, the year after the end of the Spanish Civil War. The beehive is the first point in which sound and memory space converge in the film; the hive, claustrophobic and anxiety producing

12 El espíritu de la colmena is the only Spanish film to be considered consistently by authors in broad studies of childhood in cinema. 13 The score in the film’s opening sequence could also resemble that of a music box, whose presence as a symbol of the uncanny is seen frequently throughout the decades of horror film to come.

39 by nature, is accompanied on camera by the overwhelming sound of the bees’ buzzing. Inside the home the girls share with their parents the windows are made of a honey color in the shape of a beehive; much like in El orfanato, the home can be read as a metaphor for Spain as a nation at the time of the Transition, overrun by a national anxiety sourced through institutionalized forgetting. The house in which the girls live seems antiquated and dark, out of line with any kind of idyllic childhood; the opaque beehive-like windows remind the viewer that those inside the home are almost trapped within. Ana’s search for “the spirit,” who she ultimately identifies as a

Republican soldier, takes place in part inside of the home’s walls. Returning to Wilson’s notion of the child as representing “the lost object of desire, origin and vanishing point,” I will demonstrate that Ana is not herself the lost object of desire, but rather the figure who reveals said object.

After both Ana and Isabel attend a showing of the film version of Frankenstein, Ana becomes enthralled by the monster. She asks her sister, ¿es un fantasma? To which Isabel replies, “no, es un espíritu. Los espíritus no tienen cuerpo y por eso no los puedes matar.” Ana’s subsequent quest to identify and understand the “spirit,” is juxtaposed by the adult characters’, namely her parents’, entirely detached and emotionally void dispositions. Though Ana may not understand the innerworkings of Francoism, her capacity to see and engage with the past is far superior to that of the adult character’s.

The film alludes to this throughout, perhaps most notably in a scene in the schoolroom in which Ana is called up in front of the class to place the eyes on a cardboard cutout of an adult

“Don José,” who with her help “ya puede ver.” This scene segues into what I would deem the most important memory space (particularly as it relates to sound) of the child in the film: the wide open prairie which looks out upon the small, abandoned house where Ana later hides the

40 Republican solider. The shot is taken aerially, with the children’s backs to the camera, as they face the small cottage in the distance, and move toward it head on14. The only sound present is that of heavy wind, so loud it seems to drown out all other noise.15 This wind sound, which is oppressive and claustrophobic just like the buzzing of the beehive, almost itself represents the barrier between the girls and the “spirit”, or, in my reading, the lost object of desire. The camera lands on a shot of Ana from behind, simply standing in front of the dark doorways contemplating entry into the cottage, engulfed by this sound.

This exact wind sound is used frequently in films of the Memory Boom at the moment the child protagonist is on a precipice between the amnesiac present and an exploration of a trauma- filled past. Sound as an indicator for oppression, claustrophobia and the anxiety inherent in a culture of forgetting is repeated throughout many of the films I will discuss. 16Ofelia’s entrance into the passageway leading to the Pale Man’s chambers in El laberinto del fauno, for instance, is accompanied by the same overwhelming wind sound as Ana in the prairie overlooking the

Republican soldier’s hideout, again signifying the tremendous weight and difficulty of engaging with the lost object, or Spain’s political history, just as it does in El espíritu de la colmena. The camerawork in the shot of Ana and Isabel descending through the prairie toward the house is representative of that which Thomas deems prevalent in Erice’s film as it “emphasizes the child protagonist’s subjective experience but also invites empathy with her perspective, aligning the spectator with the child, and her view of the adult world she inhabits” (Thomas 118). In

14 It should be noted here that El orfanato also includes a similar aerial shot of Laura and Simón as they approach one of the film’s primary memory spaces, the caves alongside the lighthouse where the ghost orphans are first discovered by Simón. 15 While the wind does drown out all other sound, toward the end of the shot of the girls approaching the cottage, the Spanish song “Vamos a contar mentiras” plays in the background. 16 The importance of wind sounds is also prevalent in the Gothic genre.

41 positioning the camera to the girls’ backs as they lead the spectator toward said memory space, the shot suggests that it is the child who will lead the investigation of that which has been repressed. Shots of Ana on the train tracks, with her back to the camera as she looks out onto the seemingly endless railway, with no sound but the heavy wind, also imply the child as guide in the next steps of Spain’s future. Ana’s final dialogue at the end of the film, in which she proclaims, “soy Ana,” overlaps with sounds of a train in the background. The child’s alignment with and gravitation toward an unveiling of the lost object is evident, and while Ana “is not an active participant in the political sphere by any means,” she is linked to it through the film’s mise-en-scène (Thomas 150).

As mentioned in my discussion of the child more broadly in films centered around war, the child (much like the ghost) lacks verbal possibilities. In El espíritu de la colmena, sound is both used (as in the wind example) but also omitted at certain points throughout the film to indicate the child’s engagement with “the spirit” or supernatural element. Through practically silent family dinners, in which the only sounds are the clinking of silverware, the disconnect between the adult and the child within the dark, claustrophobic home, or beehive, is apparent; Ana and

Isabel’s parents are void of expression entirely, while the girls sneak mischievous glances to one another. The child, that is, has not been numbed by isolation the way the adult characters have.

There are many instances when diegetic sound, like Ana’s mother’s piano playing, in place of verbal sound, underscores the child’s gaze such as the scene in which Ana stares at photographs of her parents lives’ before the Civil War. The intensity with which she attempts to piece together the past amplifies the importance of this process as it is driven by the child, whereas the adult appears entirely disinterested and disconnected.

42 Ana’s identification with Frankenstein17, also a non-verbal character, and actual “encounter” with him as her own reflection in the water at the end of the film, lacks dialogue entirely.

Whether Ana is observing the monster on-screen in the film or “in person,” the absence of verbal sound allows image to take precedence as “no longer a mere illustration or decoration of the verbal description, which in turn participates in but does not control the verbal atmosphere” (de

Ros 34). Ana as child protagonist is linked by the lack of verbal possibilities she shares with both physical manifestations of the “spirit” she encounters: Frankenstein and the Republican soldier.

The importance of Ana’s gaze in these moments of identification with repressed trauma is not detracted from but rather enhanced by non-verbal sound. Thus, the child is implicated as central in the processing of repressed trauma and her silence integral to said realization. Ana falls “ill” after coming into contact with the monster which her doctor explains by stating that she is “bajo los efectos de una impresión muy fuerte, pero se le pasará, poco a poco irá olvidando.” Her identification and integration with the repressed trauma is explained by the adult as pathological, yet for the child protagonist memory space such as the prairie “will reveal itself as a place of inscriptions, testifying to a silent piling up of thoughts, feelings and memories which defy words but still demand recognition” (de Ros 36).

Passageways, Tunnels and Physical Barriers as Metaphors for Mourning in El orfanato, El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno

As mentioned previously, the films in question present a child protagonist charged with revealing allegorical alternate universes which represent institutionalized forgetting: but how does their spatial positioning allude to the necessity of identifying and embracing trauma and

17 As Xon de Ros notes “the monster which haunts the protagonist comes from James Whale’s 1931 film version in which, unlike its literary original, the creature was a silent character, twice a misfit, for his silence in the flourishing world of the talkies, and for his striking physical appearance” (34).

43 advocate for the process of mourning? The child’s blurring of the “line” between amnesiac present and the buried past is often drawn between a subterranean space composed of lingering trauma in the form of supernatural elements (which only the child can occupy), and an above- ground present reality. But how is the child’s passageway between worlds represented through his or her spatial positioning? In El orfanato, El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno, the child protagonist makes regular, clandestine descent into subterranean spaces unknown to the adult, and can frequently be found on the opposite side of hallways and passageways from the adult. The child occupies various forms of physical thresholds as well, placed behind opaque windows or looking out at the adult from within dark or occult spaces. This spatial positioning not only represents the dichotomy between the child and the adult but also depicts the child as the adult’s “other.” The ease with which the child moves between the present and past enables them to serve as guide to the adult in freedom from haunting, or an interminably melancholic relationship to repressed trauma. In this case, the child is not necessarily bestowing its non- dichotomous relationship between reality and imagination on the adult in terms of Freud’s suggestions about the unheimlich; rather, the child is leading the adult out of the liminal spaces which disallows any potential for imaginative capacity. The goal of mourning is not to normalize trauma or horror but instead to enable what Idelber Avelar terms “active forgetting”: in other words, when trauma becomes part of a consciousness, rather than an unrecognized yet insidious burden (Avelar 4). No healing from national trauma will ever be achieved without recognition and introjection of the object of loss. Mourning politics in post-dictatorship society should mean allowing the past to become present without reservation, participating in an ongoing engagement with it, never fully releasing it from national collective memory (Eng and Kanzanjian 4). Active forgetting is allowing the past in without being overtaken by it.

44 Very much unlike the Spanish horror film produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which was characterized by “low-budget, psycotronic films,” El orfanato falls directly within a small group of Spanish films garnering international success at the time, alongside Alejandro

Amenábar’s The Others and a breadth of work from del Toro (Pramaggiore 1).18 The film begins with Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband Carlos’s (Fernando Cayo) decision to move to a house in the countryside of northern Spain, along with their adopted, HIV positive 7 year-old

Simón. They intend to turn the house, a dilapidated mansion which used to serve as the orphanage where Laura herself grew up, into a home for children with disabilities. Soon after they move in, Simón begins mentioning a group of invisible friends he has been playing with on the grounds of the home, a comment that Laura and Carlos play off as childish fantasy. However, when Simón goes missing on the day of Laura and Carlos’s open house for prospective children,

Laura’s journey toward recognition of the supernatural events within the house, and the real fate of the orphans with whom she was raised, all become a necessary step in finding Simón.

In part due to his embodiment of multiple temporalities, the child in El orfanato, for example, more specifically models a process of “mourning” national trauma, represented metaphorically in the film by the unrecognized murder of Laura’s fellow orphans, which I argue foreshadows the present day political debate surrounding the Valle de los Caídos and criticizes the Transition’s conscious burial of the past. In El orfanato, the fate of the orphan ghosts serve as the “lost object of love” for Laura, who, until the end of the film, represents melancholic

18 El orfanato was an international success, grossing over 24 million euros in Spain and over 7 million dollars in the United States. At the time of its release, only Pan’s Labyrinth and films from Pedro Almodóvar superseded these numbers. It should be noted that del Toro’s longstanding friendship with Bayona and role as a producer for The Orphanage was “arguably a launching pad for its success” (The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci-Fi 74).

45 Spain. The clarity of Freud’s demarcation between melancholia and mourning, which I reference in the introduction, is crucial to my argument because it underlines the film’s most urgent message: melancholia leads to the fragmentation of certain narratives or, in this case, the history of Spain’s 20th century, and in order for the past to “uninhabit” Spain’s present the victims of the

Spanish Civil War must be properly mourned (Eng and Kazanjian 4). Through the child’s modeling of mourning, the film seeks not to revive the trauma which occurred within the orphanage but rather to emphasize the necessity of its recognition in the present as the only means of becoming uninhibited by it, a reality which scholars like Maria Pramaggiore write is intrinsically conveyed by the child as “a subject always in process, propelled toward the future”

(8). The film’s opening credits feature the hands of an animated child pulling back the wallpaper of the house piece by piece; El orfanato is thus framed by the clear assertion that it will be the child who drives the process of exposing the buried trauma within the house, or allegorically within Spain as a nation.

After herself coming into contact with the ghosts of the orphans, Simón’s “friends” whose existence she and Carlos initially denied, Laura eventually comes to realize that her only hope of finding Simón hinges upon uncovering what really happened to the orphans. Laura discovers that it was Benigna (Montserrat Carulla), a former caretaker at the orphanage whose son Tomás (Óscar Casas) was killed accidentally by the orphans during an innocent game, who poisoned them and covered their deaths up as revenge. Laura eventually does locate Simón’s body in the basement of the home and realizes that his death was in fact her own doing, as she unwittingly sealed off the exit from his favorite hiding place on the day of the open house.

Ultimately, Laura must follow the methodical process of revisiting the past, as unveiled to her by

Simón and the child ghosts, in order to be released from its haunting; eventually, this process

46 leads her to “excavate” Simón’s bones from the basement of the home, after a series of terrifying encounters with Tomás (who often appears to Laura from the opposite end of hallways or other passageways) and the other child ghosts, whose call for reparations is emphasized through their spatiality. The film reveals the inevitability of the excavation of bones in Spain today; this act is crucial to Laura’s achievement of mourning in the film as the orphans, whose remains lie unrecognized in a shed on the grounds of the house, represent Franco’s victims lost within the

Valle de los Caídos as well as within the countless unmarked graves which continue to cover

Spain. It is also the filmic child figure, I will demonstrate, who calls for the outright, public commemoration of trauma, much like what Sánchez is attempting to implement today through a museum dedicated to Franco’s victims at the site of the Valle de los Caídos, as vital to what

Scott Boehm terms “reinscribing the disappeared into the fabric of the local community’s memory, as well as the memory of the nation” (259).

In one of El orfanato’s initial scenes, Laura’s first “encounter” with the orphan ghosts marks the spatial divide between the child and the adult character. She leads Simón out to visit the caves on the beach near the house; the camera takes an aerial shot of the two as they walk, focusing in on the many footsteps they’ve left behind19. We see Laura and Simón from quite a distance, as the shot emphasizes the quantity of footsteps involved. In the frame, next to the caves, stands the lighthouse, a melancholic marker. Laura describes the lighthouse which used to illuminate the home when she was a child in the orphanage but has since ceased to function. I argue that the unresolved, melancholic trauma present in the house, which will reappear throughout the film as a reminder of the orphanage’s dark history. It is no coincidence that Laura

19 In my reading of the film these footsteps, leading up to the occult memory space of the cave, represent the thousands of unrecognized victims of the Civil War and Francoism whose bodies remain in unmarked mass graves throughout Spain.

47 also tells Simón, surprised to learn of the lighthouse’s existence, that it continues to exist, “sigue estando, lo que pasa es que ya no funciona.” The following shot is given to us from inside the cave, looking outward, suggesting that we are experiencing the perspective of whoever is hidden inside, a recurring technique which will be seen throughout the film. Simón runs into the menacing darkness of the cave without a bit of fear or hesitation, whereas Laura remains outside, incredulous. When Simón finds the ghost orphans inside the cave, the camera centers in slowly on his face, transfixed but not afraid. He says, innocently, “¿Quieres jugar?” This scene is also the first in which we see the child’s spatial positioning as a reflection of his aversion to forgetting trauma. Just as in many later scenes inside the house, Simón stands in an enclosed space between actual darkness and light, more figuratively speaking, between what is visible and what is not. Scholars like Ann Davies have also read the caves’ uterine shape as symbolic of the mother, or as Spain itself (89). It is significant, then, that the orphan ghosts are first located in the film in a part of “Spain” which is dark, hidden away, where they seem to have been almost devoured by their own nation. Simón has no trouble crossing in and out of such memory spaces, and his lack of fear in breaking spatial divides is indicative of his proclivity to mourning rather than melancholia.

The evil or “othered” child figure in contemporary horror film, as Debbie C. Olson and

Andrew Scahill point out in their book Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, is often revealed to be not evil at all; instead, the “horrific” child is demonized purely because of his resistance to “the interstice within an identity that is constructed for them via adults, and when such children strain against adults, they become marginalized, outside the idealized notions of what children should be” (xi). El orfanato’s spatial depiction of the child figures of Simón and

Tomás is meant specifically to establish the difference in identity between the adult generation in

48 Spain at the time of the film’s release, the same year of the passing of Spain’s Law of Historical

Memory, and that of the possibility for a new collective identity ushered in by a generation unaffected directly by a legacy of active forgetting. Tomás, the ghost orphan who wears a scarecrow mask mimicking that of the film’s opening sequence and whose appearances in the film are easily the most terrifying, is demonized not only because he stands as the representation of the “living-dead,” or Spain’s unrecognized victims of the Civil War and Francoism, but because his very existence threatens Transition ideology and its culture of forgetting. Based on

Laura’s age, one can reasonably assume that she was born around 1975, the year of Spain’s pacto de olvido; her various confrontations with Tomás, then, can be read as the child’s direct challenging of Transition ideology. Simón and the other child ghosts in the film “are not powerless victims, but rather, these children hold the keys to restoring adult communication and helping them reimagine themselves” (Olson and Scahill 3).20 Children like Simón and the other orphan ghosts draw upon cultural anxieties and, as Sage Leslie-McCarthy states, they are

“embodying fears about a threat to ‘social and institutional normality’” (2). The “monstrous” nature of figures like Tomás and Simón may also suggest El orfanato’s warning that there is an inherently “horrific” quality in the act of mourning itself, a notion to which I will return in my analysis of the film’s ending. El orfanato suggests that recuperating collective memory, while necessary, will also give rise to terror in the physical and emotional unearthing of the past as well

20 The relationship between the living child and the dead one is at the forefront of almost all of the films in question; the ghost and the child both “occupy a liminal position in relation to both space and time” and each reference a disruption of boundaries, of time as a linear concept (Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives 102). The ghost and the child, as Thomas and other contemporary film scholars have underscored, blur the lines between life and death, present and past.

49 as in the divisiveness the film seems to predict more than 10 years before Franco’s exhumation is approved by Spain’s government.

The next instance from El orfanato of the child or child ghost’s spatiality which I would like to examine as a means of reestablishing or representing multiple temporalities can be seen during the open house that Laura and her husband host for their home for “niños descapacitados,” when Simón first goes missing. In her frantic search for him, Laura finds herself on the opposite side of the hallway from Tomás, an example of the child’s spatial placement in hallways or passageways as the embodiment of their attempt to link the past and present for the melancholic adult. This is one of the film’s most “horrifying” scenes, as Tomás’s slow movement toward her, and heavy, monstrous breathing beneath his mask appears menacing. Once Tomás crosses this passageway and reaches Laura, he ends up shoving her into the bathroom while displaying his possession of the key Laura used at the beginning of the film to lock away the records containing Simón’s true biological history. Tomás “challenges linear time by bringing the past into the present” and “introduces a repetition loop that continues to return the present to the past” (“Phantom Children: Spectral Presences and the Violent Past in

Two Films of Contemporary Spain” 103). As a ghost, and in particular as a child ghost, he challenges times as a linear concept. It should be noted here that just before Simón’s

“disappearance,” he begs his mother to allow him to show her “la casita de Tomás,” the space in the basement of the home where Tomás used to be hidden due to his malformation, and where

Laura ultimately discovers Simón’s corpse. Tomás’s “monstrous” quality is later revealed to be entirely benign once Laura has properly passed through the stages of mourning, but such freedom from his presence as terrifying cannot be achieved until Laura is aware of the object of loss, in this case the hidden truth about the ghost orphans’ murder.

50 This scene ends on the beach, near the “uterine” caves where the film opens, and where we first witness Simón’s interaction with the orphan ghosts. Though no one else believes her,

Laura is convinced that the last place she saw Simón was standing inside the caves. We see a shot of Simón standing alone inside of them, separated from Laura, representative of the persisting rift between present and past, a gap the orphan ghosts will continue to insist upon closing. Simón’s disappearance, revealed later to be the result of Laura unwittingly locking him in the home’s basement during her search for him, can be compared to Wright’s description of the missing child in contemporary Spanish cinema as “a potent but repressed image of the loss of national historical memory” (102). Simón’s “gaze” is not dissimilar to that of Ana’s in El espíritu de la colmena. Just like Ana, Simón is a dark-eyed child who serves as a “lugar de memoria” in his representation of “what has traditionally escaped from history” (94). Exactly like Ana, Simón is called upon, in this case by the persistence of the orphans, to serve as witness to the suffering brought upon by the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship.

The motif of the child’s connection to both the ghost (or other supernatural element) and multiple temporalities is also seen spatially in one of the film’s final scenes wherein Laura actually discovers the orphans’ bones in body bags in a shed on the home’s property. After being led outside by clues left for her by the orphans, Laura encounters a series of ovens, which she proceeds to pry open desperately. Upon doing so, the first shot takes place from within the darkness of the cellar, looking outward toward Laura, just like in the caves at the beginning of the film, a passageway between acceptance and repression. This camera angle, and repeated play with light and darkness, portrayed often from the perspective of the darkness, represents an acknowledgment of the presence of the unearthed trauma as very much active, agent, hardly put to rest in the present. Boehm writes that the shed is “an abject memory space full of antique

51 remains where time has been suspended….Laura struggles to break through the locked door of the oven, an ideological barrier standing between her and the traumatic real, preventing her from seeing the whole reality” (264). I argue that this physical breakthrough in the oven, where she discovers the actual bones of the orphan ghosts, placed inside what mimics a Nazi concentration camp gas chamber, represents a breakthrough in her achievement of mourning. Laura has found the physical evidence, undeniably tangible, of the film’s core repressed trauma. No longer an unidentified abstraction, or subconscious awareness of loss, the truth has come, literally, to light.

The unrecognized fate of the orphan ghosts is Laura’s “lost object of love”, and she is no longer a representation of melancholic Spain, but rather has begun the healing introjection process which is only possible when the object of loss is identified, to speak in Freudian terms. In emptying all of the bags containing the orphans’ bones, Laura “converts the space into a virtual mass grave exhumation site,” an allusion to the traumatic, yet necessary work which must be done through excavation to make reparations to victims and their families in present-day Spain

(Boehm 265).

While inadvertent, Simón’s eventual burial in the basement of the home converts him into one of the many victims of Francoism, and specifically of Transition ideology, left forgotten in an undiscovered grave. Ultimately, it was melancholic Laura, as mother figure and a symbol for Spain, who causes this end. Exhumations challenge explicitly the success of the Transition at its very core and it is this eventual excavation of Simón’s body from the basement, the climactic end to Laura’s journey, which further supports my argument that El orfanato foreshadows and reinforces the excavation of bones as crucial to mourning. In this scene, Laura, still holding

Simón in her arms, begins turning frantically in circles as the camera pans to shots of her from every angle in one of the most frightening sequences of the film. We hear the orphans’ laughter

52 from all sides, suggesting the past cannot be escaped, it surrounds them. The sound of their laughter drowns out every other noise just as the wind echo in El espíritu de la colmena does on the prairie when Ana and Isabel are confronted with the memory space represented by the cottage. This scene ends with a shot of the staircase, once again returning to the motif of the passageway present throughout the film. However, this example of the hallway, passageway or tunnel is the only one in El orfanato which is shot at an angle leading upwards. The work Laura has done to mourn, this shot suggests, signifies, perhaps, a final laying to rest of the ghosts of the past and the possibility of a moving forward, upward, from the depths of possession or haunting.

Similarly, El laberinto del fauno and El espinazo del diablo both feature the child as occupying subterranean spaces as well as passageways as allusion to the work of mourning which must be done between Spain’s traumatic past and its present. El laberinto del fauno, set during the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, chronicles the film’s child protagonist Ofelia’s exploration of a mythical world which exists in parallel to the violent reality surrounding her.

Ofelia is led by fairies to a faun who claims she is the reincarnation of a princess who will eventually return to the kingdom of the underworld through labyrinths built by her father. One of the tasks handed down to her by the faun, who states she will only reclaim her place in the kingdom should she follow his instructions, leads her to the trunk of a large, evidently uterine- shaped tree21. Her descent into the earth through the tree trunk requires her to retrieve a key from inside a toad whose presence beneath the tree is draining its nutrients. 22 Before delving specifically into the role these subterranean spaces play in the film’s suggested process of

21 This tree is identical to the agujero encendido featured in Julio Medem’s 1992 Basque generational Civil War drama Vacas. 22 In the following section I will discuss the use of subterranean space in El laberinto del fauno as it is used to indicate the process of mourning as it must be completed through a return within “mother earth” where, as the film states from its first scene, “no existe la mentira ni el dolor”.

53 mourning, in this section I seek to simply establish the child’s spatial positioning as it correlates to the notion of buried trauma. Not only must Ofelia descend into the depths of the earth in this scene, but she also must cross through a long passageway within the earth to reach the toad.23

Ofelia, much like the prior examples I’ve given of Simón or Tomás in El orfanato, is charged with bridging the gap between amnesiac reality and past buried trauma, whose existence just beneath the surface of Spanish national consciousness is reflected in its physical manifestation as the literal foundation of the earth these child protagonists walk on.

In a later scene, Ofelia uncovers another undiscovered, subterranean space housing what is perhaps the film’s most terrifying monster, the Pale-Man, also a metaphor for Francoism. It is the child in this scene who actually manifests physically the entrance into said subterranean realm; using the chalk given to her by the faun, Ofelia draws a rectangle in the wall which then turns into a doorway to the underworld. Ofelia must then move through another long tunnel in order to reach the Pale-Man; this passageway is dark, accompanied by an oppressive, tense and melancholic echo24. The score reflects the insular, anxious nature of the space.25 When Ofelia first opens the entryway, the camera pans backwards away from the child, emphasizing the massive, uncharted space which the portal is revealing, and the indistinct heavy breathing which can be read as an allusion to the lost souls beneath Spanish ground, residing amongst the unrecognized trauma manifested in the form of a monster. Once inside the Pale-Man’s lair,

Ofelia finds a pile of thousands of shoes, a clear allusion to the unrecognized victims of fascism.

23 As many scholars have established, the toad is a metaphor for Francoism and its legacy, which continues to drain the nation, or in this case the tree, from within. 24 As mentioned in a prior section, this exact echo is present in memory spaces such as the prairie and Republican soldier’s cottage in El espíritu de la colmena. 25 As Yarza notes, in the drawing in Ofelia’s storybook “the arms of the Pale-Man form a similar arch as the fallopian-like branches of the dying tree, indicating that the protective, motherly uterine world of nature has been devoured and kidnapped by the saturnine monster” (274).

54 The unresolved terror in the Pale Man’s chambers is evidenced also by bloody depictions of murder scenes painted all over the walls. The child’s breaching of this space reveals that, though it may appear dormant, the trauma is lingering just beneath the surface, and will continue to form the very foundation of Spain until properly mourned through, among other acts of reconciliation, an identification of unmarked mass graves. Ofelia’s strict allotment of time set on her in the Pale Man’s lair (by the hourglass timer she sets upon entry) will permanently trap her inside if she does not escape before its sand runs out; this is a metaphor for the urgency which I argue the film implies in Spain’s timeframe for recognizing its unresolved trauma which, while invisible some respects, will continue to produce the tacit national anxiety that these tight claustrophobic spaces exemplify from the foundation of the nation upwards.

El espinazo del diablo, another film by del Toro set directly within the context of the

Spanish Civil War, also uses the child’s spatial positioning to allegorize his embodiment of multiple temporalities, and proclivity toward mourning as opposed to melancholia. Much like El orfanato, El espinazo del diablo is set in an orphanage where an unexposed trauma has been perpetrated against a child and thus subsequently buried. When Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is abandoned at the home by friends of his recently deceased Republican father, he is given the bed of an orphan, Santi (Junio Valverde), whose mysterious disappearance Carlos eventually reveals to have been a murder at the hands of Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega). Jacinto, a caretaker who openly resents the anti-fascist orphanage directors Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Cásares (Federido

Luppi), was once himself an orphan in the home. 26 Much like the other child protagonists I have discussed thus far, Carlos bridges the gap between amnesiac reality and a hidden past through a

26 Jacinto serves as a symbol for fascism as he openly opposes Carmen and Dr. Cásares’s Republican alliances.

55 penetration of the supernatural world, ultimately revealing the “terrifying” object (in this case

Santi’s spectral appearances to him) to simply be a call for reparations. Though he was the only one of the orphans not to know Santi when he was still alive, Carlos begins to see glimpses of his ghostly figure on the grounds of the home. While out in the shed one night attempting to refill a water jug on a dare from the other orphans, Carlos is led by Santi’s ghost down to the subterranean space where he was murdered and dumped into a well. After this encounter, Carlos returns frequently to the basement, and ultimately encounters Santi face-to-face within the well when he jumps in (without fear) to rescue Jaime, a fellow orphan who witnessed Santi’s murder.

Carlos, like Ofelia and Simón, maneuvers the subterranean space and the buried trauma it encapsulates not only without terror but even with a certain ease and familiarity. Carlos’s placement and willing penetration of the “underworld” in El espinazo del diablo is a spatial, physical representation of his multiple temporalities.

The film features numerous instances in which Santi’s ghost looks out at the present world of the living through opaque windows or from across passageways; these barriers, again, symbolize the binary existence of the adult, who is cut off entirely from the supernatural world in contrast to the child, who moves freely between both. Carlos and Santi often look directly into one another’s reflections, furthering signaling their link and self-identification.Throughout the entirety of El espinazo del diablo Carlos seeks out Santi in order to understand what will happen to the orphans in the future, as Santi continuously whispers that “muchos os vais a morir.” In one of the film’s most climactic moments, Carlos is approached by Santi from across a long hallway similar to those of the confrontations between Laura and Tomás in the home in El orfanato. Santi slowly walks down the hallway toward Carlos, disrupting the strictness of the boundaries between space and time just as in the other films mentioned. Santi, and the buried trauma he

56 represents, moves slowly toward Carlos, who only fears Santi’s ghost for as long as he resists it.

The children refer to Santi as “el que susurra,” as we hear echoes of his indistinct whispering, not dissimilar to those in the Pale Man’s lair, throughout the film.

Another important motif in the film is the Republican missile, which while not directly related to the child’s physical spatial positioning, certainly reflects the notion of his ease moving between the past and present. The missile, which landed directly in front of the orphanage the same night Santi was murdered, is a source of anxiety for the adult characters. All tacitly fear its eventual eruption, while the children actually congregate in its immediate vicinity to discuss perhaps the most normal aspects of their childhood (comic books, their burgeoning understanding of sexuality etc.). The missile, itself a memory marker of not only the war but also of the night of Santi’s death, is a comfortable space for the child. The missile’s potential future explosion is not a topic the children avoid, as is the case for the adult characters, but rather something they discuss and accept as inevitable.

In a later scene, Carlos actually jumps into the cistern where he knows Santi resides in order to save Jaime because he is unafraid, or freed from his initial fear of Santi, and comfortable penetrating the subterranean spaces where trauma lies. Instead of identifying the ghost, in this case Santi, the adult characters (even those with Republican beliefs like Carmen and Dr. Cásares) can sense its presence and are therefore either weighed down, if not terrorized by it like Jacinto, whose death occurs when the orphans actually submerge him in the cistern where he is dragged to the bottom by Santi. Carmen’s resignation throughout the film that, “a veces pienso que los fantasmas somos nosotros,” aligns with the often-made argument that Spain will remain a nation of “living-dead” until its ghosts are officially recognized on a national level. The film opens and closes with the same line read by Dr. Cásares who asks rhetorically, “Qué es un fantasma? Una

57 tragedia condenada a repetirse una y otra vez? Un instante de dolor quizá. Algo muerto que parece estar vivo aun. Un sentimiento suspendido en el tiempo. Como un insecto atrapado en

ámbar.” The adult characters function in the film is just like that of the insect trapped insight amber which Dr. Cásares references; it is only the child who can access physical memory spaces, metaphorical ones in various temporalities, and ultimately, the only figure who can actually move forward.

Uterine Gateways and the Trope of the House as Metaphor for Nation: the Child Protagonist in El orfanato and El laberinto del fauno as Modeling the Transition from Melancholia to Mourning in Spain

I have already established how elements such as sound and spatial positioning of the child reflect upon the need to mourn in El orfanato; in this section, as with the labyrinth in El laberinto del fauno, I focus on the object which most closely allegorizes nation (in El orfanato’s case the house) and the significance of the mourning processes which, as Simón tells Laura,

“tiene que ser en casa.” I must also take into account the longstanding cinematographic tradition, from the end of the dictatorship to present day, of examining the house, and especially the house as unheimlich or uncanny, as a means of criticizing the nation allegorically, particularly due to its clear link to the child. Films like El orfanato and del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo take the trope of the home one step further by featuring it in its form as an orphanage specifically. This reference to the thousands of children stolen from their Republican parents and placed in state- run orphanages make Bayona’s “niños perdidos” an easily identified metaphor for the “lost children of Francoism” (“Phantom Children: Spectral Presences and the Violent Past in Two

Films of Contemporary Spain” 111). In The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in

Horror, Fantasy and Sci-Fi, Shelagh Rowan-Legg writes about the house in contemporary

Spanish horror film as it imitates Freud’s description of the human psyche, “as a building or

58 labyrinth, a series of rooms and corridors through which it finds symbols and memories to interpret identity; to come, or return, to this building is akin to returning to the scene of a crime”

(74). El orfanato’s home represents the uncanny in that it contains fear and uncertainty, which the child figure insists can only be resolved within its walls and nowhere else. The house itself is not evil, Rowan-Legg reiterates, but its haunting is almost always a symptom of loss in Spanish horror film (85). The vital process of coming to terms with said loss, mourning, is worked through physically within the home, or human psyche, as Laura will eventually transform the inside of the mansion into an exact replica of its former state as part of her uncovering of the past.

Many other scholars have already written about these concepts in relation to El orfanato; in

“Housing Melancholia: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and Juan A. Bayona’s The

Orphanage” Andrew Hock Soon Ng argues that Freud’s definition of melancholia is projected onto the architecture of the house itself as a metaphor for the possession and overtaking of a person’s psyche which is implied by melancholia (144). I am in agreement that the home functions in the film like a microcosm of grief, and can be seen as a melancholy object in that it

“served as an orphanage where a group of children were murdered, but whose deaths have gone unnoticed for several decades.27 With no one to mourn for them, the building becomes a monument whose haunting expresses their articulation for justice and their repudiation against historical erasure…” (146). However, my interest lies less in the house itself, but rather in the process of Laura’s transition from melancholia to mourning, which very intentionally takes place

27 Melancholia, as interpreted by Eng and Kazanjian as well as in how it is portrayed in Bayona’s film, implies a regressive rather than productive relationship with loss, resistant to closure and resolution, “sustained by an empathy with history’s victorious hegemony” (2).

59 within the home as a metaphor for nation, as well as the nature of this process as it is driven by the child specifically.

El orfanato opens with a scene from 30 years in the past, on the home’s front lawn, with

Laura and the other orphans she grew up with playing a game of tag. As the brief scene closes, the camera pans upward, focusing slowly and purposefully on a scarecrow perched in front of the mansion. This scarecrow, as well as the orphans’ particular game of tag, will return throughout the film, specifically in its most terrifying moments. As I will explain, both elements serve as melancholic markers of past trauma, namely the orphans themselves and their forgotten fate, and support the notion that the past will only cease to haunt the present once it has been acknowledged outright. Of course, it is also the child ghost Tomás who appears to Laura in the aforementioned liminal spaces wearing a scarecrow mask. Tomás and the other ghost orphans’ haunting is a reminder of Laura (or Spain’s) melancholia which will return in a cyclical loop until their true fate has been properly uncovered and mourned. The scarecrow mask on Tomás, or any of the other melancholic markers in the film, remain frightening only until Laura has completed said process. In fact, it is significant that it is Tomás, out of all of the orphans, who makes these brief, horrifying appearances to Laura throughout the first half of the film. He was the orphan whose story was kept especially hidden, given his physical deformation and the lack of recognition of his death. Tomás appears, until the end of the film when Laura has properly transitioned from a melancholic to a mournful character, only with his mask on. He is still hidden, left unacknowledged, and therefore still capable of haunting Laura.

In another initial scene, Laura remarks upon the lighthouse near the home and her memories of her childhood when it “iluminaba toda la casa”; it is Simón specifically who continues to ask why it has been shut off, why its light no longer fills the home. In presenting

60 Simón with this form of intuition, and as the only character to initially see the orphan ghosts, later revealed to be his imaginary friends, El orfanato establishes from the outset that he is a model for the character fully capable of the work of mourning. Simón is never fearful or haunted by the ghosts of the orphans like his mother is, and this is precisely because he has never repressed a traumatic event. As Viviane Green writes in her study, “Grief in two guises:

‘Mourning and Melancholia’ revisited,” it is actually much easier for the child to enter into the mourning process than the adult. Mourning, she suggests, is “an intrinsic part of developmental change as a newer self is formed and an older one shed” (76). Simón, El orfanato’s child figure, is also representative of the new generation of Spaniards, unaffected directly by the Civil War or the legacy of Franco’s dictatorship, and therefore not inhibited by a melancholic relationship to these wounds, but rather predisposed to give them a hospitable place in the present. While Simón is no longer an orphan, he did begin his life that way, and just like the child ghosts in El orfanato or El espinazo del diablo he denies binary temporalities. Simón has access to the past through his relationship with the ghosts, the present as he engages with Laura, and the future, as he ominously explains to his mother, “yo no voy a crecer.” Just as the ghost traditionally is seen as

“allowing multiple chronologies to exist simultaneously,” so does Simón, and this capacity facilitates mourning in a way that none of the adult characters in the film understand (“Phantom

Children: Spectral Presences and the Violent Past in Two Films of Contemporary Spain” 102).

Simón, much like the ghost, “challenges linear time by bringing the past into the present” and

“introduces a repetition loop that continues to return the present to the past” (103).

Simón, as well as the ghostly child figure of Tomás, in El orfanato is not only a direct reminder of the Civil War because of the thousands of children who were orphaned or “lost” but also because his role is representative of “the themes of the child and the monster and the

61 monstrous child” as they “stand in metonymically for the confrontation of the self with the horrors of Spain’s recent past” (17). Leslie-McCarthy states that the child figure emerges in film where communication has been lost and is in agreement with Wright that the “othered” child allows for the reintegration of whatever “ghost” may be hiding in a nation’s collective consciousness. What is clear is that the storyline of the “evil” or “monstrous” child figure is often rooted in a lack of communication between the past and the present and tension produced by this breakdown manifests in terror. El orfanato, I argue, chooses to feature a child as the inheritor of a legacy of trauma, and in the case of Simón and the orphan ghosts, as the only ones capable of re-establishing communication and connection with the past.

While I have already discussed the film’s outcome and Laura’s ultimate fate, it is worth considering in greater the depth the process of mourning which she undertakes as it relates specifically to the home. The treasure hunt that the ghost orphans leave for Simón and Laura before Simón’s disappearance serves as a perfect example of the film’s specific allusion to the work Laura, and Spain, must do to move from a melancholic to a mournful attitude toward the past as guided by the child who, again, insists that this process “tiene que ser en casa”. The scene begins with an exterior shot of the house, which appears outdated, out of place for the 21st century. The camera pans up to a shot of the moon gradually disappearing behind clouds, suggesting the passage of time, a recurring motif throughout El orfanato.28 The next shot is of

Laura’s discovery of Simón’s drawing of Tomás wearing a mask which appears identical to the scarecrow I referenced prior. Before beginning the hunt, Laura asks Simón to explain the treasure that each orphan in his drawing seems to be holding in his or her hand. Simón then explains, “te quitan el tesoro, algo que tú quieres mucho, y tienes que encontrarlo.” If one finds

28 This is another instance of the Gothic as integral to the film.

62 the treasure, following the clues, Simón continues, “te conceden un deseo.” Each step of the game created by the ghost orphans, the spectral representation of Spain’s “ghosts of the past,” has to do with recollecting the past. The first “pista”, or clue, obligates Laura to remember where she kept Simón’s baby teeth. When Laura asks Simón if they should look on the beach he responds that “tiene que ser en casa.” The game is a metaphor for the importance of going back, of acknowledging the truth of past occurrences, in order to identify one’s object of loss, what is repressed by melancholia. It is significant that it must happen in the house, in Spain, as the film suggests it is work the nation itself must do from its foundation (perhaps alluding to the home’s basement where bodies are hidden) upwards.

The next clue leads Laura and Simón into a church they have on the property, and to a small drawer which has on top of it a crucifix and a skull. This appears to be an allusion to the

Valle de los Caídos, or at the very least to the conscious forgetting of the dead, and the hypocrisy of said monument’s simultaneous so-called religious devotion. The final clue in the game leads

Simón and Laura to the papers indicating the truth about Simón’s biological roots, another act which suggests that the past needs to be acknowledged in order for there to be a transition to mourning, or an end to the cycle of “self-reproaches and self-revilings” characteristic of melancholia. If one can fully address the past, the ghost orphans’ game seems to suggest, if you can move through the stages of it, your loss will become tangible, you will be able to “pedir un deseo.” Release from the torture of an object of loss, of a melancholic relationship to the past, El orfanato implies, requires us to engage with memory in a fashion that allows us to fully understand the role we have played in it and, only then, will it become concrete enough to translate into mourning, and therefore into freedom and the disappearance of haunting. Simón’s insistence that “nunca va a crecer,” alludes to the notion that Spain’s new generation will never

63 be able to advance, or move on from the ghosts of the past, unless the memory of the victims of the Civil War is properly mourned.

The film’s narration now jumps six months into the future, when the police have still been unable to find Simón. Laura, grief-stricken but also convinced that her son is still alive, tells her support group about Simón’s invisible friends; she says that she has the “sensación de que están en la casa” as her peers look on, sympathetic but unconvinced. This moment in the film marks the beginning of Laura’s direct process of a transition between melancholia toward mourning, for which Simón’s treasure hunt functioned as a kind of microcosm. Laura’s character provides an example of Freud’s melancholic who knows a loss has occurred but “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost…an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious”

(Freud 245). In other words, Laura’s exact awareness of what happened to her childhood friends and fellow orphans has been withdrawn from consciousness, yet knowledge that a loss has occurred is present. When the police discover photographs in Benigna’s home of the orphans as children, and Laura pieces together her relationship to Tomás and his murder, she finally identifies the “object of loss,” crucial to recovering Simón, as the real fate of her orphan peers.

When Laura decides to summon a medium to the house in order to perform a séance, and attempt to summon the dead, she needs “algún objeto antiguo de esta casa, algo relacionado con su pasado.” She ultimately chooses a doll as the object, which appears previously in Simón’s bed just after his disappearance and also in Benigna’s baby carriage just before she is killed. The doll is another form of simulacra which represents the demand for reparations from the past. One of

Aurora’s colleagues explains to Laura, “Aurora necesita un objeto para motivar el trance. Así puede iniciar la regresión. Una invocación mental. El pasado, el presente y el futuro se

64 sobreponen y se cruzan. Sería algo así como viajar en el tiempo.” Mourning, as Labanyi and

Freud understand it, begins to happen here because there is an acknowledgment of the object of loss, a desire to render it visible, to give it habitation.

During the séance, the camera focuses more than once on shots of the film rolling as the medium’s colleagues tape everything. This refers, I argue, to the capacity of photographs and or other physical documentation of the past to immortalize the dead.29 When the medium finally locates the children they are on the other side of a literal divide. The children, writhing in pain, screaming and crying out after having been poisoned, are behind a door. This door, their entrapment, is another metaphor for the shutting out of the immense suffering and death in

Spain’s recent history, the latent yet equally traumatic divide which continues to exist in the nation today. Aurora explains the orphans’ continued presence in the house to Laura, “cuando algo muy terrible ocurre en un lugar a veces queda una huella, una herida que sirve de nudo entre dos líneas del tiempo y es como un eco que se repite una y otra vez esperando ser escuchado, o como la marca de un pellizco que pide una acaricia de alivio.” This “huella” or “herida” from

Spain’s past, the Civil War, dictatorship and subsequent forgetting and Transition ideology, will continue marking its present until an introjection process and outright recognition and commemoration of said trauma has occurred. Laura desperately asks the medium what she must do next, and Aurora replies, “usted es una madre fuerte, su sufrimiento le da fuerza y le guiará pero sólo usted sabe hasta dónde es capaz de llegar para encontrar su hijo. Usted oye pero no escucha. No se trata de ver para creer sino de creer para ver. Crea, entonces verá.”

29 The importance of Ana’s relationship to the photographs of her parents’ life before the Civil War in Spain is addressed in my analysis of El espíritu de la colmena.

65 It is up to present day Spain, therefore, to understand and accept that simply because one does not see the wounds, or the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Civil War which still lie in unmarked graves, this does not mean that the past can be erased. Laura will only be able to find

Simón through her belief in the existence of the ghosts of the orphans, just like Spain will only be able to heal through its recognition of the victims of its 20th century. The recurring emphasis on photographs and film footage in Laura’s transition from a melancholic to a mournful character, in my reading of the film, also foreshadows the necessity of a physical, public site of memory which is set to be implemented, should Sánchez succeed in doing so, at the former site of Franco’s tomb in the Valle de los Caídos.

Laura, now having realized much of the trauma she had suppressed as a melancholic figure, namely the existence of Tomás who it is unlikely she never knew personally as a child at the orphanage, is convinced that her only path to Simón is through a recreation of the home as it existed as an orphanage. She discovers the names of the orphans beneath the floorboards of the house, which become the first clue in a new treasure hunt set by the orphan ghosts, just like the one she went on with Simón at the beginning of the film.

As part of her journey to offer the orphans habitation in the present, to acknowledge their presence as part the healing process of introjection Freud ascribes to mourning, Laura reconstructs the house so that it is an exact replica of the orphanage as it existed when the children were still alive. As she frantically rearranges the house, Laura sets up a giant replica of what appears to be a doll-like version of Tomás. The doll-like simulacrum of the orphan ghost is set up so that it presides over Laura’s efforts to resurrect the past, just as the camera’s frequent shots to exteriors of the house, as well as the lighthouse, remind us that the past is almost enveloping her, that it is quickly pursuing her.

66 With the house reconstructed entirely to match its former state, Laura dresses herself in the same uniform worn by the caretakers in the past, and sets a table with foods identical to those eaten by the orphans. Laura places dolls in the seats of the respective children and attempts to summon them. Laura repeats urgently throughout this scene, “no tengo tiempo, no tengo tiempo, no tengo tiempo.” As mentioned prior, this obsessive, somewhat uncertain recreation of the house can be most closely identified as a melancholic act; however, I argue that it is a display of the kind of melancholia Butler refers to in A Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, in that it appears to mark the “turn” which causes the fundamental redirection of the ego upon which mourning depends (169).

As she begins to play their favorite game, referencing the film’s opening scene, Laura counts, “Un, dos, tres, toca la pared”, and the orphans appear one by one behind her. They lead her to the basement of the house, where she then tragically discovers Simón’s body. After several terrible cries of motherly anguish, Simón awakes, saying innocently, “quédate a jugar con nosotros” to which Laura replies, “no, cariño, no nos podemos quedar a jugar.” Scholars like

Wright have read this exact recreation of the house as the film’s display of “an adult female playing at being a child” and therefore creating “an uncanny sense of ‘time out of joint’, Laura as a “present past” (Wright 118). While Laura’s character does bring the past into the present, as

Wright suggests, her recreation of the house as it used to stand does not provoke the uncanny but rather a demonstration of Laura’s mourning process. Her exact recreation of the orphanage involves a journey to understanding and conceptualizing her loss and becoming freed of its burden, and her discovery of the truth regarding the orphans’ death and subsequent exhumation demonstrates. She discovers through this process that Benigna murdered the children, and

67 therefore there is a form of responsibility assumed for the injustice.30 The notion of the home as a labyrinth of the mind, containing memories as part of a quest to interpret identity, seems to have mimicked Laura’s transition. By the film’s end the unheimlich nature of the home, its dark, unsettling and outdated hallways, much like Laura’s relationship to the past, have lost their burdensome, anxious presence. The child has guided the adult into an uncanny engagement with the past, and Laura, like the home itself, has emerged free from its weight and terror in the present. The “child’s imaginative perspective” which “allows for the breaking down of such dichotomies” between reality and imagination, as I referenced earlier in the chapter, is finally taken on by Laura through Simón and the other children’s guidance.

Laura, of course, realizes that she did not in fact find Simón in time. Her grief leads her to commit suicide in order to be with her son. However, after her physical death, she awakes, and says “deseo que vuelva Simón”. This moment alludes to the game that the orphans left for her and Simón at the beginning of the film, which I have argued demonstrates the transition from melancholia to mourning. One can only “pedir un deseo,” El orfanato tells us, once you have taken the steps to recover that “object of loss” which has been withdrawn from consciousness.

Laura is returned to her place among the orphans, they greet her with overwhelming joy, and all traces of horror and fear appear to have been surpassed. In these final moments of the film, the lighthouse, which from the beginning of the film was non-functioning, now lights up the room.

Acknowledging the ghosts of the past, then, does not imply the invocation of a darkness in the present, but rather a kind of guiding light toward the future. Laura looks out the window and sees

30 It is worth considering the potential significance of Benigna’s name. Though she murdered the orphans in retaliation, Benigna can also be viewed as the original victim, who was never granted justice after her son’s murder. Her name could indicate that her role in the film (essentially a continued demand for recognition of her son’s death) is actually the most benign.

68 the child version of herself running away from the house which looms in the background. She is escaping, finally, the home, or Spain, which is outdated, antiquated and, ultimately, stuck futilely in the past.

Tomás, always forced to hide his malformation behind a mask, is shown in this final scene for the first time without his face hidden. Spain’s democracy, likewise, does not need to keep its “malformation” a secret, and must engage in a process of remembering and acknowledgment as one of the final shots references, as it shows Laura and Simón’s tombstone with the words “En recuerdo de Laura y Simón y de los huérfanos Martín, Rita, Guillermo,

Alicia, Víctor y Tomás”. The necessity for commemoration to take on a public dimension in order for it to become an “ethical act of remembering” and cease to haunt the present as “living dead” happens, as the orphans, or Spain’s ghosts of the past, receive official recognition, just as the victims of the Civil War, and subsequent dictatorship, deserve to today (Boehm 259).

Labanyi writes, “In a country that has emerged from forty years of cultural repression, the task of making reparation to the ghosts of the past – that is, to those relegated to the status of living dead, denied voice and memory – is considerable” (“History and Hauntology” 11). The weight and challenge of this task is not downplayed by El orfanato. In fact, I would say it is emphasized throughout the film by the frequent shots, usually between scenes, to the exterior of the house, looming and grandiose in its antiquity and its authority. Laura’s path to achieving mourning and engaging with the past is excruciating, exhausting and terrifying; El orfanato by no means implies that remembering will be an easy process for Spain. Yet, I argue that, in ending the film with a shot of the orphans’ tombstone, a public marker of their existence on the grounds of the house, the film implies the absolute necessity of this kind of physical monument to mourning, however controversial it may remain on the national level today.

69 While the film’s ending is portrayed in an uplifting, hopeful manner, as Laura is finally reunited with Simón, and the orphan ghosts have seemingly become unburdened by justice, it is impossible to ignore that said “happiness” comes at a price; ultimately, both Laura and Simón must die in order for this reunion to occur. Laura, as both Davies and Boehm have termed a

“monstrous mother,” is responsible for her son’s death, and both suffer immensely.31 This ending, many scholars have argued, can easily be seen as an argument for Transition ideology, which at its core warns against the potential danger in re-opening the wounds of the past.

However, my analysis of this ending posits just the opposite, though I agree that the notion of the final scene as entirely joyful is inaccurate.

I argue that Laura, though ultimately capable of mourning by the film’s end, simply maintained her melancholic position, resisting the child’s many attempts at the beginning of the film to get her to acknowledge the orphan ghosts, for too long. Laura’s character is an allegorical representation of what will happen if Spain resists mourning for too long, and reflects the urgency of mourning through her desperate race against time during the film’s final sequences.

Davies’ description of the mother figure in El orfanato as both “nurturing and horrific” is an apt one, and I argue that it is precisely the film’s demonstration of this dichotomy which leads the final scene to also be a hopeful one; it is possible to bring light back into the home, as the lighthouse’s return to full use insinuates, but Spain cannot wait forever to mourn its national trauma (90). Taking into account Davies’ assertion that Laura and Simón’s identities almost blend in this final scene, and considering Laura is ultimately only able to mourn because of the

31 In metaphorical terms, Laura as nation is not only responsible for Simón’s death but also for jeopardizing Spain’s future generations.

70 games set up by Simón and the child ghosts, I argue that El orfanato asserts that the adult is not capable of achieving mourning without direct guidance from the child.

I do not read Laura’s fate as that of being “trapped in a melancholic Neverland,” as ultimately she does complete the work of mourning, and by the film’s end the home is no longer a melancholic space (Boehm 266). It is now filled with light, has shed all remnants of terror, and makes unburdened acknowledgment of its gruesome past. Butler writes that “melancholia cannot know its history as past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the survival, the persistence of a certain unavowability that haunts the present”

(“After loss, what then?” 468). The final moments of the film present an important sequence which rejects Butler’s definition of melancholia entirely; Carlos returns to the home, pays his respects at the gravesites of Laura, Simón and the orphans, and once inside the house, looks up to see a set of doors open to him, a sign from Laura of the peace and resolution which now define the former site of so much terror. While the lives of Laura and Simón do end tragically, El orfanato’s final message indicates that, should Spain undertake the work of mourning its past, national trauma need not haunt its present. While the film’s undeniable horror suggests there will be no neat resolution to the problem of memory in Spain, the outright recognition of national history and its victims, El orfanato suggests, will open the door to a brighter future for Spain.32

El laberinto del fauno and the Child’s Connection with the Earth through Uterine Symbolism as Metaphor for Re-examining the Nation

In Erice’s cinema, as we have already seen, the child protagonist reveals herself to be highly attuned to the existence of “un espíritu,” the awareness of buried trauma which manifests

32 The importance of the tombstone is also seen in El laberinto del fauno, as the film begins with Ofelia’s placement of the eye back on what appears to be a tombstone in the shape of the faun and ends with a final shot of the tree trunk and Princess Moana’s gravestone.

71 itself in the form of a Republican soldier, of Frankenstein, and in the beginning of the film, of the earth itself as Ana and Isabel examine carefully the mushrooms and other flowers and plants which grow in the fields near their home. “Los espíritus no tienen cuerpo y por eso no los puedes matar,” Ana says to her sister Isabel, yet Ana is constantly searching for them, a fact that becomes keenly apparent in this scene, full of long, still close-up shots of mushrooms growing from the earth. The girls’ father signals to the mountain out in the distance, which represents the unknown, forbidden world beyond the children’s small Castillian town. As they gaze upon the mushrooms, their father instructs them, “fijaos bien en ella.” A little over a decade later, Basque director Julio Medem’s Vacas (1992), also set in part during the Spanish Civil War, recreates this idea from Erice’s film; the forest in Vacas, and the many instances in which the camera focuses, still and close-up, on individual plants and growing pieces of the earth itself is tied heavily to the identity of the film’s characters, and whose filmic examination is accompanied by the same phrase spoken to the film’s child figures as they contemplate the natural world and are instructed to “fijaos bien”.33 Without delving too far into a discussion of Basque mythology, it should be noted that the child in Vacas is very much conflated with the subject of the cow, which is considered to be “Mother Goddess” or “Mother Earth” (Santaolalla 335). In numerous instances a shot or transition into a subsequent scene is made through the cow’s eye; the action of the film and the way it understands time, in other words, is presented by the child, the cow, or the earth, which Vacas makes clear are all one in the same. I reference Vacas as an entry into my discussion of El laberinto del fauno precisely because of its continuation of Transition film’s emphasis on the link between the child and the earth. In the scene in which Ofelia descends into

33 See Andrés Ortiz-Osés’s La diosa madre or Julio Caro-Baroja’s El laberinto vasco for further studies of Basque mythology.

72 the ground through a tree trunk (to which I referred in an earlier section), the uterine shaped trunk is an exact replica of Vacas’s agujero encendido, a tree stump which Cristina and Peru discover has mystical powers and leads indefinitely within the earth. When the children ask their grandfather what is on the other side of the agujero encendido, he answers by saying “al otro lado estáis vosotros.”

The children’s fixation on the agujero encendido, along with Manuel’s commands taken directly from El espíritu de la colmena, “fijaos bien, es importantísimo. No os olvidéis de esto”, demonstrate that the child is pre-determined to insist upon the necessity of a penetration of the physical earth in order to mourn properly, as El laberinto del fauno will continue to argue34.

Instead of a home or an orphanage, these films choose a much more blatant metaphor for Spain as a nation: the earth itself. Much like Vacas, El laberinto del fauno is framed by references to

Spain as Mother through uterine gateways such as the tree trunk and the labyrinth. Mourning,

Ofelia’s journey shows us, will not occur until these uterine gateways have been thoroughly penetrated, and what they contain excavated.35 Vacas, I argue, also introduces the claustrophobia present in the child’s direct engagements with the earth; in Vacas’s forest the heavy breathing and desperation of the characters as they move through its tight spaces is the same as Ofelia’s when she enters the tree trunk or the Pale Man’s lair, suggesting that entrance back into this uterine gateways, into Spain, while necessary, will not be free of difficulty, and will require an unveiling of the anxiety and tension which has led to such overbearing insularity.

34 Aside from the agujero encendido, Vacas is also full of other “agujeros” which mimic the female reproductive system; many shots are taken from within camera 35 As mentioned earlier, Ann Davies points out El orfanato’s caves as also possessing a uterine quality.

73 As Santaolalla writes of Vacas, “thought processes take place not at the expense of, but, rather, from and through earthy substance”:

In the self-contained, claustrophobic world of the film – some characters move in and out of the limits of the forest and the caseríos but the camera never does…the landscape remains unchanged in its surrealist blend of the ordinary and the fantastic. It is almost as if the valley, the forest, and their inhabitants were occupying the motionless centre of a rotating wheel: history here takes a rather curved and spiralling trajectory, trapped as it is in a centripetal force which moves around but never fully abandons the centre. (“Historicizing the Forest” 317)

As full of life as the forest is, the camera’s positioning, almost floating through the vegetation, accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing, seems to indicate that it could just as easily trap one inside its confines. Similarly, shots of the cow, inextricably linked to the earth and the child, often highlight the sound of the flies buzzing around it intensely, as well as an oppressive heavy sound which appears to indicate a time limit on how long the members of this Basque forest can live with such claustrophobic tension. The labyrinth in Ofelia’s case can be seen as posing the same threat; its branches open only to allow her passage through to the underworld only as she gets closer to completing the faun’s (himself earth incarnate) mission for her, which involves multiple transgressions of the buried, claustrophobic world which exists beneath the amnesiac present’s surface.

As mentioned, El laberinto del fauno is full of “agujeros” that serve as uterine metaphors for nation; what seems worthy of further investigation in my reading of the film is the child’s intertwinement with said symbolism, and the way in which the child’s inherent desire or understanding of the need to explore what lies beneath, or within, these holes seems to determine the film’s framework. The film, set in 1944 in the early, most brutal years of the Franco regime, begins with what will eventually be the last shot of the film: Ofelia lying on the ground dying, breathing heavily. As the camera moves toward her the blood pouring from her face dissipates,

74 and it is through the child’s eye that the film’s narration begins, not coincidentally in the fantasy world beneath ground. 36 Immediately it is clear that the trauma of the film, still yet to be revealed, resides at the foundation, literally, of all subsequent narration; the idea that one must go back inside the earth in order to mourn becomes evident here, as does the need for the child’s guiding “sight” to identify the lost object of desire. The entryway into the subterranean universe shown in the opening narration, which Ofelia will enter various times throughout the film, is circular, representative of the female reproductive organ.

Also important to note is the score in this opening scene. The music, which will return throughout the film, is indicative of the fairy tale world in which Ofelia becomes enmeshed.

Returning to the notion that the child’s mind does not experience the uncanny in the same way as the adult’s, due to an imaginative capacity which does not fear a blurring between reality and the supernatural, Ofelia (much like Ana, Simón and Carlos) is drawn toward the supernatural (again a metaphor for unresolved trauma) and ultimately charged with de-legitimizing the adult melancholic’s terror in reaction to the film’s “monsters.”37 The film’s fairy tale structure begins with the narrator’s description of a fantasy universe which existed long ago; this subterranean world “donde no existía ni la mentira ni el dolor” was home to the princess Moana, whose voyage up into the human world resulted in her blindness and memory loss. The narrator continues, “La princesa olvidó quién era, de dónde venía…pero su padre, el Rey, sabía que el alma de la princesa regresaría quizá en otro cuerpo, en otro tiempo, en otro lugar…hasta que el

36 The penetration of the eye as a segue into a new scene is frequent in Vacas, which serves as further evidence that it is the child’s interconnectedness with the earth that makes them capable of another kind of “seeing.” 37 The revealing of the film’s fantastical elements as benign serves to further highlight that it is actually the adult (in this case Capitán Vidal) who poses a threat. His resemblance to the Pale- Man, and seating at the dinner table in the exact same fashion, indicates his monstrous quality as the human, present-day embodiment of Francoism.

75 mundo dejara de girar.” There is a circularity established in this beginning sequence which is vital to my argument: the connection between the subterranean world and the world above ground, the notion that present time is inextricably linked to past time and trauma, and that the latter will inevitably resurface.

The film’s action leads next to real time, as Ofelia and her mother Carmen approach the countryside estate of Capitán Vidal, Carmen’s new husband and a ruthlessly violent fascist military general. Carmen reprimands Ofelia for bringing her collection of fairy tales, commenting that she is “muy mayor” for such nonsense, establishing the adult’s inability to transgress the supernatural world without the child.

Ofelia’s first direct interaction with a uterine-like portal comes on this initial trip with her mother, as she approaches a stone structure on the roadside which is shaped like the faun she has not yet met. She picks up the stone eye which has fallen to the ground and places it back on the statue’s face, as the camera moves slowly toward the darkness of the stone faun’s mouth, the music suddenly becomes more ominous, suggesting the significance of the transgression between real time, and that which dwells within this interior space. After arriving to Captain Vidal’s estate, Ofelia first comes upon the labyrinth and an identical stone faun at its entrance. The labyrinth is another undeniably uterine passageway, and the subsequent aerial shot of Ofelia descending into the labyrinth’s (circular) entrance to the underworld where she meets the faun represents her descent back into the nation. The faun, self-described as “el monte, el bosque, y la tierra”, is the earth personified, and as Ofelia comments, “huele a tierra.” The child’s link to the natural world and the earth itself is a theme not only seen in Ofelia’s relationship with the faun, but in other important elements like the “mandrágora”, who needs to be fed droplets of Ofelia’s blood in order to survive. According to the faun, her father, “el rey del mundo subterráneo”,

76 created portals for her to return to the underworld one day, and Ofelia’s subsequent journey required by the faun is set out to demonstrate that she has “no ha vuelto una mortal.” Thus, the film establishes this ability to move in between present and past to be a distinctly non-human quality.

This all comes against the backdrop of an adult world entrapped, perhaps even in the case of Capitán Vidal and his almost pathological obsession with his watch, obsessed with time. It is not only Ofelia’s mother and stepfather who condemn or at least resist the imaginative world

Ofelia accesses, but even adult characters charged with caring for Ofelia like Mercedes, who says that she does not believe in fairies but as a child “creía en muchas cosas.” A refusal to imagine in El laberinto del fauno means a refusal to see the supernatural world and the remnants of trauma which it represents; the film suggests that in seeing only what’s on the surface, overcoming melancholic entrapment will be impossible, yet the child’s imaginative capacity and inextricable link to and identification with the earth leads to mourning.

When the faun presents Ofelia with the “mandrágora”, “una planta que soñaba con ser humana,” he instructs her to place it beneath her mother’s bed in a bowl of fresh milk as one of her tasks. This is another moment in which the subterranean is linked to nature through the child to form a memory space where past and present converge. As Enjuto-Rangel writes:

Los espacios subterráneos y ocultos aparecen de forma recurrente: con el sapo que vive debajo del árbol, el Hombre Pálido que tiene sus aposentos alternativos y casi míticos dentro de los muros del Molino, y la mandrágora que Ofelia sitúa debajo de la cama de su madre para lograr su recuperación. Lo subterráneo en El laberinto es otro espacio de encuentro, otro lugar liminal entre lo real que parece irreal y lo fantástico que se vuelve verosímil. (42)

The presence of the both natural and fantastic “mandrágora” beneath Ofelia’s mother’s bed heals her initially, but the Capitán’s discovery and destruction of it immediately results in Carmen’s

77 bloody, and ultimately lethal, pre-term labor just as she tells Ofelia “la magia no existe, no existe para ti, ni para mi ni para nadie”. The film condemns the fascist misogyny which the Capitán embodies as the uterine labyrinth’s natural creations are not permitted to flourish in the female characters’ attempts to heal. The ease with which Ofelia moves through these uterine spaces is due, again, to her imaginative capacity as a child, something all of the adult characters have admittedly lost. When Capitán Vidal asks the camp’s doctor (who secretly assists Mercedes in helping the Republican rebel group in the nearby woods) why he didn’t obey him, he responds:

“Obedecer por obedecer, sin cuestionarlo, eso sólo lo hace gente como usted, Capitán.” This line alludes directly to Transition ideology and the institutionalized forgetting and blind amnesty laws which Spain as a nation accepted upon Franco’s death in 1975, “sin cuestionarlo.” Ofelia, likewise, is told constantly throughout the film that she must begin to obey, and above all discard her fairy tales, her imagination.

At the film’s end, when the faun instructs Ofelia to bring him her infant brother, we see a shot of Ofelia running with him in her arms through the labyrinth, with Capitán Vidal not far behind.38 The shot of him running toward her, from within the labyrinth, offers another example of camerawork which fully establishes the dichotomy between the adult world and the child’s world. As he breaks through the boundary between the outside world and the uterine gateway of the labyrinth, the score once again switches to the same intense, loud music which appears to be calling for some kind of reckoning that we saw at the beginning of the film when Ofelia stopped to examine the mouth of the stone sculpture of the faun. As she runs, panicked, through the labyrinth trying to escape Vidal, the branches which comprise the labyrinth itself open up for her

38 This only becomes possible, of course, after Ofelia uses her chalk to draw another portal with her magic chalk, this time to her baby brother’s locked bedroom.

78 and create passageways to escape his immediate threat. These branches within the labyrinth are reminiscent of the tree, the consistently female metaphor in El laberinto, which stands for nation.

The earth, Spain as a nation, ultimately shuts itself to Vidal, the adult melancholic.

Ofelia’s subsequent refusal to hand her baby brother over to the faun, who claims that the portal to the underworld can only be re-opened through “la sangre de un inocente” also carries great importance. In all of the films examined in this chapter one may easily argue an insistence upon the historicization and acknowledgment of memory in a nation who has systematically sought to discard it. Through an emphasis on uterine gateways as metaphorical entryways back into the nation, or back into said history to uncover the hidden trauma that is physically draining its population of “nutrients,” the wells, cisterns, magical tree trunks, secret basements and spiral staircases which lead to fantastical underworld realms from El espíritu de la colmena and Vacas to films of the 21st century like El espinazo and El laberinto all preoccupy themselves with the same question: what will become of future generations in Spain? Where does the melancholic obsession with time posed by characters like Jacinto and Vidal end and a new national identity which embraces and mourns collective memory of national trauma begin?39

Ofelia’s decision to protect her baby brother represents her prioritization of future generations, and ultimately, this is revealed to be the faun’s “última prueba” for her. Ofelia will not obey blindly the instructions she is given, regardless of the consequences. What lies in the subterranean world, or within any of the uterine “agujeros”, while a transgression of its darkness may prove difficult, does not compare to the threat posed by the living in any of the aforementioned films. Once the child, in this case Ofelia, has completed the series of tasks which

39 It should be noted that Ana and Isabel’s father in El espíritu de la colmena also maintains a fixation on his watch, which Ana gives to the Republican soldier who is murdered with it in his possession at the end of the film.

79 require her exploration of the existence of the buried trauma in all of the film’s subterranean spaces, the underworld becomes not only non-threatening but an actual kingdom where Ofelia is reunited with both her parents and returned to her role as “la Princesa Moana,” whose memory loss the film’s opening sequence belabors has ostensibly been returned.

After panning to an aerial shot of the circular entryway leading into the depths of the earth, with Ofelia’s lifeless body lying beside it, the film ends on a shot of the distinctly uterine- shaped tree trunk to which I have referred throughout this chapter. As the camera lingers on the tree trunk, the narrator tells us that the Princesa Moana “reinó con justicia” in her father’s kingdom for many centuries. This final shot suggests a call for justice in a nation who has accepted a both physical and legal burial of its history; going forward, the narration continues,

Princesa Moana’s “ pequeñas huellas de sus pasos por el mundo” will only be visible to “aquel que sepa para dónde mirar” as the very last shot features a flower blossoming right in front of the dark space of the trunk’s opening. El laberinto’s final statement about the necessity of an exploration of these memory spaces, much like in all of the prior films I have covered in this chapter, reminds the viewer that along with the pain of excavation and mourning will come an eventual re-birth of a nation.

80 CHAPTER 3. THE 21st CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN CHILD PROTAGONIST AND NATIONAL MEMORY OF TRAUMA: IMAGINATIVE AGENCY, CONNECTION TO THE EARTH AND TRANSGRESSION OF BARRIERS IN INFANCIA CLANDESTINA (2011), LOS COLORES DE LA MONTAÑA (2010) AND MACHUCA (2004)

Like much 20th and 21st century Spanish film, Latin American film directors who themselves grew up during the Southern Cone dictatorships sought to re-examine their own violent national pasts through the lens of the child. Whether through the depiction of difficult child-parent relationships, a common thread throughout these films, or whether by setting the film’s action in an orphanage, the Latin American child protagonist presents a very different type of exploration into collective memory of trauma and its role in present society. In prior chapters on post-

Transition film from Spain, I have argued that the contemporary child protagonist functions as the adult’s “other,” and the driving force behind the adult’s eventual ability to confront national collective trauma as an allegorical catalyst for the work involved in recuperating historical memory in present-day Spain. While the films I will explore from Latin America do not necessarily present such a constant dynamic, the child protagonist depicted within the context of national trauma or

“post”-national trauma in film from Colombia, Chile and Argentina continues to serve as a destabilizing figure in response to narratives which have conceded to dictatorship or other forms of oppression, while also revealing the otherwise hidden wake left by said trauma. While it is impossible to encapsulate the portrayal of childhood in 21st century Latin American cinema in nearly as condensed a manner as that of a single nation such as Spain, this chapter will reveal the many parallels between the Latin American and Spanish child onscreen as interpreter of trauma and advocate for the preservation of historical memory. Through a discussion of Infancia clandestina (2011), Machuca (2004) and Los colores de la montaña (2010), I will demonstrate that the child continues to represent a real social agency separate from the adult’s; the child is not

81 used, I argue, either to elicit a sympathetic response from the viewer, nor to somehow play on their status as an “innocent” being. While this may be a byproduct of their role at the center of these films, like Rachel Randall and other scholars of the child in cinema studies, I reject the idea that children are “used primarily for cathartic purposes but rather to evoke their imaginative and social agencies” (Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender and Agency XLI). Instead, the filmic children I will discuss disrupt and problematize notions of time as strictly linear, serve as liminal figures which challenge national discourses prone to manipulation or streamlining memory, and act as a point of multiplicity both in terms of their relationship to varying temporalities as crucial to the formation of “post-conflict” national identity and as an embodiment of the plethora of contradictions associated with memory discourses. 40

This chapter will explore the filmic child’s role throughout these films in the development of a burgeoning national identity which is neither burdened nor dismissive of history through an examination of the following questions: How does the treatment of historical memory conveyed by the contemporary Latin American post-dictatorship child onscreen differ or compare to famous

Spanish child protagonists of the Spanish Transition to democracy in films like Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) or Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos (1976)? Are children in post-national conflict Latin American film drawn to “monsters” meant to allegorize buried trauma or to certain memory spaces as they are in post-dictatorship film from Spain? What does the child’s relationship with fantasy represent in terms of the political sphere which surrounds them? What is the

“monster” in Latin American child-driven film which tends to feature actual violence over supernatural allegories for trauma? Do the spaces 21st century Latin American filmic children

40 Not dissimilar to contemporary Spanish horror film, the child in this chapter can also be read as embodying or working through the adult anxieties which often tacitly surround them.

82 inhabit and seek out invoke a direct engagement with trauma as I have previously argued to be the case with the child in contemporary Spanish film?

Set during Argentina’s Dirty War and last military dictatorship (1976-1983), Benjamin

Ávila’s Infancia clandestina opens with the return of 12 year-old Juan (Teo Gutiérrez Moreno) and his parents (forced to take refuge in Cuba due to their participation in the montoneros leftist counteroffensive against the military junta) to Argentina in 1979.41 From the beginning of the film when Juan’s family arrives in Argentina, and he is subsequently required to take on a new identity,

“Ernesto de Córdoba,” we see his interpretation of the montonero resistance not only as it is presently occurring but through his drawings which demonstrate both his uncertainty and unawareness of what exactly his role in this resistance signifies. Andrés Wood’s Machuca (2004), set in 1973 Santiago during Salvador Allende’s socialist government and on the cusp of Pinochet’s military coup, follows two 9 year-olds, Gonzalo Infante and Pedro Machuca, one from an upper- class family and the other from Santiago’s poorest neighborhood who meet as part of a social integration project run by their teacher amidst rising political tension. Finally, Carlos César

Arbeláez’s Los colores de la montaña takes place in an unnamed rural mountain town where 7 year-old Manuel (Hernán Mauricio Ocampo) lives with his mother Miriam and father Ernesto; the town, it becomes clear, is being surrounded by paramilitaries training in the mountains, and the villagers live under constant threat of their invasion.42 The film comments directly upon the experience of children displaced from rural villages during the armed conflict; in part, this is

41 Juan is named after Argentina’s former President Perón (1946-55 and 1973-4). 42 Los colores de la montaña represents a time in Colombian history, around the time of the new millennium, “when the country suffered from particularly high levels of violence and forced internal migration. In 1999, 272,000 people were forced to migrate, just under two-thirds of whom were under eighteen…almost nowhere in the country had avoided this conflict” or the prevalence of warfare between guerrillas and paramilitary (Randall 69).

83 achieved through a demarcation of Manuel as a spatially liminal figure. In capturing his perception of the violence through physical barriers like doorways and fences, that physical liminality allegorizes his position as both inheritor of the adult’s legacy of trauma as well as symbol for the nation’s future.43 While neither of these films falls within the horror genre, used frequently in

Spanish film to depict the legacy of trauma, each one employs the use of fantasy to symbolize and interpret trauma. Whether through comic-like sequences of violence manifested by the child’s imaginative perspective, or through simple games of “pretend,” all three child protagonists attempt to grasp the immediate or past violence which surrounds them through the creation of an alternate, imaginative realm which is off limits to the adult, a trend also seen in child-driven film of Spain’s

Memory Boom.

It is not surprising that in discussing Latin American film I am not able to identify a narrative as consistent as that seen in contemporary Spanish film in terms of the child’s guidance of the adult toward mourning; I am now taking into consideration not one nation but a multiplicity of nations, which although united in their history of dictatorship or prolonged oppression, have entirely unique relationships to their respective national traumas. Still, the filmic child is similarly positioned at a crucial place between Colombia, Chile and Argentina’s national histories, presents and futures, and is instilled with the same ability to disrupt, problematize and expose national narratives which ignore the overlapping, multiple temporalities which comprise national identity.

My examination of the child and the earth, as seen particularly in my analysis of Los colores de la montaña, must be read in part through its history of being violated and controlled. The earth is very evidently intertwined with the child’s witnessing of trauma and interpretation of memory,

43 Los colores de la montaña served as Colombia’s 2012 Oscars submission for Best Foreign Language Film, and Director Carlos César Arbeláez has commented upon his surprise at both its domestic and international success (Randall 68).

84 and will become an important backdrop for the child’s identification and separation from the adult’s identity.

All set against the backdrop of trauma, Los colores de la montaña, Infancia clandestina and Machuca allow an observation and interpretation of trauma, whether through a particular connection to the Colombian countryside lost to the armed conflict or through the murder of a friend on the cusp of Pinochet’s assumption of power, which would not be possible through the adult’s perspective. These filmic children display oscillating temporalities, detached from a personal political involvement (perhaps with the exception of Infancia clandestina, though Juan relates to the political upheaval during the Dirty War in a much different way than his parents) which could have otherwise limited their capacity to see trauma with the same level of imagination and subjectivity (as in the case of the adult).

I question why film specifically about the legacy of national trauma in Latin America would choose the child as the lens through which to interpret such periods and their role in the formation of a long-term cultural and national identity in now-democratic countries. As Carolina

Rocha and Georgia Seminet write in the introduction to their book, Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film, “In some cases, the actors’ charisma and youth is used to dramatize the representation of the victims of civil violence as innocent and ideologically pure. In others, children, and in particular adolescents, are the aggressors whose anger, and often delinquency, represent an indictment of the world bequeathed to them by their parents” (1). As Rocha and Seminet’s project is the first book-length study to look specifically at the role of children in films from both Latin America and Spain, their take on issues like the construction of nation and national identity through the child is of particular importance to my work, as I build upon their arguments surrounding the representation of children and

85 adolescents in the midst of repression and political upheaval and in particular the way they read the child as either questioning or exalting the “traditional values of the family and state” (2).

Questions about the child’s place at the center of poverty, violence and a lack of state-given support which I touched upon at the beginning of this chapter are also at the forefront of Rocha and

Seminet’s analysis of the filmic child; they seek to understand what it is that the representation of children can “contribute to debates on ethics and morality within societies that have endured violence, intolerance, and injustice,” as does this study.

However, I take that task a step further in demonstrating not only what representations of children in the midst or aftermath of dictatorship and violent conflict can unveil about a nation’s history and present reality, but also how the depiction of the child and the child’s experience more aptly comments upon historical memory and the need for its preservation as part of a post-conflict nation’s present identity. Why is it that at the end of the 20th century, and into the 21st, when the recuperation of historical memory and the continued process of unearthing mass graves or the identification of the remains of victims of mass disappearances or warfare remains a topic of on the minds of Latin American nations, these directors must look to the child to convey what the adult cannot? Do children take on, transgress or move beyond (as I have argued about Spanish film) the adult’s anxieties?

Interestingly, Rocha and Seminet point out that it is primarily children (12 and under) who are used in films focused specifically on narratives surrounding historical memory and trauma as opposed to adolescents (between 12 and 18 years) who these authors argue are more geared toward a direct critique of adult society.

For their part, teens are often characterized by rebelliousness against adult rule, the loss of innocence, sexual awakening, and self-conscious behavior. Given these qualities, teens have become ideal vehicles through which a scathing critique is leveled on adults and adult society. Thus, as opposed to the typical representation of preadolescent children in film,

86 teens are a less likely choice of protagonist for revisiting the past. Instead, teen focalizers are used to analyze and question society, therefore calling attention to anxieties about the future. (5)

I am not entirely in agreement with Rocha and Seminet on this point; as I will highlight in my next chapter on adolescent protagonists in films like La Playa DC and Alias María (2015) as the child often does manifest a harsh critique of adult society in depicting the nation which has been left to them as young adults due to violence or silence. This, however, serves no less important a purpose in terms of a recuperation of historical memory; their depiction of the legacy of trauma is much more raw and perhaps more in line with “unofficial memories of horrific and violent events” which might otherwise be lost (13). The child more carefully revisits and considers the past, and portrays where that past has led a nation, and the threat its treatment of the past poses to its future.

The Child’s Imaginative and Fantastic Agency in Argentina’s Infancia clandestina and Machuca (2004) as Political Allegory for Mourning National Trauma

In his book, Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning and Accountability, Antonius

Robben writes the following of the treatment of memory in the aftermath of dictatorship:

Tens of thousands of enforced disappearances, hundreds of thousands of anguished relatives and a traumatized society…How have Argentines been struggling with the human, social and symbolic losses inflicted by the military regime? In particular, how have trust and betrayal shaped and re-shaped the long-term consequences of the State’s repressive violence and Argentina’s sociocultural traumas since the fall of the dictatorship in 1983? Finally, how did the unending confrontations between conflicting social groups and a multifacted state influence the memory, mourning, and accountability of Argentina’s many losses? (2)

Though, as I have mentioned previously, Argentina refused impunity for war criminals of its dictatorship, State-proposed narratives surrounding trauma and memory since the end of the dictatorship have not remained constant. According to Robben, these changing narratives of the past have created and what he refers to a dynamic of mistrust which has hindered the mourning process (3). As Ana de Ros writes in her book The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina,

87 Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production, after the end of the military dictatorship (and in the wake of thousands of disappeared or massacred Argentines left in unmarked graves or other unknown whereabouts), collective memory of said trauma has been shaped by dynamics between military and government actors, human rights commissions and, among other art forms, cinematic forms of expression. Child-centered films such as Infancia clandestina depict the way in the trauma of the military dictatorship and Dirty War will continue to inform and shape the generations to come. Ros also touches on a point which will be particularly pertinent to my reading of Argentine memory politics and illegal adoptions. For those who were adults during the violence:

the dictatorship is related to traumatic memories they were unable to evoke or painful experiences they prefer not to revisit. Additionally, in the public sphere, representatives of the armed forces, the government, and the human rights associations defended conflicting narratives about the meaning of the dictatorial repression…How was one to conceive of positive change after so many were tortured and murdered for wanting a better world? The present appeared enigmatic, and the future became a minefield. As a consequence, many members of the post-dictatorship generation became indifferent and were able to relate their anger and frustration about the present to a conflictive past that also held the key to social change. (4)

Films like Infancia clandestina form part of what Robben and Ros refer to in regard to the reconstruction of a post-dictatorship collective memory which confronts, and reconstructs, the past without a manipulation of history caused by conflicting political and social factions. Infancia clandestina guides the viewer through Juan’s attempt to fully grasp the violence surrounding him through Juan’s understanding of his family’s military mobilization as part of the montoneros resistance: this is done primarily through his own drawings and the comic-like fantasy sequences which reflect the child’s perspective. In this vein, the Latin American film discussed in this chapter also adheres to the “division of worlds” I described in my chapter on Spanish film. The child’s interpretation of trauma leads the spectator into a separate realm which, perhaps stemming from

88 an inability to fully process the reality of the violence as it is presently occurring, the adult characters appear unable to access. Like Jairo Eduardo Carrillo’s Colombian animated film Las pequeñas voces (2010), which chronicles the child’s view of its ongoing displacement due to the armed conflict, the comic or animated sequences in Infancia clandestina also appear to expand the depths of what the child himself can see, and what he can express that is off limits to the adult’s reduced imaginative capacity. In both Machuca and Infancia clandestina the child’s witnessing of trauma carries with it a change in the film’s color scheme; while in Machuca the child experiences violence in muted color, in Infancia clandestina it occurs in much more vibrant tones.

Juan’s comic-like interpretations of the trauma perpetrated against his family also display images not just from an immediately violent threat but also from his family’s past, and what he conceives of to be their future. I will argue in my close reading of these films that the alternate universe created by children onscreen as part of the bildungsroman they provide represents not only their untainted and pure depiction of trauma but also their understanding of the role of multiple temporalities in the preservation of historical memory of national conflict.44 Along with a look at color-coding in these child protagonists’ spaces of direct engagement with trauma and the memory of trauma, I will also analyze the role of both sound and silence in these films as they allude to the division between speaking, and not speaking about trauma.

In her chapter on transatlantic dialogism, Hogan compares Juan’s “mobilization for resistance to the state” in Infancia clandestina to that of Ofelia in El laberinto del fauno, stating that “Juan’s trajectory is similar to Ofelia’s since both young people fight their respective

44 “These films, then, wage a battle on the symbolic plane, or a cinematic biopolitics in which child protagonists are incorporated into a political struggle on-screen rather than, in the case of Spain, or in addition to, Argentina’s example, in a courtroom” (“The Transatlantic Dialogism” The Two Cines con Niño). Hogan states that the child militant protagonists in El laberinto del fauno and Infancia clandestina as engaging in “cinema memory wars” (194).

89 authoritarian regimes, and each film’s militarization of children “inhabits to varying degrees the realm of the symbolic obscured by expressionistic fairy tale and comic book aesthetics” (186). I choose to open my argument with this observation from Hogan as it introduces the notion of the child’s imagination as linked to a very specific kind of resistance. While the child protagonists in

Infancia clandestina, Los colores de la montaña and Machuca all perceive and react to trauma differently, in each film the child manifests his own “fantasy” world through imagination in order to process trauma which, much like in films such as El laberinto del fauno, confronts reality directly, or conceives of it within a multi-temporal context. While Infancia clandestina provides the most clear example of this, through Juan’s retreat into comic-book like fantasy sequences during some of the film’s most violent scenes, Los colores de la montaña and Machuca both also feature the child’s simultaneous observation and unavoidable involvement with the national trauma (the invasion of paramilitary in a small mountainside town during the Colombian armed conflict and the rise to power of Pinochet) surrounding them through a retreat into an imaginative world. As Karen Lury writes in her study of the child in film, “the child figure does not, or cannot, provide authority on the facts of war, yet the representation of its experience as visceral, as of and on the body, demonstrates how the interweaving of history, memory and witness can be powerfully affective” (7). I am interested in how the child’s telling of history and war present an opportunity to reexamine both the state of a nation and how its most violent periods have been reshaped or re- written for political gain. It is also worth considering the particular importance of the child as sites of cultural memory in relation to each respective nation. Like Spain, in Argentina memory studies of the dictatorship feature the child and its targeted victimization through state-sponsored kidnapping and displacement.

90 The political situation in Argentina at the time of Infancia clandestina’s release was “on the tails of two decades of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of those responsible for the disappearance of dissidents and their children during the Dirty War” (Hogan 193). This treatment of memory and justice in the aftermath of the trauma in Infancia clandestina varies greatly from that of my prior chapter on Spanish film; this contextual difference should be taken into account throughout the reading of my analysis.45

In the film’s opening sequence, which takes place before Juan flees with his parents to

Cuba, the family is the victim of a drive-by shooting by the military in 1974 after President Perón’s death as they enter their home. As Juan’s mother throws him to the ground, the shot immediately turns from reality into a comic-like fantasy sequence told from Juan’s perspective. As Hogan points out these scenes are color-coded to represent the dichotomy between the real and “magical” or imaginative worlds; however, I argue that the switch in color scheme serves to underscore not only the division between the real and the imagined, but to highlight certain elements which are most traumatizing for the child. For instance, in this initial scene, Juan’s parents and the backdrop are depicted in dark, neutral shades, while the red used for his father’s blood when he is hit is the most striking and prominent element in the shot. The green/grey color of the parents and sidewalk are overshadowed by two colors in the sequence’s final, aerial shot: yellow and red. The bright red blood spreads through the cracks in the sidewalk toward the yellow used for Juan’s urine after he loses control of his bladder during the shootout.

Animation signals a journey into the surreal and, with this departure, Juan’s subjectivity vis-à-vis the violence and loss surrounding him. The colour-coding that signifies a contrast between the real and magical worlds in El laberinto del fauno finds a different expression

45 As was chronicled in the Spanish documentary El silencio de los otros (2019), Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón was disbarred after attempting to try Francoist human rights abuses, an effort that was later taken up by Argentine judge María Servini de Cubría in Argentina. The Spanish state blocked these attempts by threatening their relations with Argentina.

91 in Infancia clandestina…Juan’s subjectivity to a certain extent literally and figuratively colours the events of the film according to his experience of the traumatic events around him in a slow-motion non-linear stream of consciousness fashion that imitates snapshots…” (Hogan 192)

In these comic fantasy sequences there is no room for manipulation of the violent narrative occurring; Juan’s fear, confusion and terror, visually condensed in the red blood and yellow urine, are raw, pure and impossible to be disremembered. His involvement, but mostly the national trauma into which he was born is told in a way that prioritizes the documentation of injustice.

As Lury writes, in child-guided films “the framework through which the story is told is marked by temporal abnormalities and informed by narrative forms which might seem odd or inappropriate, such as the fairytale: history is told differently, presented as magical and irrational”

(111). The emphasis on the child’s imaginative capacity as a means of interpreting national trauma in Infancia clandestina does not come only in comic-like fantasy realms but also in “real-life.”

When Juan and his classmate and “girlfriend” María sneak off into the woods during a school fieldtrip, the film switches to an ethereal, lyrical tone. The two dance through the woods, playing pretend in an old broken-down car, while the film’s score turns to a soft, nostalgic violin. This moment comes directly after the children are obligated by their teacher to act out Columbus’s

“discovery” of the Americas. Juan and María sneak away into the forest during the performance, dressed in costume as native Americans. The two then enter into what seems to be their own fairy- tale universe separate from the adult in the forest; in secretly defying the narrative (of oppression) forced on them by the adult, Juan and María remain children, playing and running through the trees, or pretending to drive the old, stagnant car. The two easily subvert the notion of colonizer as savior which is being taught to them in a manner entirely unburdened and uncomplicated; they create their own fairy tale universe in which their future is paved by their own subjective agency

92 rather than any collective national ideal. This is made possible by the child’s manifestation of and superior access to various forms of fiction, a trend which also exists in Los colores de la montaña and Machuca.

Another important aspect of Juan’s imaginative capacity as child protagonist is his manifestation of conversations with those from his past who have died fighting as part of the montoneros resistance in simultaneous conjunction with the trauma around him. As Juan’s father

Horacio explains the graphic details of Beto’s death, Horacio tells him, “no lo voy a olvidar nunca” to which Juan replies, “yo tampoco”. This dialogue segues into another entrance into a fantasy world, where Juan finds himself alone with his uncle, surrounded by the boxes of maní con chocolate that they always ate together. The color scheme in this scene turns to a dim black and green, the music once again reminiscent of a fairy tale-like world. Lury writes about such films as

El espíritu de la colmena and El laberinto del fauno as being filled with “interweaving temporalities and ellipses” which “provide a framework riddled with gaps and inconsistencies which represent the child’s experience and, in some instances, the interference of the adult’s memory with that experience” (114). I would argue that these interweaving temporalities and ellipses, while they do reveal “gaps” in time, actually provide a type of consistency only the child is able to offer. Uncle Beto’s insistence in this scene that Juan think about what will come of his life and never betray his own instinct, “pase lo que pase” reveals Juan’s interior processing of the

Dirty War and trauma occurring in his immediate surroundings. At this exact moment during

Juan’s fantasy the action turns to a comic sequence, cops storm in the room, replicating the scene of Beto’s murder. Juan’s terror is emphasized just like at the beginning of the film, this time flashing back to the explosion of the bomb which killed Beto; instead of allowing only the adult’s description of his death, Infancia clandestina’s child protagonist depicts the violence as though he

93 had been a part of it. The past becomes a part of the present violence, as Juan’s view includes the boxes of maní con chocolate exploding with Beto. His understanding and portrayal of the violence, while perhaps even more horrifying in comic form, includes an incorporation of multiple temporalities as crucial to the formation of his future self in a society at the point of one of its bloodiest civil conflicts in history.

In her article “Rupture and Reparation: Postmemory, the Child Seer and Graphic Violence in Infancia clandestina,” Sarah Thomas argues that the film’s “generational ruptures – breaks in the transmission of memory and the film’s attempts to repair them” may not only depict a new way of focusing on the child’s perspective, but also provide a different way of examining state- sponsored violence. She proposes that the film may be suggesting the impossibility of realistically conveying the gravity of the violence carried out during the Dirty War and “by employing these ruptures and attempts at repair, the film reminds the viewer of what cannot be recuperated or represented, while simultaneously exploring the possibilities of approaching what has been lost”

(237).46

At the end of the film, Juan is watching the news and sees his father’s face on TV, as the broadcaster announces that police shot and killed one of the senior members of the “subversive group” montoneros. Juan grabs his infant sister and hides in the back of the house with a gun; while waiting, Juan’s mind reverts back into a hallucinatory state. He follows several of his classmates to a shed behind his house, and finds them reciting his parents’ chant: “¡Perón o muerte!

¡Viva la Patria!” They also repeat the phrase, “¿El compañero Ernesto? Presente!” This scene calls into question whether Juan’s identity is rooted in being a guerrillero like his parents, and the way

46 It should be noted that Infancia clandestina is in part an autobiographical account of Director Benjamin Ávila’s childhood; his mother was affiliated with the montoneros movement and disappeared during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.

94 he interprets their cause without the presence of the adult’s direct influence. During this fantasy sequence, the children in the shed (still dressed in their native American or colonizer costumes from the play previously discussed) cover their eyes as they sing the song “No veo” from the film’s director, Ávila himself. While I will discuss the role of sight and the child in this film in a later section, it is important to take into account the emphasis it has in this sequence. As the children sing about not being able to see, covering their eyes, the camera pans to Juan’s body in between all of them as he watches, unnoticed by the children during the hallucination, lying motionless. As the camera moves toward his head, we see it covered by a television with his father’s face. The children stop singing, and their music teacher asks “entonces, ¿estaré ciego?” to which the children respond “¡No!”, and the song continues “Te hace falta un par de lentes decentes, te hace falta un par de lentes decentes.” In my reading of this moment, the film suggests that the child’s ability to

“see” independently has been obstructed by the adult’s, just as Juan/Ernesto’s identity has always been determined or manipulated by the adult (as represented physically by his father’s image literally impaling his head).

In the film’s final minutes, when Juan’s mother is also murdered and his infant sister ostensibly disappeared, Juan’s perception of their capture is also conveyed in comic form. As he and his sister are taken, his mind runs through images from his family’s exile in Cuba, the boxes of maní con chocolate, his parents’ romance before his birth, all intertwined with some of the most graphic depictions of their murders and lives as guerrilleros. The Argentine flag also appears in graphic form, interspersed between the comic images which reflect Juan’s stream of consciousness. Just like in the film’s opening comic sequence, the color scheme plays an important role in the child’s depiction of trauma. While the film still employs the muted greens and grays, there is a far greater use of red in this scene. In choosing such a neutral backdrop the film allows

95 the trauma points in red, now dispersed from all angles (it should be noted that the Argentine flag is lit up entirely in red), to take on a new gravity and prominence. In her study on children in film more broadly, Emma Wilson writes the following:

personal loss, individual horror and mourning intersect in a network of films haunted by the spectre of children at risk from abuse, abduction, accident and illness. The issue of the missing children enables films to mobilise questions about the protection and innocence of childhood, about parenthood and the family, about the past (as childhood is constructed in retrospect as nostalgic space of safety) and about the future (as fears for children reflect anxiety about the inheritance left to future generations). (2)

By ending the film with the aforementioned sequence of violence told from the perspective of the child’s imagination, Infancia clandestina chooses to highlight the national wound which leaves

Juan, and on a deeper level Argentina’s future generations, traumatized and faced with a fragmented national identity. In creating this separate, imaginative realm which the adult is not at all a part of, however different it may be from the ghosts and monsters seen in Spanish child-driven film, it also creates an identity for the child which is completely detached from the adult’s past; the child’s imaginative sequences expose trauma in the most upsetting and graphic way possible and Juan’s understanding of the violence as tied to Argentina’s military flag in the comic-like sequences indicate that his nation’s past will become a part of his construction of personal and national identity moving forward. As Lury writes, “The child does not represent innocence but rather challenges the conventions of a certain kind of history-telling which demands a chronological narrative determined by cause and effect, populated by the recognizably ‘deserving and the undeserving’ and which, by default, presents events as fate rather than as chance” (143).

Thomas also argues that the film’s fantastic recreation of violent events told through the child’s perception “gives visibility to lives that have been lost, constructing through a postmemorial or generational framework a fictional narrative rooted in personal experience that engages viewers with the historical past…its aesthetic departure from realist depiction – in particular the scenes of

96 ‘graphic violence’ – refuse the spectator a comfortable position from which to consume or fetishize the past it depicts” (252). Juan’s imagination disrupts the adult view of history as purely chronological by interweaving events and temporalities in both his reaction and interpretation of violence as well as his fairytale world of make-believe. In fact, as Lury notes, fairytale protagonists often “act decisively in order to survive” which furthers my argument that the child is not at all an innocent bystander to trauma, but rather agent within the context of war and memory (144). The final line of the film, when Juan/Ernesto is left on his grandmother’s front steps, now an orphan, declares “soy Juan”, echoes that of Ana’s proclamation of her identity in El espíritu de la colmena; in a transatlantic context these children have much in common as the inheritors of dictatorship as well as those charged with forging a new identity for themselves which neither excludes nor becomes repressed by the past (239).

While Machuca does not feature any of the aforementioned fantasy sequences manifested by Juan’s imagination, the concept of imagination itself plays a significant role in the child protagonist’s interpretation of historical memory, in large part through the stark contrast between

Gonzalo and Pedro’s friendship depicted against the backdrop of the severe political unrest immediately preceding the Chilean coup d’etat of 1973. Like Juan, Gonzalo also comes of age, in terms of both his political awareness and sexual maturation, alongside the mounting violence of a brutal dictatorship. Though I agree with scholars like Carolina Rocha that Gonzalo has a

“defamiliarized” perspective on the political tension becoming apparent within his school, family and country, this “defamiliarization” of trauma is not something to be attributed to Gonzalo’s

“innocence.” As Gonzalo begins to spend more time with Pedro and his friend Silvana (Manuela

Martelli), he becomes increasingly aware of Chile’s economic and social division, and in particular the struggles faced by the working class. Gonzalo witnesses, and subsequently joins in for, two

97 protests alongside Salvador Allende supporters. As Rocha writes, “The two mass mobilizations in which the boys take part are crucial events that depict not only the heightened political tension during the last months of Allende’s government but also Gonzalo’s immersion into the social and political conflict dividing Chilean society” (“Children’s View of State-Sponsored Violence”

Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America 87). It is Gonzalo’s willingness to imagine and embrace an unfamiliar reality (to which the adults in his life remain entirely closed off) that allows him to observe the protests, political calls to action and the complacency of his own wealthy and politically apathetic family members from said

“defamiliarized” perspective. As a child, Gonzalo has not yet become a part of the adult’s inability to address the past through a neutral lens; it is not his “innocence,” as many scholars have argued, which allows him to “see” and question Chile’s political circumstances from an untainted viewpoint, but rather the access he is granted to an alternate environment which the unimaginative adult refuses to enter.

Though this dichotomous universe is not as clearly represented as it is in Infancia clandestina, where Juan’s comic-like fantasy sequences draw the spectator into a separate world,

Machuca presents this divide between the child and adult through Gonzalo’s movement between his home life, full of anti-Allende sentiment and overall disinterest in the situation of Santiago’s poor, and Machuca’s much harsher reality.

When Gonzalo is invited to his house, he has to cross a river (a metaphor for class division) and a soccer field (an area of communal recreation) to arrive at a world that he did not know existed before…Hence he is introduced for the first time to a new socioeconomic reality. His impression of life in the shantytown is conveyed through the light-drenched shots that portray a peaceful community working together in a collective orchard…But he also notices Pedro’s precarious existence once he is inside his friend’s home. Dark and gloomy, the modest hut insinuates the isolation and deprivation that these characters face privately. (87)

98 Gonzalo’s willingness to engage with Santiago’s unstable sociopolitical life is allegorized by his relationship with Pedro and Silvana; several shots feature the two riding their bikes joyfully through Pedro’s neighborhood or highlight the children running past signs which read “la felicidad de Chile comienza por los niños.” The children do not fear direct interaction with the conflict, and their burgeoning identity formation as adolescents is tied to it. They neither misunderstand nor shy away from its presence as the adults in Gonzalo’s life choose to, and their attempts to understand one another are not mitigated by class.

In one of the film’s final scenes, Gonzalo stands in the midst of a second protest between pro-Allende and “anti-communist” nationalist factions, passing out Chilean flags; he witnesses his mother, proudly cheering “comunistas, desgraciados” with the crowd, attack Silvana and instruct her to “andar con su población.” The next shot shows Gonzalo turning his back to his mother and running through the protesters with Pedro and Silvana. The significance of Gonzalo’s attempts to distribute flags of the still-democratic Chile and subsequent decision to defy his mother in this moment indicates his rupture with the adult figure and formation of his own relationship to trauma.

Despite Gonzalo’s eventual inability to stop the violence perpetrated against his friends as

Allende’s government falls, he is more than a witness to trauma. Like Juan in Infancia clandestina,

Gonzalo, as a symbol of future generations left in Chile at the start of Pinochet’s dictatorship, represents a counterpoint between past and present. His embodiment of the possibility of a nation which seeks to understand, instead of bury, conflict underscores the “pain and trauma of the

Chileans who, like Gonzalo, were silent witnesses or even participants in the cruelty of the military regime” and makes even more apparent the “nostalgia of a nation that could have been a family”

(90).

99 Liminal Spaces, Barriers and the Earth as Representations of the Child’s Engagement with Trauma and Creation of a New National Identity in Colombia’s Los colores de la montaña

In prior chapters I have discussed the link between the child and a film’s mise-èn-scene and the significance of the child’s attraction to particular spaces which are tied evidently to memory or trauma; El espíritu de la colmena sees Ana’s continual return to the Republican soldier’s cottage and her decision to follow, literally, in the monster’s footsteps instead of her father’s just as Ofelia and Simón in El laberinto del fauno and El orfanato are drawn to subterranean spaces which bear the scars of conflict and repressed trauma. In this section I will examine the Colombian filmic child’s liminal nature in relation to physical space, and the barriers set up within those spaces, as metaphors for their relation to the past, and in particular how that relationship differs from the adult’s. Just as in much of the Spanish film discussed, Los colores de la montaña and Infancia clandestina both emphasize the child’s gaze as occurring opposite barriers put between themselves and the adults in their homes. These barriers come in the form of windows, walls, fences and peepholes through which the child protagonists observe trauma, or the adult protagonists’ handling of trauma. 47

When a teacher arrives to the rural town, we see the first instance of Manuel observing, and partially understanding the trauma through a spatial divide between himself and the adult. As his teacher sets her bags down and introduces herself to the school groundskeeper, Manuel follows from a distance, hiding behind one of the school’s walls which is covered in graffiti stating “el pueblo con las armas, vencer o morir”. The camera moves to an aerial shot of this moment, when the adults move inside and Manuel is then left alone, still at a distance, alongside the school mural

47 Much like in the case of Tomás and Santi’s viewing of the living world across windowpanes or long hallways in my discussion of El orfanato and El espinazo del diablo, this tendency occurs frequently in the Latin American film to be discussed in this chapter.

100 covered with the paramilitary’s message. The violent graffiti painted over a school’s wall is significant in that it highlights directly the effect of the conflict on children in particular, but this camera angle also interests me for the suggestion it makes about Manuel’s relationship to the trauma surrounding him. The shot suggests Manuel’s future as under the threat of becoming forcibly aligned with said violence; the adult’s physical separation from him at this exact moment can be read as an allusion to the violent legacy being left for the child, and the large gap between injustices the conflict ostensibly seeks to resolve, and the reality of its destruction. In the following scene Manuel is helping his father milk a cow and notices some men aggressively asking his mother where his father Ernesto is; they are at his home, we learn later, to threaten him into joining

FARC paramilitary forces. Manuel watches this conversation unfold through the opening in between two wooden bars of a fence set up on his family’s property, demonstrative, again, of the metaphorical spatial divide which exists between the child and the adult’s association with trauma and is manifested in the form of a physical barrier.

After their first day of school, Manuel and his friend Julián walk through the mountains with his soccer ball (a focal symbol of childhood throughout the film); when Julián says his brother left home to go “to the mountains,” Manuel asks if he joined the guerrilla. Julián warns Manuel to never say this out loud, and the camera turns to a shot of all the young boys running through the mountains toward their soccer field, which they find occupied by the same men seen earlier at

Manuel’s home. In Los colores de la montaña, the paramilitary consistently meet in spaces which would normally be designated specifically for children: the school and the soccer field. Thus, both

Manuel’s exterior (within the home) and interior (the school and life on the mountain) environments are marked by the presence of the conflict. Inside the home, the spectator looks out at Manuel’s parents discussing the paramilitary’s pursuit of his father from Manuel’s perspective,

101 through cracked doors, or peepholes. In one particular scene, we hear Miriam urging Ernesto to meet with the paramilitary, as he has failed to show up at several of their meetings already. During this conversation, after watching them for a time through his door, Manuel lies in his bed pretending to play goalie.

The adults’ conversation overlaps his pretend soccer game, and the scene closes on

Manuel’s elaborate make-believe; Manuel’s inclination is still rooted in a childish nature and, like

Juan in Infancia clandestina, his natural tendency is to revert to fantasy in order to make sense of violence and conflict, and then engage with it directly. Like Los colores de la montaña, Infancia clandestina also features many moments in which the child spies on the adult world from behind various forms of barriers.48 Juan often observes his parents’ discussions about the violence, and plans for their own involvement, from behind the maní cannisters, a space he also often uses to hide from the violence occurring outside or in the home. Thomas refers to Juan’s “peering”, in particular during violent moments, as part of an “oscillation between distance and identification”;

I argue that the child’ witnessing of trauma often occurs in both films through some form of barrier in order to allegorize the lack of alignment between the adult and the child’s treatment and interpretation of trauma, or in some cases between the child’s imaginative world and traumatic reality (Thomas 248).49 As the film progresses, children from the mountain begin to leave school

48 While not exactly a “barrier,” the mirror scene in Infancia clandestina, in which Juan attempts to convince María that they should run away together (his association with the adult guerrillero identity of his parents) while surrounded by hundreds of mirrors in a funhouse, and her total inability to understand such an idea, represent the child’s divided, fragmented identity caught between the adult’s and his own.

49 Thomas writes that, “…viewing the events through the prism of Juan/Ernesto as child-adult seer might provoke sympathy for his family’s plight and provide a nuanced depiction of militancy that involves close affective bonds as well as radical political activism (“Rupture and reparation: Postmemory, the child seer and graphic violence in Infancia clandestina” 247).

102 one by one, as their families flee the village due to the increasing violence and persecution of anyone accused of associating with the guerrilla, and we see Manuel’s mental digression into soccer as respite from fear. However, I hope to reveal the way in which the child’s creation of imaginative spaces functions not only as a response to trauma but also as an expanded ability to engage with it instead of attempt to escape it: an ability the adult is not privy to in the film.

In her book, Randall describes the child’s imaginary spaces in the film as providing a

“cathartic release” while “nonetheless remaining linked to, the harsh and regionally specific social problems” and as demonstrative of Foucault’s notion of heterotopic spaces as “counter-sites” or

‘effectively enacted utopias in which the real sites that can be found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’” (70). Though I agree with her analysis that the child figure manifests “‘playspaces’ somewhere in between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary,’” I believe that the series of typically child-occupied spaces presented in the film (the school, soccer field, home) never function as any form of utopia or catharsis. While the child uses imagination to escape from or interpret the violence surrounding him, in Los colores de la montaña physical space of the child is never a symbol of hope, as Randall argues. When Manuel kicks his soccer ball on top of a landmine on the soccer field, for example, the children watch as a sow is blown up in the process, and from this point on the field is off limits to them. While the children’s playspaces such as the home, where one would most closely associate the child with safety, may function temporarily in the film as imaginative space or an escape from violence, they are never free from the child’s either blatant interaction with trauma, or at the very least infiltrated by the child’s passive awareness of adult fears. After the landmine explodes, and all the other children are evacuated, Manuel is left standing in the field looking out at his soccer ball, which he cannot reach.

The camera then moves to a shot of the ball with the mountain just behind it; this symbolizes a

103 childhood not only lost but also not fully accessible. The earth in its immediate backdrop, I argue, symbolizes nation (or at least the large portion of rural, mountainous Colombia where the majority of forced migrations due to guerilla and paramilitary violence took place); thus, the soccer ball lies directly in between Manuel (Colombia’s future) and the earth which has been scarred by past conflict. The ball’s placement in this shot represents the precarious nature of not only Manuel’s childhood but also of his inheritance of trauma.

There are few scenes in the film which do not highlight the association of the child with the land; the mountains are almost always backdrop to the child’s daily life, and the sounds of nature, which I will discuss later, often louder than the dialogue between the film’s characters. In one scene Manuel and Julián play in the river, water rushing loudly by them, almost overpowering their conversation. Manuel asks Julián about his brother and why he left to join the guerilla, to which Julián replies, “no sé, se fue una mañana a conocer el mar, un mar de plomo supongo.”

When Manuel asks if Julián would like to see the coast one day, Julián replies, “un mar de plomo?

No lo sé.” What appears to be an inherent connection between the children and the land, again a metaphor for nation, from the film’s very beginning is in constant conflict with a denial of the child’s agency. As Randall writes of the child’s “playspaces,” the boys are allowed to “briefly escape social restrictions and to exercise what could be termed their own ‘imaginative agency” or potential as ‘actors’” (72).

Though I agree with Randall’s assertion that the film is “imbued with a sense of hope as a result of its child protagonists’ propensity to act,” I disagree that their collective agency is ever allowed any true social or individual realization. In other words, the child’s proclivity toward the protection and cultivation of nation, as well as his propensity to act is highlighted in Los colores de la montaña, yet the conflict prevents the emergence of that identity. Like Randall writes of the

104 soccer field, “the football’s relation to this space and the boys’ interaction with it work as a metaphor that successfully juxtaposes several of the paradigms that the film sets up relating to the rural conflict. These include: the precarious situation of Colombia itself in relation to the repetitive internal violence; the displacement of Manuel and his friends as a result of the conflict; and the threat the conflict poses to Manuel’s well-being, as well as his successful growth and development” (91).

This divide, I argue, is represented not only through physical barriers in the home but also exhibited through the child’s interaction with the natural world; just as light and darkness play a role in symbolizing the child’s interpretation of trauma in the home, the same occurs in their exterior environment. When Manuel and Julián come upon an abandoned cottage in the mountains, the camera looks out on the two from within the darkness of the cottage. Both boys are shot in the shadow of the darkness, with the brightly lit up, clear valley in front of them. When Julián pulls out a bullet, the two run through a possibility of different types of guns it could have come from, as Julián alludes to his brother’s guerrilla involvement. The shot then switches to an exterior one looking toward the inside of the cottage; this time the shot includes the boys in the lightness of the valley, and separates them from the darkness. I argue that this play with light, as was certainly the case in the child-driven Spanish film I have analyzed in previous chapters, symbolizes the spatial divide which the child is drawn to transgress, to bring trauma out into the open and into the light.

This shot of Manuel and Julián can also be read in a similar way to the image of Ana and Isabel running through the field toward the Republican soldier’s cottage in El espíritu de la colmena.

Both present a wide expanse which the camera angle indicates can only be arrived upon through the child’s guidance; the child, the film’s play with light and darkness suggests in this scene, has

105 the potential to move away from the burden of the conflict and pave the way toward a brighter national future as the shot of the green, pristine and luminescent mountain valley suggests.

When Manuel, Julián and their friend “Poca Luz” later attempt to rescue Manuel’s soccer ball from the minefield (where they have been prohibited to step foot), another transgression is made by the child of a “barrier” impermeable to the adult. Several scholars have already written about the significance of the minefield/soccer field and the child’s determination to navigate this space of conflict. Manuel’s “determination to transgress the territorial limit imposed by the public conflict and by his father represents a small act of resistance in the imaginative production and physical occupation of space” (Randall 93). Though Manuel and his friends are not initially able to reach the soccer ball, he continues to cross the minefield on subsequent occasions, tossing rocks in front of him in a playful, fearless way to manage potential explosions. Randall points out that

Manuel’s success in eventually accessing the ball runs counter to his father’s engagement with spaces of trauma or conflict as he constantly hides from the Colombian armed paramilitary pursuing him to join their cause and eventually overtake his home (93).

One could argue that his “childish” imagination, like Juan’s in Infancia clandestina, allows him to maneuver spaces of conflict both in the home and on the mountain in ways the adult cannot, and ultimately transgress barriers which allegorize the child’s potential to confront trauma head on and carry it with him as part of a burgeoning national identity. Many scholars have written about the lack of specific time setting, along with the repetitious nature of the same mountain surroundings covered by the film’s characters, as indicative of the film’s suggestion that

Colombia’s history of displacement and violence could be doomed to repeat itself (97). Yet the child’s liminal status between borders and on thresholds, like the ghost or fantastic child in contemporary Spanish film, and undeniable pull toward the earth, regardless of its scars, allows

106 them to model or demonstrate the process of engaging with trauma, if not forging an entirely new national identity neither burdened by nor detached from the past.

As the film progresses, we see more shots of Manuel (again, mostly angled by the camera from behind the child toward the landscape) looking out on the mountain; he begins to work on a drawing of the valley. This moment is another in which the camera’s position, behind Manuel, allows the spectator to take on his perspective, another nod to the child protagonist as inevitable guide toward the future, much like the shots of Ana standing on the train tracks in El espíritu de la colmena. Just as the camera lowers suddenly to the ground when the sky lights up from helicopters above threatening the valley, in order to maintain identification with Manuel’s perspective, the film emphasizes his drawing of the mountain and thereby the child’s conception and literal re-drawing of the nation.

When the children later find more graffiti painted on their school walls, reading “guerillero, ponte el camoflado o muere de civil,” it is the children who eventually paint over it, with a depiction of the landscape drawn themselves. Unlike El laberinto del fauno or El orfanato, the child protagonist in Los colores de la montaña does not die. While Manuel’s father is murdered by Colombian military who mistake him for a FARC paramilitary, he does not perish in the violence. Instead, in one of the film’s final scenes, after Manuel comes home to find his mother sobbing and his house destroyed, he goes outside to milk his father’s cow in his place. As Manuel hears more gunshots around him throughout the valley, the shot, once again taken from Manuel’s perspective, sees him looking around the land. The valley is the backdrop for Manuel’s experience and attempt to understand trauma throughout the entire film, yet in this moment he is also in a sense becoming an adult. The film ends with Manuel’s ultimate recovery of his soccer ball, a scene to which I refer earlier in this section; the playful optimism with which he retrieves it by throwing

107 stones in front of each step he takes through the minefield, and where he recovers the glasses Poca

Luz dropped while attempting to reach the ball, suggest that Manuel has managed, perhaps, to hold on to his imaginative capacity and ability to see not only the past but also to maintain the liminal nature which allow him to construct a new national identity shaped but not held to the scars of the nation’s past.

The Child’s Sensory Experience, Silence and the Soundscape as an Interpretation and Preservation of the Historical Past in Infancia clandestina and Los colores de la montaña

In his text Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive, Giorgio Agamben comments on the impossibility of articulating testimony of trauma. If, therefore, it is often impossible to speak the experience of trauma or locate it aurally, one must attempt to locate it in part through listening in a different capacity. I argue that the child, whose silence is often commented upon in film studies as a reflection of his helplessness or lack of agency, is actually more capable of showing the legacy of trauma due to their less developed linguistic sensibility.

While the child may not possess the most developed verbal language, in her book El niño en el cine argentino de la posdictadura (1983-2008), Sophie Dufays emphasizes the child’s superior access to various forms of fiction and communication which may allow a kind of understanding of trauma to which the adult is immune. Juan’s perspective displayed in comic sequences, or

Manuel’s invented narrative behind the paramilitary’s threatening messages painted on his neighbors’ homes and the children’s school, can be read as a privileged lens into dictatorship and historical memory. They do not verbalize trauma, but instead show it. Thus, the child protagonists’ many moments of silence in these two films do not indicate a lack of engagement with trauma or memory but may actually be showcasing trauma in an otherwise inaccessible way.

In the many scenes in which Manuel contemplates the mountain valley, either drawing or simply looking out upon the landscape, he is often entirely silent. Since I have already drawn

108 several connections between Manuel and Ana in El espíritu de la colmena, I must also mention that in Los colores de la montaña Manuel is frequently a silent observer of trauma much in the same way Ana is. Just like Ana, he clearly senses the threat and history of trauma which surrounds him; his lack of verbal agency in these moments of observation, I argue, actually enhance the spectator’s vicarious “witnessing” of his life as it is determined by the conflict. Instead of listening to his verbal communication of said experience, the viewer has the experience with Manuel, and is invited to participate in the unraveling of his experience. Instead of hearing his exact interpretation of what is happening, the viewer must respond to the sensory experience created by the child protagonist, a process which requires much more careful and critical observation of the film.

Thomas writes about examples of this seen throughout Juan’s protagonism in Infancia clandestina:

The tactile depiction of Juan/Ernesto and María’s connection brings the viewer into a deeper awareness of and connection to Juan/Ernesto’s bodily reality, as in multiple moments of the film when he brushes his hand along a rough wall, the bark of the tree in the forest, or in the case of the glass of the mirror/window. And we are not only ‘immersed deeper’ (to use Elsaesser and Hagener’s term) into the protagonist’s bodily experience; in this scene Juan/Ernesto’s subjective experience is also replicated in the spectator. When he tells María he has something to confess and stumbles through a vague explanation, the viewer is likely to fear that he will disclose his family’s secret. Albeit to a lesser degree, the spectatorial affective experience of apprehensive tension approximates the viewer to Juan/Ernesto’s subjective reality or living under the constant threat of discovery. (246)

Many of the most terrifying moments of Infancia clandestina are ones in which no dialogue exists but instead only Juan’s breathing, in many cases, as he hides behind the maní canisters, witnessing the violence being perpetrated outside or within his home. The child’s “tactile bodily experience” is emphasized, Thomas argues, to increase the viewer’s sympathetic response, but more importantly I would argue the viewer’s identification with the child’s experience. Thomas frames this sympathy as determined by the adult spectator’s retrospective present-day knowledge about

109 the Dirty War, yet I would argue that the increase in identification comes primarily from the lack of verbality’s ability to force the spectator’s participation in Juan’s experience.

The adult’s dialogue often takes away from the suspense and sensory reaction to the clandestine life Juan is forced into, or the utter fear Manuel experiences when he watches, stunned, as helicopters light up the village sky, or as he silently observes his parent’s fight about the conflict through his cracked bedroom door. Thomas has referred to the opening scene of Infancia clandestina in which the first comic, color-schemed sequence appears and the sound of Juan’s breathing prevails above all others, as a soundscape which attempts “to situate the viewer inside his (Juan’s) body, while the visual image foregrounds the historical events that shape the film. The viewer’s access to the historical past is thus mediated by the body of the child in a very literal way…” (250). The child’s bodily experience, therefore, has the potential to add another almost tangible level to the spectator’s understanding of historical memory of trauma. In Los colores de la montaña Randall describes the child’s “prelinguistic responses” as a means of conveying anxiety surrounding the challenges which face Colombia and the state’s ability to effectively mediate the conflict (83). This kind of non-verbal anxiety can certainly be seen in the village’s clear lack of funding for schooling and the inconsistent presence of teachers assigned to the mountain village or the cycle of poverty from which various generations in the film have clearly been unable to escape.

Another point about sound which I find it apt to make in regards to Los colores de la montaña is the almost ubiquitous presence of constant buzzing in the background of almost every scene. Exactly like the constant wind sounds throughout El espíritu de la colmena, the buzzing, I argue, alludes to the anxiety, tension and claustrophobia felt in the mountain village, which underlies every aspect of the villagers’ lives. Hogan writes about wind sounds in space as being

110 associated with abandonment or neglect “where a clandestine fighter finds temporary shelter” and the function of air as being “polysemic” (183). The ever-present wind or buzzing sounds in these films can represent the claustrophobia and asphyxiation presented by a constant threat or uneasiness, or the injustice of the neglect faced by child inheritors of trauma. Hogan determines that, in Ana’s case, the wind is also representative of a lack of “air, affection, or free speech” (183).

Manuel certainly faces a similar lack of parental affection, though I would argue that the buzzing of the land in Los colores de la montaña serves, primarily, to indicate the child’s connection to the earth as a means of interpreting trauma’s intersection with nation, which I have described in previous sections. Many of the children’s most explicit discussions about the conflict occur over a dominant, constant natural noise; when Manuel and Julián discuss his brother’s involvement in the guerrilla (for which his family is later murdered) the sound of the river rushing almost overpowers their voices. The buzzing of all of the natural life in the mountain similarly accompanies all of the children’s discussions about how to retrieve the soccer ball, again an allegory for childhood. The film suggests, therefore, that the child’s development, and burgeoning identity as an inheritor of trauma, is inextricably tied to the land, and the struggle of those who have towed it, and survived off of it throughout the conflict. Sound in the film indicates that under no circumstances can history of this particular, in many ways land-based conflict be erased from a nation’s historical memory or national collective consciousness.

In the film’s final scene, when Manuel finally retrieves his soccer ball from the minefield, and skips optimistically through it, he also comes across his friend Poca Luz’s glasses, which were dropped there by accident after the boys’ failed attempt to lower him down onto the field by rope to grab the ball. While the child’s “sight” is not as explicitly emphasized in Los colores de la montaña as it is in Infancia clandestina, this final moment can certainly be read as an indication

111 of not only Manuel’s successful navigation of a traumatic space but also of his role as “seer” in the future construction of a “post-conflict” national identity.

112 CHAPTER 4. THE LATIN AMERICAN ADOLESCENT PROTAGONIST IN POST- CONFLICT FILM: EXPOSING AND ALTERING A NATION’S RELATIONSHIP WITH TRAUMA THROUGH VIOLENCE, SOUND AND SPACE IN CAUTIVA (2003), LA PLAYA DC (2012) AND ALIAS MARÍA (2015)

In Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet set out to explore the use of the proliferation of child or adolescent subjectivities as they raise, and answer, questions regarding diverse social, political and national contexts in Latin America. In my previous chapters I have acknowledged the separation of the child from the adult through his alterity or otherness and identification with the ghostly or fantastic. This final chapter, however, will focus on the dichotomy between adult and adolescent in contemporary Latin American cinema as it occurs in non-fantastical, realist terms. I will demonstrate how the adolescent’s engagement with either urban (La Playa DC and Cautiva) or jungle-based spaces (Alias María) facilitate their modeling of the mourning of national conflict, a process to which their adult counterparts are likely to remain resistant. Sound, and in particular sound as it conjures memory of violence in the films to be discussed, reflects the adolescent’s stage in their transformation from melancholic toward mournful characters. Ultimately, this chapter will situate the adolescent’s identity formation as it presents an emerging relationship to trauma which embraces national conflict as a vital part of a nation’s present collective consciousness.

This section of my dissertation will also be limited to an examination of the adolescent, as opposed to the more common child protagonist used in Spanish film. 50 I choose to focus exclusively on the adolescent in this chapter as my research suggests that their place, on the precipice of adulthood, allows not only for a different treatment of national conflict, history and trauma in the present but increased agency to form part of said change in the treatment of memory.

50 For the purposes of this study, I will define the adolescent as a child over 10 years of age.

113 Unlike child-centered films I have discussed previously such as El orfanato or Los colores de la montaña, the adolescent in contemporary Latin American cinema both experiences the violence directly and projects a different response toward the treatment of that conflict than the adult.

As opposed to the child-centered cinema I have mentioned, the adolescents in the films to be discussed in this chapter are not portrayed through a nostalgic lens, nor do they tend to function solely as direct allegories for the treatment of national collective memory. 51 Instead, filmic teen protagonists both highlight the absence of historical memory as part of national consciousness (as in the case of the child) and alter the course of its treatment in post-national conflict societies of which they are on the precipice of becoming an adult member.

Although depictions of the bad or monstrous child abound, it also continues to be the case that children are associated with innocence, curiosity, and dependence on adults. For their part, teens are often characterized by rebelliousness against adult rule, the loss of innocence, sexual awakening, and self-conscious behavior. Given these qualities, teens have become ideal vehicles through which a scathing critique is leveled on adults and adult society. Thus, as opposed to the typical representation of preadolescent children in film, teens are a less likely choice of protagonist for revisiting the past. Instead, teen focalizers are used to analyze and question society, therefore calling attention to anxieties about the future. (Rocha and Seminet 5)

Childhood versus adolescence can be a somewhat subjective distinction; however, many prominent scholars of the child in cinematic studies define adolescence as occurring in conjunction with particular physical (puberty) and sexual milestones. According to Sophie Dufays in her book chapter on Argentinian films, Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) and Albertina Carri’s La rabia

(2008), the relationship that the child reaches with sexuality and death is critical in defining this transition. “It is also probably due to the desire to explore the territory of childhood by taking it to

51 I have also chosen to focus on the adolescent in Latin American film due to the relatively small body of scholarship produced on the topic; despite a wealth of book-length studies from English-speaking countries which discuss the child protagonist more generally, there is a limited number of studies on the topic regarding Spain and Latin American specifically.

114 its limits, toward this transient state called adolescence. Another word for ‘child’ is ‘infant’ or

‘infans’ (a person who has not yet acquired the use of speech)” (37). While I have explored the use of sound and silence within the context of the child’s limited verbal abilities in my previous discussion of Spanish films like El espíritu de la colmena, in this chapter my focus on the adolescent experience in contemporary Latin American cinema explores similar sensory modes of reading the legacy of trauma, yet this time through the perspective of the much more verbally agent, sexually mature adolescent.

While some argue that the child exists on the periphery of those spaces which define a nation’s identity and history, my research aligns with the notion that “though child and adolescent subjects are constituted in large part by the political and affective contexts that surround them, they can still be seen to act effectively as repositories of a variety of possible sociopolitical agendas” (99). In the films to be analyzed in this chapter, Juan Andrés Arango García’s La Playa

DC (2012), José Luis Rugeles’s Alias María (2015) and Gaston Biraben’s Cautiva (2003), the adolescent not only serves as a “repository” or observer of the varying sociopolitical agendas at play in post-conflict Colombia and Argentina, but their role in these films is actually to alter the way historical memory of violent periods in each country’s history is incorporated into national consciousness moving forward. As Walescka Pino-Ojeda writes in his chapter “Masculinities and

Class Privileges in Postcoup Chilean Cinema,” “in this light, the promise for the future embodied by children and adolescents, far from representing a happy perpetuation of modern History, instead signifies an area of social discontinuity, of possible ruptures that must be contained and controlled…on the other hand, childhood and adolescent nonconformities are essential articles of utopian faith; such actors are viewed as positive instigators of those unexpected upheavals that alter the historical narratives. It is this youthful rebellion that brings novel, unanticipated

115 change…” (100). Through an exploration of La Playa DC, Alias María and Cautiva, this chapter will demonstrate the filmic adolescent’s ability to challenge and expose the perpetuation of national trauma through uniquely Colombian spaces where the nation’s “future citizens” have been displaced due to war (in the case of these two films, the impoverished neighborhoods of the nation’s capital, and the violence-stricken mountainous regions). Told through the adolescent’s perspective, these films challenge the legacy of Colombia and Argentina’s violent history and state-sponsored narratives of 20th and 21st century trauma through the adolescent’s link to both urban and rural spaces and argue for the necessity of a preservation and engagement with historical memory which has not yet been completed. The spaces in question, either urban metropoles or the

Colombian jungle, hold innate ties to the national traumas in question; either through national capitols where children have historically been disproportionately displaced, or jungle settings which themselves facilitated conflict, I explore how the adolescent actually works through trauma in order to reach mourning through and of said national spaces.

Like my discussion of the child onscreen in Spain and Latin America, this chapter seeks to use the adolescent’s “gaze” as means to unearth the particular adult anxieties latent in “post- conflict” nations and pinpoint the adolescent’s divergent interpretation and presentation of a nation’s future relationship to its past. In all three of these films, the adolescent’s depiction of trauma, or the legacy of trauma on present-day Colombia and Argentina, presents us with a similar clarity to that provided by the child protagonist in conveying innocent, purely emotional reactions to violence; however, in the case of the teen protagonist, this detachment from political or social ulterior motive (that which is more often held by the adult) is met with an increased agency as these protagonists are imminently entering the adult world and equipped with a more advanced emotional maturity.

116 In their prior volume on children and adolescents in film, Representing History, Class, and

Gender in Spain and Latin America, Rocha and Seminet pose the initial question: why are teens and children used as a site of memory and cultural unrest?52 What is the intended response from adult audiences and what is it that the adolescent can convey onscreen which the adult cannot?

They write that “in some cases, the actor’s charisma and youth is used to dramatize the representation of the victims of civil violence as innocent and ideologically pure. In others, children, and in particular adolescents, are the aggressors whose anger, and often delinquency, represent an indictment of the world bequeathed to them by their parents” (2). In this chapter I look at films portraying adolescents who represent both categories. La Playa DC features both teen protagonists whose reaction to trauma engenders further violence and in other cases reflection.

In films like Alias María and Cautiva, we see the representation of teens who are exclusively the victims, and never the willing perpetrators, of civil violence. I will argue that adolescents’ role in these films as victim, witness and protagonist, uniquely positioned between childhood and adulthood, comes together to question the national, social and historical memory which has not been fully resolved. As Rocha and Seminet have determined, “In this increasingly post-national era, children and adolescents are appropriated to mediate issues of identity and difference, history, class and gender, as well as their place in discourses that question the construct of family and nation” (2).

La Playa DC, Alias María and Cautiva prioritize the adolescent’s protagonism in relation to the different forms of orphanhood to which they are subjected; I will demonstrate that familial

52Representing History, Class and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film is the first book-length study to interpret the depiction of children and adolescents in film from both Latin America and Spain; other pioneering scholars in cinematic studies of the child in Latin America and Spain are Marsha Kinder, Tzvi Tal, Sanitago Four- Hernández, Matthew Marr, and Lauren Podalsky (2).

117 issues which center around the child in these films are actually metaphors for national neglect and its impact on future generations, and that this is not only revealed by the child, but actually changed through adolescent relation to adulthood and furthered agency. Thus, the adolescent figures I will discuss exhibit the same ability to engage with the past as those discussed in prior chapters of this dissertation, yet their placement in-between childhood and adulthood allows for not only the exposure of unresolved trauma in present day society but the ability to actually change that mindset, which this project reveals through an examination of orphanhood, urban and rural space and violence as depicted in Colombian and Argentine film.

La Playa DC and Alias María: Urban vs. Mountainous Space, Sound and Memory of Trauma in Adolescent National Identity Formation after Armed Conflict

Nominated as Colombia’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2013

Academy Awards, Juan Andrés Arango’s La Playa DC (2012) follows Tomás (Luis Carlos

Guevara), an Afro-Colombian teenager who was forced by war to flee Colombia’s Pacific Coast with his family.53 The film depicts Tomás’s daily life growing up on the streets of Bogotá and the journey he must take to find his younger brother Jairo (Andrés Murillo), a drug addict who has disappeared. While there are clearly a wealth of brilliant Colombian films I could have chosen to focus on in this section of my dissertation, La Playa DC stands out for several reasons. The film does not depict in depth many scenes of the actual violence which displaced Tomás’s family; aside from brief flashbacks, the film focuses instead on Tomás’s personal struggle to discover his own identity, caught between his history and his present life in Bogotá. I argue that the adolescent’s depiction of Bogotá in this film, of Colombia’s capital, while it displays violence and poverty, does not actually paint the city in a primarily negative light. Instead, La Playa DC showcases

53 “La Playa” refers to a neighborhood in Bogotá comprised of a large population of people of Afro-Colombian descent.

118 Bogotá’s terror and beauty through Tomás’s acceptance of said violence as part of his identity.

Tomás exists constantly on the threshold between flashbacks to his family’s displacement from the Pacific Coast (Buenaventura) and the potential of his future (which takes immediate form in his pursuit of a career as a barber). In my reading of the film, I examine Tomás’s relationship between his past, present and future as it models a process of mourning, and as it can be read as a metaphor for Colombia’s relationship with historical memory and identity formation post-conflict.

I look at the use of urban space as it becomes home to the teen protagonist when their maternal and paternal figures, interpreted in my analysis as nation, abandon them. Ultimately, Tomás models a transition from melancholia toward mourning through Bogotá; the city itself is marked by trauma and allows Tomás to work through his personal history of violence as a piece of his identity which he embraces. I will demonstrate how his ultimate decision to stay in Bogotá, rather than return with his brother to Buenaventura, signifies the completion of the mourning process;

Tomás, unlike any of his adult counterparts in the film, envisions and pursues a future which is informed, rather than defined, by his history.

Unlike any of the other films I have looked at in this dissertation, La Playa DC also deals directly with race and its role in the protagonist’s identity formation. The film’s use of sound in conjunction with space, either the Pacific Coast (Buenaventura) or Bogotá, also reveals the adolescent’s protagonist’s internal process and conflict surrounding his history and present in the construction of his identity formation. As Andrés Villegas writes in his article, “El imperative alegórico: realidad y violencia en los estudios sobre cine colombiano”:

El imperativo alegórico: realidad y violencia en los estudios sobre cine colombiano,” “en términos formales, es apenas obvio, que las películas colombianas, como las de otros países, expresan sus historias a través de sonidos e imágenes en movimiento que dialogan con estéticas transnacionales como lo han mostrado para el cine mudo Ospina (2013) y Villegas (2015), para los primeros largometrajes sonoros Irwin (2012) y Vélez (2008) o para el cine contemporáneo Luna (2013) y Zuluaga (2015). La categoría cine colombiano

119 debe ser entendida entonces, como un anundamiento complejo y dinámico en una red de flujos financieros, de transferencia tecnológicas, de apropiaciones estéticas, de circulación de equipos artísticos y técnicos y, también, de intercambios y discusiones periodísticas y académicas. (430)

The film opens with Tomás walking alone through the streets on the outskirts of Bogotá, heading toward the city’s mountainous region. As the camera follows him, the marimba beat plays progressively louder. This music, which alludes directly to the piece of Tomás which remains connected not only to his former home on the Pacific Coast, but to his past and to the violence his family experienced, is a score that La Playa DC reverts back to throughout the entirety of the film, particularly in those moments when Tomás is contemplating his path forward. We are introduced to Tomás just as his mother, traumatized by the events she experienced during their displacement from the Pacific Coast and now remarried to a security guard with a new child, allows his stepfather to kick him out of their house. Tomás’s brother, Chaco (Jamés Solís), has just been deported back to Colombia from Canada, where he later declares he fled in order to escape “este hijo de puta país.” The streets are now home for Tomás and Chaco, whose goal is to save enough money to return to Buenaventura once they have recovered Jairo, who before disappearing seems uncomfortably resigned to death. While each adolescent brother has made a different path for himself in Bogotá, all three remain inextricably tied to their memories of Buenaventura as they forge ahead.

From the outset of the film, Tomás’s relationship to Bogotá is linked to his trauma from the Pacific Coast through sound and urban space. The transformation of his relationship to his past, from melancholia toward mourning, can also be read through the film’s score. The camera follows

Tomás through Bogotá as the coastal beat seems to trail him, unwanted yet unescapable. He finds respite in the city’s mountainous regions, where he writes, seemingly unsettled. Tomás’s violent history is a part of his daily life from the outset of La Playa DC, and very much reflects the

120 “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings” consistent with Freud’s definition of melancholia

(Freud 244). When his stepfather kicks him out of the house, Tomás resigns himself to life on the streets, sleeping outside in a hidden field amongst the mountainous region above Bogotá’s bustling city center. As Tomás sleeps, a coastal hum begins to play again as the film cuts to its first flashback to Buenaventura. In this semi-dream sequence, accompanied by the Pacific Coast hymn,

Tomás recounts his mother’s description of the map-shaped haircuts men used to carve into the back of each other’s scalps in order to find their way home and avoid danger. These flashbacks continue to accompany and inform Tomás’s navigation of Bogotá as he engages with the memory of the nation’s violent past; in many cases these flashbacks are interspersed between shots of

Tomás looking over Bogotá, either from the top of staircases in the city slums or from his secret corner of the mountains. The film’s featuring of this perspective, as Tomás begins the mourning process, suggests his position as guide in the treatment of historical memory for the adult member of Colombian society. These shots of Tomás present him as presiding over the city, contemplating not only his own future, but that of Colombia as well. Tomás, the film’s flashbacks indicate, is reconciling his lost object of love, in this case his tie to his birthplace and childhood, with his new reality. His “object of love” is not lost but becoming a part of Tomás’s new identity which, this shot emphasizes, embraces the present and the future without fully letting go of the past.

The contrast between life in Bogotá and Tomás’s reflective spaces in the mountains is signaled by the drastic shift from coastal folk music to urban hip hop. The city is frantic, packed.

When Tomás runs into Chaco, after years of not seeing one another, the two take a walk through his neighborhood. In this moment the urban hip hop harshens, yet a slight echo of the coastal tones

121 appear to be almost layered on top. Chaco encourages Tomás’s newfound independence and decision to live free of his mother’s house; he enlists Tomás to join him in odd jobs around the city, with the ultimate goal of saving enough money to return to the Pacific Coast. As they make their way around Bogotá looking for work, these overlapping musical tones reflect Tomás’s ongoing transformation from a melancholic figure toward a mournful one. His identity does not strictly pertain to Bogotá, or to his past trauma. Both define his newfound independence and burgeoning adulthood. He begins to leave behind those “self-reproaches” and “self-revilings” typical of melancholia, and instead of the perpetuation of a fragmented narrative of national history, Tomás represents, albeit on an individual level, the possibility of a post-conflict society

“uninhabited” by the past, reconstructing history yet not chaining oneself to it. The complexity, and in some cases difficulty of Tomás’s path toward mourning the past, is revealed through his dreams, which continue to bring him back to the Coast, even as he begins to pursue his future working in a small barbershop inside one of La Candelaria’s urban malls. The city sounds, or urban music, are often what wake Tomás from these dreams; I argue that the interplay between the two musical genres, coastal and urban, represent the struggle posed by mournful remembrance, as opposed to melancholic.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the adolescent protagonist’s sexual maturation is frequently emphasized in films which treat historical memory of trauma; a crucial part of the transformation from child to adult, Tomás’s emerging sexual confidence is an important signifier of his adulthood, his newfound agency not just over his own body but also over his own place and outlook. One of the film’s most sexually charged scenes occurs when Chaco takes Tomás to a nightclub in Bogotá. Tomás, dancing with several women, begins to look around, taking note of the designs drawn into the back of the other men’s shaved heads, many in the shape of the

122 skyline of Bogotá. The song which plays in this scene, “De donde vengo yo,” by Pacific Coast hip hop group ChocQuibTown, is also of importance. The use of a blending of urban and coastal sound, particularly in a scene which underscores Tomás’s growing adult agency, signals Tomás’s construction of an identity where the object of loss is fully recognized, yet, as his mother described, the designs buzzed into the back of the men’s scalps indicate the “the way out.” The way out, in the case of these designs in the club, is through a new life in Bogotá, rather than a clinging to the past. The lyrics of the chorus of the song, “de donde vengo yo, la cosa no es fácil pero siempre igual sobrevivimos, vengo yo, de tanto luchar siempre con la nuestra nos salimos, vengo yo, y aquí se habla mal pero todo está mucho mejor, vengo yo, tenemos la lluvia el frío y el calor” echo

Tomás’s modeling of the notion that an engagement with one’s past is key to the “way out” from under its weight or burden in the present.

Still attempting to locate their younger brother Jairo, Chaco and Tomás end up in one of

Bogotá’s upscale shopping centers, before ultimately being chased off the premises by security guards who kick them out due solely to their appearance (both have dark skin tones and dress in streetwear). As Tomás laments the treatment they received from those “perros guardianes,” Chaco turns to him and says, “después de todos estos años no sabes que los perros somos nosotros?” The shame and humiliation Chaco feels in this scene illuminates the wider history of Latin American

“street children” as they have been directly, and disproportionately, affected by the legacy of an armed conflict which originated decades before they were born. Chaco views his place in Bogotá as entirely futile, and unchanging. Unlike Tomás, Chaco has attempted numerous times to flee

“este hijo de puta país,” however Tomás’s character is representative of Pino-Ojeda’s “adolescent nonconformities” and “positive instigators of those unexpected upheavals that alter the historical narratives.” He represents that “youthful rebellion that brings novel, unanticipated change” (100).

123 Instead of fleeing the city for Buenaventura, as Chaco later does, Tomás convinces Nelson, the barbershop owner, to give him a job.

Tomás fixates on the profession and the electric clippers which were lent to him, often switching them on and off, and staring at them intently as the frame drifts to a cityscape or flashback to his life on the Coast. As he practices fervently in the mirror of the one bedroom he shares with Chaco, the mixture of urban and coastal tones returns. His blending of his past and present, as they come together to form a mournful rather than melancholic identity, is again understood through the film’s score. In a later scene, as Tomás is receiving a haircut from Chaco, the only sound which persists is that of the electronic clipper, as the camera stops to pause on several frames of individual parts of Tomás’s body, the most prominent being a large scar which runs the length of his arm. The film’s camerawork emphasizes the intertwinement of Tomás’s future (represented by the hair clippers) and his past as they coexist in a disturbing, yet peaceful manner. Where Tomás, Chaco and Jairo’s mother prefers to bury the past, the adolescents depicted in La Playa DC seem to possess and embody it. When Jairo and Tomás reminisce about their life in Buenaventura they often delve directly into conversations about the trauma they experienced without hesitation. Jairo’s descriptions of his accidental discovery of bombs, or encounters with paramilitary who murdered his father, are relayed in a forthright and complete manner. They occur in conversations about life on the Pacific Coast during the armed conflict which are also light- hearted and nostalgic. There is no elimination of the trauma which so drastically altered their lives, but instead an incorporation of it into daily life.

After Jairo turns up in the hospital after being attacked in retaliation for the debts he owes to a group of drug traffickers, Tomás’s mom asks him to assume responsibility for Jairo. Unlike the other child protagonists I have discussed previously, in this moment Tomás, as a 17 year-old

124 adolescent, himself takes on the role of parent, or nation, moving into a future where the past is not something to be escaped. However, when Tomás asks his mother, ¿te has olvidado que nosotros somos de allá?”, she replies “Pues sí. Yo sí quiero olvidarme de todo lo que pasó.” This stark contrast regarding the treatment of memory of the Colombian conflict, a divide which I have discussed in my previous two chapters as it exists between child and adult, is exhibited in Arango’s film in much the same way. Similar to the child protagonists I have discussed from Spain and

Argentina, these teens have not been able to depend on their literal parental figures, nor the figurative parent figure of the nation, to protect them. In La Playa DC the adolescent is not only capable of interacting freely with the past instead of attempting to erase it, but he also models a successful path forward which involves an incorporation of historical memory of conflict. Tomás exemplifies Idelber Avelar’s active forgetting; his trauma has become part of his consciousness, and through direct engagement and remembrance he has achieved complete introjection of his object of loss (his life in Buenaventura before displacement). Unlike Tomás, his mother resists the mourning process, holding on to her trauma through her refusal to engage with the past. The frequent use of coastal music as backdrop to Tomás’s navigation of his present, and (the film’s ending reveals) future life, in Bogotá is indicative of a newly formed adult identity which chooses to embrace rather than shut out the past. As mentioned, La Playa DC’s camerawork features numerous shots from behind Tomás as he looks out over the city from above within one of the higher altitude neighborhoods or one of the mountaintop sections of the city. In these shots when the film suggests that Tomás presides over, and possesses the answers to, not only Bogotá but

Colombia’s future, he is also insisting on memory and as Avelar describes it, “the survival of the past as a ruin in the present” (5).

125 As Villegas writes, there has been a tendency in academic writing on Colombian film to reflect the Colombian reality as inherently violent or a proliferation of scholarship on Colombian cinema which conflates violence and fantasy to manufacture a perceived national reality. While

La Playa DC is a film about violence, my focus on the adolescent protagonist in these films is intended to demonstrate the emergence of a perspective which actually lessens the burden of the history of the armed conflict on Colombia national consciousness in the present; instead, La Playa

DC reveals the adolescent’s depiction of a national identity which is comprised only in part of trauma, yet is able to persist free from its torment. Toward the film’s end, Jairo and Tomás sit in an abandoned car in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city. The two recount memories from the

Coast, in particular one day in which Jairo tried to swim to the other side of the river and attempted to grab what he thought was a milk container floating alongside him. Jairo describes the way in which this container, a bomb, exploded just as he was able to hoist himself out of the river. He draws a map on the car windshield of the paramilitaries’ descent into their village, and the spot where they murdered his father. Even the most traumatic moments of the displacement are retold through the adolescent in La Playa DC; however painful, the past is not fully detached (as the adult’s melancholic outlook proscribes) from the adolescent’s narrative.

When Jairo goes missing a second time, Tomás must go in search of him throughout the city yet again. As folkloric coastal music of women chanting plays, Tomás finds his way to the drug den where Jairo has returned. Just before his death Jairo tells Tomás, “eso es lo que me gusta de esta mierda. Me saca de este hueco y regreso a Buenaventura.” One could argue in response to this pivotal moment in the film that Jairo’s forced removal from his home and the subsequent denial (on behalf of his mother) of his right to remember it distinguishes his relationship to Bogotá from Tomás’s. Tomás does not revert to forgetting, either consciously like his mother, or through

126 the use of drugs like his younger sibling. Just before entering Jairo’s funeral Tomás flashes back to a memory of himself sitting on the beach alone in Buenaventura. He is able to confront the present trauma of his brother’s death directly while embracing his identity as it has been formed by trauma. To return to Elizabeth Jelin’s Trabajos de la memoria, “those who opt for that silence, however, do not necessarily find peace or calm in their life. The not telling of that story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny and often provokes deep distortions in memory” (63). Tomás’s long walks through the city streets, again against the backdrop of a coastal score, serve as the space through which he comes to terms with his memories of both the brutality and childhood innocence which Buenaventura represents. He finds respite in the barbershop, and in his newfound craft of tracing elaborate designs onto his clients’ shaved heads. Even though he is ultimately let go from the barbershop, Tomás decides to set out on his own cutting hair on the street. In the film’s final minutes Tomás experiences his final flashback, to the same moment in which his mother is holding

Jairo as an infant, pointing to the “maps” on the back of his head. We hear more dialogue from the scene now, as Tomás’s mother gestures toward baby Jairo and tells him to “enséñale los mapas a tu hermano.” Immediately the frame switches to Tomás’s viewpoint from the mountainside, overlooking present day Bogotá. The fact that Tomás ultimately chooses not to follow Chaco back to the coast but instead sets out on his own in Bogotá signals the completion of the mourning process. Tomás is the one in possession of “el mapa,” Tomás remembers in order to forget, and his ability to “detach” from the Coast, exhibited by his lack of desire to return or cling to it, suggests his memory of personal and national trauma is no longer an undefined obsession but a fully realized mourning process. The narrative of Tomás’s past is neither fragmented nor manipulated, but rather integrated into his selfhood as he transforms into an adult at the film’s end.

127 As mentioned, La Playa DC employs the use of predominantly non-professional actors as a means through which to convey the reality, versus the oft-fantasized versions of Colombian violence depicted onscreen.54 This brings me to the genre of the urban drama as it facilitates the adolescent’s portrayal of identity formation as it corresponds to the treatment of historical memory.

Según Villegas, “se trata en síntesis de un relato que enfatiza el fracaso de la nación ante la ausencia de un monopolio efectivo de la violencia por parte del Estado y, por ende, la proliferación de violencias privadas que irían desde las asociadas a grupos organizados como los paramilitares, narcotraficantes o guerrillas o incluso las ejecuciones extrajudiciales perpetradas por los mismos miembros de las fuerzas armadas…” (434). Colombian teen-driven urban films like La vendedora de rosas and Rodrigo D: No futuro all shed light on national “fracaso” through what Roberto Ponce

Cordero calls “auto-representación de contenido narrativo relativamente bajo, pero de altísima carga afectiva, de los sujetos más abyectos de Medellín de fines del siglo XX, esos que carecen de futuro, de esperanza y hasta de narrativas” (1). 55 Contemporary Colombian cinema’s focus on “el fracaso de la nación” as depicted through the adolescent’s experience is displayed through said emphasis on the futility of the child’s circumstances. While I do see this trend as central to the urban drama, films like Alias María, set entirely in the jungle, also critique State-sponsored, guerrilla and paramilitary violence just as harshly, and perhaps even more directly, through a determined use of a uniquely Colombian space.

Much like La Playa DC, the aforementioned paisa films highlight the inescapability of the situation with which Colombia’s urban youth have been presented. As Cordero continues:

…y es precisamente dicho carácter de manifestación palpable de la existencia de un verdadero Ausnamezustand permanente – para tomar prestado un término de Walter

54 Actors from La Playa DC, La vendedora de rosas and Rodrigo D: No Futuro had little to no previous acting experience before being cast.

128 Benjamin --, es decir, de la necesaria existencia, en el corazón mismo de la civilización, de un mundo en condiciones de exterioridad total con respecto a la ley y al sistema burgués del ordenamiento de las cosas orientado al progreso, el que hace que la representación de sujetos tan radicalmente marginales como los personajes de Gaviria sea una empresa condenada, de entrada, al fracaso. (99)

Cordero goes on to highlight the way the marginalized members of society, such as those represented by Tomás and Jairo, as well as those featured in Gaviria’s cinema, are simultaneously scandalized and silenced. “El subalterno,” as he writes, “no puede hablar” (99). Through the adolescent-driven films in this chapter, I argue, the marginalized teen is given the protagonism to depict the space in society which State-level violence has condemned them to. While the films are less “narrative heavy,” there is a weight to the pace of the teen’s storytelling not out of line with the weight of their circumstances. The use of non-professional actors, as mentioned, also emphasizes the realism of these films; nothing about Tomás’s displacement from the Pacific Coast, nor the violence he faces living on the street in Bogotá, is manufactured, and falls in line with

Gaviria’s attempts to make film “no solo sobre sujetos ‘ordinarios’, pobres o Desamparados, sino en cierto sentido desde esas posiciones” (101).

The adolescent protagonist’s experience with trauma and depiction of violence through uniquely Colombian spaces as a form of national historical memory can be seen not only in urban dramas, but also in those which feature mountainous spaces as primary backdrop for the film’s narrative. Instead of focusing on the youth’s condemnation to the result of a violent reality they did not participate in through urban space, films like Alias María (2015) depict a similar form of inescapability forced upon the adolescent through another specific setting directly tied to national trauma: Colombia’s mountainous regions at the height of paramilitary and guerrilla warfare. Not unlike Los colores de la montaña, Alias María takes place entirely against a rural backdrop in which the child, or in this case 13-year-old María (Karen Torres), is presented as an innocent

129 victim of Colombia’s armed conflict. Forced into the guerrilla as a child soldier, María is part of a small unit which must return a commander’s baby safely through the war torn jungle. María herself is also 4-months pregnant by much-older fellow soldier Mauricio (Carlos Clavijo) and charged not only with taking care of the infant, but also helping preteen Yuldor (Erik Ruiz) survive the mission.

Boyd van Hoeij’s review of Alias María at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 cites a lack of narrative (similar to the kind I referenced in regard to Gaviria’s urban teen dramas) which makes it “hard to identify” with the protagonist (1). This assessment of the portrayal of María’s experience, however, fails to recognize that a focus on María’s perspective, rather than an excess of dialogue, removes the emphasis from her individual story and places it on that of all Colombian children and teens forced to concede all control over their own lives and futures to a conflict in which they had no lived involvement. The lack of backstory to María’s life does not distance the viewer or diminish the impact of the film, but rather highlights the universality of what she endures.

Much like Tomás’s relationship to trauma is worked out through the urban space which he inhabits,

María also reconciles her history of enslavement as a child soldier through the jungle. Alias María takes place entirely within the jungle setting, with the exception of the film’s end, in which María finds a way out onto a set of train tracks. These train tracks, and her placement on them as she leaves the jungle and her place as a child soldier behind, I will demonstrate, represent María’s symbolism of the future Colombian generation’s ability to mourn the armed conflict.

In her article, “Colombian Children in War Films: Operación E and Alias María,” Rocha describes the emergence of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas (FARC) and the

ELN’s decades-long battle with the Colombian government for greater land and wealth distribution and the subsequent kidnappings and murders which skyrocketed in the 1980s as FARC transformed from an ideologically-motivated organization to a criminal one.

130 The FARC was far from being the only group that exacerbated Colombia’s political violence, however. Tensions in Colombia became even more pronounced with the creation in the late 1980s and early 1990s of groups of paramilitaries or armed civilians who, seeking to protect property threatened by the FARC, conducted a ‘dirty war’ in lieu of the Colombian army. In 2012, after decades of hostilities, the Colombian government initiated talks, which culminated in the peace agreements that were approved and ratified by the Colombian Congress at the end of November 2016. The persistence and the magnitude of the conflict between guerrillas, government (army), and paramilitaries, however, has touched every corner of life in Colombia throughout the last four decades. (554)

As I discussed in my introduction, a national conflict of this magnitude has inevitably defined

Colombian cultural production, memory debates and national identity. Much of the nation’s contemporary cinema revolves around violence, drug trafficking and war. While Alias María does fall under this category, in depicting the futility of the position she has been trapped in, a direct result, the film implies, of the legacy of violence which began far before her birth, María’s character both challenges and exposes the nation’s perpetuation of trauma and presents a new form of engagement with and preservation of historical memory of the armed conflict. María’s relationship to trauma and observation of the adult world around her, often portrayed through barriers or physical openings between doors and fences, serves to deconstruct hegemonic accounts of the conflict which may disregard the particularly violent effects experienced by child soldiers, or children more broadly. As Colombia’s National Commission for Reconciliation and Reparation has stated, “the reconciliation or reencounter that we all yearn for cannot be based on distorting, concealing, or forgetting the facts, but only by clarifying them. We are all involved in this political and ethical call to action” (30). I argue that the backdrop of the jungle, much like the streets of

Bogotá, serves as a space for the adolescent to wrestle with nation, its history of conflict and the future which she envisions for herself. The jungle, a space inextricably linked to Colombia’s armed conflict, is tense, many scenes feature only the sound of María’s heavy breathing or blank, resigned

131 and pensive stares. It is a space of entrapment, but also the development and identity formation which leads her to achieve mourning. 56

In earlier chapters I have discussed theory surrounding the child figure as it stands for a symbol of future generations and hope, particularly in war-related contexts. In limiting María’s verbal narration and focusing instead on her suffering as she attempts to survive at the hands of adults, the film emphasizes not only the hypocrisy of the FARC, but also that of a nation whose symbol of hope is affected most negatively by its actions. “By deploying the figure of the sick and threatened child, Operación E and Alias María also bring to the fore those who jeopardize children

(Colombian society’s future) and those who protect them. Consequently, these films not only share the moral denunciation of a fight that lasted for decades and switched from the quest for national liberation to the oppression of those who are most vulnerable, but also, most importantly, invite viewers to reflect on the future of Colombia as this nation leaves behind a long period of political strife” (Rocha 556). Similar to Juan in Infancia clandestina, María’s identity has been forcibly stripped away; she is not in possession of her own name, her own body or her own future (while the film features no scenes of rape, her young age (and Mauricio’s aggressive treatment of her) would imply that she has was not allowed to reach sexual maturation of her own accord, but rather as a victim of abuse. While the film addresses this form of abuse in a somewhat “silent” manner,

I argue that María’s determination to carry her child to term (despite the adult FARC members’ insistence that she have an abortion) is another example of the adolescent’s refusal to remain complicit in the adult’s attachment to the violent legacy it has created.

56 The jungle is used as primary (and only) space for the film’s action as it is a space defined by the effect of the armed conflict on children/adolescent soldiers just as Bogotá is a child-centered choice for La Playa DC in the city’s reception of mass amount of “street children” displaced during the conflict.

132 I have already demonstrated how the child’s perspective (and more specifically the

Colombian child’s perspective in Los colores de la montaña) exposes the possibility of a new national identity which more easily absorbs trauma moving into the future. However, like my analysis of La Playa DC, the nature of the teen protagonist in Alias María allows for not only an exposure of this new relationship to trauma, which is far more able to engage with its reality, and simultaneously challenge, in this case, the legacy of Colombia’s violent history and state- sponsored narratives of 20th and 21st century. The fact that the film’s action unfolds exclusively within the jungle, also brings into question the potential for the nation’s past civil conflict to threaten its future; the film chooses to depict María’s experience with trauma and bloodshed within what would largely be considered some of Colombia’s most stunning and widely-admired geographical terrain.

If, as McCallum writes, adolescent subjectivity is “constructed through interrelationships with others, through language, and/or in a relation to social and cultural forces and ideologies,” what notions of selfhood does María experience? Unlike any of the child-driven films I have examined, she is both child and adult. Much of the film’s action centers around María’s transport of her commander’s baby to safety; in this sense, similar to Tomás and Jairo, she acts as an adult, a mother. As mentioned, María is secretly pregnant herself, and subsequently decides to defy

FARC mandates to abort her child, and ultimately flees Mauricio’s troop in order to attempt to continue her pregnancy. It is not only the portrayal of the injustice perpetrated against María, but the willingness and bravery she possesses to break with the adult’s legacy of oppression. It should be noted that this bravery is directly tied to her care and preoccupation for the infant with whom she is entrusted as well as her own baby, in other words, the future of the nation. I would argue that it is within those moments which emphasize María’s existence “in-between” childhood and

133 adulthood that her depiction of a new kind of national identity is showcased. I base this claim about

María’s demonstration of a “new national identity” in her identification and establishment of two separate paths; one symbolized by the adult FARC member’s indiscriminate involvement in the warfare and one in which María, as a young adult, is able to gain autonomy over the decisions made about her own future. This dichotomy, again symbolized frequently by physical barriers, persists throughout the film, yet ends with train track’s suggestion that María both internalizes and moved forward from the trauma.

Alias María begins with an adult woman giving birth inside a shed on the group’s campgrounds; as the woman screams in pain, María watches the birth occur through a crack in the shed walls. I choose to highlight this moment because it showcases the film’s establishment of the aforementioned dichotomy from its outset; María watches intently as the woman gives birth

(something most women are forbidden to do) and considers the possibility of her own future as a mother. The barrier, in this case the walls of the shed, signifies the adolescent’s “in-betweenness.”

The decision to keep her baby would also mean a decision to break with the rules enforced, and in many cases blindly accepted, by adults. As Rocha writes of María’s role as the commander’s baby’s caregiver:

this duty, which propels her into the adult world of responsibilities, takes her away from childhood. In one scene, she follows the voices of young schoolchildren who are hoisting the flag to begin their school day. Their clean uniform and access to education sorely contrast with María’s unkempt appearance and lack of formal education. When called to join her party, she turns her back to the camera and the children, distancing herself from the glimpse of normalcy missing from her life…As in other scenarios, she is on the outside looking in, showing her dislocation and her desire for the material comforts of a middle- class adolescence. (Rocha 563)

María watching of the film’s action through jungle branches in observance of adult FARC officers or through the cracks in the wall of the home of the baby’s mother are not unlike the barriers which

I discussed in regard to Spanish films like El laberinto del fauno and El espinazo del diablo, and

134 in Argentina’s Infancia clandestina. However, alongside these oppositions, Alias María also presents these physical barriers between María and other children. María’s forced participation in the guerrilla means that, instead of being able to move in between the child’s traditionally imaginative and carefree universe and the adult’s world marked by direct interaction with the trauma in question, she has no place in either realm.

In one moment, while resting inside an old woman’s hut, María notices two crosses, stand- ins for tombstones, while the woman comments “esto no es ningún lugar para un niño.” This moment is crucial, as it emphasizes not only the tragedy of María’s circumstances, but also the unique space which she occupies. She neither subscribes, as all of the film’s adults do, to the power of FARC’s ruthless militia, nor does she accept the fate they have determined for her and her child.

When Mauricio discovers María’s pregnancy and attempts to force her to have an abortion, she escapes the safehouse where she is staying with their troop. This scene is critical in María’s identity formation process as it is a moment in which she reconciles her past trauma and forced incorporation into the FARC, yet different from her previously resigned, and almost automated acceptance of her fate at the hands of the adult characters, she decides to set out on her own and defy the legacy which has been proscribed for her. As María rows down the river, the jungle takes on a very different aural identity. The previously claustrophobic, frantic sound encompassed by

María’s desperation and heavy breathing, now turns to the peaceful flow of the river.

After she is ultimately caught by Mauricio, and he is subsequently beaten to death by his commander, María once again escapes. As she runs through the jungle, almost entirely devoid of energy, María stumbles upon a train track which runs through the brush. The camera trains María from behind, as she makes her way exhaustedly over the tracks. While several interpretations of the film’s ending are possible, including those which suggest María recognizes the impossibility

135 of her re-incorporation into society, Alias María also leaves us with the notion that the portrayal of this teen’s experience may not only serve as part of a repository of historical memory of the armed conflict, but the projection of the possibility of a different response to trauma. Ultimately,

María, as teen protagonist, refuses to conform to the sociopolitical agenda which surrounds her, and the numerous metaphors for national neglect which are manifested in her circumstances as a child soldier. The film’s final shot, in which María turns around while standing on the train track, glancing back toward the depths of the jungle, could be interpreted as a suggestion that she knows she does not have the physical strength to continue her journey. However, even if that interpretation were to be accepted, it is my assertation that even an attempt on behalf of the adolescent to break from indiscriminate and forced participation in the conflict, and to actively break from the identity and future carved out by the adult figure, is indicative of the mourning process. María’s glance back toward the jungle in my reading of the film also signifies her recognition that the conflict, and her own physical involvement in it, will inevitably form part of her identity. As Rocha states, María, in part, represents the “scarred yet resilient” Colombian society (565). However, her adolescent non-conformity allows her to present an alternative to other forms of historical narratives (allegorized by her final positioning on the train tracks, María can be seen as a metaphor for Colombia as a nation’s path forward) which we have seen onscreen: the film’s end implies there may be a youthful rebellion which brings change the adult generations, and the legacy of those who initiated and continued the nation’s violent past, have not been able to attain.

Cautiva: the Argentine Teen Protagonist and the Mourning of Trauma through Urban Space

In her 2016 article, “Gastón Biraben’s Cautiva (2005): An Instance of Enduring Grief,”

Inela Selimovic describes the film about Argentine teenager Cristina Quadri (Bárbara Lombardo)

136 who discovers that her biological parents were disappeared under Argentina’s military dictatorship of the 1970s, as a “forceful symbiosis between memory and grief” (421). She writes that the film

“invites its spectators to contemplate grief as a catalyst for promoting memory, both social and individual, beyond the film’s diegetic present” (421). The grief which Selimovic references here seems an appropriate entryway into this film; similar to La Playa DC and Alias María, the teen’s simultaneous innocence and anguish as they find themselves caught in an impossible dilemma, manufactured by (at least in the case of La Playa DC and Cautiva) the adult’s manipulation and mistreatment of memory. Though Cautiva is set in the wildly different context of 15 year-old porteña Cristina’s upper-class lifestyle, just like Tomás and María, the film depicts a teen protagonist who is essentially left orphaned by both her “parents,” and within a larger context her country. As Susana Kaiser describes in her article, “Escribiendo memorias de la dictadura: Las asignaturas pendientes del cine argentino,” with the exception of Puenzo’s La historia oficial

(1985), it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that democratic Argentina began to produce film which outrightly criticized the dictatorship. 57 “En los años siguientes, hubo muchos filmes sobre la dictadura. Es particularmente rica la producción de documentales que tocaron temas ignorados o minimizados por el cine narrativo. Una variedad de producciones asumieron la responsabilidad de enfocarse en ese pasado…los temas tratados incluyeron: casos específicos de represión, testimonios de militantes en organizaciones políticas y grupos guerrilleros…las secuelas del terrorismo de Estado a nivel politico, social y económico. Debemos incluir aquí filmes dirigidos por cineastas hijos de desaparecidos” (103). Cautiva centers its primary narrative around the

57 “…el cine producido durante la guerra se caracterizó por auto-censura, chatura, vacíos, promoción de ordén y valores cristianos, admiración por las instituciones políticas, y sexo velado. Varios actores, productores y directores se beneficiaron, colaboraron o pusieron su cara y sus filmes para promover una buena imagen de Argentina en el exterior y contrarrestar las campañas ‘anti-Argentinas’ denunciadas por las Juntas militares” (103).

137 frequency of military families who adopted children from the very men and women whose torture they had either an active or at the very least passive role in. The film sheds light upon the many families whose searches for their children and grandchildren never ceased even after decades

Cautiva directly and inherently questions, through the painful journey Cristina must take to get to know her biological grandmother Elisa (Susana Campos), who has spent the previous 16 years trying to locate Cristina, whose birth name was originally Sofía. It is Cristina/Sofía who drives the process of uncovering the truth surrounding not only her biological parents’ disappearance during the Dirty War, and the extent of the involvement of her adoptive parents in this form of State-sponsored violence, but also her own place as part of a legacy of victims of dictatorship and the repression of historical memory. This film, like others I have covered in this chapter, not only represents the teen protagonist as a “repository” of cultural and national memory of trauma, but also affords her the agency to both depict an active condemnation of Argentina’s post-dictatorship re-writing of national narratives (not dissimilar to the thousands of disappeared children and mothers during Franco’s regime) and imply a new outlook toward trauma which (as in the aforementioned Colombian films) incorporates history into a future concept of national identity.

The film opens during the celebration of Cristina’s quinceñera, a lavish party which she celebrates eagerly, still unaware of her true biological origins. When she is later called in for a blood test as a follow-up to a previous appendectomy, the film’s tone shifts in line with its first use of a much more somber score. The shot of the needle piercing Cristina’s arm and her blood slowly moving through the syringe is followed immediately by Cristina’s perspective of the cross on her bedroom wall. While she still does not know the truth about her background, her natural curiosity surrounding her “mother”’s supposed pregnancy with her, questions which suspiciously

138 go unanswered, is the film’s first presentation of Cristina as instinctually propelled toward an uncovering of a truth erased by the prior generation. In similar scenes, such as one in Cristina’s classroom, as her teacher discusses the concept of presidential pardons in Argentina, one of her peers, Angélica (Mercedes Funes), asks how it is possible that so many war criminals could simply be given impunity, despite being found guilty of committing innumerable atrocities. As it will later be revealed, Angélica is also the child of disappeared, “subversive,” parents, however the fact was never hidden from her. She is subsequently punished with expulsion, leaving the classroom after yelling “hipócrita,” at her teacher; unlike the rest of the class, Cristina appears deeply impacted by this event, her gaze fixed on Angélica, as if to convey an instinctual connection with her.

When the results of Cristina’s blood tests reveal her relation to two architects disappeared in 1978 during Argentina’s military dictatorship, she is removed from school and told the news by a judge, without the presence of her adoptive parents. As Selimovic notes, “by centre-staging the well-known cases of biological identity negotiations in post-dictatorial Argentina in 2005, the film underscores grief as an encrusted, persistent and retrospective emotion. This grief is encrusted and persistent as it symbolically and concretely endures prior to and beyond the film’s diegetic present

(mid-1990s) or the film’s release (2005), but also beyond the spectator’s present” (425). While

Selimovic cites other scholars of memory studies and the process of grief, such as Paul Ricoeur or

Donald Gustafson, I read the process which Cristina undergoes as in line with my continued reference to Freud’s definitions of the transition from melancholia to mourning. The first almost half of Cautiva features Cristina’s resistance to the truth and refusal to come to terms with the object of loss, the reality of her biological origins and trauma. She physically evades an acceptance of it, in fact, when she flees the judge’s chambers and runs through Buenos Aires attempting to return to the house of her adoptive parents.

139 Though Cristina did not officially know the truth about her birth before the judge told her, her earlier questioning of her adoptive mother surrounding her “pregnancy” with Cristina, and the manner in which she appears deeply affected by her peer’s condemnation of the memory politics surrounding the ending of the dictatorship, suggest a state of melancholia.

In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love. In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object- loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. (Freud 245)

Many scholars have noted that Cautiva is overwhelmingly less political than other films about the aftermath of dictatorship in Argentina. While it does not feature the direct demonstration of violence prevalent in films such as Infancia clandestina, I maintain that it is actually one of the most critical of Argentine memory politics, though perhaps in a less overt manner. Cristina’s journey from a melancholic relationship to her past, and in many ways the nation’s past, is forefront. Much like Tomás’s situation in La Playa DC, Cristina is faced with “parents” who insist upon wiping away history, and would have remained content to do so if not for the judge’s intervention. Though there are plenty of other adults depicted in Cautiva who want to encourage

Cristina to unravel the truth (her biological family, the judicial team charged with investigating the illegal adoptions), she is the only character who can represent a perspective on the treatment of memory entirely unaffected by lived experience of the war and its immediate aftermath.

Cristina, like Tomás and María, signifies the outlook on national trauma of the first generation untouched by firsthand experience with the trauma. And this outlook, undeniably, prioritizes

140 mourning. The fact that Cristina’s process of acceptance and coming to terms with history is showcased as the film’s primary narrative, it could be argued, is highly political, especially in the early 2000s when an unearthing of the vast number of illegal adoptions in Argentina was at its height and many children began to question their true identities.

As in the case of many of the other films I have looked at throughout this dissertation which depict a transition from melancholia to mourning, in Cautiva the emphasis on photography as a necessary form of not only documenting history but also giving physical form to the act and importance of remembrance in order to achieve mourning is key. While in the judge’s chambers

Cristina is resistant to look at photographs of her biological parents, once in Elisa’s home, much of her piecing together of her true family history takes place through Cristina’s careful observation of photographs placed throughout the house. When Cristina is allowed to visit with her adoptive parents, they pull out a photograph of Cristina’s adoptive mother pregnant, which she had been led to believe all of her life was the two of them. As they reluctantly explain that the pregnancy was not in fact Cristina but their biological child who was stillborn, Cristina begins to process and accept Elisa’s family as her own. The viewer follows Cristina’s “identification of the ego with the abandoned object,” which occurs through montages of old photos or moments of her life, beginning with her birth through to the quinceñera and to her eventual discovery of her birth parents’ forced disappearance. Her grief, as Selimovic and others have written, is a primary focus of the film, just as it is a primary component of mourning. In my discussion of Spanish horror film in Chapter 2 I refer frequently to El orfanato and El laberinto del fauno as films which offer an intentional emphasis upon the pain and horror inherent in achieving mourning. While not represented through actual horror as in the case of Spanish cinema, the intensity of Cristina’s grief and the pain involved in her process of recognition of the lost object is highlighted instead of

141 minimized. As Freud writes, “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (246).

Just as La Playa DC’s Tomás processes his history as part of his adolescent identity formation through Bogotá itself, for Cristina the streets of Buenos Aires also play a significant role in her understanding of Argentine national identity post-dictatorship, and her own place within its violent legacy. When Cristina/Sofía, now in Elisa’s legal custody, is placed in a new school, she has a chance run-in with the classmate who was expelled from their previous, heavily Catholic, institution. Both children of victims of the dictatorship’s forced disappearances, the two meet for coffee. Cristina, shocked to learn that she was most likely born in a centro clandestino, responds to the suggestion, “campos de concentración en el centro de Buenos Aires?” Cristina’s disbelief is then coupled with a sequence of her walking through the city. She notices graffiti painted on a city wall which reads, “H.I.J.O.S.”, an acronym for “Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio.”58 She walks through protests occurring in the city center and wanders through a conglomerate of endless photographs, hung up by relatives in exhibit-like form. Though Cristina has lived in Buenos Aires her entire life, it is almost as if she is experiencing it entirely anew.

Again, the importance of the moment in which the film was released should not be overlooked.

Just as in the case of the Spanish Memory Boom, Cautiva debuted at a time when Argentina was being forced to come face to face with its past. The Argentine Supreme Court was in the process of overturning formal presidential pardons previously granted to war criminals, an initiative with serious implications for the future of Argentina’s relationship to historical memory and the concept

58 “H.I.J.O.S.,” founded in 1995 in Córdoba and La Plata, and later in 1999 in Guatemala, was formed to ensure justice for those disappeared during the Dirty War, as well as for their children. The organization was victim of numerous death threats, as their campaign to raise awareness about impunity for war criminals was met with resistance.

142 of impunity. 59 The staggering amount of unfinished mourning processes which surround her (and which become even more apparent through her discussions with both her adoptive parents and the biological relatives of the ones who were assassinated) seem to leave Cristina awestruck. Her questions about her biological parents’ death become persistent and excessive, and are, in one instance, met with her biological aunt’s frank expression of her inability to discuss the circumstances surrounding the likely torture and murder of her sister, Cristina’s mother. Buenos

Aires, just like Bogotá, is physically, visually marked by its history of trauma. Cristina’s interaction with this form of tangible proof is another step which she must take in order to accept the truth behind her upbringing and forge a fully realized identity.

Cristina’s quest to learn more about her parents’ death next involves archival investigation where, again, she is confronted with photographic evidence of concentration camps, firing squads and ultimately, a news article naming her biological parents directly along with a description of their murder in a centro clandestino. Angélica, who has known of the circumstances surrounding her parents’ disappearance her entire life, is Cristina’s support throughout this process, encouraging her to compile information on both families which will lead her closer to the truth, in what amounts to a kind of “urban excavation” (435). I argue that Angélica, another teen protagonist of the film, serves as Cristina’s guide in the achievement of mourning, not dissimilar to the orphans’ guidance of Laura in El orfanato. Angélica has already reached the stage of mourning; no details about her family history were ever hidden from her, and she is able to interact with the past in a productive rather than pathological manner. Much like in the case of La Playa DC, the

59 It should be noted that no Francoist war criminals have ever been tried in a court of law in Spain to this day. The documentary El silencio de los otros (2018), features the journey of victims of the dictatorship and their children as they travel to Argentina to attempt to try the criminals in international courts. The attempt is ultimately halted by Spanish authorities as they threaten to cease diplomatic relations between the two nations.

143 city and its messages, both implicitly and explicitly held on its walls and in its archives, allow

Cristina to make sense of her past, and of her place in relation to Argentina’s past. This identification of the lost object is a crucial part of the mourning process, as I have argued in relation to many of the films covered in this dissertation; the fact that this pivotal stage in the process is facilitated by the aforementioned spaces, urban or rural, however, suggests that the answers to questions surrounding the mourning of trauma and the treatment of historical memory in present society are, perhaps, more apparent than they seem.

Cristina/Sofía’s ultimate discovery of the nurse, Marta (Lidia Catalano), who helped deliver her in a penitentiary in 1978, the day Argentina won the World Cup, is the final step she must take in her transformation into a mournful, rather than melancholic, character. The story of

Cristina’s birth is told through a flashback of Marta’s experience caring for Cristina’s mother in the jail; she recalls every moment of the ordeal, in part because of the importance of its coinciding national event, and in part due to the messages which Cristina’s mother left for her father on the wall of her cell which read, “Agustín, Sofía nació. Te quiero.” Marta’s story eventually leads

Cristina back to her adoptive parents, who she has learned were aware of her parents’ imprisonment and probable murder. When confronted with the truth, her adoptive parents reluctantly confirm, blaming Cristina’s biological parents for being “subversivos que se dedicaban a poner bombas.” The film’s emphasis on photographic evidence of past trauma comes to light again in this moment.

After showing her a family photo, Marta confirms for Cristina that her godfather, her father’s best friend and an infamous torturer, was the man who took her from her mother’s arms at the penitentiary. When her adoptive mother insists she never knew exactly who Cristina’s biological parents were or what ultimately happened to them, Cristina asks, “¿nunca quisiste

144 saberlo?,” to which her mother replies, “¿para qué querría saberlo?” The stark contrast between

Cristina’s determination to uncover the truth about her history, and her adoptive parents’ comfort with erasing it, is never more clear than in these final moments of the film. As Kaiser writes, “el cine tiene el potencial de activar la ‘máquina editora’ de lo que los espectadores recuerdan y olvidan sobre la dictadura” (101).

Ultimately, even in spite of her decision to live with her biological relatives, when asked which name she would like to be called moving forward, she responds with “Cristina.” Her implied path ahead, just like Tomás’s in La Playa DC and María in Alias María, is one marked and shaped by her history and relationship to both personal and national trauma. However, none of these adolescent protagonists allow themselves to remain chained to the past through melancholic detachment. In Cristina’s case, her decision to maintain the name which emerged directly from her trauma point, and refusal to fall in line with her “parents’” urging that she simply continue to live

“happily” without engaging said trauma, is consistent with my assertion that the teen protagonist not only serves as the representation of a new generation which pursues and reveals the truth, but also as a symbol of agency in said recognition. Cristina, just like Tomás and María, determines her own identity as it is informed and intertwined with the past, and therefore provides a perfect representation of Avelar’s “active forgetting.” The adolescent protagonist, unlike the child, plays an active role in the mourning process and later embodies its result: the formation and depiction of a new national identity and consciousness which embraces and incorporates the grief inherent to mourning.

145

146 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This dissertation tackles complex, divergent legacies of national trauma and the respective memory theory which can be used as a tool to analyze the legacies of national conflict in Spain, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. My interpretation of the child’s gaze in contemporary cinema touches on questions not only of memory, but of massacre, genocide, kidnapping and physical spaces of memory. What this dissertation defines as the adult’s frequent embodiment of a melancholic attachment to histories of violence of which they were more directly involved, is part of a wider, psychologically institutionalized historical response to violence perpetuated on the level of the histories in question. Through a study of contemporary film from recent years in the aforementioned nations, I have concluded that the child or adolescent’s modeling of the mourning process for the adult suggests the possibility of a new national consciousness in relation to trauma; the imagination, and thus invocation, of Avelar’s “active forgetting” of national trauma, according to the child’s gaze, renders a nation free from melancholic attachment through a resistance to impunity and forgetting and an open acknowledgement of the past deeply ingrained in a nation’s collective consciousness. This dissertation dialogues with horror film, and its child protagonist who obligates the viewer to consider where true horror lies in an engagement with the past. Latin American child and teen-driven film engages with the same question, though perhaps in less literal form. The monster, the latter shows us, takes realist form in the adult’s insistence upon a legacy of institutionalized memory manipulation and conscious forgetting of the past.

Returning to Paul Ricoeur’s assertion that the problem with memory today one of “trust,” easily confused with fiction, hallucination or fantasy. This dissertation demonstrates that, despite the varying degrees of emphasis they have historically placed on a recuperation of the truth, each

147 of the aforementioned nations’ contemporary cinematic children underscore the prevalence of an adult generation which has been resistant to mourning. The child’s gaze in the national cinemas which I have discussed is a response to memory of trauma as a critical social expression which can be determined, and changed, by ideologies toward its treatment adopted by societal groups and State-sponsored institutionalized forgetting. The child, through a modeling of mourning, proposes a new way for post-conflict nation to move forward, as an alternative to the historically melancholic immobilization of the present after trauma.

In his book, Trauma: A Social Theory, Jeffrey C. Alexander writes that “the

The cultural construction of collective trauma is fueled by individual experiences of pain and suffering, but it is the threat to collective rather than individual identity that defines the suffering at stake. Individual suffering is of extraordinary human, moral, and intellectual import; in itself, however, it is a matter for ethics and psychology. My concern is with traumas that become collective. They can become so if they are conceived of as wounds to social identity. This is a matter of intense cultural and political work. Suffering colectivities – whether dyads, groups, societies, or civilizations – do not exist simply as material networks. They must be imagined into being. (2)

This dissertation set out to explore the way in which individual narratives of national trauma, those which both embrace or erase its memory, inform collective narratives about national identity in the present. My argument dissents from Alexander’s statement in that it highlights the importance of individual narratives in the influence they project upon collective treatment of historical memory, mourning and the integration of trauma narratives into post-dictatorship or post-armed conflict national identity. If “the construction of a shared cultural trauma is not guaranteed” and “depends on collective processes of cultural interpretation,” then the child and adolescent protagonists in the films discussed are central actors in the formation of these processes, however traumatic or controversial their direct engagement with mourning the past may prove to be. The adult and child protagonists of which I have written actively model a differing outlook for the “suffering colectivities” represented onscreen by post-national conflict

148 nation. Through space, sound and the representation of interweaving temporalities, these child and adolescent protagonists advocate mourning as vital for the imagination and invocation of a burgeoning national identity which is neither trapped by nor resistant to an acknowledgement of its own national history.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Rugeles, José Luis. Alias María. Directed by José Luis Rugeles, Rayuela Cine, 2015.

Cautiva. Directed by Gaston Biraben, Cacerolazo Producciones, 2003.

La ciénaga. Directed by Lucrecia Martel, Cacerolazo Producciones, 2001.

Los colores de la montaña. Directed by César Arbeláez, Jaguar Films, 2010.

La historia oficial. Directed by Luis Puenzo, Historias Cinematográficas, 1985.

La noche de los lápices. Directed by Héctor Oliveira, Aries Cinematográfica, 1986.

La rabia. Directed by Albertina Carri, Matanza Cine, 2008. La vendedora de rosas. Directed by Víctor Gaviria, Producciones Filmamento, 1988.

La Playa DC. Directed by Juan Andrés Arango García, Séptima Films, 2012.

Rodrigo D: No futuro. Directed by Víctor Gaviria, Kino International, 1990.

El silencio de los otros. Directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, Semilla Verde Productions, 2018.

157 El orfanato. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, Rodar y Rodar Cine y Televisión, 2007.

El espinazo del diablo. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Sogepaq, 2001.

The Others. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Warner Sogefilms, 2001.

El laberinto del fauno. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Telecinco Cinema, 2006.

Cría cuervos. Directed by Carlos Saura, Elías Querejeta Producciones, 1976.

El Sur. Directed by Víctor Erice, Elías Querejeta Producciones, 1983.

El espíritu de la colmena. Directed by Víctor Erice, Boccacio Distribución, 1973.

Balada triste de trompeta. Directed by Álex de la Iglesia, Tornasol Films, 2010.

Vacas. Directed by Julio Medem, Columbus TriStar Films, 1992.

Machuca. Directed by Andrés Wood, Menemsha Entertainment, 2004.

Infancia clandestina. Directed by Benjamin Ávila, Historias Habitación, 2011.

¿Quién puede matar a un niño?. Directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, American International Pictures, 1976.

Secretos del corazón. Directed by Montxo Armendáriz, Ariane Films, 1997.

El viaje de Carol. Directed by Imanol Uribe, Aiete Films, 2003.

Impunity. Directed by Hollman Morris and Juan José Lozano, Dolce Vita Films, 2011.

La maleta mexicana. Directed by Trisha Ziff, 212 Berlin, 2011.

Nostalgia de la luz. Directed by Patricio Guzmán, Atacama Productions, 2010.

La toma. Directed by Angus Gibson and Miguel Salazar, Desu Productions, 2011.

158