Documenting inherited memories: homage, redemption, and affect in Entre el dictador y yo

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although the concept of postmemory emerged from reflections on the representation and transmission of the Holocaust, the term has come to describe a group of works produced in other geographical contexts that invoke equally traumatic pasts. Over the last two decades in Spain, a considerable number of documentaries has been produced by the generation following those who were victims of repression under the Franco regime. These are works of documentarians who approximate a past they do not remember but that they nonetheless must interrogate in order to define themselves as political subjects. The following article reviews one of the earliest, the documentary Entre el dictador y yo (Between the Dictator and Me) (2005), a collective project undertaken on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Franco’s death. I analyze this film through the lens of memory and postmemory studies of Spain’s traumatic past; this approach intends to offer a critical and comparative reading of the six shorts that make up the documentary, each directed by documentarians born during the transition to democracy. Largely subjective in nature, these documentaries present themselves as exercises of political, social, and family memory about Spain’s recent history, while at the same time they evidence the coexistence of multiple memories of the past.