Guest Post: Rowena Santos Aquino - Liminal Worlds and (Levinasian) Encounters in The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and The Orphanage (2007)

Guillermo del Toro and Contemporary Spanish Cinema

    Guillermo del Toro has stated many times that The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) are brother-sister companions. These two films constitute del Toro’s only Mexican-Spanish co-productions, with children as the main protagonists and set in Spain (at the end of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and in Franco-fascist Spain of the 1940s, respectively). With their imaginative narratives, political undertones, and technical innovations, these two films have been the subject of numerous essays and articles that tease out how they function simultaneously as repressed historical memories, fairy tales, gothic stories, and variations of the horror genre.
    But another pairing between one of del Toro’s above-mentioned films and a Spanish film produced by del Toro can also tease out themes of trauma, how secrets of the past impact the present, childhood and/in violence, and social rites of passage in an interesting way: The Devil’s Backbone and Juan Antonio Bayona’s debut feature The Orphanage. In these two films, the intimate connection between play and violence amongst children, or put another way, the fine line that separates play and violence, is the seed from which such themes develop.
    The Devil’s Backbone is set at the tail end of the Spanish Civil War, in an orphanage in the middle of the remote Spanish countryside. It deals with a boy named Carlos (Fernando Tielve), his experiences of being left at the orphanage, and his gradual discovery of the history that the place has witnessed in the midst of the war. This history involves the death of Santi, one of the orphans, another of the orphans’ possible involvement in his death, and Santi’s ghost wandering at the orphanage amongst the boys. The Orphanage, produced in part by del Toro, tells of married couple Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and Laura (Belén Rueda) and their adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep) moving into what once had been the orphanage where Laura had lived before being adopted herself. Simón disappears without a trace and Laura suspects a phantasmal hand behind his disappearance. A former caretaker at the orphanage then appears at Laura’s doorstep, which leads her to confront the orphanage’s past of the deaths of several children and its possible relation to her son’s disappearance.

The Liminal and the Ritual
    The delicate transition from (childhood) play to violence and its consequences shapes the kind of worlds that The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage present, the kind of characters that populate them, and the series of events that occur to the characters. The traumatic consequences of this transition are the deaths of children, in the large-scale context of war and the small-scale context of a family, respectively. Each film is about unearthing the past that lead to such deaths. Inversely, each film is about scrutinising the present that maintains this past a secret and known only to the very few. The ghostly element comes in to visualise the traumatic pasts in question and their ongoing resonance in the present. Yet the child ghosts that are such an important element in both of these films do not serve to scare or shock. Rather, they reflect back, or recall, to the world of the living the actual horror that lies in humans, young and old, regarding war or discrimination.
    Both of these films’ worlds are therefore marked by liminality, or the in-betweenness marking the before and after of change: between childhood and adulthood (age), play and violence (social), past and present (temporal), hidden and known (status), ghost and flesh (corporeal). Significantly, ‘liminality’ in anthropological terms is the intermediate stage of a rite of passage. The child ghosts in these two films have adult counterparts that embody this quality. These adult counterparts have a personal association with the orphanage that positions them in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood. In The Devil’s Backbone, that link is Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who spent fifteen years of his life at the orphanage (Figures 1-2). Though he hated his time at the orphanage and wants no one from the outside world to find out that he had lived there, he has returned to work at the site as the groundskeeper to steal the gold hidden at the orphanage. The kind of man that he has become (a distillation of a fascist, stopping at nothing to get what he thinks is due him, from children and adults, men and women, alike) is related directly to his childhood experiences of abandonment. In The Orphanage, that link is Laura, who was once a resident at the orphanage that she and her husband have now made their home (Figures 3-4). Unlike Jacinto, Laura is more at peace with her (brief) time spent at the orphanage: she and her husband have not only bought the former orphanage as their home, but they also want to use part of it to house and care for disabled children. The kind of experiences that she suffers in the film (her son’s disappearance and presence of ghosts in the home) is related directly to her childhood friendships at the orphanage. Both of these adults at the films’ conclusions enact a reverse rite of passage that brings them back to their childhood, though under differing circumstances and degrees.

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The Gothic and the Fairy Tale

    The liminal state in a rite of passage is often marked by physical isolation, even invisibility, in relation to society. This element of isolation and invisibility from society is perhaps most expressed in the Australian Aboriginal ritual of the walkabout, a journey through the wilderness undertaken by a male adolescent. The walkabout can last up to half a year, after which the adolescent returns to society as a changed person. The element of isolation and invisibility in The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage manifests itself in both films through a singular setting: an orphanage, in the middle of the countryside and by the seaside, respectively (Figures 5-6).

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    In The Devil’s Backbone, after Carlos is left at the orphanage with no explanation, his entry into its world involves multiple initiation rites that thrust him (and his new friends) into premature adulthood. During his first night at the orphanage, his brief encounters with Santi’s ghost and his entry down in the cellar where Santi’s ghost mainly resides act as initiation rites to be accepted by the other boys. Later in the film, his place among the boys fully accepted and the hidden past of Santi’s death revealed by one of them, Jaime (Íñigo Garces), together they transform the cellar into a place of collective struggle against the fascistic Jacinto. In The Orphanage, in his own way Simón also undergoes a rite of passage. In fact, his rite of passage is a lot more accelerated than Carlos. Through the ghosts of Tomás and of Laura’s childhood friends (who are never seen on screen), Simón learns very quickly of his adopted status and his mortality, secrets that Laura and her husband were keeping from him.
    Significantly, the singular setting in both films is also a mark of gothic fiction, as the container of a secret, sometimes a treasure, and the site of violence and traumatic past that gives birth to the secret and the narrative drive to unearth it. More specifically, in gothic fiction, underground structures such as cellars, catacombs, caves, and the like have particular resonance. Architecturally and spatially, these underground structures bring together the plot points of secrets, treasure(s), unknown traumatic pasts, and even ghosts. Both The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage are marked not only by their sole isolated settings, but also variations of subterranean spaces. In The Devil’s Backbone, it is the cooking area with a hearth, which is not only where the safe storing the gold is hidden but also the entryway to the cavernous cellar where Santi’s ghost dwells (Figures 7-8). This cavernous cellar was, in fact, the site of Santi’s death. In The Orphanage, it is the house’s outdoor shed where Laura sees the one who killed her childhood friends at the orphanage without knowing it early in the film. But it is also the cave by the seaside where Simón first meets the ghost of Tomás, whom Laura gradually learns was a deformed boy whose mother Benigna (Montserrat Carulla) worked at the orphanage and had hidden him from her colleagues (Figures 9-11). While playing with Laura’s friends, who were hounding him to take off the paper bag that served as his mask, Tomás died. Lastly, it is also the house’s basement, whose secret entryway is a door inside a closet and where Laura eventually finds not only her son but also Tomás’ past (Figures 12-13).

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    Tempering both of these films’ gothic fiction elements is their fairy tale aspect. Children at the center of the narratives constitutes but one manifestation of this fairy tale aspect. Related to children protagonists is the thematic of abandonment, encapsulated by the very purpose of an orphanage, where Carlos ends up in The Devil’s Backbone and where Laura and Simón remain, despite their adopted family ties. The singular, far-flung setting of the orphanage in both films echoes this theme of abandonment. Another manifestation of the fairy tale aspect comes in the form of objects. In particular, keys in both a literal and figurative sense of enabling the crossing of thresholds are prominent in the two films (Figures 14-17). The notion of crossing thresholds links back to the liminality of these microcosms, between past and present, ghost and human, child and adult, play and violence. Thus, keys denote not just keys or door knobs to open doors or safes but also old photographs to access the past. In The Devil’s Backbone, connecting these literal and figurative keys is Jacinto. He surreptitiously steals the keys from Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the orphanage’s head administrator and teacher, one at a time to find the one that would unlock the safe containing the gold. He also has the keys to the cooking area whose cellar is the site of Santi’s death. And towards the film’s conclusion, he discovers the old photographs of himself as a baby and boy, with his parents, constituting a rare moment of introspection on his part. This moment is a pause in his role as the fairy tale ogre who towers above the children and menaces them because he knows no other way to express himself. At the end of the film in his final confrontation with Carlos and the other boys, the film compares him to the extinct woolly mammoth, about which the boys learn in a lesson with Carmen in the middle of the film. In The Orphanage, connecting the literal and figurative keys is Simón. Following his encounter with the ghost of Tomás in the cave, he performs a very fairy tale-esque gesture of leaving a trail of shells from the cave to his house for Tomás to follow; in this way, the shells serve as a variation of a key to access a space (Figures 18-19). Subsequently, a game of pursuing object-related clues (or keys) begins at the house, which leads Simón to unlock literally and figuratively the knowledge of his adoption and illness. When he disappears, he becomes a kind of key himself for Laura to access the secret past involving Tomás, his death, and those of Laura’s friends at the orphanage.

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Definitions of a Ghost

   As mentioned earlier, more than anything, the child ghosts in The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage reflect back, or recall, to the world of the living the actual horror that lies in humans, as opposed to serving as mere scare or shock tactics. We return to the thematic realm of the liminal and the ritual, of childhood and adulthood, ghosts and bodies, play and violence. Santi’s ghost in The Devil’s Backbone and the ghosts of Tomás and Laura’s childhood friends in The Orphanage are products of human actions instead of something fantastical. At the same time, these films are careful to avoid demonising the human element that ends up being much more horrific than the ghosts: Jacinto and to a lesser extent Jaime in The Devil’s Backbone and Tomás’ mother Benigna and to a lesser extent Laura’s childhood friends.

    Through the vehicle of ghosts, these two films enact encounters with the traumatic, the horrific, the flawed, and the unknown, in other words, for Carlos in The Devil’s Backbone and Laura in The Orphanage. These encounters with the more melancholy and unsettling, darker, and uglier facets of life constitute rites of passage in their own way. When initially confronted by the notion of ghosts, both Carlos and Laura recoil from or deny them, based on their seeming incomprehensibility. In doing so, they recoil from or deny the actual pasts, marginalised and hidden, to which they refer. Yet in the course of the films, both Carlos and Laura, among others, learn to face what they do not know or understand. This process of facing the incomprehensible and therefore fearful is made literal with the ghosts in both films. Taken further, in the context of the ritualistic, liminal, and confrontational, The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage’s encounters with ghosts chart the process of not only facing the incomprehensible and fearful but also realising one’s connection to it, on a humanistic level.

    Both films ponder definitions of the ghost: The Devil’s Backbone in its prologue and The Orphanage midway through the narrative. Both films ask, plainly, ‘What is a ghost?’ In so doing and through their definitions, they emphasise the characters’ encounters with the ghosts as something beyond the function of scaring audiences and towards something like ethical action and responsibility, in keeping with the idea of one’s connection to the incomprehensible and fearful, on a humanistic level:

The Devil’s Backbone: ‘A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion, suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph.’

The Orphanage: ‘When something terrible happens, sometimes it leaves a trace, a wound that acts as a knot between two time lines. It’s like an echo repeated over and over, waiting to be heard. Like a scar or a pinch that begs for a caress to relieve it.'

Each film’s definition of a ghost shares characteristics with the other: repetition; something between living and dead, or past and present; and a physical pain with an indexical counterpart that is not always seen but asking to be acknowledged. In their philosophical definitions of a ghost, these two films locate themselves in a nearly Levinasian realm of face-to-face encounter, echoed literally by Carlos’ meeting Santi’s ghost in The Devil’s Backbone (Figures 20-22) and more figuratively by Laura playing along with the ghosts of Tomás and her childhood friends (Figure 23).

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    In his 1984 essay ‘Ethics as First Philosophy,’ Levinas writes,

‘A responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have done to

the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted

to the other man before being devoted to myself. Or more exactly, as if I had to

answer for the other’s death even before being. A guiltless responsibility,

whereby I am none the less open to an accusation of which no alibi, spatial or

temporal, could clear me. It is as if the other established a relationship or a

relationship were established whose whole intensity consists in not presupposing

the idea of community. A responsibility stemming from a time before my 

freedom – before my (moi) beginning, before any present. A fraternity existing

in extreme separation. Before, but in what past? Not in the time preceding the

present, in which I might have contracted any commitments’ (83-84, The

Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Strikingly, in his audio commentary to the 2013 Criterion DVD of The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro states along similar lines about the gothic romance, which can also apply The Orphanage:

‘It’s the only genre that teaches us to understand the otherness. At its best,

it is probably the most humanistic genre there is, because by being fascinated 

by [and] by being sort of in love with the monsters, we are exercising, in the

abstract, the most beautiful form of tolerance: a desire to understand the

other […], as opposed to trying to destroy it and wipe it from the face of the

earth.’

Rowena Santos Aquino is a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University, Long Beach. You can find her on twitter, @FilmStillLives.

Guest Post: Michael Pattison - Notes on Some Spanish Films at the Seville European Film Festival

     Though their country’s economic plight worsens daily, Spanish filmmakers are beginning to assess and get to grips with a political climate that is, in the final analysis, antagonistic to artistic endeavour. While films ineluctably express the complex, contradictory tensions that characterise the social context in which they are made, the aim and hope is that any historical period finds its artistic match: those works that grasp the matter at hand, embrace the difficulties ahead, and refuse to evade the work to be done. To this end, there were a significant number of Spanish films at the tenth Seville European Film Festival (SEFF) whose general focus and political persuasion spoke of a palpable discontent with regard to the current state of things. Not every film will be politically charged, of course, and so it is to SEFF’s credit that it waded through what I presume to be a large swamp of mediocrity in order to present, by and large, the strong selection it finally offered. These works speak to the present precisely because they convey an understanding – to varying degrees – of how they relate to the unfolding historical moment.

Costa da morte / Coast of Death

     I have written elsewhere – here and here –  on Lois Patiño’s Costa da Morte, but some further remarks won’t go amiss (I first saw the film in Locarno in August, and again at the Viennale prior to my arrival in Seville). An essay film on the eponymous Galician coastline – named so because of its history of shipwrecks – Patiño’s debut feature frequently surveys its region from afar, zoomed-in so as to flatten its landscapes and thereby deny a more visually harmonious vantage point. There’s something unnatural about such optical choices: as humans, we cannot, after all, get a closer look at an object without telescopic aid or without physically moving to a closer proximity. Consequently, the film enables an unspoken but ongoing commentary on its own function: in denying itself and its audience a postcard-friendly view of the Coast of Death, it suggests a better understanding of these locales might come from a more idiosyncratic view. By flattening the landscape in such a way, Patiño’s film pits a multiplicity of histories against one another, privileging none and including all. Just as every landscape is the sum of its parts, so the present is the sum of its pasts. Note the plural: at no point in history has there been a moment without contradictions – the remnants of a bygone time, the formations of an era to come. 

El Futuro / The Future

     El Futuro takes an aesthetically different approach to history. Set in the immediate aftermath of Spain’s 1982 General Election – which was won by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – Luis López Carrasco’s debut feature confines itself to a house party attended by a group of increasingly inebriated twenty- and thirty-somethings hell-bent on indulging the post-Franco night away. When I saw the film at Locarno in August I couldn’t write the soundtrack list in its end credits down fast enough: this boasts an infectious selection of the Euro-synth and -punk of the period, and lends the narrative a real verve. There’s something futuristic about electronic music, of course, and yet ’80s synth – as well as other fashions from that decade – seems to have dated quicker than most. Likewise, the forward-thinking euphoria facilitated by a socialist party’s assumption of governmental responsibilities now seems a distant memory: López Carrasco’s ironically-named film is anything but optimistic, and the textured grain of his 16mm compositions reminds us at every turn of its own retrospection. Every smile, laugh and suggestion of a future appears as a ghost prohibited today by Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy’s enforced austerity.

El triste olor de la carne / The Sad Smell of Flesh

    Mariano Rajoy is a secondary character in El triste olor de la carne, the second feature by Cristóbal Arteaga Roza. Having his first state-of-the-nation address in February this year overheard in intermittent snippets here recalls Andrew Dominik’s similar employment of Barack Obama soundbites in Killing Them Softly (2012). Unlike that film, however, El triste olor de la carne has no time for allegory: a single-take trudge through Madrid’s urban sprawl, it takes one citizen’s financial loss to its logical, literal and inevitable (if no less powerful) conclusion. Said citizen is Alfredo (Alfredo Rodríguez), an uncanny cross between Boris Karloff and Peter Capaldi, his visibly fatigued face saying more than the character ever does, as he tries desperately to defer a meeting with the bailiffs who are coming to repossess his home.

     When a recession begins to affect the perfect image of a white middle-class nuclear family, you know you’re in trouble. Alfredo’s burnt-out businessman is a figure of belated if bewildered acceptance, and the only resistance he can summon rings, in the end, all too true. Though some critics might feel its persistent, unbroken take results in unnecessary bouts of dead time – such as when Alfredo is driving, or else travelling on a bus or in a taxi – this is precisely the film’s strength, lingering as it does on those unbearably long passages in which unthinkable stress drains a person’s life away. Indeed, the prospect of financial collapse is now too familiar a prospect for many Spanish people that contrived dramatics are no longer necessary.

Alegrías de Cádiz / Joys of Cádiz

     Not every Spanish film at SEFF felt like it was making a significant contribution to the battle. Gonzalo García Pelayo’s Alegrías de Cádiz returns its director to filmmaking after three decades in other fields, and feels very much the product of someone lacking practice. (For a serviceably flashy take on García Pelayo’s venture into professional gambling in the 1990s, see Eduard Cortés’s The Pelayos (2012)). Anyone familiar with the director’s work – pseudo-cerebral, flesh-heavy forays into the beauty of women, the joys of sex, monogamy as a socially conditioned and therefore unnatural state, and so on – will not be surprised to hear this is a heavily indulgent work. Not without its lively moments, the film is an uneasy blend of a meta-comedy about a ménage-à-trois and a sincere essay film on Cádiz. As such, it keeps itself busy for its two-hour running time, but García Pelayo’s implication-cum-assertion, that the most interesting thing about a city is its women, seems like a perverted joke.

10.000 noches en ninguna parte / 10,000 Nights Nowhere

     Other films disappointed. 10.000 noches en ninguna parte, by Malaga-born writer-director Ramón Salazar, is a centrifugal triptych on themes of loss and – of course – love. Wide-eyed Andrés Gertrúdix plays the same character thrice, living in parallel dimensions: with a bohemian trio in Berlin, with a childhood love in Paris, and with his alcoholic mother in what I presumed to be Spain. A dull, cold visual palette – with shallow-focus camerawork – gives the film a terminally malaised look, and though a certain whimsicality forces its earlier passages along, the employment of Arvo Pärt’s overused ‘Fratres’ reveals an essentially juvenile sensibility at work. Indeed, at a certain point during the film I wrote in my notebook: these people don’t live in the same world as me – the real world, with financial pressures etc. 

Los chicos del puerto / The Kids from the Port

     Nor do the protagonists of Los chicos del puerto, by Alberto Morais. The film’s eponymous port is that of Valencia, and its kids are Miguel, Lola and Guillermo, three pre-teens who embark upon the ostensibly simple trek to a cemetery, to place an army jacket on the grave of the recently deceased friend of Miguel’s grandfather. The pilgrimage of course turns out to be more arduous than first assumed. The friends underestimate their bus fare; they journey to the wrong cemetery; they become lost; they grow hungry; they go broke. That one-note tone of dramatic seriousness – more familiar to French productions than to Spanish – sets in quickly: characters act not how people do, but for a desired symbolism, one which over the course of even a slim 78 minutes drains all would-be energy. Programme notes mention “sparse dialogue and a formal Bressonian minimalism”, but the invariably stilted interactions here are part of a wider filmmaking trend that may very well be indebted to Bresson but which provides too little social commentary to justify the comparison. Too many filmmakers seem to mistake this sullen, ploddingly mopey register for mysteriousness, for ambiguity, for poetry or for purity – or for any other apparently desirable trait.

     All the more refreshing, then, to watch more upbeat films like El Rayo, Un ramo de cactus and Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato. The first of these, directed by Fran Araúgo and Ernesto de Nova, screened in SEFF’s ‘Andalusian Panorama’ section following a world-premiere at San Sebastian, and sees a defiantly high-spirited itinerant labourer trekking across Spain back to Morocco on a tractor. The second, which received its world-premiere at SEFF as part of the festival’s inaugural ‘Resistances’ strand, is a pleasing if sometimes technically amateurish comedy by Pablo Llorca, featuring a deceptively masterful central performance from Seville-born Pedro Casablanc, who has in recent years been ubiquitous on Spanish television. Casablanc’s deadpan style and pockmarked face recall Bill Murray, and his turn in Llorca’s film – as a fiftyish farmer at odds with his family’s acceptingly money-oriented ways – deserves much wider recognition. In contrast to a film like Los chicos del puerto, both Un ramo de cactus and El Rayo demonstrate that a serious film need not be glum.

Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato / The Adventures of Lily Cat Eyes

     Las aventuras, meanwhile, is a night-in-the-life-of tale centring heavily on inebriation as a means to forget. Working as a PR for a bar in Madrid, Lily (Ana Adams) meets a bleary-eyed customer with whom, after hours, she solemnly swears to drink till she hits the ground – and perhaps would if real-life events didn’t get in the way. To be sure, Lily is drinking away the hurt of a break-up, but her temporary escape is frustrated by more pressing matters: a friend’s pregnancy, her new pal’s paralytic state, an abusive employer, and so on. A more systemic understanding of things might be beyond Boix and his film; I would have preferred a less cartoonishly cruel boss, for instance. And though these are palpably more universal features with which to pepper a story – as opposed to the characteristics of the Galician landscape, or the political fate of Spain – the film nevertheless has an undeniable strength, in taking an otherwise insufferable young drunk and accounting for her self-destructive behaviour in a non-evasive way. Played by British actress Adams – who speaks Spanish fluently – Lily has a rugged, get-on-with-it edge, which makes her charming even when she’s actively derailing a blues performer’s final song in a late-night bar.

Michael Pattison is a freelance film critic based in Gateshead, UK. He blogs at idFilm and Tweets @m_pattison.

Guest post: Fiona Noble on Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976)

As indicated previously, I've paused my Carlos Saura Challenge for a few weeks while I deal with a situation at work. Fiona Noble kindly offered to write something for Nobody Knows Anybody about Cría cuervos as it is a film that features in her doctoral research. I hope to be back up and running in July, but in the meantime I leave you with Fiona's take on one of Saura's key films.

   Like La prima Angélica (already discussed on this blog), Cría cuervos revolves around the intersection of memory and childhood.  These themes are channelled primarily through the film’s central character, Ana, played by Ana Torrent.  Torrent has been read by Marsha Kinder as emblematic of the generation raised during the dictatorship, the self-proclaimed ‘children of Franco’ (1983: 57).  For Kinder, the figure of the child in films produced by this generation of directors (including, as well as Saura, José Luis Borau, Jaime de Armiñan, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón) symbolises their infantilisation by the Francoist regime.
   Regarding Torrent’s earlier appearance in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Kinder underscores the fundamental ambivalence of the child: while her ‘luminous dark eyes confront us with a bold knowing gaze, conveying a precocious intelligence, passion and intensity that seem almost ominous’, at the same time ‘her pale oval face and slender birdlike frame create a fragility that also marks her as a victim – a delicate instrument for the registering of pain’ (1983: 59-60).  This ambivalence underscores the dualism of this generation, at once victims, who have suffered at the hands of the regime, as well as potential future aggressors, who have learned from, and are at risk of perpetuating, their traumatic experiences through the repetition of violent acts.
   These concerns surface too in Cría, insofar as protagonist Ana actively seeks to kill her father, and then her aunt by poisoning them.  While the poison is revealed to be a harmless substance (bicarbonate of soda), and thus ‘meaningful action is still only imaginable, not performed’ (Kinder 1983: 66), Ana’s desire to provoke the death of these individuals is anything but imagined.  The figure of the child thus functions as a metaphor for those who have grown up under the Franco regime, replicating their sentiments of frustration and helplessness, but also encapsulating their impulse towards violence.
   That the child is representative of a now adult generation impacts upon Cría’s temporality and chronology.  Produced in 1975, shortly before Franco’s death, the film prophetically and symbolically addresses this event through the death of the father in the opening scenes. Furthermore, the narrative moves between past and present, or rather between present and future.  The action takes place on two distinct temporal planes – the first during protagonist Ana’s childhood in 1975, and the second, twenty years later, in 1995, when an adult Ana attempts to explain her actions in the past.  The child in addition demonstrates the ability to conjure up the image of her dead mother, evidencing a fluid approach to chronology and to history.  This is further underscored by the film’s casting, given that Chaplin plays both the adult Ana and her mother María.  On the one hand, this fluid chronology, that evidences the influence of the past on the present, is tied specifically to the film’s politico-historical context.  Specifically, it highlights the extent to which the country’s forgotten traumatic past was bound to return in the aftermath of the dictator’s death.  On the other, and in more general terms, this evidences the child’s status as, in the words of Judith Halberstam, ‘always already anarchic and rebellious, out of order and out of time’ (2011: 27).
   In spite of this fluid approach to chronology, the film’s spatiality is characterised conversely by claustrophobia and restriction.  The majority of Cría’s narrative unfolds during the girls’ school holidays, creating a stifling atmosphere in which the children have little access to the world outside the walls of their home.  In support of this, the action takes place almost exclusively within the family home.  The only exception to this is the episode in which Aunt Paulina takes the children to their father’s friend’s farm.
   Furthermore, the family home is marked as a site of trauma, given that the film begins with the death of the girls’ father in his own bed.  Having previously lost their mother, Ana and her sisters are now orphans, under the tutelage of their Aunt Paulina, their mother’s sister.  Their mute grandmother, and maid Rosa, also live in the house with the three girls.  The fractured family unit, in conjunction with the claustrophobic family home, symbolise the political and cultural climate in Spain during and after the dictatorship.  Cría’s spatial restraint thus contrasts dramatically with its temporal freedom, underscoring both the limitations and possibilities of the child’s imagination.
   The film ends with the girls’ re-emergence into the outside world, the camera positioned in a high angle shot, tracking the children as they make their way along the bustling streets of Madrid to attend their first day back at school after the holidays.  The camera lingers at the city skyline, leaving the spectator wondering about the fates of these young girls, and the generation that they represent.  The unfinishedness of this conclusion echoes the liminality of the climate – in the months preceding Franco’s death – in which the film was produced.

References:
Halberstam, J. (2011) – The Queer Art of Failure, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Kinder, M. (1983) – ‘The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 8.2, pp.57-76.


Bio:
Fiona Noble is currently working towards the completion of her PhD in Hispanic Studies and Film & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, where she also completed her MLitt (in Visual Culture with Distinction) and MA (with Joint Honours in French and Hispanic Studies).  Her research centres on notions of transitory subjectivities in contemporary Spain, an issue she explores through three key figures of post-Franco Spanish cinema: the child, the performer, and the immigrant. She writes the blog spanishcinephilia.