The haptic in hindsight: neighbourhood cinema-going in post-war Spain

This article looks to the recent work of Guiliana Bruno and to that of Michel de Certeau to analyse the ways in which oral testimony might be mapped in terms of spatial affectivity. With reference to the responses of a small selection of interviewees, I seek to draw parallels between the physical movement involved in the act of cinema-going during the 1940s and 1950s in Madrid and the narration of the memory of such activity half a century later. The discussion here interrogates traditional views of nostalgia within a context of habitus and aims to establish other connections of space (city, domestic or sonic spaces).