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Pedro Almodóvar’s film Tacones lejanos/High Heels (1991) portrays the interconnectedness between past and present in early 1990s Spain, when the country had seemingly become a modern nation and left the Transition behind. While in the 1980s Almodóvar had famously mentioned that he preferred to make films as if Franco had never existed, this work suggests otherwise. Tacones lejanos portrays a protagonist suffering a traumatic personal experience in her childhood during Spain’s dictatorship and its enduring impact on her present life in the early 1990s. The film employs cinematic devices such as flashbacks, memory triggers and dialogic relations with earlier films as tropes of memory. By studying individual memory to understand the workings of collective memory and national identity, I argue that Tacones lejanos provides an analogy to comprehend an unprocessed trauma and constitutes a symbolic illustration on how Spanish society at that time was dealing with its past, depicting it as something eventually inescapable which must be addressed.
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https://doi.org/10.1386/slac_00100_1 Published content will be available immediately after check-out or when it is released in case of a pre-order. Please make sure to be logged in to see all available purchase options.