International Journal of Iberian Studies - Volume 27, Issue 2-3, 2014

This article presents an overview of historical fiction broadcast in Spanish and Portuguese television over the last decade and analyses its main characteristics (narrative modes, patterns of representation, evocations of times and spaces, relations with current events and agendas), regarding these productions as examples of twenty-first-century media memory.

Belle Époque (Trueba, 1992) and La lengua de las mariposas (Cuerda, 1999) offer a nostalgic representation of a specific Spanish past, the Second Republic. This period is rendered as an ahistorical, quasi-bucolic and freer time when sexual and/or cognitive desire circulated with fewer restrictions. In addition, in these two films, nostalgia is not only a set of topics or an emotional tone, but also (and above all) a narrative structure based on a semi-disjointed episodicity. The success of this episodic approach to the idealized scenario of the Second Republic cannot be properly understood without paying attention (and in contrast) to the type of films that a young generation of directors popularized in the 1990s. These film-makers emphasized tight causal plots and a thematic interest in pan-European, late-capitalist tribulations, such as commodification, lack of authenticity, delusion and social marginalization. In this context, Belle Époque and La lengua de las mariposas re-imagine a different, looser and less constrained experience of time and temporal succession.

Departing from a synthesis of Cuéntame como pasó as a cultural memory text, this article intends to draw an open, indefinite assessment of the significance of the series after thirteen years of broadcasting. This shall result in the proposition of some key interpretative lines of enquiry that are worthy of further observation, research and debate, insofar as they reflect the complexity and dynamism of collective memory processes in post-Francoist Spain.

Television is a privileged conduit for current events, for an unstoppable flow of live news, but it is also a suitable place to reflect on the past and to build a certain position towards history. In the last decade, there has been a revival of historical fiction in European television that has revealed a nostalgic approach to collective memory. Television series propose a review of the twentieth century’s official European history, but from the everyman perspective. The Galician public channel Televisión de Galicia (TVG) aired Libro de familia (José María Besteiro) in 2005 for the first time, and the audience quickly ensured its place in the schedule for the following seven years due to personal identification with the protagonists of the series. The success of this portrait of a rural family in Galicia during the 1960s raises some issues related to collective memory, official history and the ideology implicit in a fictional portrait of the past.

Taking into account that photography is a privileged tool of memory transmission, the aim of this essay is to analyse the role of photography in some Spanish contemporary audiovisual narratives. As a case study, the article deals with the Catalan miniseries Tornarem (Felip Solé, TV3, 2011), which fictionalizes the experience of the exile of Catalan republicans after the Spanish Civil War and, more specifically, the experience of those who enrolled in the Leclerc Division and led a central role in the liberation of Paris in 1944. As it will be argued, photographs help evoke historical events in the miniseries, thus recalling what Marianne Hirsch has called ‘postmemory.’ Along with photography, the (fictional) oral testimony of Garcia – the narrator and a character in Tornarem – fills in the blanks of memory of Maria, another fictional character who represents the point of view of the postgeneration. At the same time and appealing to emotions, the miniseries fills in the blanks of the collective memory of many Catalans who barely know the historical events lived through by republicans who fought for La Nueve against the Axis powers.

Portugal and Spain both experienced republican regimes in the first half of the twentieth century, namely the First Republic in Portugal (1910–1926) and the Second Republic in Spain (1931–1936). Their contemporary memorial configurations reveal significant differences between the two countries. As I will argue in this article, this is due not so much to the differences between the historical periods of the Portuguese and Spanish republics, but rather to the different situations in both countries today. Whereas, in Portugal, remembering the First Republic is a way of confirming national identity, in Spain, the memory of the Second Republic functions as a claim for ‘rehabilitating’ this period, stressing its political and social achievements. I will address this theme by means of a comparative analysis of the treatment given to the republics in two different TV series: República/Republic (Portugal 2010) and 14 de Abril. La República/14 of April: The Republic (Spain 2011). As we will see, the different functions performed by the memory of the republics in both states affect the representation of the republics in the TV series.

This article analyses Portuguese documentary films from the 1990s, when public discussions about the war of decolonization gained a new dynamic. The video series Guerra Colonial. Histórias de Campanha (Quirino Simões, 1998) relates the war in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique mainly by drawing on archival material and voice-over narration. Margarida Cardoso’s Natal 71 (1999) concentrates on specific episodes and individual experiences of the war in Mozambique. This article explores how the aforementioned films use certain strategies to include footage, other visual representations and audiovisual testimonies in order to create a specific image of the past. The leading question is not how much truth these films contain, but rather which techniques they implement in order to produce truth, authenticity and evidence about the war and the people involved. I will argue that documentary productions constitute a form of memory politics in which discussion and negotiation of the colonial past are brought forward from particular social frameworks situated in the present.

This article investigates the origins, main characteristics and some of the campaigns organized by the Women’s Socialist Group of Madrid (WSGM). It shows a general overview of the social diversity of WSGM’s members and of the different strategies advanced by their leaders. It argues that the WSGM played a decisive role in incorporating women from working-class backgrounds into the campaign for the recognition of women as full citizens, which was later achieved in the Constitution of the Second Republic in 1931.

Since the mid-2000s, the Catalan secessionist movement has become a key protagonist in the territory’s political landscape, moving from the margins to become the axis of political dispute. This article contextualizes this change and argues that its emergence can be accounted for by a series of structural changes, which include the evolution of Catalonia’s weight within Spain, identity shifts and comparative economic decline. The discrediting of once dominant political ideologies has intensified following the post-2008 economic crisis, which has resulted in a moderate pro-independence movement successfully subsuming a full range of grievances.

A Short History of the Spanish Civil War, Julián Casanova (2013) London: I.B. Tauris, 230 pp., ISBN 978-1-84885-658-5 (pbk), £12.99; ISBN 878-1-84885-657-8 (hbk)

Spanish Horror Film, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (2012) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780748636389 (hbk), £65; ISBN: 9780748636396 (pbk), £19.99.