Short Film Studies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2018

Although there are many live-action films about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, Zepo is the first Spanish animated film that deals with this period. This article will focus on Zepo’s contributions to Spanish cinema on Francoism (1936–75), relating it to some of the main works on this period.

The highly subjective storytelling in Zepo amplifies the emotional impact of the plot on the viewer. This article explores cinematic subjectivity in the film by identifying and analysing the instances of subjective storytelling, which range from the classical point of view shot to affected POV shots and additional subjective devices.

This article addresses Zepo as an extended reflection – a ‘metapicture’ – on the material conditions by which its sand pictures are made. It examines the film’s selfreflexive gestures by tracing its visual-narrative motifs of traces on surfaces (blood spots, footprints), together with covering layers and depth (breakable ice, trappings under snow).

This article will focus on the use of sand-on-glass animation in Zepo as a way to understand the film in relation to craft-based, or ‘handmade’ practices. The aesthetic such a method can produce in this case has a direct correlation with the subject matter in terms of innocence, vulnerability, fear and isolation.

This discussion traces the principle antecedents to Zepo throughout the history of animation, identifying how sand animation pioneers like Ernest and Gisèle Ansorge and Caroline Leaf defined the core vocabulary of the technique, and created visual motifs that have been further developed and refined in Meléndez’s work.

This article explores the fairy-tale influences of Zepo that make it similar to two other Spanish Civil War films, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive. The medium of sand animation is also considered in terms of its aesthetic and thematic contributions to the film.

The short film Zepo – an allegory of bewilderment, cruelty, horror and deceit – uses abstraction and the metaphor of silence to reveal the latent historical memory surrounding the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and subsequent dictatorship (1939–75).

The close-up of the human face is regarded as an effective means of fostering audiences’ identification with characters. Listen effects an empathic involvement with a character whose face remains covered throughout. A creative experiment with identification, Listen yields insights that contribute to debates in the philosophy of film.

With an acoustemological approach the article analyses layers of audible perception and communication in Listen – not only between the characters but also in relation to its reception by the audience. The focus is on different points of audition, modes of listening, and qualities of voice.

Focusing on the competing perspectives at stake when an abused woman tells her story, Listen offers a searing rendering of the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding in situations governed by gender and cultural differences. Further, the marginalized woman in Listen reflects a common short film strategy to feature ‘lonely’ characters.

Listen is a film about words, but around words. The words become useless and are surrounded by silence. And the whole film is constructed on this silence, which builds up like an unbreakable wall. The question is thus: what are we listening to? What should we listen to? And maybe, even more crucial: who should be listening?