Short Film Studies - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019

The article analyses the film’s mise en abyme structure, with special attention paid to the play of continuity and discontinuity between shots and the tableaux-like organization of images.

The female characters in the film have very different approaches to death. Julia, the youngest, has to learn about death by observing Rosana’s and Mercè’s ways of processing it. This article will compare these death narratives and their visual representations.

Through explicitation of Roquet’s aesthetics – including echoes and reflections of Erice, Hammershøi and Martel – this article argues that The Goodbye harnesses intertextuality concisely to question how class, language, gender, servitude and race intersect. It addresses the role of grief in illuminating the indignities of deeply entrenched power relations.

El Adiós is a sincere portrait of a dutiful servant as she tends to her deceased employer’s body and home for the last time, while enduring the routine class-based offenses delivered by her employer’s daughter. This article notes how camerawork and mise en scène emphasize the protagonist’s sensitive and ambiguous position.

This article compares Roquet’s short with García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), exploring how relationships between maids and female employers have been preserved despite the passage of time. When framed by the incidence of class differences, long-held traditions and repressed emotions, silence dominates both texts.

The story unfolds chronologically and each sequence has a specific ‘time quality’ according to who appears on-screen. The death of the grandmother evokes the past, while most of the story takes place in the present as told by the omniscient camera. The future brings a paradoxical sense of closure.

The article discusses the strength of stillness both at a narrative level related to Rosana’s appearance and at an aesthetic level related to the soundtrack. The quiet sound design communicates intensity and meaning, as does Rosana, who is largely ignored by the family but is an eminently strong character.

This article studies the reception of The Goodbye among Latin American migrants in Spain. Through a focus group discussion with Latin American female caretakers in Madrid, the article analyses the individual and collective responses in relation to the issues of class, race and gender mobility addressed by the film.

This article examines Haunted Memory’s overall structure and how the voice-over commentary both caresses the images as treasured objects and inscribes new meaning. Thus, the video essay goes beyond paying homage to the celebrated film director and considers the universality of the experiences of trauma and cinema.

This article will analyse the use of voice in this video essay and how the authors’ voice, spoken by Martin, engages with the images and sounds of Erice’s films, most importantly, with Erice’s voice. How do the voice of the video essayist and the voice of the director differ? And what do these voices teach us about the possibilities of speaking with, over and about images?

Haunted Memory evokes those themes across Erice’s cinema that are of universal significance: memory, childhood, the nature of cinema itself. Mostly absent, however, is the specifically Spanish context, something that attests to this audio-visual essay’s engagement with the predominantly poetic, rather than explicative, approach of Erice’s work.

This article reflects upon the audio-visual essay as academic work and work of art, exploring Martin and Álvarez López’ short to demonstrate that this form of cinematic experimentation is indeed both things – providing analytical examination of the cinema of Víctor Erice as well as creating a new poetic experience in itself.