This article was downloaded by: [Eastern Michigan University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 14:20Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Bulletin of Spanish Studies: HispanicStudies and Researches on Spain,Portugal and Latin AmericaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbhs20

Between History and Memory: Creatinga New Subjectivity in David Trueba'sFilm Soldados de SalaminaArthur J. Hughes aa Ohio UniversityPublished online: 30 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Arthur J. Hughes (2007) Between History and Memory: Creating a NewSubjectivity in David Trueba's Film Soldados de Salamina , Bulletin of Spanish Studies:Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America, 84:3, 369-386, DOI:10.1080/14753820701321797

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820701321797

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Between History and Memory:

Creating a New Subjectivity in David

Trueba’s Film Soldados de Salamina

ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Ohio University

Based on the novel of the same title by Javier Cercas, David Trueba’s film

version of Soldados de Salamina faithfully reflects the novel’s plot and major

events.1 In both the filmic and literary texts the protagonist embarks on a

search for the truth of history, a microhistorical approach that examines a

specific traumatic event with the aim of elucidating details (people and their

individual acts) ignored by broad historical representations. In the process,

the novelist also lays bare the structure of the fictional text in order to demon-

strate the impossibility of writing a real story. Despite the similarities of the

two versions, the many changes effected by the filmmaker, as well as the

nature of the film medium itself, provide sufficient reasons to examine

Trueba’s work on its own merit.2 For one thing, the eminently visual language

of film obliges a change from the dependence on the powers of verbal description

to the use of photographic, mise-en-scene, and editing techniques in portraying

psychic and physical information. For another, constraints on time and audience

attention-span do not allow the repetition often put to very effective use in the

literary text: film makes use of more dialogue not only to rapidly contextualize

an event, but also to reduce the time needed to describe events and people.3

The reception of a visual text differs significantly from that of the written.

1 Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2001); Fernando Trueba,

Soldados de Salamina (Lola Films, 2002).

2 The interested reader will find a more detailed comparison of the two works in Isolina

Ballesteros, ‘La exhumacion de la memoria historica: nostalgia y utopıa en Soldados de

Salamina’, Film-Historia Online, 15:1 (2005), n.p. (<http://www.swcp.com/�gigicarl/historia/>).

3 The novel’s protagonist reaches the decision to abandon the ‘relato real’ on his own

after several revisions fail to make it work. He is assigned a series of interviews by his news-

paper job that puts him in touch with the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. The latter’s stories

lead the protagonist to Miralles. The film takes a more dramatic approach: Conchi reads the

‘relato’ and her negative opinion leads to a tense dialogue with Lola and her decision to

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/07/03/0369-18

# Bulletin of Spanish Studies. DOI 10.1080/14753820701321797

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXIV, Number 3, 2007

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

While the plot and key characters are the same for both works, the film

reduces the three-part structure of the novel to two, integrating the initial

investigative chapter with the ‘relato real’ that constitutes the second

chapter. Added to this is the change of central character (from Javier to Lola

Cercas) in Trueba’s version, creating a remarkable difference in the dynamics

of the protagonist’s relationship to other characters and events. While the

flashback is a standard literary tool and is present in the original text,4 the

extensive usage in the film goes beyond a simple technical ploy. This last is

probably the most significant difference from the novel, for it plays a large

role in the new structure Trueba creates, blending the first two chapters of

the novel into a seamless unit, and linking the new identities created in the

movie through shared images and memories. What these two changes have

in common is the use of the flashback in the creation of memory and identities.

Lola commemorates the Civil War in an article entitled ‘Un secreto

esencial’ that narrates the story of Rafael Sanchez Mazas’ miraculous

escape from a firing squad with the connivance of the Republican

soldier Miralles. Lola’s thesis is that between the broad facts of history

and the individual memories associated with these events lies ‘un

secreto esencial’ which might help make sense of the trauma of the

Civil War.5 Lola’s quest for this vital secret leads her on a journey that

moves between the two poles of history and memory that the film presents

through multiple flashbacks. By positing Lola as the remembering subject

of those flashbacks, the film succeeds in creating a new subjectivity that is

both individual and collective. There is a parallel between history and

semantic memory in their mutual dependence on facts and knowledge

about the world, in contrast to the subjective and emotive recollection

and imaging of the past found in episodic memory. Furthermore, in the

production of history, or the transfer from episodic to semantic memory,

the ethical lessons of the past are effectively neutralized. If memory con-

sists of recollection and repetition,6 history’s elimination of the subjective

abandon the manuscript. This is followed by the film’s newscast version of Bolano’s anecdote

about the anonymous hero who dies saving people from a burning building. Lola assigns her

literature class an essay on the concept of heroism, as a result of which she learns about

Miralles’ story from a student.

4 I make a distinction here between memory-verbs that are not accompanied by a descrip-

tion of the image the narrator mentally sees, and those that are. The latter I consider true flash-

backs, comparable to that of film. The novel’s narrator experiences this second type of flashback

while talking to Sister Francoise: ‘porque en ese momento vi a Miralles caminando por el desierto

de Libia hacia el oasis de Murzuch, joven, desharrapado, polvoriento y anonimo’ (194).

5 This episode is crucial to both texts as it sets off the entire quest. Trueba’s film intro-

duces Lola’s infirm father into the picture, setting off parallels between the opening and closing

moments of the movie.

6 Patrick Hutton makes a case for considering history as a mediation between the two

moments of repetition and recollection. In this view, repetition is not the simple recurrence

of past events but rather a sort of ethical lesson that informs present actions: ‘Repetition

370 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

connection with the past, especially in cases of extreme trauma, allows

recollection but not repetition, and it is in the latter that the lessons of

the past are manifested. Lola’s link to the past through the subjective rep-

resentation of images (Hutton’s repetition function of memory) positions

her to configure a new sense of identity that learns from the past.

While Lola’s search fails to elucidate the enigma of the ‘secreto esencial’,

the process leads her to examine the different forms of memory discourses

with regard to the trauma of the Civil War, and to enable the creation of

an identity position that bridges the gap between past and present.

The final scene in Soldados de Salamina provides clues to understanding

the film. Lola has just taken leave of Miralles, and as her taxi leaves for the

station she turns to look at his slowly receding figure and repeats three

times: ‘No me olvidare de usted’, ending with a final ‘No dejare que se le

olvide’.7 These words are visually emphasized by the contrast between the

forward motion of the taxi and Lola’s resolutely backward gaze towards

Miralles, a figure of the past. Thus the backward look stylistically and thema-

tically symbolizes the subject of the movie: the importance of remembering and

of memory. This scene and the movie in general suggest a contemporary

Spanish culture steeped in a dynamic of forgetting, in part due to the recent

trauma of the Civil War and the Transition, combined with the country’s inser-

tion within a postmodern global economy characterized by the frenetic pace and

instant oblivion that technology and capital propagate. In this sense, contem-

porary Spanish society has two motives for living in a perpetual present: trau-

matic and technological. Lola’s search for Miralles is set within the

technological context of international phone calls that enable an individual to

be located almost instantly, as well as the possibility of trans-state travel,

especially within the borderless space of the European Community. Lola’s

search for memory is made possible precisely because of her insertion within

the global society.8 The visual contradiction of the taxi’s forward motion

against Lola’s backward look is a distillation of contemporary Spanish society.

A seeming contradiction of the need to forget, or living in the present, is the

proliferation of memory and historical markers in both monumental objects and

the mass media. The obsessive concern for recovering the past through cultural

concerns the presence of the past. It is the moment of memory through which we bear forward

images of the past that continue to shape our present understanding in unreflective ways’

(History as an Art of Memory [Hanover: New England U. P., 1993], xx).

7 In the novel (p. 205) the protagonist sticks his head out of the moving vehicle to ask

Miralles what it was he had just mumbled. This position is maintained until Miralles enters

the garden of his residence. Trueba’s scene ties this scene to the dramatic vocalization of the

protagonist’s internal monologue on the train back home in which he hits on the idea of

writing a book as a way of keeping alive the memory of Miralles and his companions forever

(Soldados de Salamina, 208–09).

8 Though the international phone calls derive from the novel, Trueba’s protagonist is

more completely surrounded by technological progress: images from NoDo footage, TV inter-

views, newscasts and programmes, and amateur video of the Estrella del Mar resort.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 371

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

artifacts belies the wholesale embrace of a culture of forgetfulness. This

paradox in capitalist culture, in the view of Andreas Huyssen, is evidence of

a crisis of the ideology of progress and modernization and is characterized by

the shift from history to memory as a critique of the former’s teleological

notions.9 As Huyssen explains, history as an institution has lost credibility

through its association with the goals of modernity and has become supplanted

by memory, a more relevant and meaningful view of the past.10 One of the func-

tions of memory in this postmodern context, Huyssen goes on to say, is to create

meaningful identities in a supranational global environment of migrations and

demographic changes, both characteristics of a postmodern society that apply to

contemporary Spain. The obsessive concern for memory points to a loss of iden-

tity that, in the case of Soldados de Salamina, appears to refer to both the lack

of memory in contemporary Spanish culture about the Civil War and the appar-

ent amnesia that operated during the Transition to democracy, as well as the

insertion of Spain in a global economy marked by a hectic swiftness designed

to impede reflection on the past.11

A significant technique underlying the point the movie makes, that is, the

contrasts of memory versus history, the collective versus individual, authentic

and ethical versus inauthentic and unethical, is the use of flashbacks. The

flashback is usually associated with the mental images of an individual. It

is the visual representation of a memory, an image from the past that the

subject has in mind and, by its juxtaposition with the current situation,

effects a transformation on the narrative. Traditionally occurring in an

abrupt cut (or a slow dissolve) from an individual to an anterior situation,

the flashback almost always serves to put the present situation within a

context that by its very juxtaposition reinforces, opposes, or associates

events, ideas, people, and objects. Flashbacks indicate not only a juncture

that conflates past and present, memory and history, but can also be linked

to the entirety of narrative if we think of the formalist separation of story

and plot, Barthes’ five codes in S/Z, or Genette’s analysis of analepses and

ellipses.12 Common to all these approaches is the question and role of time

in representations, or put another way, the structuring of time into past and

present. It is within the context of forgetting and remembering that the

9 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

(New York: Routledge, 1995), 3–5.

10 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6.

11 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 3. Huyssen coins ‘twilight memories’ to account for

memory’s problematic nature: the passing of time and consequent loss, the representational

nature of memory itself, and the effect of technology and modernization. Isolina Ballesteros

sees all three factors coming together symbolically to explain the ‘obsesion memorialista’ that

emerges from the controversies arising from Libertarias by Vicente Aranda and Ken Loach’s

Land and Freedom in 1995 (‘La exhumacion’).

12 Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (New York: Routledge, 1989),

8–11.

372 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

flashback operates in film. That is, within the ‘impression of reality’ that filmic

narrative imposes on the spectator, the flashback operates to suspend the par-

ticipatory viewing of a film and encourage a greater distance.13 Here the

linear narrative of the film suggests presence, reality and knowledge,

aspects that are opposed to the flashback’s implicit absence from reality and

presence, the move into memory and the past. This contrast produced by

the flashback between a ‘reality presence’ and an ‘absent reality’ suggests a

continuity in time, the presence of the past within the present, and finally

posits an individual as the nexus between these two realities. Flashbacks

imply individual memory as traces of the collective past in the present.

Endel Tulving’s terms ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic memory’ are of great help in

understanding the position of subject in Soldados de Salamina. Tulving has

suggested a distinction between episodic and semantic (or knowledge of the

world) memory based on their content and the processes that constitute

them.14 Episodic memory, Tulving says, is among other things a memory for

events along with information on the spatial and temporal contexts. He

further suggests that this kind of memory ‘always involves the rememberer,

either as one of the actors or as an observer of the event’.15 In contrast, the pro-

totypical unit for semantic memory is facts, ideas, concepts, rules, or prop-

ositions, their basic function being a comprehension of some aspect of the

world. We can infer from this definition that episodic memory differs essen-

tially from semantic memory in the absence of subjectivity in the latter,

although certain types of memory may partake of the two forms. This subjec-

tivity is what William James highlighted over a century ago as key to its differ-

ence from other forms of memory: ‘Memory requires more than mere dating of

a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think

that I directly experienced its occurrence’.16 There is a parallel here

between memory and history, where the former works like episodic memory

in its placing of the subject directly in an experiential position in the past,

whereas the latter can be thought of as based mostly on semantic memory,

that is, a remembering (or knowledge) of events that does not necessarily

depend on the subject having been witness to the events. Again, as in the dis-

tinction between episodic and semantic memory, there are moments when

history is based on memory, that is, on the remembrance of an individual’s

own past, which blurs the distinction between the two.

The importance of these distinctions can be found in some of the conse-

quences drawn by the philosopher John Campbell who argues that episodi-

cally remembering a particular event not only requires the ability to think

of this event as part of a sequence of events that make up the individual’s

13 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 17.

14 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (New York: Oxford U. P., 1992), 11.

15 Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory, 37.

16 Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory, 39.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 373

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

own history as well as the history of the world, but also the individual’s

relationship to other events, and more importantly of what he describes as

‘affordances’, the behavioural options that the environment offers us.17

Another way of putting this would be that episodic memory, much like the

Cartesian ego, establishes the ontological subject but, unlike it, is simul-

taneously the memory of events and the outside world, and the basis for

both present and future actions. In its capacity to view itself as an object,

an ‘other’, episodic memory posits the subject who remembers as the object

of another temporal dimension. The wider implications of episodic memory

are seen in their ethical outcomes for the present.

If episodic memory provides options as to our current and future beha-

viours, it is the result of a ‘significance’, an ethical lesson having been

drawn from that memory. For David Cockburn, a person’s grasp of the

past tense cannot be divorced from that person’s grasp of the ‘broadly

ethical appropriateness of certain feelings and actions in the present’, a

point of view that links episodic memory with knowledge of the past and

the lessons we draw from it.18 Cockburn proposes two ways to explain the

choice of behavioural options: one that sees the present as the present

state of traces of the past, as opposed to the second perspective that

thinks of it as knowledge of the past. One of the consequences of seeing con-

temporary reality as traces of the past, Cockburn suggests, is a refusal to

acknowledge the importance of what has happened. A person who consist-

ently refuses to see past events as providing reasons to be, say, ashamed,

hurt, or proud could be said to not understand what happened in the

sense we normally assign to that phrase. For Cockburn, memory results

directly in action and feeling.19 I would like to propose that this way of

thinking is a blurring of the difference between episodic and factual

memory, a slip of the mind that allows the individual to deny the subjectivity

inherent in the memory. A refusal to face up to the lessons of the past is a

transfer of episodic to factual memory. To put this in terms of our earlier

opposition of memory and history, the translation of memory to history is

a way of neutralizing its force, the implications that arise out of assuming

a logical rather than a causal relationship between events in the past and

the reality of the present. This is perhaps what Maurice Halbwachs

17 Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Christoph Hoerl and

Teresa McCormack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 9.

18 David Cockburn, ‘Memories, Traces and the Significance of the Past’, in Time and

Memory, 393–409 (p. 400).

19 Cockburn, ‘Memories’, 406. Cockburn’s emphasis on memory reformulates

Nietzschean reservations about history as pure knowledge: ‘A historical phenomenon, comple-

tely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it,

dead’ (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins

[Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957], 11).

374 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

means when he refers to history as a crowded cemetery; that the lesson we

learn from history is that we never learn, that it is easily forgotten.20

If we consider the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship a trauma

in the Spanish psyche, it is easy to understand why a blanket of silence has

been drawn over this period in contemporary life. Many observers of the

Spanish political and social domain have used amnesia to describe the tran-

sition to democracy in Spain. Kathleen Vernon holds up Jorge Semprun’s

approach to the Spanish Civil War as a critical and creative response to the

personal, collective and historical nature of trauma.21 Implied in Vernon’s

chiastic title is the idea that historical events may produce a profound psycho-

logical commotion, which in turn produces its own narratives, or histories.

The obsessive return to certain images and their varied repetition in

Semprun’s works, according to Vernon, is characteristic of trauma narratives,

a process that ‘generates its own history’. A crucial step in this historical

process is forgetting as a condition of remembering or, in Semprun’s words,

‘la cura del olvido’.22 Given Semprun’s closeness to the events of the Civil

War, this amnesia, or ‘cura del olvido’ is a reasonable stance, similar to

Nietzsche’s belief that an excess of history is deleterious to life.23

Amnesia suggests an involuntary psychological process beyond the body’s

control, an idea undermined in the realm of cultural representation by a direc-

tor such as Almodovar, who openly states that his movies consciously take the

premise that both Franco and the Civil War never existed for the current gen-

eration that neither experienced the trauma of the war nor the ensuing dicta-

torship.24 Looked at in a positive way, Almodovar’s position would be an

example of Semprun’s determined forgetting as the first step in the process

of remembering trauma. This stance suggests the impossibility of represent-

ing trauma, an enactment of George Steiner’s remark that ‘the world of

20 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi

Ditter (New York: Harper, 1980), 52. Cockburn’s distinctions provide an explanation of the

novel’s reflections on Sanchez Mazas’ non-recognition of the tragedy unleashed on the

Spanish people by his writings and activities. This misunderstanding of the past leads to a

lack of genuine memory. Ironically, it is this type of mis-recognition (e.g., military victory)

that is often memorialized in history.

21 Kathleen Vernon, ‘Trauma of History/The History of Trauma: Plotting Memory in

Jorge Semprun’, Cine-Lit III: Essays on Hispanic Film and Fiction, ed. George Cabello

Castellet, Jaume Martı-Olivella and Guy H. Wood (Corvallis: Oregon State Univ., 1997),

157–67 (pp. 157–58).

22 Vernon, ‘Trauma of History’, 160–61.

23 Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, 12. In addition to defining three types of

history—monumental, antiquarian, and critical—Nietzsche also describes five ways in which

an excess of history becomes dangerous to life, the last two particularly relevant here: ‘we

get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survi-

vals, mere epigone. Lastly, an age reaches a dangerous condition of irony with regard to itself,

and the still more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning egoistic theory of action is

matured that maims and at last destroys the vital strength’ (28).

24 Rob Stone, Spanish Cinema (New York: Pearson, 2002), 127.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 375

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason’,25 suggesting that

violent experiences are not only difficult to describe verbally but also imposs-

ible to explain in terms of human agency. This seems true in the case of Spain’s

traumatic Civil War past given the fact that very few films to date have

attempted a comprehensive representation of the events of the war and the

few approximations have been either tangential or symbolic in their reference

to the trauma of the war.26 However, as the obsessive repetition of images in

Semprun attests, a complete turn away from the past is not as liberating as it

would seem, and in the case of Almodovar, Victor Fuentes suggests that his

later films from Matador through Atame show increasing traces of this forgot-

ten past in its use of nostalgia and sentimentality.27 The price of a wilful for-

getting, the transfer from memory to history, or the decision to see the

relationship with the past as logical rather than causal, is the return of the

repressed.28 Though Almodovar’s films have seemed to epitomize Spain’s post-

modernist culture, his avoidance of the recent past is in direct contradiction to

the compulsive remembering that characteristically exemplifies contempor-

ary western society. As Andreas Huyssen points out, Nietzsche’s views on

the need for forgetfulness were posed within the context of a hypertrophy of

historical consciousness in public culture during the nineteenth century.

Our present culture, with its fast-paced forgetfulness or lack of a historical

consciousness, seems to be the exact opposite of Nietzsche’s context.29

In a strikingly symbolic mise-en-scene, Lola is shown reading her article to

her amnesiac father, but the scene is reflected in a mirror that reverses reality.

Filmed from the perspective of the mirror, the audience sees a close-up of Lola

looking straight into the camera, creating the effect of her turning her back on

her father, a representative of the previous generation responsible for failing

to transmit this collective memory to their children.30 This scene also provides

25 Quoted in Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1990), 151.

26 Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema

(New York: Manchester U. P., 1998), compute approximately three hundred historical films pro-

duced between 1975 and the ’90s, half of which are set in the Second Republic, the Civil War and

the Francoist periods (16). However, the majority of them use these periods as backdrops for

fictional characters and events, with tremendous variety in ‘the extent to which these films

engage with their historical context’ (32).

27 Victor Fuentes, ‘El cine de Almodovar y la postmodernidad espanola (logros y lımites)’,

in Cine-Lit: Essays on Peninsular Film and Fiction, ed. George Cabello-Castellet, Jaime

Martı-Olivella and Guy H. Wood (Corvallis: Oregon State U, 1992), 209–18 (pp. 211–13).

28 Cockburn, ‘Memories’, 408.

29 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6–7.

30 If many Republican families hid their past from their children in order to protect them

from discrimination, as Paloma Aguilar believes (Memory and Amnesia, trans. Mark Oakley

[New York: Berghahn, 2002], 32), it is not surprising for this prolonged state of repression to

become permanent, especially in old age. Vernon (‘Trauma of History’, 157) also cites Madeleine

Albright’s ignorance of her Jewish heritage and her family’s losses during the Holocaust as due

to her parents’ desire to protect her.

376 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

other readings about the Transition period; here Lola’s father becomes a

symbol of the amnesia of that period, and Lola herself a child of the Transition,

the generation of children who neither lived through the Civil War nor

Francoist periods. Seen in this light, Lola’s article becomes the means of

remembering, a way of inculcating memory in the new generation as well as

simultaneously restoring memory to the lost generation. Some theorists

have suggested that amnesia is a condition in which episodic memory is selec-

tively impaired while semantic memory is less or not at all affected.31 Accord-

ing to this perspective, we can place Lola as the repository of unaffected

semantic memory, with her father representing directly lost memories. The

visual juxtaposition of semantic and episodic memories in this scene, embo-

died in Lola and her father, suggests an irreconcilable difference, but the

effect of filmic representation creates an ontological equivalence, implying

the possibility of a transfer from one to the other by placing in abeyance the

grounding that distinguishes the real from the imaginary. This two-way

benefit is what Hayden White refers to as a way of thinking ahead.32

Within the context of the distinction between autobiographical and collec-

tive memory on the one hand and historical memory on the other,33 Soldados

de Salamina also enables an examination of the blurring that occurs between

remembering and forgetting in the creation of memory. These two poles are

symbolically presented when Lola reads her article to her amnesiac father;

Lola representing the process of remembering against the backdrop of her

father’s total forgetting. In addition the two characters loosely symbolize his-

torical versus autobiographical memory and what happens when the latter is

lost, that is, forgotten. However, as Halbwachs suggests, individual memory is

constructed in nature and depends on collective recollection for its emer-

gence.34 It is thus impossible to posit an opposition between individual and

collective remembrance, as they are mutually related and dependent. The

image of Lola’s father, incapable of remembering the Civil War, becomes sym-

bolic of contemporary Spanish society. Nevertheless, his memories are not

entirely lost as they necessarily depend on collective memory, and thus can

be reconstructed.

31 Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory, 30. Trueba’s insertion of the father figure

starkly contrasts the loss of memory with its eventual restoration by the resurrection of

Miralles.

32 Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’, in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian

Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17–38 (pp. 19–21).

33 Maurice Halbwachs believes ‘historical memory’ to be an unfortunate term because ‘it

connects two terms [collective memory/historical memory] opposed in more than one aspect

[. . .]. Undoubtedly, history is a collection of the most notable facts in the memory of man. But

past events read about in books and taught and learned in schools are selected, combined,

and evaluated in accord with necessities and rules not imposed on the groups that had

through time guarded them as a living trust. General history starts only when tradition

ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up’ (The Collective Memory, 78).

34 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 23.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 377

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

In this sense, Lola filmically becomes the repository of the autobiographi-

cal memory that her father has lost, a symbolic recovery of the collective

memory that is never entirely individual in nature. In this scene, Lola is meta-

phorically converted into the subject of memory, situated as she is between

historical facts (what she uncovers in her investigations) and the autobiogra-

phical memory her father has lost (re-constructed in the film through flash-

backs). Lola’s position in this scene is not that of total presence in the sense

that she is not recalling directly personally experienced episodes. Hers is

then a mediated memory, a prosthetic memory,35 a collection of accounts

themselves based on other recollections. Her investigations are an effort to

arrive at the truth of memory, which though presented in the film as ulti-

mately unknowable, is posited as an end in itself. In the absence of the

subject of memory through death or amnesia (total or partial),36 what is left

are traces of the past, which become collective memory. Lola’s remembering

becomes a recovery of personal memory by way of collective remembrance.

Soldados de Salamina starts with a flashback of a battlefield where the

camera slowly pans over the bodies of dead soldiers. This relatively long

sequence, simulating a jerky handheld camera providing close-ups of the

dead bodies on the field, in black and white and a realistic period setting,

sets up a field of expectations in the audience. In effect, the spectator is

encouraged to believe that the movie intends to deal with the causes that

led to this result, a flashback involving a quest for the answer to an enigma,

or, Barthes’ hermeneutic code.37 To a large extent the movie partly solves

this enigma by frustrating the expectations set up by the initial flashback.

The first quest Lola undertakes is an examination of the events that led to

Sanchez Mazas’ arrest and miraculous escape from a firing squad. This is fol-

lowed by a second quest for Miralles, the soldier who spared Sanchez Mazas’

life, after Lola remains dissatisfied with the results of her investigations. It is

evident that these two searches do not help explain the causes that led to the

Civil War, the subject of the opening credit flashback, except tangentially.

Lola’s two quests put representatives of the opposing sides under the spotlight

and reenact in their personal histories a clash of ideas and personalities that

rewrites the ending of the Civil War, setting up Sanchez Mazas as the loser of

the conflict as well as the prime cause of the catastrophe. As Turim points out,

there is a logic of inevitability to this framing of events that implies that the

events subsequently explicated after the flashback have no alternative but

to lead to this end.38 Ostensibly about uncovering the story behind the

35 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance

in an Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia U. P., 2004), 26.

36 If we see partial amnesia as selective remembering or forgetting of the past, this

process is strikingly similar to the historical process.

37 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 11–12.

38 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 19.

378 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

miraculous escape from a firing squad, Lola’s investigations lead the viewer

through periods of Sanchez Mazas’ life, culminating in the journey to

the Collell sanctuary and the firing squad. Through Lola’s investigation the

viewer learns of the founding role played by Sanchez Mazas in the

Falange, the fascist movement that fed the flames of the Nationalist ideology.

The implication is that the death of Sanchez Mazas might have prevented

the opening shot of the film, a theme that both Cassandra and Miralles

reiterate.

Soldados de Salamina contrasts two protagonists of the Civil War, bring-

ing back from the dead two people on opposing sides of the war; literally in the

case of Antoni Miralles and metaphorically with respect to Sanchez Mazas.

Lola unearths the Falangist’s past through documents, such as his diary

and novels, as well as through interviews with the children of ‘los amigos

del bosque’. In a sense, this resurrection is achieved through the memory of

second-level witnesses, who were not present themselves but heard of the

exploits from other people. Helping in this recreation of the past is the use

of fictionalized documentary archives of Sanchez Mazas’ swearing in as a

member of Franco’s government, his own accounts on state television of his

miraculous escape from the firing squad, and his long-forgotten novels.

These historical recollections provide the first step for Lola to recreate a

more subjective perspective that literally puts her in the past as she vicar-

iously relives Sanchez Mazas’ experiences. The juxtaposition of fictional

reconstruction with official newsreel footage presupposes an ontological

parity of the two types of remembrances; the authenticity of archival

footage derives from collective memories of the Francoist past and confers it

on the recently created memories of Sanchez Mazas’ life.39 With the infor-

mation obtained from her searches, Lola sets out to write a novel tracing

Sanchez Mazas’ journey to Collell and the firing squad episode. However,

the finished work does not convince her friend Cassandra, who finds the

novel lacking in emotion and a personal touch. Lola recognizes the truth of

Cassandra’s opinion and decides to abandon her novel, implicit admission of

her inability to identify with the protagonist of her novel.

The second search focuses on the Republican soldier who spared Sanchez

Mazas’ life, with the aim of elucidating the motives for this unusually

generous act within the context of a fratricidal war, one of the two ‘secretos

esenciales’ of the initial article. Miralles’ story is unearthed by a student in

Lola’s literature class, whose essay on the topic ‘heroe’ prompts him to write

his recollections of a summer resort camp, Estrella del Mar, where he gets

39 In what purports to be authentic NoDo footage, the film shows a scene where the actor

Ramon Fontsere, in the role of Sanchez Mazas, is sworn in by Franco as Minister; another scene

also shows him in an interview on state television recounting his escape from the firing squad.

It is not certain that real footage exists of these two occasions; it is more than probable that they

occurred in real life, a possibility Trueba uses to create his fictionalized footage.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 379

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

to know a colourful veteran of the Civil War.40 A series of coincidences points

to Miralles as this heroic soldier, and after a lengthy investigation Lola finally

tracks him down to an old age home in Dijon, France, where Miralles admits

that his unit was at the Collell sanctuary and formed part of the group

detailed to execute the Nationalist prisoners. Asked if he was the one who

spared Sanchez Mazas, Miralles denies this in spite of the coincidence of

both the Republican soldier’s and Miralles’ predilection for ‘suspiros de

Espana’, the song Sanchez Mazas had identified with the soldier who

spared his life. To the hypothetical question of what that soldier might have

been thinking in deciding to let Sanchez Mazas go free, Miralles replies

after a long pause: ‘Nada’. In spite of the impossibility of ascertaining the

truth of history, the ‘secreto esencial’, Lola’s return home shows both a

visual and voice-over rediscovery of her literary voice, suggesting that the

journey into the past enables her to overcome writer’s block.41

As Miralles emotionally points out, there is no official history of him and

his dead colleagues, in neither commemorative representations nor official

documentation. As far as the Spanish government is concerned they never

existed, in sharp contrast to the street named for Sanchez Mazas in Bilbao,

the official documents, archives, and books, which keep his memory alive.42

But as the film makes evident, Miralles’ history is kept alive, albeit in

private places; this is represented in the amateur movie shot by Gaston at

the Estrella del Mar resort, or in the photograph of Miralles and his group

of legionnaires that the waiter in Dijon shows to Lola. As was the case with

her research of Sanchez Mazas, Lola is once again positioned between these

private memories and official history, becoming the constructed subject of

those recollections. While reading Gaston’s essay on what makes someone a

hero, a flashback accompanied by Gaston’s voice-over informs the spectator

(and Lola) of Miralles’ original enlistment with Lıster’s army, their flight to

France via Collell, his enlistment in the Foreign Legion, their innumerable

marches and battles across the deserts of North Africa, and the final trium-

phant entry into Paris. This flashback of Miralles’ story ends with a cross-

cut to another flashback, this time of Sanchez Mazas’ story, showing a

young soldier cocking a rifle. The film then cuts to Lola jumping out of bed

saying: ‘Es el’. Through the juxtaposition of these flashbacks, Sanchez

Mazas’ story merges with that of Miralles’ through the agency of Lola, who

40 In Truebas’ film the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano becomes the Mexican student

Gaston Garcıa Diego. Source of the two anecdotes about heroes in the novel (one anecdote is

transformed into a television newscast item), Bolano’s presence in the novel enables an explora-

tion of Chile’s descent into dictatorship as well as another opportunity for the protagonist’s

introspective analysis of his artistic career.

41 The film shows this with a shot of Lola behind a blank computer screen repeatedly

typing A’s, a visual representation of screams of frustration.

42 See Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia, 90, for more detail on the sharply contrast-

ing treatment displayed by the Francoist regime in memorializing the fallen.

380 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

serves as the intermediary through whom disperse and semantic memory

becomes localized and episodic.

The combination of images using the newsreel format simulating the

notorious NoDo documentaries of the Franco era with the home videos shot

by Gaston presents multiple frames of reality that serve an authenticating

function. We can see the NoDo newsreels as representing official history

while Gaston’s amateur video preserves personal memory.43 In both cases,

there is a voice-over that provides a narrative enframing the reception of

images; the anonymous stentorian tones of the newsreel in contrast to

Gaston’s Mexican-accented speech. In the two formats, the voice-over serves

the function of suggesting direct testimony from a participant. The combi-

nation of narration with footage of historical sites interspersed with older

footage from newspaper, magazine clippings, photos, and paintings fulfils

an authenticating function, presenting what Robert Rosenstone defines as

the history-as-document-film.44 In their staging of ‘factual’ materials ‘the

history-as-document film is prepackaged with nostalgia that influences the

viewer’.45

If the flashback is essentially memory and specifically individual memory,

the conflation with history occurs when that memory is identified with offi-

cially recorded events. Needless to say, history is traditionally understood to

be about the actions of groups, nations, states, and the role of significant

people within these groups. The conflation of memory and history therefore

requires the subject of the flashback to be a witness either directly or

indirectly to some of these events whose recollection forms part of that individ-

ual’s life events. This is the case of the subject position in the biopic, a genre

that often blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, usually because

the protagonist of the biography is a fictional character whose life story is

the material of an internal inquiry by a journalist or biographer.46 Although

narrating the story of two lives in Soldados de Salamina creates a reality

frame in much the same way as the traditional biopic, the flashbacks used

43 The first of the Noticiarios y Documentales Cinematograficos (NoDo) began in January

1943 and were compulsory exhibition in cinema houses until 1975. Two weekly versions of the

newsreel were the norm from 1946 to 1960, after which they increased to three until 1967,

beginning a slow decline till 1980 and 1981, the last two years of its existence. The NoDo con-

stituted the only source of film footage for most people about news and events both inside and

outside Spain. See Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia, 49–54.

44 Robert Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age’, in

The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick:

Rutgers U. P., 2000), 50–66. This form of historical film, says Rosenstone, most closely approxi-

mates the written practice and is more trusted by historians than the history-as-drama film.

45 Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film’, 53. Isolina Ballesteros proposes that the blurring of

factual documentation with fictional representation succeeds in creating a ‘tono historico’ that

in turn gives rise to a positive ‘nostalgia reflexiva’ in contrast to the Manichean nostalgia re-

presented by Sanchez Mazas (‘La exhumacion’).

46 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 110.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 381

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

are not attributed to characters, fictional or real, who bear witness to the lives

under investigation.47 The absence of a clearly defined ‘remembering’ charac-

ter undermines the reality effect produced by the narration, an absence that

entices the viewer to put herself, and the film’s protagonist by identification,

in the remembering subject position in order to smooth out this narrative dis-

turbance. In an interesting technical parallel the opening scene/credits of the

battlefield which the viewer readily identifies as a flashback is duplicated in

the next sequence with the presentation of Lola, the character that motivates

the quest. The same jerky handheld camera with a dizzying birds-eye-view

close-up of cadavers on the battlefield this time slowly pans objects and furni-

ture in Lola’s room, ending with a final tilt upwards to a shot of Lola in front of

her computer.

Placed in a linear sequence, these two scenes suggest a connection that the

use of similar camera techniques visually enhances. If the viewer identifies

the first scene as a flashback, the presentation of Lola in the next scene

helps reinforce the impression that she is the rememberer. It is pertinent to

note that memory, or the contrast between forgetting and remembering, is

paralleled in film production, where the processes of cutting and montage

simulate the forgetting and construction of events.48 But the relationship of

film to memory is even more problematic in what Christian Metz refers to

as its imaginary relation to time: the fact that in presenting an event, film

appears to be a recording of a past that was never present before it comes to

the spectator’s consciousness as past.49 The assumption is that film is a

‘re-presenting’, which implies a prior existence, a has-been that even in the

most realistic of representations is a myth, since it can never refer directly

to an object but must go via another code system.50 In an interesting twist

of the traditional sequence, the viewer sees the battlefield flashback before

seeing the remembering subject. This manipulation of screen time is histori-

cally correct, in that these events happen before Lola’s birth (and appearance

in the film). However, filmic re-presentation creates an instantaneous past

that simultaneously posits the existence of a collective memory which, in

turn, enables a retroactive individual memory capable of retrieving images

from this collective reservoir. While this interpretation is not realistically

factual, it makes fictional (filmic) sense in a narrative built on Lola’s search

for memory.

47 Turim uses Citizen Kane as an example of this blurring of reality and fiction, in which

five narrators tell the story of Kane’s life through flashbacks of their memories.

48 Peter Krapp, Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis: Univ. of

Minnesota Press, 2004), 98.

49 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

(Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1982), 43.

50 Krapp, Deja Vu, 97.

382 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

The subjectivity of flashback can also be examined from the point of view of

Halbwachs’ analysis of ‘Reconstructed Remembrances’.51 By placing Lola in the

subject position with respect to the film’s flashbacks, these become construed as

reconstructed by her. An individual may not remember directly an incident that

happened in her life despite having lived it. Even when the remembrances of

others, such as friends and family, rectify this amnesia, several factors may

still make it impossible for the individual to directly evoke the particular

event. However, with the help of external remembrances in addition to her per-

sonal images of the period, says Halbwachs, the individual can still come up

with a reconstruction that is no less true than a directly evocable memory,

while still unable to personally remember a particular event (or person). Halb-

wachs also posited that other people and events continuously overwrite our

remembrances of a person (and an event) even after the death of that person.

Our memories are always rooted in the present (or successive presents when

the supplemental images are superimposed), and are always a function of the

viewpoints of the different groups to which we belong and have belonged.

Lola’s flashbacks at the Collell sanctuary represent a simultaneous inser-

tion and retrieval of collective memory into space, or the conversion of space

into memory.52 The film prepares the viewer for acceptance of this view of col-

lective memory when an old resident of the district directs Lola to the site of

the sanctuary. Here there is a monument erected to the memory of the fallen.

Even though she herself has no direct memory of the events that took place,

this memory space aids in her reconstruction because spaces become

imbued with lived pasts, a repository for visual and memory images. In this

sense, evoking those spaces is one way of arriving at the memory of those

people and events that had a significant impact.53 As Lola walks through

the grounds of Collell, the film crosscuts with flashbacks of Sanchez Mazas’

escape, suggesting that Lola’s spatial itinerary is a direct evocation of a

former episode whose memory has impregnated the spatial framework. So

vivid is this memory that when Lola comes under fire just as Sanchez

Mazas did, the present becomes a repetition of the past. Thus Lola cries out

‘no disparen, no disparen’ in the present to avoid being shot by a hunting

party, a modern day repetition of Sanchez Mazas coming under fire from

the search party after escaping from the firing squad.54 While much of the

51 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 68–76.

52 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 140–41. See also the use of the terms ‘marked/unmarked’ spaces by Roland Barthes, ‘Semiology and Urbanism’, in Architecture Culture

1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 413–18 (pp. 414–15).

53 Isolina Ballesteros borrows Pierre Nora’s ‘lieu de memoire’ to suggest that this is re-

presented in Spain by the exhumation of Franco’s forgotten mass graves and bodies, as well

as the cultural manifestations surrounding them’ (‘La exhumacion’).

54 Trueba’s recreation of this scene differs significantly from that of the novel, where the

protagonist finds no connection: ‘Como si aguardara una revelacion por osmosis, me quede allı

un rato; no sentı nada’ (70).

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 383

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

synchronicity of past and present is achieved through montage and sound

effects, their juxtaposition implies that past events do get repeated and

memory is vital in avoiding and learning from the mistakes of the past.

Given the above view of flashbacks, it is obvious that Lola cannot be the

remembering subject of these memories for, as we are well aware, she

belongs to a generation that is almost completely removed from the events

of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath. The obvious question

that this raises is whose memories they are. This question is important to

identifying the subject position posited by the film. If they are Sanchez

Mazas’, is Lola identifying with him? And by extension the viewer through

her? Is the film reconstructing Sanchez Mazas as a hero? Some evidence to

this effect is innate to the story itself; the human-interest angle of how a

man survives a firing squad and overcomes the adversities he faces in his

escape from his captors. Visual and sound effects, as well as the use of flash-

backs and ellipses employed in recreating Sanchez Mazas’ escape, highlight

this human-interest angle.

On a more theoretical level, the representation of Sanchez Mazas’ story as

narrative results in a comprehensible total that enables a mastery of the

events, a position fraught with danger as pointed out by historians averse

to the representation of traumatic events. By narrating these events, they

are made understandable and permit the viewer’s identification with the

subject agency positioned by the text. Thus Sanchez Mazas, for all that he rep-

resents the victorious but currently discredited faction of the Civil War, is

transformed into a kind of hero, albeit more of an anti-hero through the

filmic juxtaposition with Miralles. This risky strategy by filmmaker David

Trueba depends on a parti pris by the audience for it to succeed. As everyone

well knows, the Civil War was won by the Nationalist faction; their side of the

story became inscribed as the official history and led subsequently to the sup-

pression of the Republican version during Franco’s dictatorship. That the

film’s audience is not expected to identify with the Nationalist side is evi-

denced by the succinct evaluation of Sanchez Mazas’ life: ‘que gano la

guerra pero perdio la historia de la literatura’. Lola’s struggle to write his

story provides further evidence of her (and the viewer’s) dis-identification

with Sanchez Mazas’s heroic stature. Here the film provides a visual represen-

tation of a writer struggling to find the right words, emphasized by the many

repetitions (‘desconocida y agreste’, ‘caminaba de noche’) and constant rejec-

tion of words as inappropriate. Photographically, the oblique framing of

Lola as she writes the novel on Sanchez Mazas accentuates this dis-identifi-

cation. Lola clutches her stomach in pain in a symbolic representation of

dis-ease (the impossibility of identification) while writing, an attack that

obliges her to lie prostrate on the floor waiting for the pain to subside.55

55 The writing process is only implied in the second part of the novel where a third-person

narrator takes over from the previous chapter’s first-person. Avisual presentation of Lola in the

384 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Given the difficulty of Lola’s identification with Sanchez Mazas through a

subjective positioning by memory, we can speak of these images as belonging

to a collective memory, in which case Lola’s position as subject becomes highly

charged and suggestive. When history is rendered as the subjective experi-

ence of fictive individuals, it is often meant to be representative of a universal

response, or at least, a response representative of a gender, nationality, or

class.56 As the ostensible rememberer of this subjective history, the flashbacks

associated by montage with Lola (en)gender a collective memory of the

Spanish Civil War, suggesting a configuration of the nation-state as female,

a gender that provokes the connotations of nature, essence, and identity.57

Further enhancing this gendering of collective memory is the image of the

young Miralles dancing in the rain to the strains of suspiros de Espana, a tra-

ditional song that directly figures Spain as female, as he embraces his rifle, the

female partner that ostensibly represents Spain in the song. However, it is

this very rifle, the symbol of arms, that tears apart the two Spains, a

symbol of a mother devouring her own children, but also capable of operating

a reconciliation. Miralles, with his rifle trained on Sanchez Mazas in his

attempt to escape, is unable to fire on the fugitive in an inexplicable

moment of tenderness, identification, and recovery. Even in the bleakest

moments of their lives, both sides of the Civil War find a moment of respite

and a sense of identity watching the young Miralles dance to suspiros. The

stasis in Lola’s writing career, equated to that of the state’s postmodern frag-

mentation and immobility, is a result of the trauma of history. In both cases,

the solution is to find authenticity, to discover a real self that will at once be

liberating and productive.

Thus in a situation of too much forgetfulness, remembering seems to be the

more appropriate solution to dealing with trauma. Ironically, it is also by

remembering that one is able to forget past trauma, that is, to be liberated of

its hold. Remembering the past does not necessarily entail re-living the experi-

ences of the trauma. Rather, it is the first step in assuming the ethical conse-

quences of the past, a process of making past knowledge influence our

present and future actions and feelings.58 To a large extent, official history is

based on this process of remembering and forgetting, given that the selection

process of writing Sanchez Mazas’ story shows the protagonist behind the computer as well as

shots of the screen with the words she vocalizes. Here Trueba’s use of angles and colour provides

a commentary not directly found in the original text.

56 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 103.

57 The gender of the remembering subject is significant given the change from the male

protagonist of the text to the filmic version’s female. This can be seen as a way of appealing to a

wider audience through what Laura Mulvey has theorized as specularization, wherein a

fetishization of the woman’s body is provided as an appeal to the male gaze, whereas the pre-

sence of a female protagonist is aimed at appealing to a liberated image of Spanish femininity

for female audiences.

58 Cockburn, ‘Memories’, 403.

BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: TRUEBA’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA 385

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

of events and details to be included relegate what is left out to the level of some-

thing of little consequence, or to that of the personal. This is perhaps the signifi-

cance of Lola’s article ‘Un secreto esencial’, a way of a rescuing from the oblivion

of not figuring in official history. Her article is a recovery of events and details

that do not appear in official history books. ‘Un secreto esencial’ narrates these

events and, in its constrast of the chronicle of events with the subjective mem-

ories they evoke, attempts to create meaning out of the traumatic past.

As indicated earlier, Lola cannot be the subject of the flashback given her age

and her generation’s distance from both the Civil War and the post-war periods.

In light of Halbwachs’ analysis, it is conceivable and even natural to suppose

that references to these periods through personal anecdotes as well as written

(official) history would have impinged on her childhood. Specifically, her

amnesiac father was not always amnesiac, or to put it differently, our sources

of information as children come from varying origins, for which reason Lola

could be said to have a doubly reconstructed memory: the first transmitted to

her directly in her childhood; the second through contact with the materials

dealing with that period when she undertakes her research on Sanchez

Mazas and Miralles. In a sense, the flashback is the medium through which

these two reconstructions, separated in time and space, are brought together

and made integral. It is through these flashbacks that Lola recovers her recon-

structed memory, which allows her to claim the position of subject.

In the wake of trauma and its attendant act of forgetting, the reconstruc-

tion of memory becomes a significant process in rebuilding both individual and

social identity. The importance of the flashback in creating a new subjectivity

derives from the collective nature of memory, such that the loss of individual

memory is restored through collective images, enabling their transfer

between generations. History, the film suggests, is impotent in the face of

trauma. It suggests that in the conflict between history and memory, the

latter is a more trustworthy basis for constructing a subject position and iden-

tity. This is due to memory’s more subjective (and therefore grounded) selec-

tion of events as opposed to the presumed objective selection of facts and

their importance in shaping history.59 Given that an objective representation

of trauma is almost oxymoronic, the cause-effect structure of history reveals

its inadequacy to make sense of such catastrophes; it is left to memory and

its narratively constituted structure to provide a meaning that goes beyond

the logical, extracting clues from spaces, objects, monuments, and people.

59 In his belief that even suggesting something is an event is an a priori judgment as to its

significance, Hayden White argues convincingly that ‘facts are a function of the meaning

assigned to events, not some primitive data that determine what meanings an event can

have’ (‘The Modernist Event’, 21). This is similar to Foucault’s rejection of what he terms

‘magical’ concepts such as influence, crisis, sudden realization, in the historical explanation

of change (Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion [New York: New

Press], 282–83).

386 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) ARTHUR J. HUGHES

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Eas

tern

Mic

higa

n U

nive

rsity

] at

14:

20 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014