Zombie-nation: Haunting, ‘Doubling’ and the ‘Unmaking’ of Francoist aesthetics in Albert Boadella's ¡ Buen viaje, Excelencia!

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Notes

1. I would like to thank the following people for their help with this article: Albert Boadella, María M. Delgado, Chris Small, Cristina Ferrández, Jack Goody, Juliet Mitchell, Lourdes Orozco, David Bradby and the anonymous reader.

2. See, for example, Anon., ‘El fantasma de Franco’, http://burlanegra.vieiros.com/foro.read.php?f=3&i=4759 [accessed 11 July 2004]. Aznar (prime minister from 1996 to 2004) is the grandson of Manuel Aznar Zubigaray, a prominent journalist during the Franco regime.

3. See, for example, Enrique Moradielos, Crónica de un caudillo casi olvidado (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2002).

4. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, ‘Los iconos de Franco: imágenes en la memoria’, Archivos de la filmoteca (Materiales para una iconografía de Francisco Franco), 42–43 (October 2002–February 2003), 8–21 (p. 8).

5. Ibid., p. 8.

6. http://www.memoriahistorica.org/ [accessed 2 November 2006].

7. See Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Looking for Lorca: A Poet's Grave and a War's Buried Secrets’, The New Yorker (22 and 29 December 2003), pp. 64–78.

8. Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, Las fosas del silencio: ¿hay un holocausto español? (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2004).

9. Juan Ramón Resina (ed.), Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).

10. Jo Labanyi, ‘History and Hauntology; Or, What Does One Do With the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period’, in Disremembering the Dictatorship, pp. 65–82.

11. See their website, www.eljoglars.com.

12. See Albert Boadella, Memorias de un bufón (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2001), and Oriol Malló, El cas Boadella: desventures d'un joglar en temps de transició (Barcelona: Flor del Vent, 1998).

13. See Maria M. Delgado, ‘La torna returns’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 15:3 (August 2005), 372–374 (p. 372).

14. Els Joglars sent an invitation to Jordi Pujol to ask whether he would like to substitute for Ramon Fontserè in some of the performances of Ubú President. Pujol did not take them up on their offer.

15. Albert Boadella, Franco y yo. ¡Buen viaje, Excelencia! (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2003), p. 13.

16. The film had 170,011 spectators and made 825,491 euros, from 1 January to 31 December 2003. This is compared with the most popular film in Spain during the same time-period: Gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón (The Big Adventure of Mortadelo and Filemón), dir. Javier Fesser, which had 4,979,991 spectators and made 22,827,620 euros. Information from http://www.mcu.es [accessed 15 October 2004]. One suspects that this niche film most likely did not gain a new audience by virtue of the new medium – rather, those who know and like Els Joglars would have been attracted to the film.

17. Sarah Wright, ‘Unpublished Interview with Albert Boadella’ (2003). For a fascinating account of the testy relationship between Els Joglars and state sponsorship, see Lourdes Orozco, ‘Els Joglars: cuaranta anys de vida’, Journal of Catalan Studies, (2004), http://www.uoc.edu/jocs/7/articles/orozco/index.html [accessed 3 November 2006]. The irreverent reputation of Els Joglars is such that Boadella found it difficult to obtain permission to film in a church.

18. Vicente Gómez was of the opinion that ‘ya tenían el cupo de conflicto cubierto con el documental de Medem’ (they already had their conflict quota covered with Medem's documentary [La pelota vasca (The Basque Ball) about Basque separatism]. See Alberto R. Roldán, ‘Boadella: “Hay salas que no exhiben mi filme por temor a represalias”’, La Razón (8 October 2003), p. 60.

19. The state news, Noticiarios y Documentales (No-Do), was created in 1942.

20. The theatricality of the language employed in speeches in this spectacle not only serves to remind us of the performativity of the Francoist spectacle. In addition, the self-consciousness of the Catalan group mimicking Castilian fascists stands as a metaphor for the plight of the Catalans under Francoism who had to suppress their native language and replace it with a Castilian masquerade.

21. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.

22. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 10.

23. Vic was traditionally a stronghold of Catalan nationalism, ensuring a strong reaction to the re-creation of a Francoist motorcade through the city. The main crowds seemed to fall silent (allowing the loudspeaker with cheering crowds to speak for them). Some whistled, jeered the actor playing Franco, or proudly hung the senyera (Catalan flag) from the balconies. (‘Muchas personas acudieron con sus cámaras para filmar y fotografiar al Caudillo, algo sin precedentes ya que en las visitas de Franco no se podían sacar imágenes’[Many people came with their cameras to film and photograph the Caudillo, something without precedent as on Franco's official visits taking photographs was prohibited]). Eva Clota, ‘Franco revive en Vich’, El País (18 September 2003), p. 19.

24. Ibid. See also the film Entre el dictador y yo (2005), a documentary in which young people born in democracy give voice to what Francoism means to them, billed as ‘Un ejercicio fílmico contra el olvido’ (A filmic exercise against forgetting). Derrida uses the term hantise, translated as ‘haunting’, which can also mean constant fear or a nagging memory. Specters of Marx, p. 177n.

25. In Ubú President, which toured nationally and internationally, Fontserè and Sáenz played the President and his wife and no doubt this must have played an interesting trick in the minds of those spectators who saw the film or were present at the film's publicity event.

26. Tatjana Pavlović, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies: Spanish Culture from Francisco Franco to Jesús Franco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 73.

27. There is an interesting twist here in that Els Joglars's early work used inarticulate noises to get by the Spanish censors: in this film Franco's inarticulate grunts symbolise his frailty, the ridiculousness of his position as speaker for the nation.

28. See Juan Luis Cebrián's novel Francomoribundia (2003) which centres on the final years of the Franco regime and José Luis Gómez's theatrical version of the novel, presented at Madrid's Teatro de la Abadía (2003). See also Pavlović's discussion of ‘the authoritarian body in agony’, Pavlović, Despotic Bodies, pp. 71–89.

29. See Sarah Wright, ‘¡El Generalísimo ha muerto!’, Product (Winter 2003/2004), 48–49, 78 (p. 49). The browns also are a visual gag relating Francoism (in common with the Catalan delight with scatology) to excrement, emphasised by the digitally mastered flies which buzz interminably around Franco and his entourage.

30. In her discussion of the ‘unmaking’ of Nazi aesthetics Kriss Ravetto notes the tendency to use visual or rhetorical analogies (applying conventional aesthetic images of evil) to fascism as a means of expelling them from the present. Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Boadella associates Franco with depravity and mediocrity, but he successfully presents him as close to home, thereby preventing us from merely ‘othering’ Francoism.

31. The words of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Los alegres muchachos de Atzavara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987), p. 180.

32. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L'Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987; first published 1978), p. 427.

33. Colin Davis, ‘Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, French Studies, 59:3 (2005), 373–379.

34. From an unpublished interview with Albert Boadella, October 2003.

35. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985). Hutcheon distinguishes between parody (which reproduces the aesthetic qualities of an earlier text or texts) and satire (which has a social or moral aim). ¡Buen viaje, Excelencia! is, according to this definition, both parody and satire.

36. Ibid., p. 37.

37. Boadella, Franco y yo, p. 45.

38. Ibid., p. 60.

39. Doubling extends to the methods used by the director. Unusually, the group created the whole film on video using improvised props before going to filming. See the DVD extras for scenes from this initial doubling.

40. From an unpublished interview with Boadella, October 2003. See also ‘Holocaust laughter’ which uses critical distance and humour to ‘foster resilience'. See Terrence Des Pres, Writing into the World. Essays 1973–1987 (New York: Viking, 1991), p. 86.

41. Ever the provocateur, Boadella has the nation drink Cava which is a Catalan product recently subjected to boycotts by anti-Catalan Spaniards.

42. Polo was known as ‘Carmen Collares’.

43. Real footage shows the dismantling of Franco's equestrian statue. The last statue, in the plaza San Juan de la Cruz in Nuevos Ministerios, Madrid, by José Capuz (1956) was dismantled in 2005. Boadella notes that the Azor really has become a motel. Boadella, Franco y yo, p. 30. Juan Carlos, did, of course, famously turn against his mentor General Franco and aid the transition to democracy.

44. The scene recalls Marlene Dietrich's posturing from Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), recast by Martin Von Essbeck's camp performance in Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Liza Minnelli's rendition in Fosse's Cabaret (1972). For a discussion of the erotics of Fascist aesthetics in these films, see Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics.

45. In 2003 the Chapman brothers defiled a limited edition imprint of Goya's Desastres de guerra.

46. Román Gubern, ‘Tres retratos de Franco’, Archivos de la filmoteca (Materiales para una iconografía de Francisco Franco), 42–43 (October 2002–February 2003), 144–155.

47. See Basilio Patino's Caudillo (1973) which assembles newsreel, images and sounds to create an alternative to the official view of Francoism.

48. David Rey presents the following examples: the Carlist in Belle Epoque by Trueba (1992), the Falange official in Los años bárbaros/The Barbaric Years (1998) and Calimero el Tirano in Mortadelo y Filemón (2003), ‘Laughing at the Dictator: Franco and Franco's Spain in the Spanish Blockbuster Mortadelo y Filemón’, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/site/40208280/default.aspx [accessed 25 March 2007]. See also Paul Julian Smith's paper, ‘Big Babies: Javier Fesser's Adult Children’, Screen Conference, July 2004.

49. The Republicans lost the battle for Belchite in 1937. Franco decided to keep it as a ruin as a reminder of the Francoist victory. In a ghoulish variation on the theme of doubling, Franco had a new Belchite built alongside the old one, using Republican prisoners of war as slave labour, many of whom died whilst at work. Both Belchites, old and new, are therefore ghost towns, in that the ghosts of the dead inhabit both old and new towns.

50. See Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Fontana Press, 1995).

51. Boadella, Franco y yo, p. 19.

52. Derrida writes of the need to grant ghosts an hospitable memory in Specters of Marx, p. 175.