Imagining Time, Embodying Time in David Trueba's Soldados de Salamina (2003)

Abstract

This article places David Trueba's Soldados de Salamina (2003) in the context of the two trends that have dominated post-Franco Spanish historical cinema — documentary and historical recreation — and argues that the picture is particularly concerned with the relationship between film form and the representation of time, and film form and the representation of the body. First, taking its cue from Laura Mulvey's notion of ‘Delayed Cinema’, this study explores the uses made of authentic and fictitious archive materials in the film to suggest that its protagonist engages in a process of imagining past time. Second, the article pays attention to the previously ignored extra-diegetic moments in the film to suggest that childlessness emerges as a key concern. In an original departure from the subject of childhood, which has been frequently explored in Spanish historical cinema, Trueba thus considers the childless female body in order to point to a threatened future time.

Keywords:

• Fernando Trueba
• Ariadna Gil
• historical cinema
• delayed cinema
• childlessness
• body

Notes

 1. By using the metaphor of the body to describe the city, Lola joins an illustrious group of artists and theorists who have also represented urban space in this way, such as Wim Wenders in Wings of Desire (1987), and Michel de Certeau in Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, California UP, 1988.

 2. My thanks to Chloe Paver for alerting me to this point, and for her thorough reading of a first draft of this article.

 3. The phrase ‘recuperación de la memoria histórica’, as the phenomenon is referred to in Spain, has been critiqued by, among others, Jo Labanyi (‘The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9:2, pp. 119–25, p. 122) and Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (‘From Recuperating Spanish Historical Memory to a Semantic Dissection of Cultural Memory: La malamemoria by Isaac Rosa’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 16:1, July 2010, pp. 1–12, pp. 1–2).

 4. I find ‘historical recreation’ the most accurate term to identify this tendency. ‘Costume drama’ excludes non-fiction, and ‘period film’ is too loose. ‘Heritage cinema’ has only recently been introduced in Spanish Film Studies, in connection with a sixteenth-century recreation (Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2006, chapter 5). Marvin D'Lugo's proposal of a ‘Spanish nostalgia genre’ (Guide to the Cinema of Spain, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, p. 289) is loaded with critique.

 5. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London, Reaktion, 2006; Rob Stone ‘“Al mal tiempo, buena cara”: Spanish Slackers, Time-Images, New Media and the New Spanish Cinema Law’, in Ann Davies (ed.), Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave, forthcoming.

 6. Soldados de Salamina, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2003. Its runaway success became known as the ‘fenómeno Salamina’ (Luis Alegre, Diálogos de Salamina: un paseo por el cine y la literatura, Barcelona, Tusquets; Madrid, PLOT, 2003, p. 7). The publication of Diálogos de Salamina is testament to the apparently helpful role of Cercas in the adaptation and to the productive relationship between novelist and director. For a study of the film as an adaptation, see Isolina Ballesteros ‘La exhumación de la memoria histórica: nostalgia y utopía en “Soldados de Salamina” (Javier Cercas, 2001; David Trueba, 2002)’, Film–Historia Online, 16:1, pp. 1–7.

 7. Lola is even described as wearing ‘armour’ by Conchi, in the scene that follows the completion of her book.

 8. Carme Molinero questions the establishment of such a ‘Pact’ in this period, and attributes it instead to post-Transition democratic governments, in ‘La transición y la “renuncia” a la recuperación de la “memoria histórica”’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11:1, 2010, pp. 33–52, p. 33.

 9. ‘El cine histórico’, in Vicente Benet et al., Escritos sobre el cine español: 1973–1987, Valencia, Filmoteca Generalitat Valencia, 1989, pp. 45–64, cited, for instance, in José Colmeiro's largely unsympathetic chapter on the subject in Memoria histórica e identidad cultural. De la postguerra a la postmodernidad, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1995, p. 189.

10. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosumas noted in 1998 that ‘Of the nearly three hundred historical films produced since the 1970s, more than half are set during the Second Republic, the Civil War and Francoism’ (Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester, Manchester UP, 1998, p. 16).

11. The hope that Isolina Ballesteros expresses in 2005 has thus been met: ‘sólo cabe esperar que estos productos sigan actuando a modo de vectores de memoria para generar un cambio real en las políticas gubernamentales y en su actitud hacia las víctimas del franquismo’ (‘La exhumación’, p. 6). The full title of the legislation is ‘Ley por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la Guerra Civil y Dictadura’ (Molinero, ‘La transición’, p. 33).

12. This Manichean account now deserves reconsideration, though such a task lies outside the scope of this article. For instance, where do we place the ludic references to the conflict in the consensual family comedies La gran familia (Palacios 1962) and La ciudad no es para mí (Lazaga 1965).

13. Colmeiro, Memoria histórica, pp. 190–91.

14. See Colmeiro, Memoria histórica, pp. 187–88, for a recent summary. My study of two key 1980s literary adaptations proposes an alternative reading by using Linda Hutcheon (Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema, London, Tamesis-Boydell & Brewer, 2004, chapter 2).

15. ‘Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno)’, Film Quarterly, 60:4, 2007, pp. 4–9, p. 6.

16. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1991, p. 60.

17. This bypassing of the ideological divisions entrenched over a thirty-six year dictatorship, which is found in Cercas's novel and is followed in Trueba's film, was condemned by many as a shameful acceptance of consensus politics. Ribeiro de Menezes summarizes the ways in which critical response to the novel has shown that Cercas's ‘treatment of the political element of his narrative remains ethically questionable’ (‘Recuperating’, p. 3).

18. For Ballesteros, he is a ‘símbolo de la humanidad’ (‘La exhumación’, p. 6).

19. ‘Between History and Memory: Creating a New Subjectivity in David Trueba's Film Soldados de Salamina’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84:3, 2007, pp. 369–86, p. 371.

20. Soldados, p. 59.

21. A further alternative for the outside figure is the foreigner, used by Patino in Madrid (1987).

22. Saura's 1990 historical recreation ¡Ay Carmela! also has a childless protagonist played by Carmen Maura (whose fertility is referenced through menstruation). Unlike Lola, Carmela is nonetheless a mother-figure: to Gustavete in particular and the homesick soldiers in general.

23. My thanks to Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, who encouraged me to develop my ideas about this subject in response to a paper I delivered at ‘Contested Memories: War and Dictatorship in Contemporary Spanish and Portuguese Culture’, Instituto Cervantes, Dublin, 2007.

24. In 2004 he won a Goya and a CEC award for his work in this film.

25. Further historical recreations in the film are less successful, however, owing in part to the uncharismatic performance of Ramón Fontserè as Sánchez Mazas, and Trueba wisely excludes much of the material filmed, which may now be found on the DVD Extras.

26. Death 24x a Second, p. 22.

27. Death 24x a Second, p 8.

28. Pascale Thibaudeau shows how the use of archive material, its falsification, and its combination with fictitious material, cast doubt on the ‘“vérité” de l'image’ (p. 129) in ‘Réécriture filmique et écriture de l'histoire: de la survie à la dette dans Soldados de Salamina’, in Solange Hibbs and Monique Martínez (eds), Traduction, adaptation, réécriture dans le monde hispanique contemporain, Toulouse, Presses universitaires du mirail, 2006, pp. 121–36.

29. In Vicente Aranda's flawed Libertarias (1996), Gil's body is similarly crucial to meaning as a conduit for viewers' emotional responses, registering fear, despair, violation and — especially in the film's graphic and bloody dénouement — horror at physical violence.

30. However, Trueba also casts star Gil to attract audiences, but, as the contemporary observer, she doesn't compromise the recreation. In this way Soldados shrewdly treads a middle path between politically committed and commercially orientated cinemas, a fine example of Spain's little acknowledged middlebrow tradition.

31. Alegre, Diálogos, p. 180. Canciones para después de una guerra is noteworthy for its exhilarating use of archive footage, including NODOs, press clippings, and foreign newsreels.

32. The actress noted the difficulties of remaining in character when interviewing these real participants (Alegre, Diálogos, p. 186).

33. Alegre, Diálogos, p. 62.

34. Hughes notes that this ‘modern day rendition of Sánchez Mazas coming under fire’ (‘Between History and Memory’, p. 383) differs significantly from the novel, whose narrator writes ‘Como si aguardara una revelación por osmosis, me quedé allí un rato; no sentí nada’ (p. 383, n. 54).

35. ‘Between History and Memory’, p. 384.

36. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1997 and Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in an Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia UP, 2004. Hughes also links the latter to Lola's investigations (‘Between History and Memory’ p. 378).

37. Prosthetic Memory, p. 2.

38. ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover, UP of New England, pp. 8–9.

39. For Cercas, ‘la búsqueda del padre’ is the subject of his novel (Alegre, Diálogos, p. 53).

40. I interpret the title as a reference to anonymous historical subjects, who may disappear into oblivion unlike those who are formally commemorated, like Sánchez Mazas. It also ties in to the exploration of heroism: at Salamis a small band of soldiers stood up to a larger army. Cercas suggests an alternative interpretation again with his reference to the fact that, today, ‘la Guerra Civil es una cosa del pasado, algo tan remoto y ajeno como — digamos — la batalla de Salamina’ (Alegre, Diálogos, p. 27).

41. Quotation from film.

42. Published 3 May 2002, cited in Eva Antón, ‘Soldados de Salamina: guerra y sexismo: otro ejemplo narrativo de la reacción patriarcal’, Mujeres en red: El periódico feminista, http://www.nodo50.org/mujeresred/cultura/soldados_de_salamina.html, accessed 12 September 2010. This change enables Trueba to avoid the sexist elements of the novel criticized by Antón, especially ‘la desproporción en la individuación de los géneros y la remota representatividad del género femenino’ (n.p.).

43. Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2010, p. 163. My thanks to Conn Holohan for sending his work to me.

44. This exchange is casual in the novel — just a distraction from Miralles's recall of his memories: ‘pareció desconectarlo de sus recuerdos’, Cercas, Soldados, p. 188. Lola's confession that she was about to have children is added, as is Miralles's philosophical comment about life.

45. Diálogos, p. 10. The film reference is to Jules et Jim (Truffaut 1962).

46. For Hughes, Lola stands for the ‘new subjectivity’ of contemporary Spain (‘Between History and Memory’, 2007).