History as Ritual: Fernando Arrabal’s L’arbre de Guernica and the Panic Historical Film

ABSTRACT

In the present article, L’Arbre de Guernica (Fernando Arrabal, 1975) is analysed. The aim of this paper is to study the suitability of an experimental film as a representation of the past. In the first part, I analyse its aesthetics, following the research developed by authors such as González, Monreal or Sánchez, who have studied Arrabal’s Panic Theatre. The goal of this subchapter is to apply the traits of his theatre to his cinema – which has been scarcely studied—, in order to conclude whether his films can also be considered as part of his panic creations or not. In this part, the concept of the ‘Panic Ceremony’ will be crucial to understand the logic of the film. The second part delves into historical film studies. Following the works of post-modern historians such as Rosenstone, White or Ferro, I study if the film works not only as a panic film, but also as a valuable experimental historical film. I conclude that L’Arbre de Guernica can be understood as a panic creation, in which the Panic Ceremony is crucial for its representation of the past, thus successfully working as an experimental historical film.

KEYWORDS:

• Panic Movement
• Fernando Arrabal
• Avant-garde
• Historical film
• Spanish cinema
• Spanish civil war

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the insightful and constructive comments offered by the anonymous reviewers, as well as the help I received from my colleagues Raúl Álvarez, Ignacio Pablo Rico, and Daniel Pérez-Pamies. All of them have made this work considerably better.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Yago Paris

Yago Paris (Tenerife, Spain, 1989). Researcher and Professor at King Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain), where he is a member of GIAVEC (Research Group in Visual Arts and Cultural Studies). He has published academic articles in various journals and has presented papers at several conferences. Co-coordinator and co-author of the collective monograph Lo que nunca volverá: La infancia en el cine (Applehead Team Ediciones, 2022), and member of the editorial publisher A Contraluz. He is a film critic for the magazines Cine Divergente and El Antepenúltimo Mohicano, and has collaborated with newspapers such as InfoLibre or Ctxt. In 2022 he was chosen as a member of the Critics Jury for the Novos Cinemas Festival (Pontevedra, Spain) and in 2023 as a member of the Short Film Jury for the Dock Of The Bay Festival (San Sebastián, Spain), where he also participated as a speaker in a roundtable.