Abstract
Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas (2021) is arguably his most politically engaged work yet, with the protagonist Janis (Penélope Cruz) leading a project to exhume a Civil War mass grave. This essay begins by exploring previous engagement by Almodóvar with memorialization practices, including the short film Cultura contra la impunidad (2010). The analysis of Madres paralelas tackles the privileging of memory work and familial inheritances, with attention to the role of photography and the final scenes at the exhumed graveside. Ultimately, Almodóvar’s film, diegetically and as material object, intervenes in the current ‘memory economy’ as an act of justice.
Before Madres paralelas: Almodóvar and War Memory
From a black screen the figure of a talking head becomes gradually visible. Many viewers recognize the face and voice of Pedro Almodóvar, by 2010 the well-established face of contemporary Spanish cinema and infamous provocateur of the nostalgically recalled Movida madrileña. As he comes into focus, the viewer does not expect to hear the following words, delivered directly to camera:
Me llamo Virgilio Leret Ruiz. Soy aviador. Jefe de las Fuerzas Aéreas de la zona oriental de Marruecos. Me niego a apoyar la sublevación y al amanecer del día 18 de julio de 1936 mis compañeros me convierten en el primer militar asesinado por cumplir con su deber.
Produced in 2010 by El Deseo S.A., the Almodóvar brothers’ production company, and directed by Azucena Rodríguez, the short film Cultura contra la impunidad was intended to foster in the public domain visibility and support for those who continued the search for family members, typically grandparents or great-grandparents, whose bodies remain in unmarked mass graves, or whose deaths had been meted out without adequate justice during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the ensuing dictatorship under General Francisco Franco (1939–1975). The famous contributors, ventriloquizing and inhabiting the dead, provided their faces and voices voluntarily.
The choice to place the internationally renowned Almodóvar as the first speaker, voicing the likely first victim of the war, was no doubt deliberate. As Adrián Pérez Melgosa notes, this creates ‘a spectral presence of both the dead officer and Almodóvar’s well-known persona’ which ‘hints at the deep personal involvement of the director in the subject’.Footnote2 Of the experience, Almodóvar noted that although his family had not been directly impacted by the war: ‘Ha sido una experiencia muy emocionante poder darle voz’.Footnote3 The intention of the video and the context in which it was produced attends to the legacy of an internecine conflict that has left scars to this day. Intervening in the political landscape of 2010 Spain, the short film attains an affective impact through the repetition of the victims’ stories, whilst underlining the political imperative to provide financial and administrative support to allow victims’ families to receive appropriate reparation. However, for Almodóvar: ‘No es una cuestión política, sino simplemente una cuestión humana’.Footnote4
From this point of departure, this article takes as its key focus Almodóvar’s 2021 film Madres paralelas and explores its ethical engagement with the reparative act of exhuming a fictional mass grave. Whilst examining the cinematic representation of this act as a mark of dignity to the real victims of the Civil War and their descendants, this article also demonstrates how a narrative of memorialization is bound up with one of futurity, through motherhood, loss and familial relations, experienced most acutely through the photograph as both a material and digital object. As ‘un film de Almodóvar’ Madres paralelas attends to both the ‘cuestión política’ and the ‘cuestión humana’.
The Spanish Civil War and Dictatorship Memorialized
Almodóvar’s sentiment, disavowing the political imperative of Rodríguez’s film and instead appealing to an empathetic humanitarian response, is not unsurprising in twenty-first-century Spain. The short film appeared three years after the Ley de Memoria Histórica that recognized, amongst other things, the existence of the victims of Francoism, the need to support the exhumation of the disappeared and the removal of all public symbols of the regime, enacted whilst Spain was also in the grip of an economic crisis and growing discontent amongst its citizens. Intended to correct some of the failings of the immediate post-Franco transición period, the 2007 law was viewed by many on the Left to have been insufficient redress for the victims. Writing in 2017, on its tenth anniversary, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and Stewart King recognize that ‘the lack of public recognition of plural memories is the main failing of the socio-political settlement which underpinned the country’s transition to democracy’.Footnote5 Over decades, the continuous but uneven dynamic between personal memories and their public recognition has been predicated on the willingness of those with memories to speak, of potential recipients to listen and on the appropriateness of the mediating tool, be that direct conversation, visual culture (such as documentaries and fictional films) or textual culture (histories, novels and the like).Footnote6 The dynamic between a memory, as a discrete object, and memorialization as a process is inflected by political positions, of those involved in both the provision and the reception of memories, where they might take up ideological or affective affiliation with the winning or losing sides of the war, and also those who wield the power to commemorate or denigrate acts of memory. The 2019 reinterment of Francisco Franco from El Valle de los Caídos to his family mausoleum is a case in point, with positions for and against broadly in line with socialist and conservative political divisions. At the time of writing this essay, the Spanish government is debating a Proyecto de Ley de Memoria Democrática, an evolution of the 2007 law that proposes considerable reparative gestures towards the many differing peoples victimized during the war and dictatorship, including a more centralized effort to coordinate the exhumation of mass graves.Footnote7 It is not the purpose of this essay to debate the ideology of the proposal, nor how the new law might be implemented practically; instead it is important to note this contextual background for the filmic material discussed here, against which and because of which the Spanish cultural sector has been dominated by narratives of the war and dictatorship, embedded frequently in a twenty-first-century context where Spanish citizens investigate their familial history and/or become agents of acts of justice.
Within this evolving political landscape and the ‘memory boom’ of novels, fictional films and documentaries that focus on individual stories, it is unsurprising that personal memory and testimony have become reified above efforts to forge a collective history.Footnote8 For Ribeiro de Menezes and King ‘memory has come to replace politics as a form of dissensus’.Footnote9 Such narratives of memory are predominantly structured upon two core forms of memorialization: the witness testimony and the material artefact, both of which bring to light injustices of the past for the twenty-first-century reader to discover. Some eighty years on, survivors of the Spanish Civil War and its brutal immediate aftermath are few and their testimonies sometimes unattainable, as evidenced by documentaries that foreground the devastating effects of ageing and dementia.Footnote10 Whilst memories and lives sadly fade, some material artefacts—documents, rings, photographs—may physically endure, substituting totemically for lost family members and metonymically for Spain’s trauma, as indicated by Abigail Loxham who observes film aesthetics and contemporary memorialization practices to be ‘gathering together the material artefacts of a troubled past in order to construct a new archive and explore the potential for new memorial practises to honour those whose memories have been effaced’.Footnote11
Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas intentionally operates within such a memory economy. The film’s narrative is centred on Janis (Penélope Cruz), a Madrid-based photographer who meets Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist who will go on to support Janis’ quest to exhume the remains of her great-grandfather and nine others from her village who were executed together at the start of the Civil War. Janis and Arturo become lovers and in filmic time we cut immediately from their first sexual union to the hospital and the birth of a child almost two years later. Here Janis befriends another single mother, the teenage Ana (Milena Smit), both giving birth on the same day. As the two new mothers’ lives progress, tragedy ensues as Ana’s daughter dies and Janis discovers that her baby, Cecilia, is not her biological offspring. Suspecting that Cecilia is Ana’s baby due to an accidental swap in the hospital, Janis employs Ana to assume domestic duties in her home, withholding the DNA test result that subsequently proves Ana’s maternity. The two women also become romantically entangled until the truth about the baby is exposed, with Ana and Cecilia leaving a devastated Janis. The film’s final Act takes us to Janis’ village where she and Arturo, again a couple but seemingly within an extended familial structure including Ana and Cecilia, take DNA tests from descendants of those in the mass grave and Arturo’s team complete the exhumation process.
Although Almodóvar conceived of the film in the late 1990s, during the incipient moments of the ‘memory boom’, its gestation was gradual; what had been the initial narrative focus—the quest to exhume a mass grave—ceded to a more intricate and melodramatic story of motherhood, love and generational difference as Janis educates Ana not only in domestic duties but also the ethical duty to pay respect to the past, especially when the two clash over the exhumation project immediately prior to the climactic revelation of the babies’ maternal origins. That these two aspects of the film appear to jostle with each other in the film’s plot has been one of the critiques of Madres paralelas, yet, as this essay will show, the interaction of the personal and the political is a recurrent concern in the Spanish debate on democratic memory.
Madres paralelas: Politics and Work
Many early critical studies of Almodóvar’s works situated him and his films as intentionally anti-political, reading them as conscious rejections of the dictatorship and Franco through hedonistic narratives such as Laberinto de pasiones (1982) or dark tales of sexuality such as Matador (1986). As the auteur filmmaker has aged, the critical narrative suggests that his work has become more explicitly engaged with depicting the Francoist regime (Carne trémula [1997]), with spectres of the past (La mala educación [2004]; Volver [2006]) and with autofiction, through the tale of a director and his troubled past (Dolor y gloria [2019]). However, as has long been argued by the likes of Paul Julian Smith and recently neatly summarized by Ana María Sánchez-Arce, politics—whether of the State, identity or belief systems—has been omnipresent in the work of a filmmaker whose raison d’être is readily characterized as a provocateur:
Almodóvar has always engaged with the legacy of Spain’s past and its repercussions in the present, be it through intertextuality with films of the dictatorship, challenges to traditional ways of thinking, or focus on individual trauma and healing processes.Footnote12
Madres paralelas presents many different forms of ‘work’ through its characters and their narratives. Whilst Janis has been working for many years towards the exhumation of the mass grave in her village, for her own family and others, in the course of the narrative she adapts her career to become a working mother. The film presents her also as a strong homemaker, although she relies on the labour of a maid and live-in help for her baby (the hapless foreign student Deborah [Alice Davies] and then Ana). Ana’s family also relies on paid domestic services in the form of maids; the paid work of Ana’s mother Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is literal performance as an actress, whilst her work as a mother is discussed and questioned by herself and others. Women’s places of work occupy and move between both domestic and public spaces; Janis as photographer; Ana as waitress; Elena (Rossy de Palma) as Janis’ boss but also closest friend; Teresa as performer; the various child minders and domestic employees. Other forms of labour are manifest too, most obviously the physical act of childbirth and child-rearing (‘has hecho un buen trabajo’ comments Arturo to Janis after seeing their supposed daughter for the first time), but also inter-generational education and domestic chores such as cooking. In both the film’s narratives—of motherhood and of exhumation—Janis is the collector of DNA samples, supported by the invisible work of laboratory technicians. Within the village, Janis and Arturo also collate testimonies from the descendants of those whose bodies lie in the mass grave, informally taking on detective work that will help bridge the temporal gap and connect the living with the deceased. This work, as is known from real life exhumations, finds a focus on material objects that have survived the passage of time and come to signify much more than their status as objects might have been originally.Footnote15 As well as human remains, in Madres paralelas a baby’s rattle, a glass eye, a particular style of shoe all acquire affiliative and emotive meaning as memory prompts.
Whilst recognizing all these forms of labour, this essay takes as its focus ‘memory work’, to explore how political and affective engagement is enabled through the film’s narrative and visual strategies. Annette Kuhn insists that such work must question the assumption that memory alone is a direct relation to the past since memory work ‘takes all forms of remembering, memory accounts, including memory texts, as material for interpretation’.Footnote16 As interpretative labour, Kuhn here also asserts that memory work ‘is an active practice of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory’.Footnote17 As practice and process, memory work engages physical labour (the brain’s act of recall, archive work, the exhumation of mass graves, DNA testing), as well as interpretative labour (museums, textual and filmic narratives, private displays of images and objects) and, perhaps most importantly, emotional labour as objects and memories can be imbued with affective qualities by those who receive them, whether during physical or interpretative processes. All these are present within and without Madres paralelas.
Engagement with memory work is not a disinterested act. Descendants seek justice for unrecognized wrongdoings, those who undertake the act of recall may seek nostalgic escapism or resolution from past traumas, while those who observe become implicated through the act of viewing. As Colin Davis notes:
[…] the responsibility of the witness is not to become the victim, to partake of the victim’s pain; rather […] it is to regard the other’s pain as something alien, unfathomable, and as an outrage which should be stopped.Footnote18
The Preparatory Documentary: El silencio de otros
A filmic focus on Civil War grave exhumation is not unknown in Pedro Almodóvar’s broader intervention in the cinematic industry. El Deseo S.A., the production company run by Pedro with his brother Agustín, was key to the creation of the documentary El silencio de otros (2018), directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. Filmed over six years, amassing 450 hours of footage, the interconnected strands of narrative move between Spain and Argentina, focused on acts of justice that respond to the atrocities of the Civil War and Francoist dictatorship: the initial retaliatory murders during the war, the torture and imprisonment of political dissidents during the dictatorship and the niños perdidos del franquismo scandal that continued into the democratic era. Whilst some of the documentary’s ‘protagonists’ are lawyers and political activists, the directors recognize that the core of the filmic narrative is formed by the plaintiffs themselves, those who suffered the injustices or are familial relations of those who have died.Footnote20 Emblematic of this voicing of the victims, and first presented in the film’s running time, is María Martín, described in a Mexican review as
[u]na anciana que aparece al principio del filme narrando la desaparición, humillación pública y asesinato de su madre, [que] dice con una voz ronca que la vida es injusta, pero sólo le toma un momento para rectificar: ‘No la vida … los humanos, somos injustos’.Footnote21
In interview, it has been made clear that Carracedo and Bahar attribute the film’s success to its resonance with a global audience where conflict resolution is a constant theme: ‘We go to all these other countries where they think they don’t have a conflicted past but they do. Every country has something to deal with in a way’.Footnote26 In the same interview they also recognize El Deseo S.A.’s expertise in international marketing and the positive influence of the Almodóvar brothers in its promotion. Yet, despite the international success of Carracedo and Bahar’s film, co-executive producer Almodóvar recognized that: ‘A fiction feature with Penélope gives much more visibility to this problem, because a documentary has less distribution’.Footnote27 Elsewhere, the director/scriptwriter notes the politico-ethical imperative to remember appropriately and create Madres paralelas: ‘Me pareció que era más necesario que nunca recordar de dónde venimos y contrarrestar el revisionismo de la extrema derecha’.Footnote28
Madres paralelas: Production and Reception
As noted earlier, Almodóvar had conceived of Madres paralelas many years before its production began; the title even makes an appearance in Los abrazos rotos (2009) as the script that Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco has just completed and as a fictionalized film poster on his office wall. In this anticipatory representation, the poster’s imagery of two dice showing opposing faces within a bird’s nest suggests differing but equivalent lives, situated in an uncanny and inappropriate environment. As substitute eggs, symbols of reproductive futurity, the dice indicate chance, game play and the uncertain outcomes redolent in the 2021 film’s script.
Madres paralelas was by and large welcomed by critics, particularly for Cruz’s performance which garnered her an Oscar nomination, despite the film being overlooked as Spain’s nomination for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards. The parallel nature of the two narratives drew criticism not only for the tension between their differing focal points, but also as individual plots; Janis and Ana’s romantic relationship rendered ‘poco creíble’Footnote29 and the treatment of the Civil War legacy deemed patronizing.Footnote30 Many, especially in international circles, welcomed the political intervention and celebrated Almodóvar’s idiosyncrasies, such as the influential British critic Peter Bradshaw who described the film positively as having ‘the warmth and the grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age […] and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap’.Footnote31
Bradshaw’s evaluation locates the aesthetic and story of Madres paralelas within a tradition of melodrama, where the personal and political interact, as recognized also by Carla Marcantonio who notes that ‘viewers must shed their own tears at the moral dilemma that besets Janis, a personal one that closely echoes the historical one’ and that Almodóvar has elevated melodrama to ‘its full political and transformative potential’.Footnote32 The director’s own take on this generic stylization is to point out the film’s eschewing of the lachrymose: ‘I decided that Parallel Mothers would be a tense, restrained drama, difficult to act’.Footnote33 Accordingly, performative tears shed by Cruz and Smit are mostly excised from the edits, suggested instead through affective expression and response. Little cinematic time is given to grieving for baby Anita or even Janis’ loss of Cecilia and Ana as they leave her apartment and potentially her life. Likewise, much of their reconciliation and Janis’ rekindling of her relationship with Arturo are omitted as Janis’ loss segues into her action in the village collecting DNA and testimonies.
Covid restrictions that limited access to more public filming spaces ensured that the mise-en-scène is largely tightly focused within domestic spaces, principally Janis’ apartment, although frequent use is made of placing the actors in front of windows that through deep focus enables viewers to see madrileños going about their quotidian business. Again, redolent of Almodóvar’s oeuvre,Footnote34 the kitchen is reclaimed as a space of female power, rather than patriarchal servitude: it is the space in which Janis asks Arturo for his support with the exhumation and where she breaks their relationship to set out to be a single mother, where she educates Ana not only in cooking but also Spain’s recent traumatic history and where, extended into the adjoining liminal space of the terraza, heartfelt conversations take place. The space and food within it—a leg of jamón on its carving stand, manchego cheese in a bell jar, preparation of the tortilla—is quintessentially Spanish, aligning Janis with national traditions. The green tiling of Janis’ kitchen walls, with its elongated hexagonal structures, even echoes the pervasive honeycomb imagery of Víctor Erice’s seminal El espíritu de la colmena (1973), both films focused on the impact of the Civil War on the interconnectedness, or not, of families.
Janis and Memory Work
Janis’ memory work, interwoven into her journey towards resolution and happiness, is bound up with familial intergenerational connections, so commonly seen in works responding to the legacy of the 1930s. Indeed, the temporal shifts in the filmic narrative are most easily visualized through images of reproduction and child-rearing; the jump cut from sexual intercourse to birth is deliberately jarring and elsewhere the baby’s physical growth is the viewer’s key indication of passing time over several years, reflecting the real-time lengthy process of preparing a mass grave exhumation.Footnote35 Almodóvar makes only one concession to non-linearity in the film, deceiving the viewer with a match-cut of Janis opening her apartment door to Arturo which unexpectedly takes the viewer from postnatal Janis to when she reveals her pregnancy, before returning us to the film’s chronology through another (now anticipated) match cut.
Although her intention is to ensure that justice is recognized for her great-grandfather’s remains, it is Janis’ duty to her grandmother and her great-aunt Brígida (Julieta Serrano) that drives her political agency, as well as to her ‘daughter’, Cecilia, named after her grandmother. Whilst matrilineage is a hallmark of his films, Almodóvar is also renowned for his focus on non-normative family units and parental relationships. Since Madres paralelas reifies the DNA test, and concomitantly biological parenthood, as ultimate proof of familial connection, it would seem that the film’s appeal to the image of the ‘parallel’ is borne out through the straightening of the maternal roles and queer family unit. However, there are moments of transgression, most obviously during Janis and Ana’s lesbian relationship where both perform differing forms of motherhood to Cecilia: the baby is in Janis’ home and to the outside world is her daughter; Ana is the biological mother and has assumed primary caring duties. Queer potentiality is visually signalled in the final scenes of the film at the graveside where Janis creates a physical bridge between Arturo and Ana, the latter holding Cecilia as well as Janis’ hand; the only other person in the shot, Elena, remains physically unconnected to the family unit. Indeed Cecilia embodies a multiplicity of potentialities as a child who is both marked as the fetishized symbol of futurity within a heteronormative reproductive line, but also marked queerly by sideways movement and orientations around adults whereby connections and expected familial formations have been re-cast.Footnote36 Not only does the child hold an unusual position in this queer family unit but also through her status as redemptive object of love from her mother’s traumatic experience of rape, and even through her name: Cecilia is named after Janis’ grandmother, but she instead carries the name into Ana’s family; reciprocating, Janis promises that if her unborn baby is a girl she will name her after Ana. Such forms of familial spectrality and re-orientated inheritances underpin and bring into question the broader emphasis on intergenerational reparation in the film.
This emphasis on intergenerationality is unsurprising, given both the importance of the family unit as metonym for the nation within the Francoist ideology and also its deification in memory work where families operate as sites of memory transmission and recovery.Footnote37 In line with a tradition of writing strong women into his film narratives, Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas situates intergenerational trauma not just within Janis’ and Ana’s families but also the village community as a whole. Echoing accounts of real-life exhumations, Almodóvar depicts the mourning villagers carrying photographic images of their relations as they approach the graveside. By this point in the film, approaching its end, the viewer is already familiar with the images of the men killed in 1936, presented to us early in the filmic narrative. Photographs act not only as narrative aids in Madres paralelas but occupy a potent role in shaping visually the intergenerational affective relationships, evoking the past, but connected to the present. The dead of Janis’ village were all captured on film by her great-grandfather, also a photographer. As Marita Sturken notes:
The photograph of personal value is a talisman, in which the past is often perceived to reside so that it can be reexperienced. It evokes both memory and loss, both a trace of life and the prospect of death.Footnote38
The Role of the Photographic Image
As is well documented in studies of photography, the talismanic quality of the photographic image is centred on the image’s indexicality, as a testament to the lived reality and situation of who or what is captured in the image. The image’s meaning exceeds its physical qualities as it operates within a memory economy, a circulation that, as we shall see shortly, has been enhanced by digitization. More than just a thing to see, the photograph has an action to do, an agency enacted by the gaze of the onlooker. The photographic image is ‘a concretization of memory’ as an artifact ‘that can be remobilized, recontextualized, and reanimated’.Footnote39 The power to receive the image, to (re)mobilize it through memory work, lies with the viewer as recipient and active participant in an act that is much greater than mere contemplation. Such an act occurs as an activity beyond the knowledge of the original subjects of the image and, as such, people who are photographed are subject always to an act of symbolic violence.Footnote40 In Madres paralelas Janis is able to reproduce her great-grandfather’s images of deceased community members; although they have no role in identifying the individual skeletons in the grave, they humanize the absent for the living.
The interaction of photography and film itself is evoked in Madres paralelas’ opening and closing credits where imagery of traditional filmstock frames text and image, their annotated mounts, denoting film as a form of material preservation: ‘Negatives are not kept to be looked at but to ensure future reproduction; like slides, their value as objects lies in their reproducibility and “projectionability” ’.Footnote41 This introduction to the film narrative, and to Janis, is during the act of photographing Arturo in a professional studio environment, a space to which the narrative returns several times as, in typical Almodovarian fashion, we are reminded of performative artifice and the act of capturing it. Whether Janis captures images of people or objects, they are all in the service of not only conveying indexical realities, but also enhancing them through lighting and perspectives, typically for media consumption. As such, the consumer objects—shoes, handbags—fill the frame, to be admired by the spectator of Madres paralelas as much as their intended diegetic audience. The humans captured by Janis are observed in the studio in dialogue and performance, Almodóvar’s directed dynamic movie camera bringing us privileged viewing of the photographer at work, her body and camera moving together as an assemblage. The dynamic we observe in the studio is a counterpoint to photography later at the exhumation site, another site of contemplation and memory work.
Any reading that suggests that photography has agency, enacted by the eye of the beholder, implies that each viewer is a consumer. In her seminal book On Photography, Susan Sontag suggests that the acquisition of photography is in several forms: the ‘surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing’, the ‘consumer’s relation to events, both to events which are part of our experience and to those which are not’ and ‘as information (rather than experience)’.Footnote42 Whilst all are relevant to the use of photography here, it is worth noting that Sontag’s language is strongly inflected with a recognition of distance, between the object that is the photograph and viewer as onlooker, between the people or event captured in the space-time of the image distanced from that of the viewer, between information and experience. Patty Keller, drawing on the work of Barthes and Derrida, sees in this distancing the experience of deferral, essential in processes of production and reception as the photograph acquires referential value as it ‘becomes’ and then ‘remains’ what it has become; deferral is ‘the delay that comes with exposure, the time lag connected to appearance, and the action […] that occurs through the experience of mourning’.Footnote43 Whether of a consumer product or family member, the photograph acquires meaning, but images of loved ones are more bound up in a dynamic of mourning. Such experiences of mourning are intimately engaged in personal memorialization; the mise-en-scène of Janis’ living room includes photos of four generations of her family with Janis at several points deliberately positioned in the space before and beside them, echoed later in the film when Janis stays in what had been her grandmother’s house in the village.
The composition of the wall’s family photo display changes over time, but its purpose suggests a desire to exhibit intergenerational assemblage and affiliation, with linguistic narrative coming into play when Janis explains to Ana who the people are. Experiences of mourning are also collective, most obviously in the film around the mass grave. When the images later carried by the women are first presented to the viewer of the film, they form a focal point of the narrative in which Janis engages Arturo in the story of her village’s collective trauma. For the film viewer, each photograph of the deceased occupies the filmic frame in its entirety as we hear Janis name and explain the corresponding identity; together they accumulate affective value, not unlike the sequence of faces and stories in Cultura contra la impunidad. Echoing the movement to a headshot in Rodríguez’s short film, in Madres paralelas there is sometimes a cut from the full image to the upper body close-up, Almodóvar’s camera performing the act of closer looking on the viewer’s behalf, a technique employed also when Janis looks at digitized letters bearing DNA test results.
The use of the images of the dead in the film, filling the frame, not only returns the deceased to the living, but works as a rupture to the experience of film as continual movement. David Campany notes:
Literally and psychologically, the still image in film causes a pause. […] We see the photograph exaggerated by those qualities that distinguish it from film: its stillness, its temporal fixity, its objecthood, its silence, its deathliness, even.Footnote44
We connect to our web memory: Google, Flickr, social networking etc. and our web memory connects to us. What are these digital archives? Memory aids, nodes, portals? Or are they actually part of memory: inseparable from memory through the connections we make with them. Unlike human memory, mediatized memory is ‘always on’.Footnote45
Underneath the apparent neutrality of the swipe, one may be reminded, for instance, of the light, gentle brush of a finger used when touching a precious object, or the hand or face of a person who is dear to us.Footnote46
The civil contract of photography shifts the focus away from the ethics of seeing or viewing to an ethics of the spectator, an ethics that begins to sketch the contours of the spectator’s responsibility toward what is visible. The individual is not confined to being posited as the photograph’s passive addressee, but has the possibility of positing herself as the photograph’s addressee.Footnote49
Exhuming the Mass Grave
As seen in El silencio de otros the opening up of mass graves is an act of considerable physical and emotional labour, and not without controversies. More than just the removal of human remains, Nicole Iturriaga notes that an excavation is ‘a performative action, convert[ing] the space[s] into public places for the exchange of oral testimonies, or storytelling, about the past’; she also describes examples of silencing and resistance to the metaphorical act of opening up old wounds through what is a literal ‘wounding’ of the ground, an act that can be justified as the grounds for familial reparation, of scientific interest, or as a political (and ethical) act, before the landscape is returned to its previous unmemorialized state.Footnote51 As politicized acts, the recovery of the skeletons as materialization of a collective trauma is a clear gesture against the political power that ensured their presence there in the first place, speaking against ‘necropower’.Footnote52 While realistically portraying the exhumation process, Madres paralelas does not explicitly engage with such debates as the ground is opened up, choosing instead to observe the exhumation work and show a community united in its gesture to the past.
In interview, Almodóvar has claimed that the final fifteen minutes of Madres paralelas, where the narrative shifts from Madrid to the exhumation, are intended to be ‘like a documentary’ and photographic: ‘The narration softens and the film has a certain stillness in this epilogue’.Footnote53 As well as collecting testimony and DNA from the villagers, as noted earlier, archaeological labour is writ large in this final narrative act, in parallel to the narrative and emotional construction of El silencio de otros which focuses our attention on the search for one woman’s father in a Guadalajaran mass grave. Archaeology as forensic exhumation work in the context of the Spanish Civil War is not only the political and ethical gesture noted above, but also an affective gesture as noted by Layla Renshaw:
The volunteer excavators do not merely facilitate these materialisations through physical labour, or mediate representations of the past through expert readings; they are also profoundly affected by their encounter with the bodies and objects in the grave.Footnote54
Almodóvar’s film tracks the work of the forensic archaeologists through close ups of hands at work, placing the slowly revealed skeletons central in the frame, the camera positioned alongside the long dead victims, rather than those who uncover them. The workers remain largely anonymous, seen from behind or fragmented at the edge of the cinematic frame; only Arturo is presented as an agent moving through the space, including occupying the role of photographer, here to document and appropriate the camera lens as witness, rather than in the service of consumerism. Close-ups of the objects found on the skeletons—the child’s rattle, the glass eye, footwear—connect the images affectively to the antemortum stories heard just previously in filmic time; the replacement of a glass eye into a skull socket becomes an attempt at partial re-humanization. Ultimately, as the last of the skeletons is revealed, and the villagers have gathered with images of their loved ones, Almodóvar concludes the film through an affective connection between living and dead. Accompanied by Alberto Iglesias’ evocative non-diegetic score, an overhead shot tracks the skeletons within the grave, before cutting to a tracking shot, in parallel movement, of the onlookers, tilted upward slightly below head height to implicitly connect their act of viewing as a gaze returned to the skeletons. No words are spoken or movements made—are the onlookers grieving their loved ones or identifying themselves with those in the grave? After returning to the grave to conclude tracking along all the skeletons, the camera cuts to rest on Cecilia, here played by two-year-old Luna Auria Contreras, whose gaze is directed down, towards the space out of frame where we know the grave and skeletons to be. Lingering on this image of uncomprehending yet focused gaze and contemplation by a quintessential symbol of futurity, the film’s ethical reparative intention seems clear, even if Cecilia, as noted before, symbolizes a non-normative intergenerational linearity.
Yet the film then surprises us, presenting the viewer with two sharply angled images of members of the forensic team lying in the grave, occupying the spaces of the skeletons. The two angled shots are then followed by a vertical shot allowing the viewer’s gaze to take in the entirety of the grave and the full visual impact of the living bodies that have placed themselves in the positions of the dead, a form of displacement and replacement. The image is itself infused with stillness and flatness, shifting from disorientating angled fragmentation to instead make the bodies complete and contemporary. Inhabiting the grave is both a literal and symbolic occupation of the open wound that is the Spanish Civil War in current historical memory debates. This is a moment of circuitry between the living and dead, an ethical gesture but also one that is characterized by approximation and appropriation, by spatial and temporal disruptions. Unlike Volver, Almodóvar’s most celebrated film about death, here there are no embodiments of ghosts that can be accepted and assimilated easily. It is a temporary moment captured in stillness by the camera and the haunting final visual image of the film.
The physicality of the skeletal remains of loved ones lost decades earlier thus plays an imperative role in shaping the interpretative and emotional labour of those who are affiliated with them or indeed, in the case of Janis’ great-aunt Brígida, are a direct link to the living. Brígida’s frailty prevents her from standing vigil by the mass grave, with Janis a familial affective presence instead. As noted previously, it is Cecilia who occupies the position here of a symbol of futurity, but unlike most straightforwardly heteronormative and patriarchal structures, she is an embodiment of queerness, her parallel queer mothers by her side, themselves the daughters of mothers who we see or are told have rebelled against patriarchal norms. Even the intergenerational futurity symbolized at the graveside by Janis’ unborn child is aligned with women’s work, through Janis herself and also through the suggestion that the child is conceived in the bed where Janis had earlier told us that her mother and grandmother were born. The arresting nature of these final scenes signal the gravity of the exhumation narrative for Madres paralelas and the impact intended for its contemporary audience(s).
The Film and Its Audience(s)
Any new cinematic release from Pedro Almodóvar is an ‘event’ of media interest, bound up in both Almodóvar’s auteur persona and also the bond between the director and his ‘chicas Almodóvar’. Even before its release, the film courted controversy by using a poster whose only image was a large nipple secreting a drop of milk, deemed to have transgressed etiquette rules on some social media platforms. Instead, the most common promotional poster image is of Janis and Ana embracing, with bankable star Cruz’s face visible to camera, their clothes blanked out with black and white parallel stripes that intersect awkwardly according to the position of each actor’s body. We know from the film that the still image is from Janis’ kitchen during a moment of tender consolation, but decontextualized on the poster it could just as well have been by the graveside, or even on the maternity ward where the women first meet.
Does Almodóvar take on the mantel of international spokesperson for contemporary Spanish culture and politics? Teresa’s role in the fictionalized production Doña Rosita la soltera, offers clues: is Teresa’s comment ‘yo soy apolítica, mi trabajo es gustarle a todo el mundo’ a thinly-veiled comment by Almodóvar on some of his previous works being perceived as ‘apolitical’?Footnote58 The references to García Lorca in Madres paralelas are an implicit further commentary on the ethical imperative to exhume mass graves, since the body of the poet and playwright himself famously still lies in an unmarked grave. Duncan Wheeler, commenting on the use of Lorca in Todo sobre mi madre, draws on the connections between the poet and Almodóvar: ‘Federico García Lorca is both the film’s primary autochthonous reference point and the only contemporary figure to rival the filmmaker’s stature as a global ambassador for Spain’.Footnote59 Wheeler later recognizes Almodóvar’s weaving of the ‘culturally specific’ and ‘open’ as ‘symptom and a cause of his cinematic genius’,Footnote60 whilst Marina Díaz López claims that ‘Almodóvar is thus one of the best examples of the achievement of glocal (global + local) culture’.Footnote61 The connection between local and global is present throughout Madres paralelas where the international viewer is, with Ana as partial avatar, educated as much in Spanish domesticity—for example, the art of making tortilla de patatas—as in its recent troubled history, both as Janis remonstrates with Ana about the ethical position vis-à-vis the mass graves and also in the film’s expository dialogue. The presence of Lorca’s work not only functions as a recognizable figure for international audiences, although Doña Rosita is one of his lesser-known plays, but also underpins the autochthonous nature of the cultural crisis that is the crux of the film: the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the ongoing need to pay tribute to its victims.
Janis’ involvement in the film’s narrative of motherhood and romance is a metonym for the broader ethical questions of remembering and forgetting. Her inability to tell the truth about her daughter’s biological maternity despite scientific evidence enacts her own crisis of ‘forgetting’. Anthony Lane’s review notes this as a ‘parable of repression’, stating that whilst she is a loving and caring character, ‘she is nonetheless drawing on deep wells of cultural denial, forging her own private pacto del olvido’.Footnote62 Although this narrative might challenge our suspension of disbelief, for some viewers it is precisely this that we expect from ‘un film de ALMODÓVAR’, as the credits attest. This is, of course, for the viewer the same Almodóvar behind the international success of El silencio de otros and, for Spanish audiences, ventriloquizing the Civil War dead in Cultura contra la impunidad.Footnote63
Conclusion
As arguably the most political of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, Madres paralelas engages its audience first and foremost with the work of exhuming a mass grave, alongside and interwoven with a narrative that privileges intergenerational, queer, affective connections. In so doing it draws its viewers into contemplation on the past, present and futurity, albeit with the emphasis on the first of these. As the visually arresting image of the living in place of the dead fades from the viewer’s gaze, occupying the screen instead is a quotation from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: ‘No hay historia muda. Por mucho que la quemen, por mucho que la rompan, por mucho que la mientan, la historia humana se niega a callarse la boca’. Taken from the essay ‘La impunidad de los cazadores de gente’, Galeano goes on to point out that ‘el derecho de recordar no figura entre los derechos humanos consagrados por las Naciones Unidas’ although it is of utmost necessity in order to prevent repetition of the past, since instead of existing in institutions such as museums ‘la memoria está en el aire que respiramos; y ella, desde el aire, nos respira’.Footnote64 As has been argued, although they may be omnipresent, memories none the less are to be recognized, appropriated, interpreted and made into history. In so doing, those whose memories have been effaced can be honoured.
In contrast, in her work on the exhumation of mass graves, Iturriaga notes that ‘reclaiming a body’s biological identity is an internationally recognised human right’.Footnote65 In the context of a mass grave, this right corresponds to the identification of human remains and their return or repatriation to their family and loved ones. Bodily materiality here interacts with affective memory, both sites of trauma and potential reparation. As Almodóvar’s film shows, biological identity is also privileged as a place for identification of family, with Cecilia ‘returned’ to her rightful family and Janis and Arturo’s unborn child a cipher for an acceptable familial continuation. That the film places both mothers in a romantic relationship, with continued filiation and love despite the dramatic revelations, signals disruptive queer potentiality and an alternative arc.
Photography in the film draws together the physicality of the body and the abstraction of memory in material form, albeit digital. As we have seen, photographic images of the deceased maintain their absent presence in the lives of the living, whether familial or the (inter)national audiences that come to understand something of Spain’s traumatic past and its relevance in the memory economy of twenty-first-century Spain. The viewer gains privileged access to the continued suffering of victims; whilst the documentary El silencio de otros focused on real life victims, aesthetically drawing us into their narratives, the fictional Madres paralelas echoes real life mass grave exhumations. Traumatic memory, experienced in discrete—and sometimes discreet—moments by individuals, maintains a performative role in all these lives, the character of Janis and the memory work she undertakes acting as a focal point and conduit, biologically and metaphorically.
As such, we might productively ask ourselves not what the film is but what it does. Whether documentary or fiction, the affective and intellectual experience of watching a film collectively enacts, in Beugnet’s words, ‘the possibility of a joint reaction that may simply express itself in the need to bestow the work, and, therefore, the images it displays, attentive time’.Footnote66 Attentive time is enhanced through cinematic techniques; in the case of Madres paralelas temporal slippage (Janis opening the door to Arturo), the photographic image within the cinematic frame (privileging the deceased as much as the living), arresting mise-en-scène (Janis’ apartment) and the proximity to human remains in the final Act, all coalesce to shape the affective and affiliative viewer experience. Naturally, such a reaction is dependent on the open reception of codified images within the film, the film’s narrative and the film as product, with viewers’ responses shaped by their own experiences and proximity to the issues represented, local or global. Although discussing Todo sobre mi madre and the theme of overcoming grief, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla addresses squarely the importance of sharing memory as a potentiality and as such a marker of futurity and not solely the past:
[...] ‘com-passionate memory’ allows a community to share residues or traces of personal and collective history, whether they are known or unknown, and to look forward to the unpredictable future. This suggests a potential transformation or reconfiguration, rather than attempting to master the traces, or relegate them to oblivion.Footnote67
Notes
1 The full list of contributors is: Pedro Almodóvar, Maribel Verdú, Hugo Silva, Juan José Millás, Carmen Machi, Juan Diego Botto, José Manuel Seda, María Galiana, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Miguel Ríos, Pilar Bardem, Almudena Grandes, Juan Diego, Javier Bardem and Paco León, who notably ventriloquized his own great-grandfather.
2 Adrián Pérez Melgosa, ‘The Ethics of Oblivion: Personal, National, and Cultural Memories in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar’, in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. Marvin D’Lugo & Kathleen M. Vernon (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 176–99 (p. 177).
3 Quoted in ‘La Cultura, contra la impunidad del franquismo’, Público, 14 June 2010, n.p.; available at <https://www.publico.es/espana/cultura-impunidad-del-franquismo.html> (accessed 11 May 2022).
4 Quoted in ‘La Cultura, contra la impunidad del franquismo’, n.p.
5 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes & Stewart King, ‘Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain’, in The Future of Memory in Spain, ed. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes & Stewart King, BHS, XCIV:8 (2017), 793–99 (p. 795).
6 See in particular Jo Labanyi’s seminal essay ‘Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War’, Poetics Today, 28:1 (2007), 89–116.
7 See ‘Proyecto de la Ley de Memoria Democrática’, La Moncloa, 20 July 2021, n.p., <https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/consejodeministros/Paginas/enlaces/200721-enlace-memoria.aspx> (accessed 8 June 2022).
8 Key examples of ‘memory boom’ novels, many of which have been adapted into films, are Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina (2001), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Alberto Méndez’s Los girasoles ciegos (2004). Documentaries include Les fosses del silenci (Televisó de Catalunya, 2003) and, as will be discussed, El silencio de otros (Almudena Carracedo & Robert Bahar, 2018).
9 Ribeiro de Menezes & King, ‘Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain’, 796.
10 See, for example, Nedar (Carla Subirana, 2008); and Bucarest, la memòria perduda (Albert Solé, 2008).
11 Abigail Loxham, ‘Objects of Memory in Contemporary Catalan Documentaries: Materiality and Mortality’, Senses of Cinema, 60 (2011) n.p.; available at <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/objects-of-memory-in-contemporary-catalan-documentaries-materiality-and-mortality/?cialis-daily-prescription> (accessed 20 July 2022).
12 Ana María Sánchez-Arce, The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2020), 11. See also Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2014); Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2017); and Fiona Noble, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
13 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, Pedro Almodóvar (London: BFI, 2007), 240.
14 For a Spanish response, see Jordi Campeny, ‘Madres paralelas (2021), de Pedro Almodóvar – Critica’, Culturamas. La Revista de Información Cultural en Internet, 20 October 2021, n.p., <https://culturamas.es/2021/10/20/madres-paralelas-2021-de-pedro-almodovar-critica> (accessed 27 April 2022); and for a Mexican response, see René Sánchez, ‘Reseña: Madres paralelas/Parallel Mothers’, Cine sin Fronteras, 20 February 2022, n.p., <https://cinesinfronteras.com/2022/02/20/resena-madres-paralelas-parallel-mothers-almodovar-penelope-cruz-netflix/> (accessed 27 April 2022).
15 See Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011).
16 Annette Kuhn, ‘Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media’, Memory Studies, 3:4 (2010), 298–313 (p. 303).
17 Kuhn, ‘Memory Texts and Memory Work’, 303.
18 Colin Davis, ‘Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story’, in Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, ed. Martin Modlinger & Philipp Sontag (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 19–42 (p. 30); original emphasis.
19 Dean Allbritton, ‘Timing Out: The Politics of Death and Gender in Almodóvar’s Volver’, Hispanic Research Journal, 16:1 (2015), 49–64 (p. 50).
20 Almudena Carracedo, ‘No More Silence: Franco’s Victims Raise Their Voices’, The Guardian, 20 October 2018, n.p.; available online at <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/20/no-more-silence-my-mission-to-let-franco-victims-be-heard> (accessed 27 April 2022).
21 Greta Padilla, ‘El silencio de otros, documental sobre la “relación” entre franquismo y el México actual’, Sopitas.com, 26 October 2018, n.p., <https://www.sopitas.com/cine-y-tv/silencio-otros-documental-franquismo-resena-ficm-2018/> (accessed 27 April 2022).
22 See Willy Veleta, ‘Tres errores de El silencio de otros’, ctxt. Contexto y Acción, 20 November 2018, n.p., <https://ctxt.es/es/20181114/Politica/22919/errores-en-el-documental-el-silencio-de-otros-willy-veletavictimas-del-franquismo.htm> (accessed 27 April 2022).
23 See Miguel Ángel Martín Maestro, ‘El cine impostor. El silencio de otros’, Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria, 6 May 2019, n.p., <https://www.foroporlamemoria.info/2019/05/el-cine-impostor-el-silencio-de-otros/> (accessed 11 October 2023).
24 See Carlos Boyero, ‘Historias de la infamia’, El País, 16 November 2018, n.p.; available online at <https://elpais.com/cultura/2018/11/14/actualidad/1542230500_702782.html> (accessed 27 April 2022).
25 See Musanna Ahmed, ‘The Silence of Others: Momentous Story Must Be Seen on the Big Screen (& Interview with Filmmakers)’, Film Inquiry, 21 September 2018, n.p., <https://www.filminquiry.com/silence-of-others-2018-review-interview/> (accessed 27 April 2022).
26 Ahmed, ‘The Silence of Others’, n.p.; original emphasis.
27 Nick Chen, ‘Pedro Almodóvar on Parallel Mothers: “Conservatives don’t like this movie” ’, Dazed, 28 January 2022, n.p., <https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/55335/1/pedro-almodovar-parallel-mothers-penelope-cruz-politics-spain-franco-film> (accessed 28 April 2022).
28 Robin Wallis, ‘Almodóvar’s “Madres paralelas”: New Tactic, Same Strategy’, Bulletin of Advanced Spanish, 5:2 (2021–2022), n.p.; available online at <https://bulletinofadvancedspanish.com/almodovars-madres-paralelas-new-tactic-same-strategy> (accessed 27 April 2022).
29 Juan Orellana, ‘Madres paralelas’, ACEPRENSA, 6 October 2021, n.p., <https://www.aceprensa.com/resenas-cine-series/madres-paralelas/> (accessed 27 April 2022).
30 Carlos Boyero, ‘Madres paralelas, de Pedro Almodóvar: la maternidad y no sé cuántas cosas más’, El País, 7 October 2021, n.p.; available online at <https://elpais.com/cultura/2021-10-07/madres-paralelas-de-pedro-almodovar-la-maternidad-y-no-se-cuantas-cosas-mas.html?event=fa&event_log=fa&prod=REGCRARTCULT&o=cerrcult> (accessed 13 May 2022).
31 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Parallel Mothers Review – Almodóvar Delivers an Emotional Bundle of Joy’, The Guardian, 27 January 2022, n.p.; available online at <https://theguardian.com/film/2022/jan/27/parallel-mothers-review-pedro-almodovar> (accessed 27 April 2022).
32 Carla Marcantonio, ‘Digging Up the Future: Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers’, Film Quarterly, 75:3 (2022), 38–45 (p. 43).
33 Anon., ‘Parallel Mothers, a Film by Pedro Almodóvar. Press Notes’ (supplied to the author by Pathé Productions).
34 Marcantonio, ‘Digging Up the Future’, 38.
35 The film opens with the screen text ‘Invierno 2016’ and the attentive viewer can build a timeline through Anita’s birthdate on her gravestone, the dates provided on the DNA test result letters and mentions of the month in which the exhumation will shortly take place, July 2019.
36 My language here deliberately invokes Kathryn Bond Stockton’s seminal work The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2009).
37 See Laura Gómez Vaquero, ‘Hacer visible el trauma: la invocación de la memoria en la producción documental desde los años setenta en España’, Secuencias, 30 (2016), n.p., <https://revistas.uam.es/secuencias/article/view/4025> (accessed 27 April 2022).
38 Marita Sturken, ‘The Image As Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory’, in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1999), 178–95 (p. 178).
39 Patricia R. Zimmerman, ‘The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings’, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishikuza & Patricia R. Zimmerman (London: Univ. of California Press, 2007), 1–28 (p. 1).
40 See Ariella Azouley, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali & Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008 [1st Hebrew ed. 2006]), 106.
41 José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2007), 108.
42 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 155–56.
43 Patty Keller, ‘Capturing Death: Photography, Performance, and Bearing Witness’, in Rite, Flesh and Stone. The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture: ed. Antonio Córdoba & Daniel García-Donoso (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2021), 143–68 (p. 145).
44 David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 96.
45 Andrew Hoskins, ‘Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn’, in Transcultural Memory, ed. Richard Crownshaw, Parallax, 17:4 (2011), 19–31 (p. 24).
46 Martine Beugnet, ‘Touch and See? Regarding Images in the Era of the Interface’, in Ubiquitous Visuality: Towards a Pragmatics of Visual Experience, ed. Catherine Bernard & Clémence Folléa, InMedia. The French Journal of Media Studies, 8:1 (2020), [1–19] [p. 7], <https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/2102> (accessed 11 October 2023).
47 Beugnet, ‘Touch and See?’, [8].
48 Emanuelle André, ‘Seeing through the Fingertips’, in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2017), 273–87 (p. 273).
49 Azouley, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Mazali & Danieli, 130; original emphasis.
50 Patricia M. Keller, Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016), 13.
51 Nicole Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory and Rewriting Spain’s Past (New York: Columbia U. P., 2022), 54.
52 Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories, 6.
53 María Delgado, ‘Until We Resolve the Issues of the Country’s Mass Graves’, Sight and Sound, 32 (2022), 38–47 (p. 42).
54 Renshaw, Exhuming Loss, 156.
55 Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories, 2.
56 See Gómez Vaquero, ‘Hacer visible el trauma’, n.p.
57 Renshaw, Exhuming Loss, 180–92.
58 With thanks to the anonymous peer reviewer who included this observation in their feedback.
59 Duncan Wheeler, ‘(Dis)Locating Spain: Performance Intertextualities in Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre’, JCMS. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58:1 (2018), 91–117 (p. 107).
60 Wheeler, ‘(Dis)Locating Spain’, 116.
61 Marina Díaz López, ‘El Deseo’s “Itinerary”: Almodóvar and the Spanish Film Industry’, in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. D’Lugo & Vernon, 107–28 (p. 109).
62 Anthony Lane, ‘Cradles and Graves in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers’, The New Yorker, 24 December 2021, n.p.; available online at <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/cradles-and-graves-in-pedro-almodovars-parallel-mothers> (accessed 27 April 2022).
63 See Josetxo Cerdán & Miguel Fernández Labayen, ‘Almodóvar and Spanish Patterns of Film Reception’, in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. D’Lugo & Vernon, 129–52.
64 Eduardo Galeano, Patas arriba: la escuela del mundo al revés (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2009), 216.
65 Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories, 82.
66 Beugnet, ‘Touch and See?’, [9].
67 Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2022), 90.
68 Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, 17.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.