Historical remembrance in the documentary interview of the Spanish transition

Abstract

The majority of the filmography composed by the full-length documentaries released during the Spanish Transition to democracy (1976-1982) focuses its attention on exhaustively revisiting recent History, especially the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. It also recurrently uses interviews as the epicentre of its discourse –its protagonists speak up as witnesses or narrators– with an aim to allow alternative voices to the official version of past events imposed during the decades of dictatorship. This body of films aims at, rather than recalling what happened, making a remembrance of it; building an account of it selectively and with an awareness of the present it tries to serve: the ongoing political, social, and cultural change. Using film textual analysis as a methodology, this paper aims at determining the contribution of documentary interviews in laying the foundation of the historical memory of the Spanish society that was experiencing a transition from dictatorship to democracy. In the report of results, three categories of documentaries, which can be distinguished depending the intentions behind the remembrance, are established: the “memory of the losers”, praising the victims of the war and openly questioning Franco’s figure and ideology; the “activist memories”, which propose vindications, allegations and complaints in the highly spirited debate on the fight for freedom during the Spanish Transition to democracy; or the “biographical memories”, which disclose the repression that had been piling up during years of dictatorship in contexts of intimacy, and which leads to extrapolate those experiences to the society of that time.