"Paseo por una guerra antigua" (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1948-49): a counter-memory of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

This article aims to prove to what point Paseo por una guerra antigua (1948-1949) Juan Antonio Bardem’s second year film project at the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas (IIEC) in which he shoots a young maimed veteran while walking through the ruins of Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria – constitutes an original attempt to dismantle the official version of the Spanish Civil War and to recover the memory of the defeated Republicans. Filming the ruins of Madrid’s campus in those years was a subversive act, since the regime had begun to rebuild it in order to erase all traces of a Republican Madrid and of the Civil War, giving the University’s area a whole new meaning. For this reason, in Paseo por una guerra antigua, Bardem tries to reclaim a space that, at the time, was becoming one of Franco’s Regime’s “spaces of remem­brance”. This film´s role is to document this space in order to immortalize these ruins that symbolize the Spanish Republic and Civil War, to preserve them of the symbolical death of reconstruction. Filming these ruins in 1948-1949 is equivalent to “materializing” the past, of bringing it back to the present post-war period, through a process which brings Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on History to mind, in order to propose an alternative vision of the Spanish Civil War. This vision is tinged with an intimate memory, since the film is a stroll not only through those ruins but also through the young maimed veteran’s memories. In short, Bardem proposes a counter-memory of the Civil War.