The Poet’s Archive That Speaks the Truth: Lorca’s Audiovisual Discovery at the Menéndez Pidal Foundation

Abstract

The recent discovery made by filmmaker Manuel Menchón—found while researching for his documentary La voz quebrada in the Menéndez Pidal family archive: previously unseen footage of Federico García Lorca waving from a car in 1932, on his way to Berlanga de Duero, where La Barraca would perform La vida es sueño—constitutes an event of historical and epistemological significance. It is not merely a matter of adding one more document to Lorca’s iconography; it is a call to interrogate the very nature of the archive in relation to memory, disappearance, and the mechanisms of silencing that have shaped Lorca’s reception for almost a century.

This article proposes a reading of the discovery through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s theory of the archive as formulated in Mal d’archive (1995), in which the archive is not a neutral repository of information but a structure of power that produces, preserves, organises, and simultaneously destroys. The recovery of this footage—together with the technical restoration of other known films of La Barraca—offers a fertile ground for examining how the emergence of a forgotten document can alter the regime of visibility that has governed a historical figure whose life and death were marked by political and sexual repression.

Lorca’s appearance in motion—smiling, alive, on his way to a democratizing cultural project—creates tension with narratives that have fixed him exclusively within his tragic fate or the static image of the martyred poet. This article analyses how the new audiovisual material contributes not only to a documentary expansion but also to an ethical reconfiguration of the archive, allowing us to question the historical silences surrounding his homosexuality, his murder, and the politics of disappearance that turned him into a symbol of a fractured Spain.