Remembering attitudes in the fiction movies of Carlos Saura over the Late Francoism and Spanish Transition: from the active memory of Blindfolded Eyes (1978) to the passive memory of Sweet Hours (1982)

Abstract

This paper discusses the flashback, mental image and metalepsis in two essential feature films belonging to the memorial season that the filmmaker Carlos Saura undertakes over Late Francoism and, above all, Spanish Transition: Blindfolded Eyes (1978) and Sweet Hours (1982). Although a highlighted metafictional dimension is underlay, the mnemonic discourse that grows out of both of these movies drives us to identify, respectively, two opposed constructs: active or rehabilitation memory, in the first one; passive or narcotizing memory, in the second one. The singularity of these two selected films allows us to analyze this pair of recalling attitudes, which are the same ones for categorizing the remaining six films of the aforementioned season.