Screening the past: the Spanish Dictatorship in two recent films

Historical memory is one of the dominant themes of Spanish cinema. This course will study two highly successful 21st-century films that take novel approaches in their representation of Spain’s conflictive recent past.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) combines a historical narrative of the small pockets of resistance that remained in the aftermath of the civil war with a Hollywood-style fantasy narrative. It was directed by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and the film is aimed both at local audiences familiar with the historical context and global audiences who may have little or no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War.

Marshland (2014) is a crime thriller that takes place in 1980, during the transition to democracy. This film takes a more straight-forward realist approach to representing the past than Pan’s Labyrinth, but its style and location in the Doñana marshes are reminiscent of US Southern gothic noir.

We will discuss the historical contexts represented in both films and study how their aesthetic approaches affect their representation of the past.