Spectacle as spectralization, untimely timelessness: Marcelino pan y vino and mid-1950s' Francoism

Justin Crumbaugh ^[1]
1. [1] Mount Holyoke College
  
  Mount Holyoke College
  
  Town of South Hadley, Estados Unidos
Localización: Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, ISSN 1463-6204, ISSN-e 1469-9818, Vol. 15, Nº. 3, 2014, págs. 337-350
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- This article asserts an intrinsic link between the spectacle and the specter. More precisely, I argue that the spectacularization of some dead bodies spectralizes others and that the spectacle's pursuit of a sense of timelessness necessarily brings about its own shadowy untimeliness. The beloved classic Spanish film Marcelino pan y vino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955), when examined against the backdrop of the Franco regime's official ideology of the mid-1950s, shows how these connections play out in a specific context. The film, based on a popular short story by the militant Falangist José María Sánchez Silva, clearly attempts to promote National-Catholicism and the timelessness of the imagined España eterna characterized by essentialized traditional values exalted at the time by the regime. As we will see, the spectacle of the title character's glorified death in the film resonates with the contemporaneous enshrinement of the “caídos por Dios y España,” that is, the deceased from the winning side of the war. However, Marcelino's death also inevitably evokes the untimely specter of the vencidos, whose experience the regime erased from public discourse. Ostentatious visibility and concealment from sight are thus of a pair both on and off the screen. And disavowed past violence emerges in spectral form through a fraught temporality, an untimeliness that manifests itself in the film at both a thematic and formal level.