A work of death: martyrdom, myth and dead women in contemporary Spanish film

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the same moment that the Spanish government passed the Ley de memoria histórica, recognizing the rights of those persecuted during the Civil War and dictatorship, the Spanish Church escalated its own project of remembering, more than doubling between 2007 and 2013 the number of beatifications of clergy killed during the war. This discordant combination of circumstances has been reflected in cultural production where cinematic representations of the Civil War dead have often reanimated tropes of the Catholic popular imagination. While these films mark a broader cultural move away from the Church rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom and towards human rights frameworks as a way to deal with past traumas, their reliance on the culturally charged motifs of traditional hagiography has meant that contemporary martyr narratives remain entangled in older national myths. Taking examples from Emilio Martínez Lázaro's 2007 film Las 13 rosas, Mikel Rueda's Izarren Argia (2010) and Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida (2011), this article will demonstrate how the interpenetration of opposing discourses both undermines the films’ contribution to the project of historical memory while also offering powerful moments of reflection and empathy at the intersection of traditional martyrology and cosmopolitan memory practices.