Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition by Sarah Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition by Sarah Thomas Elizabeth Scarlett Thomas, Sarah. Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition. U of Toronto P, 2019. 240 pp. The Spanish Transition into democracy was not only lengthy, but also plagued with contention. In fact, it has taken twice as long as the Transition itself to fathom how much went wrong with the process. Sarah Thomas discerns the presentiment of this being a fraught pathway in the films she studies in this excellent monograph. Although the adherence to representations of children in eight films of late Francoism through the democratic Transition (1970-83)—plus two others that form bookends—may seem like narrow terrain, the author connects it to a surprising number of contexts that make the whole substantially more than the sum of its parts. Meanwhile, the parts, in terms of the eight (ten, really) individual analyses, also attain an essential level of interest for scholars and students of Hispanic cinema. Other book-length studies of children in Spanish film by Sarah Wright (2013) and Erin K. Hogan (2018) with wider time frames still leave room for the concentrated and intense work with perspective, mise-en-scène, production, censorship, screening history, and reception provided by the current volume. Thomas's work is characterized by its deep analysis of film technique, close readings of [End Page 639] dialogue and plot developments (including shot-by-shot descriptions and plentiful screen shots), and a disposition toward far-reaching implications concerning historical memory far and near, recent and remote. Her gracefully shifting theoretical and critical orientation includes Philippe Ariès, Joanne Faulkner, Lisa Cartwright, Edward Soja, Britta Sjogren, Anne Higonnet, Arnold van Gennep, David Martin-Jones, D. N. Rodowick, and Kathryn Bond Stockton, as well as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. Thomas builds upon scholarly treatments by previous Spanish film scholars such as Marsha Kinder and Marvin D'Lugo. All of these are referenced in the most lucid and readable manner to ground the detections of liminality that unite the figures of children and the situation of turmoil and crisis in which they were created. The introduction identifies qualities of the long democratic Transition that guided the selection of films: "[T]hese films can be seen to negotiate a series of in-betweens, in an uncanny mirroring of their socio-political context of transition, flux, potential, uncertainty, and change" (9). The children who form subjects and objects of spectatorship create a third space that reveals the impossibility of a clean break with the past, or of a linear progression into a well-defined future adult state. The child remains within the adult, to some extent unknowable and incomprehensible. The stark starting point is a brief treatment of Uruguayan director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's cult horror flick ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976), in which children exact revenge for nebulous injustices committed against them as a group. We then sidestep into Cría cuervos (1976), directed by Carlos Saura during the dictator's final months and released soon after his death. Despite the accumulation of a ponderous critical corpus around this text, Thomas's precision and sensitivity to dynamics, gaze, and filmic language yield fresh insights. The multiple planes or layers of adult narration of childhood events are joined by camera sweeps that make Ana seem to grow sideways instead of up (18). The porous boundaries between Self and Other also characterize Saura's earlier La prima Angélica (1974), in which the imbrication of temporal frames and of child and adult selves (one of many startlingly adroit analogies employed by the critic) takes the form of an adult actor (José Luis López Vázquez) stepping into the role of himself as a boy in reveries of childhood during the Civil War—Vázquez's masterful acting replicates childhood experience filtered through an adult subject frame (44). In an earlier effort of Saura's, El jardín de la delicias, a family stages scenes from the protagonist's boyhood in order to jog his memory. If they are able to make his adult self collide...