Spectrality in Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga 2010): Queer aesthetics and its politics of memory

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre/Black Bread () is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral and aesthetic complexity that resists the politics of consensus and avoids essentialist views on queer identity, the Catalan resistance to the Francoist state and the treatment of the past as a mere ideological commodity in the contemporary politics of memory in Spain.