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Spanish Civil War Horror and Regional TraumaThe Politics of Painful Remembrance in Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles (Painless, 2012)

Spanish Civil War Horror and Regional TraumaThe Politics of Painful Remembrance in Juan Carlos... This article unpacks the cultural work that Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles, released in English as Painless, carries out in relation to Spain’s modern history and argues that the film’s painless children are an allegory of the country’s postdictatorship generations. The rendering of fascism as monstrous is less interesting than the connection of insensitivity to the Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and its suppression of painful memory. The fact that the children speak Catalan is a significant overlooked aspect, because Catalonia was the last region to succumb to Nationalist military forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and is known for its independentist fervor. A regionalist reading of the film does not simply connect the present and the past; it proposes that the children of the war mediate Spain’s current troubled relationship with historical trauma and act as an artistic response to centralist ideas of a unified and stable nation-state. Such a rethinking demonstrates that the horror genre continues to offer a language of anxiety capable of negotiating and contributing to debates around the importance of national accountability, war reparations, and the condemnation of genocide. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png English Language Notes Duke University Press

Spanish Civil War Horror and Regional TraumaThe Politics of Painful Remembrance in Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles (Painless, 2012)

Reyes, Xavier Aldana; Hurley, Kelly
English Language Notes , Volume 59 (2) – Oct 1, 2021
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References (11)

Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Regents of the University of Colorado
ISSN
0013-8282
eISSN
2573-3575
DOI
10.1215/00138282-9277238
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article unpacks the cultural work that Juan Carlos Medina’s Insensibles, released in English as Painless, carries out in relation to Spain’s modern history and argues that the film’s painless children are an allegory of the country’s postdictatorship generations. The rendering of fascism as monstrous is less interesting than the connection of insensitivity to the Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and its suppression of painful memory. The fact that the children speak Catalan is a significant overlooked aspect, because Catalonia was the last region to succumb to Nationalist military forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and is known for its independentist fervor. A regionalist reading of the film does not simply connect the present and the past; it proposes that the children of the war mediate Spain’s current troubled relationship with historical trauma and act as an artistic response to centralist ideas of a unified and stable nation-state. Such a rethinking demonstrates that the horror genre continues to offer a language of anxiety capable of negotiating and contributing to debates around the importance of national accountability, war reparations, and the condemnation of genocide.

Journal

English Language Notes – Duke University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2021

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