Cuéntame cómo pasó/Tell me how it was : Narratives of memory and television drama in contemporary Spain

Spain’s silenced memories

The issue of memory in contemporary Spain is a fraught one. It regards the memory of the Civil War fought from 1936 to 1939, a violent conflict which in reality did not end in 1939. The ‘victory’ of the Nationalist forces resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship under Francisco Franco and his policy of extermination of all opposition continued in the early years of this regime, against anyone who was perceived as a supporter of the defeated Republicans and as such an enemy of Spain. The climate of fear that this policy created meant that the war was swiftly eradicated from popular discourse – by the victors who did not want to acknowledge the terror that maintained the fragile peace and by the Republicans whose fear kept them silent. It is estimated that as many as 150,000 people lost their lives during and after the conflict. ⁵ Until recently, this has not been recognised as genocide but Paul Preston’s (2012) book The Spanish Holocaust and a Spanish documentary that used the same title in its English version (The Spanish Holocaust/Les fosses del silenci. Dir. Monste Armengou Martín 2003) have gone some way to rectify this semantic inconsistency and raise the inevitable political and ethical questions in response. The dictatorship lasted for more than 45 years and when Franco died, he successfully positioned the monarch and leading political figures to initiate a transition to democracy which necessitated a rejection of the past, or at least a moving forward without looking back, a policy known as the pacto de olvido (pact of amnesia). It is with this double silencing that memory debates in Spain struggle to this day. Scholarly accounts of this contested memory interrogate the ubiquity of amnesia and the appropriateness of the term reminding us that what took place was a very deliberate effacement of the past in order to avoid its negative effects in the present (Juliá, 1999; Labanyi, 2007). For the purposes of this essay, I understand memory as something that has been distorted, if not totally silenced, and as pre-eminently an act that, while it refers always to the past, is contentious only because of its ongoing and troubled relationship to the present.

Although there is frequently an assumption that television encourages a passive mode of spectatorship with regard to memory, here its insistent ‘present-tense’ even as it depicts the past make it an ideal case study for an examination of active, dynamic and affective modes of memory making. Furthermore, its aesthetic properties are uniquely placed to elucidate the way in which memory is made present and visible within Spanish society today. Thus, the events being remembered are, here at least, given less priority than the memory processes revealed through these media. There is scope for a more nuanced look at their differences elsewhere, and I must recognise here that the extraneous and intermedial discourses that surround all of these texts and the histories that they attempt to bring to life further complicate these readings of them. Nonetheless, therein lies the richness of memory and these media.

The silence that has been constitutive of this period means that Historical Memory in Spain primarily figures as a discursive gap; hauntings, ghosts and wounds dominate the lexicon in academic and popular accounts of recent history and the struggle for recognition of past crimes is embedded within regional, national and familial identity politics (Tremlett, 2007). Any approach to mediated, cultural or collective memory is plagued by conceptual and methodological understandings of the terms. In Spain, these epistemological uncertainties are exacerbated by the contested politics of memory that are embedded in social practices, media discourse and political and judicial structures today. The term Historical Memory gives rise to some of the disputes of meaning that plague the debate. Among those relevant to this study, truth as an absolute and possible aim pervades the rhetoric involved with the process of the recovery of memory ⁶ and a side effect of this approach has been to imagine a scientific understanding of the past that considers fictional products as unworthy vehicles for the transmission of these memories and thereby of this history.

Notwithstanding such complications in the process of retrieving Historical Memory, it had already gained momentum in the 1990s and more officially in the 21st century through the efforts of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory. ⁷ Their aim is to discover the whereabouts of the victims killed by Franco’s Nationalist forces and those associated with them during the Spanish Civil war. The result of the Francoist victory and the subsequent 36 years of dictatorship was one of a deliberate refashioning of history, which included denial of the scale of the killings, the reasons for them and, as is approached by Rodríguez’ video, the whereabouts of the bodies. This erasure of a sector of the population from the history of the country was not addressed when the dictator died and thanks to a peaceful transition, democracy was established. In 2007, the Spanish government passed legislation under increased pressure from the organisations that were already carrying out exhumations of victims’ bodies. This law, popularly known as the law for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, was criticised for its emphasis on the private nature of memory. What this grassroots popular movement has demonstrated is that the private and the public are inseparable, particularly in cases where the public authority has inflicted such violence on so many families. The two spheres in Spain are firmly enmeshed, and these domestic audio-visual products sit at the interstices where the public and the private interact and renegotiate their meanings.

For the purposes of my argument here, it is worth underlining what my understanding of these screen media’s role in collective memory might be. Paul Ricoeur’s (2010) investigation into memory and imagination reminds us that

we have no other resource, concerning our reference to the past, except memory itself […] To put it bluntly we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it. (p. 21)

Testimony, videos and television reconstructions of a certain period of history work through different versions of this history, their modes of circulation and the potential for revision, reviewing, reinterpretation and debate that they give rise to draws private memories into the public sphere and engages with the manipulation of memory in the past and the present. Their formal techniques admit ambiguity, interpretation and present a version of dynamic memory that opens up, rather than foreclosing, a space for a narrative of memory in the public and popular sphere.

Unreflective representations do not tackle the pressing debates surrounding memory today as Labanyi (2008) points out

the key issue at stake is that memory of the violence of the civil war and dictatorship has been forced to remain a private matter until very recently, thanks to repression under the dictatorship and a lack of interested interlocutors at the time of the transition. (p. 120)

I look at the way in which audio-visual witnessing articulates an alternative response to memory that positions these productions as active participants in the creation of a narrative and its contestation in the present, rather than as agents of reconstruction of the past, as Andreas Huyssen (1995) makes clear:

The mode of memory is always recherché rather than recuperation. The temporal status of any act of memory is always the present and not, as some naïve epistemology might have it, the past itself, even though all memory in some eradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience. It is this tenuous fissure between past and present that constitutes memory, making it powerfully alive and distinct from the archive or any other mere system of storage and retrieval. (p. 3)

The priority of this is communication, dissemination of these memories, and for this reason at the site of exhumations attempts have been made to record testimonies, not just recollections but also responses from family members who have no direct recollection of events. The collection and recording of this material forms part of a project undertaken by CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas/The Higher Council of Scientific Research), focussed on the ‘politics of remembrance’. As such, it participates in the creation of an academic discourse surrounding the exhumations at the same time as it seeks to comment on the process in which it is involved. ⁸

From testimony to television

These audio-visual testimonies perform the tensions that subtend the mediation of contested memories in Spain. For the political import of these memories to be understood then, they must be disseminated in public. The difficulty of witnessing is that even within families the process of this dissemination or transmission was disrupted by fear. This rupture makes for an effective mode of performance and, more importantly, in this form channels the affective and imaginative processes of memory – postmemory – that enlivens a ‘living connection’ to them (Hirsch, 2008: 104). Some of these video testimonies are available through Vimeo, on a channel established by the research team working at these exhumations. ⁹ One of these is the recorded testimony of Fausto Canales, the son of a victim of the Falange (the fascists) whose father was shot when Fausto was 2 years old. In keeping with Jo Labanyi’s (2010) analysis of the use of testimony to address the trauma of the Civil War, its use here is

not the legal functioning of establishing what happened (though that has to take place too), but the insight they give us into emotional attitudes towards the past in the present time of the speaker. Only if this is borne in mind can testimonies serve not only to recognize past injustices but also to work for a future that is not determined by them. (p. 193)

For most of the recording, Fausto Canales studiously avoids looking directly at the camera, and presumably the interviewer who serves as interlocutor, looking down and to the side as he recounts these horrific events. The horror of a small boy bearing witness to his father’s disappearance in such violent circumstances is intensified by the flat, diffuse aesthetic of the grey haired adult who recounts what his childhood self saw. During this testimony, Fausto Canales recognises his own partiality, and the limited memories of a 2-year-old child. He acknowledges his inevitable subjective desire to understand what it is that he believes he remembers, and describes his attempts to gather this information from his mother saying that he implored his mother ‘madre, cuéntame lo que pasó/mother tell me what happened’, an insistence on bringing to light the narrative of memory. These are narratives of memory that, because of the law’s emphasis on the private and domestic nature of recollection, are navigated and discussed within popular culture. The perceived ‘ordinariness’ of the situation and its domesticity work to establish an emotional connection to the events being described, an empathetic tendency that is also operational in our relationship with television texts.

Cuéntame cómo pasó/Tell me how it was is a long-running and incredibly popular drama series broadcast on the state-owned main television channel in Spain (TVE1). It is a family melodrama, centred on the Alcantará family who live in a working class neighbourhood in Madrid, San Genaro, and it runs for 70 minutes an episode. It recreates a recent and difficult period in Spain’s history, the first series beginning in 1969 and the most recent episodes focussing on 1981. Viewing figures attest to its popularity; by the time the 13th series aired, 63 percent of Spain’s population had seen at least 1 minute of the show. It regularly reaches at least 30 percent of the market share; its 3rd episode of the 1st series achieved a 33 percent share of the audience (there were four national channels competing for this audience as well as the autonomous community channels). The first episode of this most recent series, broadcast in 2013, previewed at the San Sebastián film festival, firmly establishing its cultural capital and the role of television in National celebrity culture; its cast were the stars of the red carpet. In the summer of 2012, an excerpt from the first series of the show made it into the London Olympics’ opening ceremony, the only non-English-language television production to feature in a montage of nostalgic family-oriented shows. For the purposes of this article, I look at the first two series of the programme, set from 1969 to 1970. I attend to the ways in which the workings of this series are informed by existing work done on television and cultural memory but also how it diverges from these accounts because of the specificities of its national origin. I also investigate how popular memory might be created and sustained by media texts, and how this text positioned itself in its early years as negotiating, performing and remediating the tensions of popular cultural memory within Spain.

The series directly engages with memory and narrative, and with the material objects of memory that are involved in its dynamic construction, the television set itself being one of these. The series begins in 1969 and depicts the daily life of the fictional Alcantará family. The family live in Madrid, the parents Antonio (Imanol Arias) and Mercedes (Ana Duato), their three children Toni (Pablo Rivero), Inés (Irene Visedo) and Carlos (Ricardo Gómez) and Mercedes’ mother, Herminia (played by Maria Galiano who played the teacher in my opening example) are at the centre of the narrative with various friends and neighbours working to extend the family drama into the close-knit community in which they live. Its domesticity is central to what might be considered its conservative appeal, but it is also the central means by which we are privy to the everyday memory-making that was dependent on the media practices of the time for its formation.

In the first episode, El retorno del Fugitivo, first broadcast on 13 September 2001, the family receives delivery of a television set, which takes pride of place in the family living/dining room. The television broadcasts that are watched by the family each meal time (twice a day as the family return home for lunch and the siesta in the middle of the working day) prompt conversations between the three generations of the Alcantára family and are an attempt to engage with the tricky problems of creating a narrative of memory under such strict ideological conditions and still reflect the changing social reality of a small part of Spain at the time. The reality of the public sphere’s influence in the private context was in large part through strictly controlled Francoist media broadcasts, although the scarcity of archival programmes makes it hard to conduct a thorough survey of what was actually screened during the period. Such broadcasts’ positioning in these episodes usually provokes a debate. The older two of the three children, Toni and Inés, are both frustrated by the conservative politics of the Franco regime, while the older generations are determined to maintain the status quo, the consequence of a fear which is shown to be rooted in memory of past atrocities metered out to dissenters. In fact, in these first two series, there is contemporary footage on more than one occasion of police brutality at the University in Madrid. Toni is the first member of the family to attend University and as such these incidents are brought into the family and into the home as they affect him. He is beaten on more than one occasion and gains a police record for his political activity, which bars him from possessing a passport and consequently from International travel.

In its familial domestic setting, Cuéntame relies heavily on creating a separation between the historical events that are depicted on the newly acquired television set and the family’s lived experience of them. It cleverly stages the essential temporal difference between the ‘then’ of the events that we watch and the ‘now’ of the viewing time by suggesting that the political situation is vastly changed but that the struggles of everyday life and the family are not so different. In this way, the mnemonic potential of television is intensified by its reassuring connection to a shared past in which the less seemly elements are relegated to a public sphere that does not contaminate the more ‘important’ human relationships which endure today – within the home and around the television set. The generational element of memory – another means by which continuity is ensured and a common trait of all memory narratives in Spain – is addressed through this intimate domestic mode of address, specific to television. Indeed, the veracity of this scenario and its replication in the contemporary consumption of this series adds to this feeling of proximity to the lives and emotions of these characters. Domesticity is central to the way in which memory is approached by the series as both intensely private and yet mediated by the television that becomes the nexus of the personal and the public in terms of the family’s relationship to wider political issues, mirroring the imbrication of the personal and the political which has forced the issue of memory narratives to the fore in Spain. Outside the immediate domestic setting of the family, further communities are established by Cuéntame that enable these networks of memory to widen their scope while remaining firmly within the confines of San Genaro – the suburb of Madrid in which it takes place. One example of these other community spaces that establish intimate relationships would be the bar, a site of male community which also uses the television as the source of information, contention and frequently provocation but returns to football when disagreements over politics are raised, or more frequently when the grises (Franco’s police force) enter the bar. Such incidents refract the broader tensions of society then (and the conflict over memory now) by performing the enforced silences and returning to the community cohesion (albeit with smaller partisan elements) brought by a football match or occasionally a bullfight selectively referring to the continuities of cultural distinction reiterated by television’s role in their dissemination.

In its structure as long-running series, Cuéntame is involved in a constant process of renegotiation of the meanings of events that it depicts. The discrete events and stories depicted in each episode may be resolved on the micro-level of events within the family or the barrio/neighbourhood but the open-ended nature of television drama means that this is a work in progress. This has much in common with Rigney and Erll’s (2009) version of ‘dynamic memory’: They argue that in the development of media studies and memory studies

one can note a shift to understanding cultural memory in more dynamic terms: as an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to reconfigure their relationship to the past and hence reposition themselves in relation to established and emergent memory sites. (p. 3)

This developing theory of a dynamic mode of memory is configured in part as a removal from the sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) that have dominated thinking in memory studies.

The emphasis of the wider process of recuperation in Spain has been on the way in which family histories and personal losses must be acknowledged in the public sphere, revisiting the history and memory of the nation and the way in which it is appropriated and understood. The television series contributes to this process in complicated but significant ways: it locates the complex process of narrating memory within the domestic sphere and situates the media, particularly television, as a transitional device which links private and public space, and it emphasises the emotional import of these memories and the generational transmission of them, highlighting the blockage in the nation’s memory as one which was reproduced within the home through fear and an unwillingness to relive endlessly a painful past. In such ways, it performs ‘dynamic memory’ in this negotiation, participating in the process of memory rather than reconstructing an established version of history. In Spain, in contrast to other European nations with recent authoritarian pasts, there are few public monuments, commemorations or official sites of remembrance. Tobias Ebbrecht (2007) acknowledges the role of television in Germany as an extension of an existing memorial culture claiming that ‘it works as an archive of collective memory and, at the same time, takes part in the construction of a national culture of public memory’ (p. 221). This series might be one element of this process in Spain; it performs the gaps, fissures and disjunctures that are part of forming collective memory in a scenario that has so many competing voices and claims. I argue that it might be considered as a text, which, in its popular appeal and affective import in the domestic space, demonstrates the workings of memory in the popular and public sphere. It articulates to wider debates in memory studies in Spain and sheds light on one way in which the negotiation of memory takes place in the media.

This analysis of textual aspects of the drama series Cuéntame como pasó looks to two major issues of memory that were highlighted by ¿Hasta cuándo? and the testimonial video of Fausto Canales: the construction of a narrative of memory, that is aided by the performative and affective dimension of the moving image, and the way in which premediation and remediation, as features of contemporary media, work to establish a legitimate site of memory in Spain’s televisual culture. If we are to appreciate the political significance of past events, then we must be made aware of their continued political effects. The means by which we are given access to these images, their mediation, is crucial to the import that they have in the present. This television series draws on the intimate and domestic structure of television viewing to construct these stories as fractured, interrupted and potentially misleading through recourse to the silence enforced during the regime. They function not as reconstruction but as active engagement with the process of remembering and forgetting, a process that implicates television as a further actor in the creation of these memories, and in their self-reflexive examination and remediation here (Hoskins, 2001).

The construction of a narrative about a past surrounded in silence is foregrounded in several of the episodes. In this example, taken from Episode 40 (series two) Primeras tardes con Teresa broadcast on 7 November 2002, Antonio, the patriarch, has a late-night discussion with his mother about why he left the village, a departure that for her constitutes abandonment, and moved to Madrid. The pueblo/village has, until this point, been an invisible site. It lies beyond the confines of the small neighbourhood in which the series is set and marks a spatial and temporal separation that relegates the events of the Civil War to another location, but in its persistent presence in the discourse of the family, it always threatens to impinge on the present. It is a space that seems irrelevant to the lives of the younger members of the family (they do not visit until the third series), and yet, it is they who are curious about it and about what went on there. In the second series, Antonio’s mother has come to Madrid temporarily because she is ill and needs to visit doctors in the capital. The anxieties surrounding the rapidly changing social structure in Spain are foregrounded by the repeated dichotomy between city and village. This dichotomy is staged as a temporal division too; the stasis of the village is linked to the stranglehold of memory and its melancholic aspect, in its Freudian sense, as being internalised but never properly mourned. Antonio’s mother, Pura, tries to explain this to her son. He has effaced the memory of his father’s murder but his mother attempts to remind him that it needs to be spoken about if it is to be properly assimilated. The negotiation of difficult memories is performed through this resistance to their transmission through the family from one generation to the next.

This incident is framed as a familial rapprochement, as with so many other events in the drama making the public events private, keeping them within the sphere of the family setting to which we have become accustomed. It is with some pain that Pura begins to talk about her husband Antonio’s father

Your father said that before we die we should make peace with everyone. […] When they came to the village I told him to hide but he said ‘what for? I haven’t done anything wrong’.

Antonio replies, ‘Leave the memories alone mother, they’re too sad’. ¹⁰ The generational gap that played out in Fausto Canales’ testimonial video is echoed here. This is represented as a rejection of the past because it has nothing to give to the present or presumably the future. The conversation continues with his mother demanding that they talk, and Antonio resisting, she persists saying ‘all of these years without talking’. ¹¹ This, like the whole series, is an eminently domestic scene. Paul Julian Smith (2004) claims that in this domesticity lies the emotional appeal of the series. It reflects a reality, when the conversations turn to memory that Lorraine Ryan (2009) recognises, ‘As the republican memory of the Civil War was not permissible in the public sphere, it remained confined to the domestic sphere for the duration of the Franco dictatorship’ (p.120).

The perceived issue with the domesticity of Cuéntame is that with the taint of nostalgia comes an attempt to redeem the crimes of the past, that the collusion of large sectors of society with the regime’s crimes is passed off as ignorance, that these are hard working families who were too frightened to resist, or were unaware of the activities of the dictatorship. There is an alternative reading: that the political can begin in the private sphere, that the material traces of domestic life and the sensual memories of that life are significant because that is for many where the negotiation of their role and their past took place. Television, as Amy Holdsworth proposes, intensifies this emotional and sensual relationship with memory that in this case, rather than constructing a fondly remembered past, seeks to engage with the possibility that these events need to be remembered.

The series has attracted attention for its construction of a narrative that paints the latter years of dictatorship as a time of community cohesion, a developing middle class and Spaniards overcoming the minor adversities of a Catholic dictatorship in their daily lives where the minutiae of family life were more pressing to them than the repressive politics of their rulers. Such readings argue that the drama simply reproduces the function of television as it existed during the dictatorship reinforcing the ‘fascist obsession with family and nation and the fuzzy boundary between the two’ (Pavlovic, 2011: 84). The series integrates television footage from the era that it depicts, mining the TVE archives and some foreign sources, the most problematic of these perhaps being the inclusion of the NO-DO Francoist news footage. The integration of archive footage, it has been claimed, falsely constructs a national past within a coherent media framework in which television was the creator and mediator of the original events and must now be employed in their remediation as a legitimate creator of memories (Rueda Laffond, 2011). Similarly, the selection of material included and the positioning of Spain within a global news media framework is criticised for its imaginative emphasis on the reach of international news within Spain and its attempts to retrospectively legitimise Spain’s place on the world stage, comparing the student unrest in Paris in 1968 for example with the brutal treatment of a scant number of student demonstrators in Madrid by the notorious Francoist police force los grises (López, 2007). On the other hand and in line with my analysis here, Paul Julian Smith (2012) argues for more sustained attention to be paid to this series, and Spanish television more generally, not only for its importance within cultural studies (a discipline slow to develop in Hispanic studies) but also because in a memory obsessed moment then it might yield rewards for those of us interested in the presence of historical memory in the popular and public sphere: ‘popular narratives, in print and television, offer similar problems, and opportunities, to the scholar interested in exploring the historiography of everyday life at a time of radical change’ (p. 23). Those who read the series as little more than a nostalgic trip down memory lane point out its revisionist tendencies and believe these early episodes are simply another means by a reactionary Television channel to propagate the myth of Spain’s peaceful transition (Estrada, 2004).

The silence and now the screening of memory has to be understood not just as the consequence of the terror of the Civil War and the brutal actions of the subsequent dictatorship, nor as simply the inevitable side effect of the pact of amnesia that was established in order to rebury that terror and remove the threat of another Civil War. We also need to understand that long period of dictatorship in terms of the processes of remembering and forgetting that were active at the time, looking to the ways in which history was made visible or occluded during the long 70 years in which this silence reigned. We can do this through the cultural products of the time, and in this case, approach their effect on the present precisely through the remediation of those products in a contemporary television drama. Criticism of this revisiting of media objects centres on an apparently unreflective attitude towards them. Resina’s (2010) attitude to this, for instance, is pessimistic, arguing that media culture does nothing to engage with the shape of the past and its effects in our present and future: ‘Our relation to the past has become spectatorial, as if mediated witnessing of the atrocities and injustices of previous generations happened in a different moral planet and could not claim our moral response to the lived present’ (pp. 225–226).

Television drama might be criticised for hiding the ghosts that should be made visible, reformulating the past through its domestic intrigue, comfortable outlook and focus on the national as a unifying focus of identity that goes some way to conceal the fissures that exist between the various factions whose memories are still contested. However, this focus on dynamism, on remembering and forgetting, and on premediation and remediation points to an alternative view, one which raises questions of the specificities of this television text to media memory in Spain. These tensions reflect a problematic relationship between televisual and other representations of memory in this specific national context. The question of how to ethically and adequately represent history – and this is a history that I understand here to be inextricably linked to official and popular memories of it – is unavoidably tethered to affiliations and identifications that, when the surface is scratched, return to the entrenched divisions of the Civil War. The amnesiac practices first instigated to avoid the divisive effect of these memories result in the stasis that is inevitable when the same arguments are rehearsed in the media. Scepticism towards the serious study of television in these cases is not peculiar to Spain and seems to be noticeably problematic in post-authoritarian societies as Anikó Imre (2013) suggests,

because it muddles the differences between the two kinds of practices and corresponding research approaches lined up behind ‘memory’ and ‘history’ and because there seems to be more at stake than elsewhere in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media. (p. 66)

I would argue that there are several reasons why television and its remedial operation here is a legitimate object of study in terms of the memory debate taking place in Spain. The result of the suppression of memory has been a lack of a means by which to access it; there are insufficient memorials and the archive has been destroyed. In their place, the affective, imaginative and possibly performative facets of memory seem to be the features that are not only accessed but also contextualised by this remediation. This is my argument for noting the equivalence between some apparently disparate media products here, one which appeals to theories of memory and media to acknowledge the significance of their ability to mesh private and public recollection. This alters the way in which we read this remediated footage within Cuéntame. The piecing together of memory materials appeals to an emotional and imaginative attachment to this past that I have already hinted at, but it is more than this; the place of the media is intimately connected to the domestic sphere and the initial consumption of these remediated images, and in the case of this series their disputed meanings are not only experienced through the content of the images but also through the lived experience of the family, and the domestic setting of the television viewing:

Television is understood not as a box in the corner of a room but embedded within the sensual aspects of the domestic environment, producing memories which are forged from a network of sense impressions and allowing television to be seen within a network of memories. (Holdsworth, 2011: 7)

The high production values that are part and parcel of the series also strengthen this affective link with the past that works on the level of the everyday and the intimate. For example, the family’s routine frequently sees them eating breakfast together (in the kitchen) and dinner together in front of the television. The rituals of the home and meal times are an affective link to the present and an important marker of this continuity; meal times are still a family event in many Spanish homes, and this series airs at dinner time on a Thursday.

The deciphering of the past through material memories that the work of dynamic memory entails as well as this emotional engagement with the past is suggested by the examination of photographs in the title sequence, an activity marked as taking place in the present by the use of the computer scanner to re-order and re-imagine the family album. The editing process, the reviewing suggested by the playing of sections that have appeared in previous episodes during this title sequence, alerts us to the revision at work, a double-edged sword as it grants an alternative version of the past that is inevitably partial, overlaid with the situation in the present from which we recall it. The archive footage is seamlessly interspersed with pictures of the actors playing the parts of their respective characters and, at the beginning of most episodes, further archive footage opens the episode usually making reference to the main themes of the piece, or situating the episode seasonally or historically, emphasising the temporal progression of the episodes through the yearly cycle, seasonal markers emphasising continuity and progress. It thus reminds us of their status as representations of a lived past, but a past which exerts a strong hold on the present.

Although archival sources used within the series often depict newsworthy political events taking place in Spain, during this time there is also a marked emphasis on the daily lives of Spaniards, the Christmas parades in Madrid, the January sales, Spain’s Eurovision win and the development of Spain as an important European tourist destination. The formal properties encourage the connections between the public and the private: ‘the camerawork suggests that such individual and private media narratives must be placed in a collective or public context’ (Smith, 2006: 21).

The series approaches memory as it is being created, offering a mnemonic device that is revealed as inconsistent, in the process of creation, the subject of contestation. Its popularity suggests that this is not a process that remains confined to the domestic sphere. Indeed, television’s developing modes of circulation and increased Internet presence attest to its ability to provoke debate and extend the argument on memory, media and remediation which there is not space to address here but which must be a fruitful avenue for further investigation. Ricoeur (2010) claims that what distinguishes memory from history is the way in which we forge a narrative of memory that is meaningful for us and depends on our affective relationships with the past in the present. Cuéntame, the short Internet video starring Almodóvar and the testimonial videos of Republican family members, creates an emotional space for memory and the affective intensity of memory narratives which are ideally placed on the domestic small-screen, the computer or the television. ¹² Remediation is always an attempt at reconnection – of past media forms with those in the present – and re-contextualisation and as such presents a partial view of history, not a new finding with regard to television and its remediation of its own past (Spigel, 1995).

Memory is concerned with making things present. Of course, it entails a remembering of a contentious and violent national past in the case of Spain, but we must also understand it as an emotive, personal and familial process. Rather than empty these audio-visual memories of political and ethical significance when we recognise this fact, we actually heighten it; the impact of memory is acutely felt in the present through popular cultural products and the graveside recordings that are disseminated through Internet video channels. These media products go some way to address the discursive gap, and foreground an emotional relationship with the images that fill the lacunae left by years of repression, acknowledging and exploring the lack of narrative that seems to be part of the haunting of Spain. As an article in a leading Spanish newspaper reported in 2003 on the 28th anniversary of Franco’s death, the series, with all its inconsistencies and nostalgic tendencies, nonetheless addresses memory in a popular form:

In a country which has had its personal memory stolen, Cuéntame gives back, all be it in scraps of dignity, the reflection of the fight against the longest and most anachronistic regime of the twentieth century in western Europe. (Monedero, 2003) ¹³