The premiere of ‘Malnazidos’ on March 11, the film by Javier Ruiz Caldera, Alberto de Toro brings the Spanish Civil War back to the cinema, but this time with a different vision, one that uses the conflict to propose an unusual mixture of adventures, humor and terror, in which the soldiers nationals and republicans must unite against a common enemy, a zombie attack created by the Nazis as a weapon.
It is not the most orthodox approach to the conflict, but it is one of the most different, combining the fantasy genre with the war genre in our field, almost a taboo that was hardly touched by Vítor Erice and that later would change Guillermo del Toro in his horror and fantasy diptych in that convulsive stage of history, ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, both connected thematically and stylistically.
A problem of production or ideas
But, whether fantastic or not, Spanish cinema has not stopped locating its cinema in the Civil War, a topic that has haunted it for many decades and that each new related project seems to confirm. According to the Film Academy, such an obsession is not such, and it only coincides with a ridiculous percentage of the films produced. in recent years. Considering that hardly any science fiction, supernatural horror, or western movies are produced, such a statement and statistic may seem ironic.
The percentage of films of almost any genre compared to certain types of comedies or current social drama is lower, but if we consider the traditional green light of projects set in the Civil War versus genre pieces, it may not come out ahead by number, because some thriller projects are relatively cheap, but Few times do they have as much entity and budget item as a work located in 36.
This makes any statistical data misleading and of little use in unraveling the eternal question of Spanish cinema. Can industry overcome the Civil War? The answer may not be yes, but yes it should, since the information that supports the fascination with conflict is changing, there are more points of view and options the more you study. Perhaps the question should go more towards whether the War as a theme is exhausted, or if there are still angles to continue justifying constant films about it.
The War and the New Ways
If Spanish cinema has learned anything in recent times, it is to pose as entertainment movies that are not ashamed to bewith a certain commercial vocation but maintaining thematic and subtext coherence with the works of authorship that proliferated from the 1980s to the end of the 2000s. This has also brought with it a regeneration of the perspective with which issues such as the Civil War, many times integrating it as the theme of something larger, background, framework for action or simply a starting point.
Thus, a new era can be seen after ‘Balada triste de trompeta’ (2010), the film about murderous clowns by Álex de la Iglesia that opened with a Civil War scene to develop, despite its playful violence, his mimesis with Tod Browning and gothic horror, an accurate thesis on the two Spains that even today has not been overcome.
Agustí Villaronga also surprised with ‘Pa Negre’, an adaptation of two novels by Emili Teixidor that reflects the post-war period and the state of mind left by the civil war, a work with the entity of an author who has never conformed to the styles of others, who will complete with ‘Uncertain Glory’ 2017 , about a young republican officer, assigned to a temporarily inactive position in a desert wasteland, where he meets an enigmatic widow with whom he falls in love.
The spectacle of misfortune
The virtue of these new perspectives is that they tend to play less of the easy pamphlet, but instead focus on the horror of dehumanization and violence in war, showing a fairer vision of those involved, although they still do not tend to face the causes of the war, with the barbarities and the suffering, or the errors of each side, with the difficult line to cross of the tremendous repression of the vanquished. On that uncomfortable, but fair, edge of concord played ‘Ispansi’ (2011), a meeting between the two Spains in the Soviet Union, during World War II.
One of the most interesting approaches is ‘Silence in the snow’ (2011), about a Blue Division battalion that runs into a serial killer intrigue set in the aftermath of the Civil Wartaking the idea to historical fiction to the field of terror on occasions, and thus religious and political themes enter organically as pivots of the historical framework in which a mystery novel fiction is framed.
More focused on the conflict, ‘Gernika’ (2016) by Koldo Serra portrayed the tragedy from the perspective of a big Hollywood production, With a distance that allows knowing the factors at stake, despite taking some liberties, it works in a didactic way with an impressive production treatment that revalues it for the international public. Not strictly from the Civil War, but about one of the worst consequences was the correct miniseries ‘Stolen Children’ (2013), about the church stealing babieswhich reached the chilling figure of 300,000, a perimeter proposal, but which should open a new thematic path.
the eternal return
Some new works such as ‘The Sleeping Voice’ (2011) they returned to the old days of the Civil War cinema. Here, a young pregnant woman is tried and sentenced to death after childbirth. A return to drama and commonplaces with suffering, executions and tearful manipulation that brings back the ghosts of Spanish cinema’s obsession with telling the usual. From another angle, ‘The Infinite Trench’ (2011) told the story of moles with the leaden neatness of Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño, which if it weren’t for its actors would be little more than a telefilm, and revalues the most surreal and Kafkaesque ‘ The hidden man’ (1971).
Also academic and classic but with more humor and a better script was ‘While the war lasts’ (2019), a return to form by Alejandro Amenábar that explores the role of Miguel de Unamuno in the military uprising, the questioning of his initial position and his attempt to save the paths of reason that ended up scratching the same at different ideological extremes, because you know what was said, ‘death to intelligence’.
Faced with these turns relative to the usual, a curiosity appears like ‘Intemperie’ (2019), based on the novel by Jesús Carrasco, which tells the story of a shepherd who takes in a child who has run away from his house in the Dry and deep post-war Spain, in ua mixture of Western and road movie that shows a way forward. Also in the documentary genre ‘The Red Box’, he explains the curious history of Antoni Campañá’s hidden photographs, which portrayed how they took corpses out of churches, the tragedy of death and children’s war games and decided never to show them .
The future
With new points of view, such as the animation in ‘Josep’ (2020), about a concentration camp in the south of France, or the outlandish metaphor, in ‘Mothers parallels’ (2021), in which Almodóvar pays homage to those who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War with the subtlety of a jackhammerthe conflict seems to return to circulate on its steps, although the director from La Mancha affirmed that “the great Civil War movie is yet to be made”.
One of them may be the series by filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen that will fully enter the Spanish civil war for Movistar + and it will be shot in 2022, where he will seek to “create a fiction where we can move the viewer, but above all try to understand our characters, our past and present society (…) it will be the greatest challenge of our career”. They are also in production ‘The shrapnel’who will look for a “courageous and self-critical look” or ‘Command Slackers’ by Miquel Romans, which will tell the story of Neus Catalá, nurse and republican activist during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, being one of the Spanish survivors of the Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp for women.
There is also a miniseries on the life and work of Miguel Hernández, and there is speculation that ‘The Ministry of Time’ may return, one of the fictions that have managed to unite playful and didactic fiction without falling into empty frivolity. The Civil War is still going on and it doesn’t seem like it will stop for a while, but routes like ‘Malnazidos’ are options that we haven’t seen and whether there are zombies or not, it’s a path that many should take as an example.