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Unveiling The Monster: Memory And Film In Post-Dictatorial Spain, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano

Self-Designed Majors Honors Papers

In 2007, the Spanish congress approved the Law of Historical Memory, recognizing a collective desire to exorcize the ghosts and monsters from its abject and repressed traumatic past. Spanish contemporary identities are still heavily impacted by the traumatic Civil War (1939) and the nearly forty-year long dictatorship (1939-1975) that marked most of its twentieth century’s history. This research focuses on a close reading of three films located within the aesthetic tradition of the Grotesque and the Gothic, and situated within the aftermath of the Civil War: El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973) by Victor Erice, …