The case study for this session is the documentary The Silence of Others (Spain, 2018), directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar and produced by Pedro Almodóvar, which reveals the struggle of survivors and family members of victims of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship as they organize a groundbreaking international lawsuit to receive restorative justice.
The session is structured in a top-down circular fashion, beginning with the social and legal contexts surrounding the reception of the film and moving on to a discussion of the specific rhetorical strategies employed in its creation, the impact that the emotional architecture of the film may have on audiences, and whether this impact may produce forms of pro-social response. Each presentation will last 15 minutes.
In “Carracedo and Bahar’s Labors of Law: The Silence of Others (2018) and Spanish Documentary beyond ‘Historical Memory’” Gina Herrmann, contextualizes the work of Carracedo and Bahar by offering an account of how twenty-first century Spanish and Catalan documentary and television journalism have played an important role in the media-based dissemination of the history of the criminality of the Franco dictatorship and its many human rights abuses. The 2018 The Silence of Others by Carracedo and Bahar invites spectators who contemplated issues of the apparent non-justiciability of Spain’s totalitarian past to consider anew the judicial function of documentary film in a new phase in what is now a nearly two-decade long cultural and historical phenomenon of multiform confrontations with Spain’s prolonged dirty war. Herrmann reconsiders the relationship between judicial redress and documentary film’s stretch towards justice. Carracedo and Bahar trace precisely a real judicial process (as fraught, frustrated, and belabored as that case might be) that the previous films and programs could logically only imagine as beyond the realm of the possible. This paper thus compares the judicial unconscious of Spanish and Catalan documentary of the early 2000s with the representation of the judicial political drama playing out today between Spain and Argentina as survivors and relatives of victims of Franco regime gather forces to bring forth a lawsuit in Argentina.
“The Act of Listening: Documenting Political Violence in The Silence of Others” by Scott Boehm, looks at Carracedo and Bahar’s documentary as the cinematic portrait of the first attempt to prosecute the crimes committed by the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. The nature and extent of Francoist repression is relatively unknown outside of Spain. In this regard, The Silence of Others, which enjoyed an unprecedented theatrical success for a Spanish documentary film, complements the work of international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in raising global awareness about Spanish political violence. Drawing comparisons with similar documentaries related to the silenced Indonesian and Chilean genocides, Boehm discusses how The Silence of Others dramatizes the traumatic wounds related to this type of violence that have been denied public recognition for decades in Spain. Paying close attention to the use of silence in the film, he specifically explores how the directors re-establish social links that were broken by violence through the act of listening to the traumatic wounds their subjects bravely lay bare on screen, reflecting on how documentary film can play in putting an end to the silence surrounding them.
“Developing The Silence of Others: A Filmmaker-Activist Perspective” features Almudena Carracedo herself. She provides the creator’s perspective on the contextual and developmental aspects of the documentary, discussing (1) the creative and rhetorical conception of the film, (2) the use of the tools of filmmaking to create a powerful emotional experience that can engage viewers, create empathy, challenge national narratives of “forgetting” and reframe the issue as a human rights violation that perpetuates into the present, (3) the construction of the film from a crucial insider /outsider perspective (the cultural sensitivity and shared subconscious brought through her eyes as a Spaniard challenged by the fresh eyes and interrogative posture of her American partner Robert Bahar), (4) the importance of appropriately inclusive roles for the protagonists to participate in the filmmaking and distribution processes, and (5) their role as filmmakers-activists attempting to integrate their work (both the production and the distribution) into an existing social reality.
Finally, in “The Silence of Others as Empathic Strategy: Can Cinema of Empathy Help Us Recover Historical Memory?” Isabel Jaén considers the documentary from a cognitive-affective perspective, introducing the notion of cinema of empathy: a type of cinema—often tied to a film genre that features human rights abuses as a central theme—featuring a high density of scenes where the human face and the energy created among human bodies are employed as a strategy to both portray and elicit empathy, potentially inducing a pro-social behavioral response in the audience, in connection to an ethical-socio-political problem presented in the film. In exploring the question of whether historical memory film narratives that feature empathic strategies based on embodied affect and shared interiority—and specifically The Silence of Others—can help recover historical memory, we must consider that contemporary Spain is a diverse society where different ideological groups with different attitudes towards historical memory exist. Despite the complexity of the phenomenon and the lack of sufficient empirical studies on empathic response to film, Jaén maintains that this connection underlies both the creation and reception of these cinema of empathy narratives.
These presentations demonstrate how film narratives retain the potential to transform our societies and the path toward the recovery of their traumatic pasts, as well as the power of combining perspectives from different creative and critical realms and disciplines.