Chapter Title: Notes

Book Title: Ghostly Landscapes

Book Subtitle: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary
Spanish Culture
Book Author(s): PATRICIA M. KELLER
Published by: University of Toronto Press

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Notes

Introduction

1 The notion of “wounded time” will be discussed more in detail in chapter

3. For a provocative account of the relationship between temporality and
wounds, see Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, specifically the second part of
the text, where he outlines a theory of the punctum as time itself. Here
Barthes also discusses the spectral or ghostly aspect of the photograph’s
metonymic force – namely, that while it renders the time of the object pho-
tographed impossible, it also imparts a referential relationship to that lost
time and lost object such that the structure of all photographic images
is one of the return of the referent, or a structure of spectrality. Jacques
Derrida offers a poignant reading of Barthes’s analysis of spectrality
and referentiality vis-à-vis photography in his eulogy “Roland Barthes
November 12, 1915–March 26, 1980” in The Work of Mourning (31–67).
Though Derrida’s intricate examination of Barthes’s theories lies outside
the scope of this introduction, it is worth noting that here Derrida embarks
on a lengthy meditation on how the singular death of a friend – indeed, the
singular loss of anyone – becomes a pluralized event. He discusses how the
singular event of one’s death reverberates and – in a sense, like the uncan-
ny, ghostly image – proliferates as it is cast into multiple times and images.
2 Ernesto Laclau’s wonderful essay “The Time Is Out of Joint” takes up and
elaborates on two key issues from Derrida’s work: the “logic of the spec-
tre,” and the “question of the messianic.” Spectral logic, for Laclau, is root-
ed in undecidability between flesh and spirit. And this indeterminacy, this
undecidability, “desynchronizes time.” The messianic, by contrast, is akin
not to a specific conception of time but rather to a certain kind of experi-
ence or “promise.” This is similar to my idea about the field of possibility

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218 Notes to pages 5–6

created through visual media – the same field in which, for Benjamin and
Cadava, the spacing of time occurs. For Laclau, this idea is key since the
messianic is what opens up another possibility of historicity.
3 This notion of “holding,” it should be noted, suggests a temporary state
of fixed-ness, or of being agitated, suspended, or perhaps even influenced
by the ghost. I would argue that this idea is not so much about maintain-
ing a static, fixed, or rigid relationship with the past; rather, somewhat like
Walter Benjamin’s concept of the philosophy of history, it entails more
a radical embrace or “seizing” of the ghost or the spectral in its moment
of emergence, in its very state of emergence. For a beautiful reading of
Derrida’s concept of the politics of mourning, see also Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas’s introduction to his The Work of Mourning, where they
provide a detailed account of his rhetoric of mourning, such as with their
close reading of this passage from Aporias: “In an economic, elliptic, hence
dogmatic way, I would say that there is no politics without an organiza-
tion of the time and space of mourning, without a topolitology of the sep-
ulcher, without an anamnesic and thematic relation to the spirit as ghost,
without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost, whom one holds, just as
he holds us, hostage” (Derrida 2001, 19). Through Derrida’s own philo-
sophical ruminations – and personal reflections – on death, what takes
shape is an explicit link between the way to visualize loss and the process
(and practice) of mourning. Though many of the texts on mourning are in-
vested in thinking through the politics of friendship, authorship, survival,
and philosophy, Derrida maintains a strong theoretical interest in under-
standing loss from both acutely personal and acutely intellectual angles.
For him, while loss enables and precipitates mourning, the politics of
mourning produces and originates from the image, which always marks
a ghostly return of the lost object.
4 David Punter (2002) provides a wonderful and concise explanation of this
marginality from within criticism, especially with regard to gothic literature.
5 For a thorough discussion of modernity and modern theory’s indebted
relationship to ghosts, see Buse and Stott (1999). Similarly, Punter (2002),
drawing on Derrida’s engagement with the “looping circularity of histo-
ry,” particularly in Specters of Marx, notes that history understood not as a
linear development “but as the site of multiple hauntings” simply cannot
be written without ghosts (262). Buse and Stott’s and Punter’s texts both
equate modernity with a troubled, indeed spectral, vision of history and
the historical. Punter writes: “but the point goes further than this: narra-
tives of history must necessarily include ghosts – indeed they can include
little else – but they will also be written by ghosts” (262).

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 Notes to pages 9–16 219

6 One important distinction between Eng and Kazanjian’s work and my

own should be noted here. Whereas their collected volume is interested
primarily in the question of what remains, I am interested in both what re-
mains and what returns, in spectral form, whether visible or invisible. For
a rich analysis of mourning and a detailed account of what is at stake in
any contemporary consideration of the politics of mourning, see their in-
troduction in Loss, specifically, their tracing of Freud’s theory of mourning
and melancholia, and also their analysis of Benjamin’s theses on the phi-
losophy of history where they read the hopefulness embedded in histori-
cal materialism against the hopelessness brought about by historicism,
“active mourning against a reactive acedia” (Eng and Kazanjian 2003, 2).
For additional analysis of the Freudian and Benjaminian theories of
mourning in relation to politics and history, see also Wendy Brown’s won-
derful essay in the same volume “Resisting Left Melancholia” (458–65).
7 Cadava (1997), reading Benjamin, beautifully articulates the connection
between living and leaving traces as a form of “afterlife.”
8 My study is principally concerned with the relationships among land-
scape, presence/absence, and ways of seeing. There have been many ex-
cellent explorations of the landscape–being–seeing configuration, though
many are concerned with the connection between humans and the land
rather than with, say, notions of history and time within landscape. Bender
(1993) considers the historical and social aspects of landscape; DeLue and
Elkins (2008) survey different theories of the land/art connection; Wells
(2011) is a vast and stunning work that underscores the intimate connec-
tions between photography, human impact, social memory, and environ-
mental issues.
9 Contemporary Spanish literary and filmic representations of ghosts
abound. A few examples from contemporary Spanish cinema are provid-
ed here. In the horror genre there are popular commercial films such as
Guillermo de Toro’s El espinazo del Diablo (2001), which begins with a se-
ries of rhetorical and ontological questions about the nature of haunting
and ghosts; Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001); and Juan Antonio
Bayona’s El orfanato (2007). There are also darker films about trauma,
­encounters with death, and the return of the repressed, such as Agustín
Villaronga’s Tras el cristal (1987) and Pa negre (2010) and the black come-
dies of Alex de La Iglesia, who recently has explored the notion of spectral
legacies and the trauma of inheritance in works such as la comunidad
(2000) and Balada triste de trompeta (2010). A more melodramatic overture
to ghostliness, including the familial and communitarian aspects of inheri-
tance and the politics of return, is Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006). On the

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220 Notes to pages 17–18

more artistic/auteur side of the cinematic representation of spectres are José

Luis Guerín’s stunning works, such as Tren de sombras (El espectro de Thuit,
1997); Mercedes Álvarez’s documentaries El cielo gira (2004) and Mercado de
futuros (2011); and Víctor Erice’s always masterful and elegiac cinematic
meditations, such as El sur (1983) and El espiritú de la colmena (1973).
10 Most scholars and critics – Labanyi (2002, 2007, 2008, 2009), Moreiras
Menor (2002), Resina (2000), Colmeiro (2011), Jerez-Farrán and Amago
(2010), Moreno-Nuño (2005, 2006), Snyder (2014), Keller (2012), Crumbaugh
(2009, 2011), Vilarós (2002), Martín-Cabrera (2011), Loureiro (2008), Medina
Dominguez (2001) – who have expressed concern for the dictatorship’s
l­iving legacy or afterlife address, in one way or another, its spectral re-
emergence in the post-dictatorship and/or transition era after years of
­silence and repression.
11 Perhaps one of the greatest material consequences of the dictatorship is the
highly controversial monument El valle de los caídos (Valley of the Fallen),
completed in 1959. In many ways, the monument architecturally embodies
the problem of how to inherit the memory and legacy of Francoism, given
that it is recognized as an official memorial site. Between 30,000 and
70,000 bodies are buried in the unmarked tomb of the mountain – that is,
in the natural and constructed landscape.
12 Mirzoeff, a long-time defender of visual culture, has insisted throughout
his scholarship on the importance of “visual culture” over “visual stud-
ies,” in order to emphasize the political stakes inherent in our compre-
hension of the visual realm and what W.J.T. Mitchell has referred to as
“the everyday practice of seeing and showing” (2008, 91). Note that for
Mirzoeff as well as for Mitchell and for my own study, the study of visual
culture does not entail simply looking at and describing images on the
page; it includes gathering a sense of how and why our cultural and his-
torical narratives are constructed, symbolically or otherwise, through imag-
es. In other words, what is key is thinking of the visual not only in terms
of genre or objects but also in terms of encounters and “events” – networks
of associations, ideas, and theories that arise from vision, forms of non-­
vision, the act of seeing, and what Mirzoeff later calls the “right to look.”
For further reading, see Nicholas Mirzoeff’s introduction to The Visual
Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (2008) and W.J.T. Mitchell’s entry in the same vol-
ume, titled “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” For a wonder-
fully original decolonial analysis of visual culture’s complex relationship
to authority and power, especially with regard to the underlying tension
between visuality and countervisuality in modernity, see Mirzoeff’s
The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011).

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 Notes to pages 23–6 221

13 I am indebted to W.J.T. Mitchell’s thought-provoking take on the main

­objectives and contributions of the study of visual culture. For further
reading, see Mitchell’s aforementioned essay; see also Mitchell (1994).

1 Documentary Optics

1 Joaquín Soriano, cited in Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca (2005). In 1945,

the noticiarios officially became part of the regime’s popular education
­program, which was coordinated through the Ministerio de Educación
Nacional (Ministry of National Education). The plan was to educate citi-
zens spiritually and culturally (Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca 2005, 56).
Unless otherwise noted, all transcriptions and translations from the origi-
nal Spanish are my own.
2 For a concise analysis of Spain’s economic policies, see chapter 10,
“Francoism 1939–1975,” in Carr (1980). There, Carr writes: “In the immedi-
ately postwar years the problem was one of sheer physical survival, of feed-
ing and finding jobs for a nation whose economy had been run down by its
own Civil War and which was isolated from the economies of the West, first
by the Second World War and then by the diplomatic and economic boycott
imposed by the victorious democracies on a ‘fascist’ state which had, until
1943, openly supported the Axis powers. ‘In 1940,’ wrote Paris Eguilaz, one
of the foremost economists of the new Regime, ‘the national income, at con-
stant prices, had fallen back to that of 1914, but since the population had in-
creased the per capita income fell to nineteenth-­century levels. That is, the
Civil War had provoked an unprecedented economic recession.’ The instru-
ments with which the Regime sought recovery had been forged in the war
itself with the help of Italian Fascist models: the regulation by the state of a
‘capitalist’ economy cut off, as far as possible, from the world market; an
autarchy that would embark on a massive programme of import substitu-
tion, producing everything at home regardless of economic cost. State diri­
gisme and protection were old traditions, but they were no longer justified
on economic grounds, as protecting a weak economy. Rather, they were
presented as political ideals: the recipe for a stable economy and a suitable
policy for an ‘imperial military state.’ The unique feature of Spain in the
’40s … was that autarchy was presented as a permanent ideal” (155–6).
3 This point echoes visual historian Vanessa Schwartz’s (2007) idea that “the
archive is already in the film canister” – an idea by which I understand
Schwartz to be suggesting that the archive (its power, its seduction, its
­order, its logic) is, in essence, a narrative. Like works of fiction, the archive
has its own structure, characters, authors, plot, and story.

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222 Notes to pages 26–32

4 NO-DO has three main classifications in its catalogue: noticiarios (the

equivalent of 10- to 12-minute newsreels); documentales (the rough equiva-
lent of documentaries, usually ranging anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes);
and imágenes (stills narrated as if they were moving images, or photo-­
romans.). The corresponding numbers and dates of the four “newsreel
­biographies” – or meta-NO-DOs, as I am calling them here – are No. 0001
(1943), No. 105A (1945), No. 1000A (1962), and No. 1304B (1968).
5 This experience is uncanny in another sense as well: entering the archive
marks a sort of spectral encounter in which something previously invisible
is now made visible. This, in a sense, identifies the archive as a ghostly
place – an uncanny site where the relationship between seeing and know-
ing seems clear and tangible but is always uncertain or at best ­onditional.
This tenuous relationship between visibility and knowledge was mapped
out in the discovery that the very text that should “inform, instruct, and
entertain” viewers with the news, had deviated from its ­normal protocol
to dissect and display itself. My own experience in the ­archive – namely,
difficulties locating this particular newsreel (and many other materials) –
would foreground what I later understood as the very problem underly-
ing the newsreel’s content and self-imaging. In effect, what is seen does
not correspond to what is present, whether deliberately staged or random-
ly materialized. Similarly, what is not seen (individual news events,
­stories, reports) is, we are told, nonetheless present because recorded.
6 The word recrear in the original Spanish has a double signification: to
­“entertain” or “make something pleasurable,” and also to “recreate” or
“reproduce.” This point is key to my analysis of the modes of production
and reproduction that the newsreels expose.
7 My own rhetorical questions are undoubtedly influenced and framed by
Derrida’s line of inquiry in Archive Fever, in which he poses the following:
“But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of
the archive. There are undoubtedly no others” (1996, 8).
8 In this shift towards the discursive incorporation of “organic,” the use
of the term “totalitarian” was more or less disavowed in the official dis-
course; however, in the newsreels, totalitarian logic and rhetoric remained
a fundamental component, in the sense of working towards and construct-
ing a totality, and a totalizing movement in the Arendtian sense.
9 The connection between universal sight and truth or a structuring of belief
simply reinforces the nineteenth-century notion of knowledge and sight
that emerged with the rise of industrialism, modern science, and Enlight­
enment philosophy, summed up neatly as follows: what one sees, one also
knows. For a detailed and poignant discussion of the seeing/knowing

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 Notes to pages 32–47 223

­ ialectical relationship as it emerged in the discipline of medicine and

d
modern science, see the chapters “Seeing and Knowing” and “Open Up
a Few Corpses” in Foucault (1975).
10 This also suggests that the optical mechanics of the 1945 newsreel are
­dialectical in the sense that they engage the viewer by “inviting” him to see
through the camera’s lens, which is already the screen, and that they also
wield an alienating power by temporally distancing the images from us or,
better, altering the temporal nature of the images on the screen so that they
appear different from what the viewer otherwise expects and ­understands.
The newsreels, in this sense, take those moving images that were captured
in the past with the intention of presenting them in the ­future and recasts
them as moving images captured in the present by us; our position shifts
from (potentially passive) viewer to (unexpectedly ­active) director.
11 It is worth noting Robert Spires’s brief but excellent comparison between
Foucault’s panoptic theory of surveillance and discipline and Francoist
­discourse. Spires argues that Franco’s public speeches offered a unique
register that exemplified the kind of discourse based on optical control and
power that Foucault theorized: “Even before he became dictator, the gener-
al himself assumed a major responsibility for implanting the concept of a
self-disciplining society. Indeed the discursive link between Foucault and
Franco clearly emerges in one of the general’s addresses delivered in April
1937 in which he promised to give ‘to the people what truly ­interests it: to
see and feel itself governed.’ By stressing visual and sensorial ­phenomena, the
soldier Franco actually seemed to be anticipating the ­philosopher Foucault
and his panoptic thesis” (1996, 17; my emphasis). In the same book, see
also the illuminating chapter titled “The Post-World War II Episteme.”
12 I use this term deliberately, drawing on the “camera eye” as not only an
optical instrument but also a literary device employed by the American
novelist John Dos Passos in The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel of his
renowned U.S.A. trilogy.
13 If standard propaganda strategies involve concealing how the mode of
production operates on the viewer to coerce him into becoming a disci-
plined, loyal subject, then the NO-DO reverses this order. It takes the more
conventional propaganda technique and turns it inside out, showing us
the otherwise secret or hidden recipe of its coercive tactics, those methods
that are performed on subjects clandestinely, supposedly without their
knowledge or awareness.
14 In comparing the archive to writing, Derrida explores the problem of
­inscription – that is, the question of how history, or the traces of lived ex-
periences, get recorded, written, and stored for future use or reference.

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224 Notes to pages 48–54

This is to ask how inscription works, or how inscribed histories remember

or suppress certain memories. Such that, for Derrida (and for our purpos-
es here), this question is no longer limited to how memory is inscribed into
writing, but extends to the converse: how writing is inscribed into memory.
In the context of the newsreel biographies, this is a particularly striking
point. It means we should think about how images are captured, severed
from reality, catalogued, and transcribed into Spanish cultural memory,
thereby shaping the parameters of visibility in a twofold manner – both in
the way it sees and captures and also in how it sees itself.
15 This is an interesting point of departure itself, since Derrida begins Archive
Fever with the “exergue” – that is, with an examination and theorization
of “that which lies outside the work.” For Derrida, the examination of the
outside and of the ways in which the outside defines the inside (of the ar-
chive, in this case) is paramount for his reading of Freudian thought and
the relationship between, on the one hand, the archive as a place of origins
and power, and on the other, a place deeply tied to history and psycho-
analysis – that is, a place where the compulsion to repeat, order, record,
and catalogue becomes a defining characteristic of inscription, one that
serves as both the foundation and the principal component of the archive.
Derrida draws from Freud’s inscription or impression on his own writing
(i.e., his archive) and from his writings on the death drive to elaborate this
argument. Namely, that history is a technology of memory and that archives
are to some extent technologies of history. By Derrida’s interpretation, ar-
chives do not simply accumulate and catalogue as a way to “remember”
or recover what has been lost or forgotten; they are also as a means to pro-
duce (and reproduce) a structure that embodies the always imminent threat
of forgetting, death, destruction, and loss.
16 In reality, the law’s true objective was to convert all forms of press and
­media communication into “una institución al servicio de la propaganda
del nuevo Estado” (“an institution at the service of propaganda of the new
State” (Alejandro Pizarroso, cited in Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca 2005,
184). Tranche explains that the state relied on the press not to impose an
official doctrine but rather to channel subtler mechanisms of indoctrina-
tion and coercion. That is, to transform belief systems, the state harnessed
the power of images and political rhetoric rather than overt violence. For
more information, see chapter 3, “La ideología y la propaganda franquista
en NO-DO,” of Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca’s seminal work.
17 The state often identified and reinforced its natural origins by invoking its
imperial past. To that end, it referred constantly to el tiempo de los Reyes
Católicos (the time of the Catholic Kings), la Cruzada (the Crusades), and

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 Note to page 56 225

el Renacimiento cultural de España (the Rebirth of Spain). Besides relying

on Spain’s imperial past, the Franco regime instituted and defended the
Organic Law of the State, which underwent several drafts during the 1960s
before finally being presented to the Cortes in 1966 and incorporated into
the Constitution. That law declared that the Movimiento Nacional (i.e., the
Fascist Party) was “the only legitimate political alliance in Spain” (Spires
1996, 21). For further reading, see Carr (1980). Carr contends that the re-
gime “prided itself on its capacity for ‘institutional perfection,’ on the evo-
lution of a constitution sui generis, completed by the Organic Law of 1967”
(165). See also Payne (1999) for a detailed breakdown of the Organic Law,
especially as it related to the other six fundamental laws of Spanish fascism.
18 A striking example of the rift between real world events and contrasting,
indeed opposing, images of Spanish national ideals is found in the first
NO-DO, No. 0001 (1943). As the inaugural noticiario, it somewhat pre­
dictably opens with images of Palacio de El Pardo and a commanding and
victorious Franco; it then cuts to a sequence of chaotic images from the
battlefield, narrating how El Caudillo used his wisdom and prudence to
guide Spain through its darkest “days of supreme danger.” Franco’s her-
oism is central to this newsreel: “Él supo salvarla con su p ­ resencia herói-
ca y con su talento de estratega en los campos de batalla. Y abrir las
puertas de España a una nueva era de honor nacional y de grandeza.
[Image: military parade] Siguiendo el símbolo y el ejemplo de nuestro
Caudillo, la unidad de los españoles y su disciplina es base de nuestro re­
nacimiento presente y futuro” (my emphasis). (Following the symbol and
the example of the Caudillo, the unity of Spaniards and their discipline is
the foundation of our present and future rebirth.) The newsreel affirms
that Spaniards are universally united and disciplined under Franco;
it does this by showing us images of the organized masses – snapshots
of those infamous military spectacles of immense proportion and scale.
The narrator continues: “Noticarios y documentales cinematográficos,
NO-DO, cuenta con una información rápida y completa de todos los sec-
tores de la vida nacional y extranjera. Las operaciones de selección: mon-
taje y sincronización se realizan rápida y eficazmente. Todos sus trabajos
se efectúan en los laboratorios españoles dotados por la superioridad de
los necesarios medios técnicos. Una perfecta organización garantiza en
todo momento la distribución rápida por todo el ámbito nacional.
Realizaremos un esfuerzo constante para cumplir sin desmayo el lema de
nuestro noticiario: ‘El mundo entero al alcance de todos los españoles.’”
(NO-DO counts on swift and complete information from all the sectors
of life, national and international. The task of selection: editing and

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226 Notes to pages 58–9

synchronization is carried out quickly and efficently. All work is complet-

ed in Spanish laboritories equipped with superiority in the essential tech-
nical mediums. Perfect organization always guarantees fast distribution
throughout the entire nation. We make a constant effort to achieve tire-
lessly the motto of our newsreel: “The e­ ntire world within reach of
every Spaniard.”)
19 For a more detailed description of this “second metamorphosis of the
Franco Regime,” see Payne’s (1999) section titled “Technocracy and eco-
nomic liberalization.” Payne writes: “Franco’s new choices thus revealed
­a further downgrading of Falangists and renewed emphasis on technical
expertise, yet he had always used experts freely, usually civil or military
engineers or elite State lawyers. Privately he described the new cabinet
as simply a renewed effort to give balanced representation to the forces
­behind the Regime, adjusted to the realities of the late 1950s.” These repre-
sentations, of course, consisted of changes to dismantle the original “fascist
economics” plan of the first phase of the regime. “The dramatic success of
economic liberalization would eventually bring in its wake further liberal-
ization of the Regime and, even more important, decisive change and
modernization in society and culture. The subsequent changes within
the Regime would in certain respects further minimalize the Movement,
though it is more than doubtful that Franco had alterations of such magni-
tude in mind when he assembled the new government” (426–7).
20 These are hardly the only events that contributed to Spain’s apertura.
These two are highlighted here because they are among the major political
events that led to the country’s increased liberalization and to political and
economic change. Payne’s summary of this period is most helpful: “By the
end of 1945, some of the economic leaders of the Regime had realized that
the ‘fascist economics’ of statism, regulation, and control under autarchy
could no longer function as originally conceived at the height of the fascist
era in 1939–1940. The ambition to create a major military-industrial com-
plex for aggressive warfare had to be relinquished long before the war
ended, and by 1945 the Regime’s economic leaders recognized the need
to liberalize at least certain aspects of their policy and to associate Spain
somewhat more with the international economy. The alteration of the
Regime’s economic policy took place in three different phases, the first in
1945–1946, the second in 1951, and the third and most extensive and deci-
sive in 1958–1959. Each step took Spain further and farther from the origi-
nal ‘fascist model’ of economics and was opposed – always relatively
unsuccessfully – by remaining Falangist leaders” (1999, 408).
21 For a fascinating analysis of the paradoxical political agenda of tourism
and 1960s Spain, see Justin Crumbaugh, Destination Dictatorship: The

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 Notes to pages 59–66 227

Spectacle of Spain’s Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (New York:
SUNY Press, 2009).
22 The year 1959 was a crucial one in the political, economic, and cultural
history of Francoist Spain and for the country’s gradual liberalization.
It is worth noting, ironically, that in the same year, the epic-scale war
­memorial Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) was completed and
opened to the public. Simply put, this mammoth structure was, and to-
day still is, a fascist spectacle. It had been constructed to resurrect and
glorify Spain’s heroic and nationalist past – that is, to pay homage to
the nationalists who had been killed during the Civil War. Also worth
mentioning is the sheer size and proportion of the adjacent Basilica de
la Santa Cruz, with its 152-metre cross, the tallest in Europe. To this day,
the site remains as controversial as it is physically stunning, and it would
be difficult to deny that it has radically transformed the Spanish land-
scape. This becomes especially significant when we consider the sweep-
ing shots of barren landscapes as presented in Carlos Saura’s first feature
film, Los golfos (The Hooligans) from the same year, 1959. Los golfos (refer-
enced in the next chapter) uses neo-realist techniques to bring Spain’s
barren, impoverished landscapes to the screen. The contrast between fas-
cist landscapes like Valle de los Caídos and the social-realist landscapes
portrayed by politically conscious artists is remarkable.
23 Por los pelos means “by the skin of one’s teeth,” although I have altered that
meaning somewhat due to the prior poco menos in the original Spanish.
24 Tranche’s reading of NO-DO’s shift to “numbers” and statistics in the 1968
newsreel suggests the state’s self-awareness and “cynical irony.” The state
would end up overtly recycling the same images from previous newsreels
(in Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca 2005, 200). It is also worth mentioning here
that the third meta-newsreel (not studied in-depth in this chapter) cele-
brates NO-DO’s one-thousandth instalment (“from 1943 to 1962, 19 years
and 1000 weeks of NO-DO,” the narrator exclaims). This feature of NO-
DO No. 1000B is later echoed in the 1968 meta-newsreel; both measure
­numerically the institution’s success. The narrator quotes exact numbers,
synchronized with the screen, which displays various charts of the same:
“Documentales: 47; Documentales de largometraje: 19; Documentales
en color: 42; Ediciones especiales: 93; Noticiarios en color: 15; Imágenes:
894; Metros producidos: 1, 588,200; Distribución de NO-DO en España;
Madrid, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Palma de Mallorca, Bilbao,
Vigo, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas.” The obsession with quantifying
news production and integrating the numbers into official newsreel dis-
course during the 1960s is perhaps nowhere clearer than in these later
two newsreel biographies (Nos. 1000B and 1304B).

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228 Notes to pages 68–81

25 As with the other newsreels, the final image and NO-DO logo appear at
the close of the narration, along with the image of a soaring eagle over a
rotating globe, which is labelled “NO-DO.”
26 Another relevant question may be: Is spectacle the opposite of dialogue,
­as Debord suggests? Does ideology operate then not on a system of differ-
entiation but rather on one of assimilation; not on a system of openness
that facilitates the exchange of ideas or the “flow of information,” but
­instead on a system of closed doors that only allows the same information
(and rhetoric, as I have argued) to circulate continually through a hyper-
mediated, controlled, authoritative lens?
27 I have relied here on Ricoeur’s reading of Althusser because I find in it the
clearest explanation of the effects of ideology and its relation to the imagi-
nary. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between ideology and
­materiality, see Althusser’s “Thesis II: Ideology Has a Material Existence”
from the chapter “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970)
in Althusser (2001).
28 I would like to thank Juli Highfill, who brought to my attention a clear
­reference to the Leviathan with the “Franco and the whale” episode of the
newsreel. This is an intriguing point, as the term “leviathan” itself refers
to a large sea monster (in modern-day Hebrew it simply means “whale”).
In both Judaic and Christian traditions, the leviathan commonly refers to a
huge, destructive force that needs to be destroyed (in the Old Testament,
it is mentioned in Psalms, Job, and Isaiah as a large force of nature, where-
as in the Christian texts it often refers to a demonic, evil force). It would
certainly be interesting to compare the religious (biblical) concept and
­image of “leviathan” with Thomas Hobbes’s seminal text (published in
1651, borrowing its title explicitly from the Bible) on the social contract
and the creation of the ideal state. Of course, Francoism does not defini-
tively derive from Hobbes’s principles of commonwealth, sovereignty,
and defence. But the notion of one giant state comprised of individuals
and led by one sovereign power is one reflected in the mass ornament
spectacles featured in the NO-DO as well as, undoubtedly, the very
­underlying principles of the regime itself.
29 The whale episode quickly cuts to a more peaceful image of Franco as a
family man, on the Bastiagueros beach in Galicia, once again with his
grandchildren.
30 One could also argue that the erected tower is a phallus that “rises” from
the orchestrated masses, filling the screen, which in turn “penetrates” our
gaze. In the context of the original event, these exercises of physical agil-
ity always faced the dictator, suggesting that he could impregnate the
tower, in this case with his gaze. For further reading of this kind that

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 Notes to pages 82–8 229

would place spectacle in relation to a rhetoric of haunting and a sexual-

ized masculine gaze, see Spackman (1996).
31 Admittedly, this is a literal translation of the passage. Nonetheless, the
meaning still comes through, I believe – namely, that the mass stadium
demonstrations function as spectacles that operate in specific patterns on
the spectator’s sight and in accordance with disciplinary rules and stan-
dards, recalling Tranche’s apt phrase “obedience to Franco.”
32 Kracauer continues: “Actors likewise never grasp the stage setting in its
totality, yet they consciously take part in its construction; and even in the
case of ballet dancers, the figure is relinquished in favor of mere linearity,
the more distant it becomes from the immanent consciousness of those
constituting it. Yet this does not lead to its being scrutinized by a more
­incisive gaze. In fact, nobody would notice the figure at all if the crowd
of spectators, who have an aesthetic relation to the ornament and do not
represent anyone, were not sitting in front of it” (1995, 77).
33 For further details on the NCE, see Castro de Paz et al. (2000). Specifically,
in this Spanish cinema anthology, see chapter 2, Carmen Arocena Badillos’s
“Luces y sombras. Los largos años cincuenta (1951–1962),” and chapter 3,
Santos Zunzunegui’s “Llegar a más. El cine español entre 1962 y 1971.”
Both chapters offer detailed analysis of the emergence of Spanish new wave
cinema. Various key events in the 1950s and early 1960s led to the forma-
tion of an alternative cinema. In particular, a conference titled Conver­
saciones de Salamanca de 1955 resulted in the founding of the Federación
Nacional de Cine-Clubs in 1957, and in 1962, José María García Escudero
was appointed to Dirección General de Cinematografía y Teatro. These
two events brought about cinema reforms and a loosening (in theory) of
strict, outdated censorship practices; they also widened Spain’s cultural
aperture. With regard to the NCE, important participants included pro-
ducers like Elías Querejeta and independent film directors like Jorge Grau,
Francisco Regueiro, Sergio Sollima, Joaquín Romero Marchent, Eugenio
Martín, and Pedro Lazaga, as well as film critics, including those who
wrote for the popular film magazine Nuestro cine – Diego Galán, Manuel
Pérez Estremera, Miguel Marías, Vicente Molina Foix, and Santiago San
Miguel, to name only a few.

2 Cinematic Apertures

1 See John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
2 See Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and
the Rhetoric of Haunting. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

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230 Notes to pages 88–102

3 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2002).
4 See Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
5 Saura was at forefront of the NCE movement along with contemporaries
Fernán Gomez, Azcona and Ferreri, Bardem, and Berlanga, among others.
In one way or another, all of these directors were preoccupied with
untimeliness.
6 This link with cinema could be further elaborated by taking up a more
typically psychoanalytic notion of memory as re-presentation, or as some-
thing that presents itself as a “once was presence.” Though I’m not ex-
plicitly stating it, my reading does echo a pseudo-Lacanian paradigm:
repetition–reproduction–return. Obviously, a Lacanian reading is beyond
the scope of this project, but it is worth noting here that in terms of trau-
ma’s relationship to “the real” – which, for Lacan, is “beyond return” –
one could link this to spectrality. Here, a return that is “beyond the real”
is dually ambiguous; like the ghost, it is “the real” and “not the real.”
7 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso,
2009).
8 The opening credits note that La caza was filmed on an actual former Civil
War battlefield on the outskirts of Madrid.
9 D’Lugo’s reading establishes links between entrapment, cinema, and
­social spectatorship. See D’Lugo (1991).
10 Scholarship on Saura no doubt has evolved over the years, presenting
­insightful readings and theoretical assessments from critics who largely
agree that La caza is Saura’s masterpiece because of its technical and narra-
tive achievements during a time of censorship. They also note that La caza
achieved international recognition, largely on the basis of its having won
the Golden Bear at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival. Santiago García Ochoa,
like many Spanish film scholars, situates Saura at the forefront of the New
Spanish Cinema (which was heavily influenced by neo-realist experimen-
tal techniques) and as one of the greatest representatives of auteur cinema,
which developed in European cinemas during the same period – the 1950s
and 1960s – as an artistic alternative to classical and popular cinema.
Ochoa traces the director’s transformation from “objective realism” to
character-­fantasy pieces to auteur–character identification, eventually
shifting to the figure of the protagonist/artist and culminating in auteur
self-referentiality (2009, 368–9). See Santiago García Ochoa, “‘Mirarse en
la pantalla’: el cine de Carlos Saura,” Hispanic Research Journal 10, no. 4
(2009): 357–69. Many scholars and critics working within the language of
auteur cinema, new wave, and Spanish national cinema, and in the even

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 Notes to pages 103–17 231

broader context and field of European cinema, have noted that Saura con-
tributed strongly to the practice and art of political filmmaking (or, at the
very least, that he reinvested film with politics); they also point to his com-
mand of political subversion and to his innovative ways of seeing, espe-
cially given that his films were subject to censorship. See Kinder (1993),
Kovács (1990), Faulkner (2006), Delgado (2013), Ochoa (2009), and Sánchez
Vidal (1988). But the figure perhaps most responsible for making Saura’s
work (from this period but also generally speaking) accessible has been
D’Lugo, whose in-depth study of the auteur’s filmography has theorized
how his texts inaugurated a philosophically oriented, intellectually inter-
rogative, and indeed revolutionary “practice of seeing” in which long-dis-
empowered spectators (such as those whom I discussed in chapter 1) be-
came empowered subjects within and against “the constraining norms of a
social order” (1991, 11). I too am interested in Saura’s “practice of seeing,”
which I situate theoretically within the larger question of apertures, open-
ings, and wounds that reveal an untimeliness pressing into the thematic
and temporal textures of these cinematic texts.
11 Faulkner (2006) offers an excellent and thorough reading of masculinity
and aging in La caza to which I am deeply indebted.
12 This moment exemplifies what Deleuze calls the “crystal image” of time:
the strange multiplicity of time manifests itself in a moment. But I see this
less as an “unanchoring” of the viewing subject and more as a displacing/
replacing move that situates the spectator deeper within the narrative’s
­reinforcement of the hunt’s oppressive and repressive logic. See Deleuze
(1986); see also Sutton (2009).
13 Old age is one of the main anxieties expressed in the film. This is evident
during the first hunt scene in Luis’s interior monologue: “¿Y si todos estu-
viesamos por la mixomatosis? José, Paco … están ya viejos. Y yo. Parezco
tan viejo como ellos.” (And if we all had myxomatosis? José, Paco ...
they’re already old. And me. I seem just as old as them.)
14 This is relevant to Robert Pogue Harrison’s discussion of sema, which in
Greek means both “sign” and “grave.” That the secret body should signify
both a failed attempt to properly and collectively address the past and the
tomb where that past has been kept out of sight is telling in that the site
notably outlines a fundamental tension between two approaches to the
past – on the one hand, keeping the body hidden, and on the other, laying
it to rest. See Harrison (2003). The holes, insofar as they signify both the
land’s apertures and its wounds (its “eyes”), are neither fully open nor ful-
ly closed. It is only when the cinematic apparatus enters the equation that
the secret/sacrifice can be identified as an “opening of the eye” – that is, a
moment of figurative awakening, which we might link to Saura’s larger

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232 Notes to pages 118–44

concern for opening the “cinematic eye.” Interestingly, this resonates with
another “opening eye,” in Los golfos – the close-up of the eye of the dying
bull is the closing image that counters Saura’s opening image, in which a
blind lottery vendor is robbed.
15 The murmurings of each character give the spectator insight into the con-
tent of each dream, suggesting signs of disavowal, fears, denial, rejection,
paralysis.
16 Kovács’s assessment of Saura’s “visual paradigms” – quarantine, enclo-
sure, entrapment – is fascinating, but I would add that these visual para-
digms also include a careful play between what is captured and what is
exposed, between what is underground (or in the ground) and what sur-
faces from the ground. Indeed, the visual paradigms make the most sense
in the context of landscape.

3 Photographic Interventions

1 See Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion,

2000).
2 Countless texts diagnose Spain’s various “abnormal” states through the
image of the sickly or deformed body. Two of the more notable ones are
Ángel Ganivet’s Idearium español (1897) and José Ortega y Gasset’s España
invertebrada (1921).
3 Sendón’s interest in landscapes as found and/or constructed objects can be
traced back to his early series Paisaxes (Landscapes) from the 1990s. This was
before he turned his attention to rural houses and cinema houses in decay
(in Casas doentes and Derradeira sesión, respectively). The photographs in the
Paisaxes series are in many ways about time – specifically, the time of wait-
ing. These images reproduce a stillness and a presentness already embed-
ded in the logic of waiting – in the sense of to “remain in readiness,” to
“observe carefully.” These serializations of interior landscapes served as
the precursor to Sendón’s explorations of exterior landscapes and, eventu-
ally, houses in ruins. One such project is Cuspindo a barlovento (Spitting in
the Wind), which surveys the Galician landscape (mostly the coast) after
the catastrophic Prestige oil spill in 2002. Such landscape projects had enor-
mous influence on his later and more recent project, As crebas, in which he
studies found objects washed ashore from the ocean – objects that he likens
in his images to natural sculptures of time. All translations are my own
­unless otherwise noted.
4 I had the opportunity to visit this exhibition in 2007 when it first opened
in A Coruña. The description here is based on my personal notes and ob-
servations from that visit.

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 Notes to pages 145–50 233

5 Brian Dillon in “Fragments from a History of Ruin” (2005) notes that in

Renaissance art, the ruin appears as the stage or setting upon which the
suffering and/or sacrificed human body appears.
6 In photography, the concept of the mask is fairly common. On a technical
level, “masking” can refer simply to the non-exposure or hiding of blem-
ishes or unattractive realities. On a more abstract, theoretical level, this
same idea of calculated concealment directly contests the photograph’s
claims to transparency and objectivity and to laying reality bare. See Mary
Price, “Mask as Descriptive Concept,” in A Strange, Confined Space (1994).
With Sendón’s photographs, it seems at times that we are presented with
a double-mask: the facades are masks for the more extensive ruins, which
they signal but ultimately obscure, and the images of the facades repeat
this pattern. The photographs, like the facades themselves, show without
showing. They initiate and block our sight. For Gondar Portasany, the
“mask” or facade in Sendón acts as a “metaphoric architecture” that
stands before the real architecture of each house (2007, 9).
7 This is not a quote but rather the beautiful and intriguing title of a pho-
tography project by Dillon DeWaters. Visit http://dillondewaters.com/
index.php/prominent/as-things-decay-they-bring-their-equivalents-
into-being.
8 Translation by Cao. In the original Gallego: “O compromiso que Sendón
asume non é o de dicirnos qué temos que pensar ou que sentir sobre ese
segmento da vida (ou, por mellor dicir, da non vida) que el fotografa,
senón algo moito máis profundo e humanizador, o de facernos pensar e
sentir (pero, iso si, o que nos queiramos) de xeito que as cousas non pasen
a carón de nós sen interpelaren as nosas vidas. O resultado é que as súas
mensaxes máis que transportaren contidos crean campos, máis que pensa-
mentos concretos constrúen as condicións para calquera pensar posible no
ámbito do vivir e do habitar” (Gondar Portasany 2007, 10).
9 The Harrison/Heidegger question “What is a house?” connects to the
Benjaminian question “What is the ruin?” But of course, these are not just
any structures; they are explicitly houses, and even in their most abstract
representations, we never forget that these places were once lived in. One
could read these images as posing a simple question: “What does it mean
to live in?” For Harrison (2003), the question “What is a house?” is an im-
portant philosophical reflection of our time and in fact “may well be the
philosophical question of our time – a time when traditional philosophy …
has come to an end” (37). To house something is of crucial importance in
the modern age, during which, for Heidegger, the most basic problem is
“homelessness.” Thus, part of the answer to these questions may lie in the
nature of dwellings and their links to traces and photography.

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234 Notes to pages 152–65

10 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility.” (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008).
11 See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly
13, no 4 (1960): 4–9.
12 This phrase plays on Baudrillard’s “luminous materiality of things,” in
reference to “the secret of an inexorable exteriority in Edward Hopper’s
paintings,” which, Baudrillard suggests, constitutes the works’ “immedi-
ate fulfillment” and “an evidencing through emptiness” (2001, 142).
13 Smith is talking, of course, about a wider, panoramic view of the surround-
ing area.
14 See “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in W. Benjamin (1968). See also
N and Y convolutes in W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project. (2002).
15 Dillon articulates that the ruin is itself a kind of threshold, a structure of
liminality and ghostliness that signals multiple temporalities simultane-
ously. See his “Fragments from a History of Ruin” (2005) at http://www
.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/dillon.php. It is worth mentioning here
the “naturalized” time of ruination included in Sendón’s work. Several
images in the series frame houses amidst overgrown nature, such that the
natural world that thrives and lives on becomes both entangled and visu-
ally inseparable from the architectural constructions of each building. For
more details about the project, visit http://manuelsendon.wordpress
.com/series/casas-doentes.
16 See Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981), in particular chapters 32 and 33 on the
real or the “that-has-been” that testifies to photography’s authenticity and
“factness.” On facticity, see also Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneu­
tics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). See also
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Roland Barthes,
The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). Also, on the
­“status of fact” that all photographs possess, see the inspirational volume
John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995).
17 Equating photography with death, and moreover, photography with the
“corpse,” Barthes writes: “In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a
certain past moment) is never metaphoric; and in the case of animated
­beings, their life as well, except in the case of photographing corpses; and
even so: if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies,
so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a
dead thing. For the photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a
perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by

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 Notes to pages 167–77 235

attesting that the object has been real … but by shifting this reality to the
past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead”
(1981, 78–9). See also Christian Metz’s (1985) essay on photography’s rela-
tion to the fetish for an analysis of the links between photography, memo-
ry, and death. For a compelling discussion of photography as a
thanatographic ­inscription, see McCallum’s (2008) essay on photography
and love.
18 Walter Benjamin noted the New Objectivity’s political tendency but also
its counter-revolutionary function in that it aestheticizes the abject for
mass consumption. The question here is: How can the artist (as producer)
make “fashionable” the consumption of such social ills, such abjection?
19 Interview with María Bleda and José María Rosa in Martín (2010).
20 Worth noting here is that two of the images in the series reference the art-
ists’ birthplaces – Albacete and Castellón respectively. This additional
component adds a subjective and personal element (in interviews they
­refer to this as an “emotional” aspect) and at the same time reinforces the
notion of return. With these two images, the return back is to a once-­
familiar place that has now become estranged, foreign. While it might
be tempting to read the photographs as ways of capturing the past at in
a moment of nostalgia, or as a way to return to and capture childhood
memories, it is perhaps more productive to think about how these images
invite us to consider each place as having already been lost; and in return-
ing to them, they are lost again – doubly lost. It is not about recognition of
what these fields once were, but about what they have become, which is
to say what they are now. How they remain.
21 Here I am using the idea of non-place based loosely on Smithson’s concept
of the “non-site.” Non-sites, for him, are abstract representations of actual
(real) sites or places. See his 1968 essay “A Provisional Theory of Non-
Sites.” While non-sites have real places attached to them, they are only
­abstract representations. Smithson (1996).
22 This process of exposing what lies beneath the surface – the photographic
excavation or penetration of the strata of appearances within the image –
is doubly reinforced with images such as “Craneo de Gilbratar, Forbes
Quarry” (2003), “Cráneo 5. Cueva Mayor” (2003), and “Hombre de
Ceprano, Campogrande” (2006), which detail subterranean landscape
perspectives – quarries, caves, soil – where human remains have been
found. For more details, visit the artists’ official website, http://www
.bledayrosa.com/index.php?/proyectos/origen.
23 See Smithson’s 1967 essay “Language to Be Looked At and/or Things
to Be Read” (1996). Throughout Origen, each image uniformly contains
two key elements: the landscape photograph, uninterrupted and

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236 Notes to pages 177–9

surrounded by a white border, and the text below the photograph refer-
encing the human remains discovered there. At each image’s original di-
mensions (124x222 cm, approximately 4x7 ft), this text is quite legible. It
should be noted here that for layout purposes, the white border and text
have been cropped out due to illegibility when reduced in scale. For this
reason, in Figures 3.18, 3.19, and 3.20, for example, only the landscape im-
age is shown. The textual component inserted below each visual depiction
of place is crucial as a supplementation device and a form of subtracting
from each landscape; textual cues form part of the total image. This is also
a key feature in the following series: Arquitecturas/Memoriales, where the
text includes proper city names, general areas or neighborhoods, and site-
specific locations, and Campos de batalla, where text includes the geograph-
ic location and historical (or approximate) date of battle. Original
dimensions for those series respectively are 100x110 cm (approximately
3.3x3.6 ft), and 85x150cm (approximately 2.8x4.9ft).
24 On appearance and phenomena, see Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008,
74–5). On the language of appearance, see Berger’s “The Enigma of
Appearances” in Berger and Mohr (1995, 111–29). Another interesting con-
nection is to a Foucauldian conception of “archaeology,” widely under-
stood in terms of looking at the discursive traces of the past as a way to
write history in the present. For Foucault, “archaeology” signifies a method
of writing history. Similarly, we could say that for Bleda y Rosa, “archaeol-
ogy” relates to a practice and process of photography in which the pro-
duction of the image in the present moment always has recourse to –
indeed, constantly reproduces – traces.
25 David Torres’s review essay on “Mandíbula” can be found online at http://
www.calcego.com/en/garcia-dora/103-mandibula-de-sitges-sitges.html.
26 It is fascinating to compare Bleda y Rosa’s pseudo-scientific photographic
classification of place through unseen objects (itself a possible critique of
scientific modes of classification) with Smithson’s “Strata: A Geophoto­
graphic Fiction” (1972), in which the artists, through a vertical (top to
­bottom) layering or “stratifying,” juxtapose photographs of geological
­deposits with “blocks of text ostensibly referring to the geological periods
listed in the margins, blocks of text that themselves look like stratified lay-
ers of verbal sediment but that, when scanned closely, are poetic collages,
spliced together from a great variety of sources, whether geology text-
books or literary classics” (1996, 230). These landscapes are comprised
of different materials, including language itself; it is to this materiality of
language that Smithson, like Bleda y Rosa, entrusts his images, wielding
­certain appearances while displacing, remapping, or destroying others.
See Smithson’s “Collage and Invention” (1996).

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 Notes to pages 179–89 237

27 In his essay on painting and film, Bazin talks about the centripetal and
centrifugal forces at play in orienting the gaze. In this light, Bleda y Rosa’s
photography might be situated somewhere in between – it draws us to
the centre of the frame as much as it displaces us outside the frame. Bazin
(2003).
28 The order and number of the photographs in each section are Jerusalem
(9)–Berlin (6)–Washington DC (8). Though all of these images are connect-
ed to places of memory, they range from current sites of religious contes-
tation and violence (raising questions of ethnicity and historical traces,
and questions of national identity) to spaces of conspiracy and spaces
of conversion.
29 This includes the other series Estancias (2001–6), Corporaciones (2006–
present), and Tipologías (2007–present).
30 See Martín (2010) for a full discussion of the “imagen latente” (latent
­image). This concept also relates to Eisenman’s idea of lateness, which is
about a “politics of the surface.” Eisenman (2004) identifies architecture
as the locus of a metaphysical presence, and lateness dislodges that meta-
physical project through untimeliness, which is to say through physical
presence and re-emergence out of time. He proposes that we think of an
architectural lateness in terms of a reterrorialization of presence.
31 There are also examples of doorways, which fall under the “barriers” cate-
gory I have sketched. Usually these are closed doorways or ones opened
but not entered. For reasons of space, I do not go into detail about the vari-
ous doorways that Bleda y Rosa have photographed, but there are fasci-
nating examples, such as their “Neue Synagoge Oranienburger Straße”
and “Sewall-Belmont House Constitution Avenue.” Visit http://www
.bledayrosa.com/index.php?/proyectos/memoriales/
32 The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe was designed by architect
Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. The artist Gunter Demnig
conceived of the Stolperstein in the 1990s as a way of remembering the
­victims of Nazism.
33 Regarding Bleda y Rosa’s treatment of monuments and how they weave
into their work specific paradoxes, Mah’s description is apt: “At the same
time, they highlight the contradictory and paradoxical nature of our ten-
dency to try to pin down and transcribe history as something which oscil-
lates between oversight and monumentalisation, between the elision of
the past and the ideological reconfiguration (from mitigation to mythifica-
tion) which causes it to be out of sync with what it is meant to evoke”
(2010, 8).
34 For a fascinating analysis of afterness, the photographic and unsettled
time, see Richter (2007).

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238 Notes to pages 194–200

35 The exhibit’s title Ante el tiempo bears an interesting double meaning:

­“before time” in the chronological sense meaning pre-existent to time; but
in a physical sense it means “standing before time” or “in front of time,”
which connotes an encounter or confrontation. Didi-Huberman (2003) also
draws on this phrase to suggest the notion of presencing.
36 In the same essay, Musil writes: “If we mean well by monuments, we must
inevitably come to the conclusion that they make demands on us that run
contrary to our nature, and for the fulfillment of which very particular
preparations are required” (1995, 63). He advocates for making monu-
ments more visible by reconceiving them as advertisements so that they
are not cast into the “sea of oblivion.” This point relates well to Bleda y
Rosa’s theoretical inquiry into the in/visibility of monuments. But for
these artists, the way to attract attention and create awareness of the un-
tapped power of monuments is to play with their essence, which is to say
with their monumentality. This is why they, in many ways, reduce monu-
ments to fragments or barely legible pieces of a larger whole, instead of
capturing – for instance, with a wide angle lens – the totality of each struc-
ture. This process of voiding or nullifying the monument does not under-
mine its potential achievements as much as call attention to how its
potentiality is never truly harnessed.
37 This also reinforces a tension found in any archive – preservation versus
access.
38 Juli Carson understands “screen memory” as an image in which a neither/
nor relationship between meaning and being manifests itself. See her won-
derful essay “Two Walls: 1989” (2003).
39 After photographing the Lincoln sites, Bleda y Rosa travel to and photo-
graph the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, DC. However,
they exclude full images of the Mountain of Despair, the Stone of Hope,
and the Inscription Wall, all considered to be structures that evoke and
­celebrate the core of Dr. King’s activism: the dream of equality and peace.
It is notable that though the memorial is designed to appeal to all five
senses, Bleda y Rosa focus their camera on the simple but powerful words,
“I have a dream,” cropping out the architectural structures to hone in on
the fact that the essence or “message” those structures stand for is perhaps
overlooked at the moment of entering the site itself.
40 One side of the sign reads: “Lies Are Bad”; the other, “Honesty Is Good.”
41 Jackson believes that this shift from monuments as structures that evoke
a sense of obligation to the past to monuments erected to anonymous fig-
ures to whom we have no sense of obligation marks a new relationship
with the past. He calls this the “vernacular past,” in which history is “the
chronicle of everyday existence” (1980, 95). In this vernacular approach,

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 Notes to pages 202–13 239

there lies a new interpretation of history, which sees history not as a con-
tinuum but as a “dramatic discontinuity, a kind of cosmic drama” (101).
42 Pérez (2010). The title of Peréz’s article, “Ante el tiempo” (Before Time),
somewhat awkwardly translated as “In the Face of Time,” makes explicit
reference to Bleda y Rosa’s exhibit at Telefonica in Madrid, Spain. http://
www.artecontexto.com/es/leer_en_linea-27.html.
43 An additional “happy coincidence”: Concepción comes from Vigo, the
­native Galician city of Manuel Sendón. I mention this here because Galicia
is a peripheral region of Spain. In many ways, the Norman Meyer monu-
ment, much like the Casas doentes photographs, draws from its ­peripheral
status for its artistic invention, its creativity, and – most importantly – its
intervention into how we see and remember.
44 Battlefields references the time of battle; it also represents glory and honour
at those sites, which are commemorated after the fact through paintings,
often commissioned by the Crown. See Anton Martín, Bleda y Rosa (Seville:
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Consejería de Cultura, 2009).
45 Landscape, if we follow Nancy’s logic, when understood as place and as
“a taking place of the unknown,” connects to the notion of capture. If we
trace capture back to the notion of taking (i.e., taking a life, producing or
leaving a trace), then landscape is a form of capture. Here, rather than the
capture of something specific, it would denote the capture of something
non-specific.
46 The space in the middle of each photograph is a unifying element of the
series as a whole. Similarly, this “missing piece” creates both rupture and
symmetry within each frame, effectively dividing in half each landscape.
Here a visualized absence stands in as a space of inscription within the
photo that, in turn, mirrors the space of contemplation that each photo
­creates outside itself. Of course, what is remarkable is that this space of
­inscription is intentionally left blank or “unscripted,” as it were.
47 It is fairly significant that Bleda y Rosa choose not to serialize the contem-
porary landscape counterparts to former Spanish Civil War battlefields.
That historical event is arguably more relevant, given its proximity in time.
In interviews, the artists have discussed a photograph titled “Pico de la
muerte” (Death’s Peak), which references the famous Battle of Ebro of
1937 that took place in the Jarama River valley. As far I know, to date this
project has not been undertaken, or it has not been made public.

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