Abstract
As I have been reflecting on how to engage both phenomenologically and conceptually with Jaime Camino’s documentary about war and exile,1 as experienced by the children of ordinary, voiceless, faceless Republicans, I keep returning to one scene from the documentary, one fragment that, like the Barthesian punctum — which Roland Barthes describes as the explosive prick of contact with one’s own image repertoire — engenders, unleashes or sparks a powerful intellectual, emotional and affective response in me. In this chapter, I will attempt to focus primarily on this scene and I will tease out my theoretical interpretation of Camino’s documentary by means of a close perceptual and cognitive engagement with this scene. This scene forces us to reflect on and re-think the conventional representational devices that are used in Camino’s documentary beyond the common insistence on interpreting the documentary image in the light of its referential achievements or failures. I want to shift the focus from epistephilia, which is defined as the desire to know (Nichols, 1991), towards an ethical consideration that underpins the intellectual and affective transactions between the documentary image and the spectator. My chapter focuses on how Camino’s Los niños de Rusia (The Children of Russia, 2001), remembers, repeats, confronts or ‘works through’ individual and collective traumatic experiences associated with involuntary and premature exile during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime.
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© 2011 Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla
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Gutiérrez-Albilla, J.D. (2011). Children of Exile: Trauma, Memory and Testimony in Jaime Camino’s Documentary Los niños de Rusia (2001). In: Davies, A. (eds) Spain on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294745_8
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