Jaime Camino’s Evolving Dialectic: The Reconstruction of the Spanish Civil War through Filmed Testimony

Abstract

Five days after Francisco Franco’s death, Jaime Camino expressed that his upcoming film Las largas vacaciones del 36 (1977) “es una película motivada por la intención genérica que tengo de recuperar la memo-ria” (“is a film motivated by the generic intention I have to recuperate memory”; TeleExprés, November 25, 1975, qtd. in Ripoll-Freixes 127–28). This supposed “generic intention,” however, was not as commonplace in 1975 as it is today in the twenty-first century. Jaime Camino is a film director who has fought for “memory” in Spain for the last four decades. Long before “historical memory” was the subject of great national debate, before the creation of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), previous to the famous “Ley de memoria histórica” and the momentous commercial boom in Spanish Civil War memory products, Camino was making films that recalled Spain’s painful conflict of 1936–1939. Six of Camino’s thirteen major films treat some aspect of the Spanish Civil War. All six reveal much about the evolving and complex relationship Spain has had with its past during the last three and a half decades of democracy.

The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world…is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.

Immanuel Kant