Los Niños de la Guerra II – El Sur
A still from El Sur
Join columnist Asher Porter as he examines a new film in each article in this series, ‘Los Niños de la Guerra’, which explores the role of children in Spanish cinema about the Civil War through both a historical lens and from a simple love of film.
After having explored the outburst of the Civil War through the film La Lengua de las Mariposas in the first column of this series, my focus now shifts to a new landscape, the desolate and taciturn aftermath of the war Spain portrayed in Víctor Erice’s 1983 film, El Sur. In the film, we follow the childhood of the protagonist, Estrella, as she tries to navigate the past of not only her family, but also her entire country, when no one seems willing to share it with her, a search which culminates in the film’s crushing climax, the suicide of her father. A beautifully shot film, El Sur supports its challenging themes through its dark and artistic cinematography, and an expertly crafted soundscape which often favours periods of reflective silence over dialogue, leaving the viewer with a well-balanced, pensive work, which often draws us to equally profound moments of introspection as it does its own characters.
For me, one of the most impressive features of El Sur is almost certainly its cinematography, rooting itself deeply in the practices and techniques of classical art, every scene and still of the film looks like a painting, indeed the lead cinematographer José Luis Alcaine said, and I translate, ‘We were inspired by the paintings of Caravaggio, Vermeer or Rembrandt’. Perhaps the most notable influence is the use of chiaroscuro, a technique developed by the aforementioned painters, in which there is a striking contrast between light and dark in the image, seen for instance in one of the initial scenes when Estrella holds her father’s chain aloft, enveloped in the half-darkness of their attic, and illuminated by a single ray of golden light which creeps in from the left hand side of the frame. Moreover, Erice and Alcaine pepper the film with subtle intertextual references to classic artists, for instance drawing inspiration from Goya’s painting El Hijo del Conde y la Condesa de Altamira in the positioning of Estrella in her first communion, or the likening of Estrella’s father to Saturno Devorando a su Hijo when the young girl’s perfect image of him begins to unravel following the discovery of his long term affair.
More than just a visual spectacle, however, Erice manages to combine this strong artistic foundation of El Sur with a moving and genuine script based on the short story of the same name by Adelaida García Morales. The film begins with a young Estrella, enraptured by her father’s seemingly fantastical ability to divine water, and instantly establishing this sense that her father is perhaps too good to be true, perhaps shielding his true identity behind a magical façade. This seed of doubt begins to blossom in the viewer and Estrella alike, as when looking through her father’s desk she notices a postcard addressed to an unknown woman, who later is revealed to be a former lover of her father, who he was forced to abandon during the Civil War as he fled north to escape Francoist soldiers. The brilliant performance of Icíar Bollaín as the older Estrella, reflecting the girl retreating within herself and growing a deep rooted distrust of the world she inhabits, drives the latter half of the film, and perhaps the most emotive scene in the film is when she sits down with her father as an older, wiser young woman, and realises she doesn’t know how to relate to a man who has lied to her whole life. Erice deftly highlights that this realisation is not just crushing for the younger generation of Spaniards, however, but also for the generation of the war who feel the need to honour the so-called pact of forgetting, and ignore this bloodstain on Spanish history, a sentiment delivered perfectly in the eerily quiet shot of her father’s lifeless body besides the river by which Estrella grew up.
Perhaps an underrated feature of the film is Erice’s treatment of regional differences, and the cultural and emotional divide left in the aftermath of the Civil War between the north and the south. The story takes place exclusively in Galicia, a northern Spanish territory in which her father had sought refuge from Francoist persecution, and despite Estrella never visiting the south and discovering her father’s history, as Erice planned in the original script before filming was cut short by executive producer Elias Querejeta, the family of Estrella’s father leaves a strong impression on the viewer and Estrella alike through their brief visit to the young girl’s first communion. The character Milagros particularly stands out, as her brief willingness to discuss the taboo of the Civil War with Estrella opens a door into a past that was completely unknown to her, and thus Erice cleverly highlights how the war had not just immediate, but long-lasting effects on the Spanish psyche; the traditional Nationalist strongholds of the south are willing to discuss the war, as being the victors they feel as though they have little to be ashamed of, whereas the Republicans are forced to forget years of their history in order to avoid persecution from Falangist soldiers. Thus, El Sur presents a somewhat bleak image of post-war Spain; a country split asunder by an almost unsurmountable ideological rift, a people left broken and bruised, yet unable to discuss and heal from their wounds, and a new generation who fear the horrors that the past may hold if they delve too deep.