skeleton scene in en construcción ROUGH DRAFT
The most startling and fascinating spatial tactic in the film is one symbolically reclaimed not by the living, but by the dead. During the demolition of the old building, workers discover a cemetery of skeletons. Fences are immediately erected around the remains, and while construction work is postponed, Guerín’s camera continues filming, recording the disparate comments and facial expressions of the people who huddle around to speculate about what’s been found.
The oddity of the scene is not only due to the fact that it unexpectedly severs linear time, but also because it interrupts our familiar space. The spatiotemporal exception creates an unprecedented situation, rooted in history and ethics, and to which we are unsure how to respond. What are these skeletons doing here? Under my apartment? In my neighborhood? Aren’t skeletons supposed to be somewhere else, far from here? Two onlookers argue that the archaeologists shouldn´t be disturbing the sacred site: “ésta es una cosa histórica” says one woman, “no se tenía que haber tocado, qué barbaridad el respeto, hombre, esto es un cementerio…por ley es un cementerio no se tenía que edificar”. As if the skeletons were going to rise from the dirt and start accusing someone of something. And symbolically they do. Their mouths agape and eye sockets staring—something is pending, something has been left undone. Suitably, the bystanders come up with logical explanations (maybe they feel obligated) to quickly smooth over the historical gap, the embarrassing historical ignorance, and yet another example of the city’s inability to keep up appearances and literally hold itself together. They pose a series of disparate hypotheses: “eran romanos [. . . ] hablaban catalán? [. . . ] hablaban latín? [. . . ] enanos? [. . . ] una matanza étnica [. . . ] romanesco? [. . . ] godos? [. . . ] árabes? [. . . ] españoles? [. . . ] de la Guerra [Civil] [. . . ] de los asesinatos que pasan en España [. . . ] de los crimenes que había en España….”
Perhaps to a sigh of relief our questions and insecurities are pacified: the archaeologist identify the remains as Roman, from the sixth century. Accordingly, the scene suggests the Roman collective imaginary consists in a far away mythical and inferior place, one entirely disjointed from contemporary society, as we hear a male voiceover state “en esa epoca [. . . ] los romanos tenian cosas raras [. . . ] se hablaba un idioma raro.” Of two dozen or so commentators, only one woman recognizes the spatiotemporal continuity and oneness of the situation—shrugging as she gazes down at the Roman skeletons, she comments “todo el mundo en el mismo agujero, tanto los ricos como los pobres.”[1]
The commentary on the remains may, on one hand, reflect what Jameson calls a “dehistoricized present” in a neocapitalist society, a general ignorance of the past which is no doubt attributed to nearly 40 years under isolation and dictatorship, and a democracy that wanted to forget the past—"vives encima de los muertos, y ni te enteras"—critiques another observer.
On another hand, the comments symbolically surface and unite all the unaccounted dead, alluding to universal and hypothetical questions. What if they were Arabs? What if they were from the Civil War? What if they were our relatives? Am I an accomplice to a crime? Moreover, their hypotheses identify their metanarratives, triggering the question: what lies beyond, in-between, and beneath the imaginaries of Romans, Visigoths, and Arabs, Spaniards?
This spatiotemporal exception appears so out of the ordinary, that we see pencils, note pads, film and video cameras congregate from all over the city to quickly try to duplicate the remains. Why? Because we know something as unusual nowadays as coming face to face with raw history simply can’t last. We are aware that we are not supposed to see this, this rare glance of spatio-historical truth. Because we are accustomed to the fast pace and general predictable roar of consumer stimuli of contemporary urban culture, we assume, consciously or unconsciously, that a scene as spontaneous, truthful, and unpolished as this will be quickly taken from our view. Four months alter the discovery, the remains are removed from the site and the bulldozers and cranes, (the speculation machines of capitalism) are turned back on.
This scene resonates with many cultural texts that have been produced in the last 3 decades in Spain that represent the discovery of dead or sickly bodies, ghosts, and uncanny and/or haunting remnants of the past, especially of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism.[2] Even greater in number are the discussions in academic, grassroots, and most recently—political—spheres on historical memory, in which the texts are inevitably embedded. Generally speaking, critics have interpreted these cultural texts as restless and critical reflections on the country’s inability to collectively and legally address and reconcile with the horrors of the twentieth century. Cristina Moreiras Menor, for instance, opens up these discussions to current political entities with an analogy between the discovery of a cadaver in Alex de la Iglesia’s film La comunidad (2000) and the Ley de Memoria Histórica (2007), the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, and the exhumation of mass graves in Spain (2009), all of which hope to _____reconcile w dead quote of people who are looking for the disappeared__.[3] We will soon see if the results of these political initiatives will improve personal needs and transform future debates regarding historical memory.
At the beginning of the film we see a series of eyes painted on a wall.Towards the end, the camera zooms in on the eyes and a bulldozer tears the wall down. Besides denouncing gentrification, Guerín is asking us to look more closely at the paradoxical significance of space at a time when visibility is being literally and symbolically torn apart. On one hand, we observe the dense socio-historical network that space provides and retains, but on the other hand, we observe its superfluity and irrelevance. We see walls going up and being torn down, floors being installed and ripped apart, doors being knocked down and put up again—constant movement on a variety of planes, transition, replacement, demolition, construction: all these spatial transformations on fast forward. In the end, it is as if all the material barriers cancel each other out or disappear. We see how silly they are or, how silly we are to give such importance to putting up a bathroom door, or a wall between my apartment and my neighbors, when soon they’ll be torn down again.
