Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition by Sarah Thomas

Reviewed by: Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition by Sarah Thomas John Margenot Thomas, Sarah. Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition. U of Toronto P, 2019. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-48750-488-5. Thomas’s insightful monograph, Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, probes the portrayal of the multivalenced, ambivalent and ambiguous child in emblematic films produced by four Spanish filmmakers—Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice and Jaime de Armiñán—during the Long Transition to democracy. Her main thesis is that the cinematic child from this historical period is a fundamentally oscillating figure whose presentation yields multiple readings of history, temporality and the subject. She seeks to expand the critical dialogue surrounding these films across several fields of inquiry—film and media studies, queer studies and Latin American studies, among others—to generate new scholarly debate regarding both the cultural legacy of the Transition and, more broadly, to foment theoretical discourse on the representation of children in cinema. While acknowledging traditional allegorical interpretations of these films (i.e., the child who, like Spain, “comes of age”), Thomas instead builds on work by Lebeau, Lury, Wilson and especially Sarah Wright’s The Child in Spanish Cinema, taking care to eschew a chronological focus in favor of close readings which cast new light on iconic works by Saura and Erice as well as less scrutinized films by Mercero and Armiñán. She argues from various critical perspectives that these films present different types of “in-between” within a socio-political milieu characterized by transition, uncertainty and change. The monograph consists of an introduction, four chapters, each one dedicated to an in-depth analysis of two films by the same director, and a short coda on Carla Simón’s film Estiu 1993 and Saura’s Cría cuervos. Thomas interpolates black and white photographs of cinematic scenes throughout her study, which further enhances her analysis. She also provides English translations in the appropriate register for readers unfamiliar with Castilian. The opening chapter centers on two Saura films from the 1970s: El jardín de las delicias and La prima Angélica, both of which reveal an intense interest in the in-between world of childhood. Thomas’s interpretation draws principally from the political geographer Edward Soja’s theory on thirdspace, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s views on lateral contact—“growing sideways”—between adult and child, as well as trauma theory. She fruitfully explores how each film portrays a former child filtered by adult memory and fantasy amid the temporal dissonance between the present and a personally and politically traumatic past. Chapter 2 turns to two mainstream works from the cine de reforma by Antonio Mercero: La guerra de papá and Tobi, el niño con alas. Thomas bases her critical model on several thinkers— Anne Higonnet, Sally Faulkner and Phillippe Ariès—who discuss from various perspectives the cultural conception of the child’s body. She argues that Mercero’s two films stress the ways the child cannot comprehend the actions or motivations of adults around her/him, particularly regarding sexuality, death and the political sphere. More specifically, Thomas focuses on the presentations of the child as subject and object, as human and non-human, and concludes that Mercero’s cinematic representation of the child figure is the product of anxieties regarding the past and future during the Long Transition to democracy. Of special interest is the discussion on how the director’s use of mimicry has political implications: the child’s mechanical repetition of the adult character’s language serves as a critique of the “grown-up” world of Francoist Spain and the persistent shadow of the Civil War. In Chapter 3 Thomas turns her attention to the oscillation dynamic of empathetic identification central to Víctor Erice’s vision of the child in his El espíritu de la colmena and El sur. Drawing [End Page 293] on theorists of cinema ethics—Judith Butler, Lisa Cartwright, Vicky Lebeau, Emma Wilson, among others—Thomas posits that Erice employs cinematic techniques of proximity and distance to portray child characters who learn...

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