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

Reviewed by: Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition by Sarah Thomas Fiona Noble Keywords Onscreen Childhood, Cinematic Childhood, Spanish Transition, Spanish Cinema, Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, Jaime De Armiñán, Sarah Thomas, Fiona Noble thomas, sarah. Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition. U of Toronto P, 2019, xii + 240 pp. The figure of the child has a long history in Spanish cinema, though it is only relatively recently that scholars of peninsular studies have dedicated their attention to unpacking its importance throughout the history of Spanish film. Early critical focus on this figure can be found in articles by Marsha Kinder and Isolina Ballesteros,1 who pinpoint the cinematic child’s significance as a cipher for the directors who came of age under Franco and as a historical witness, respectively. More recently, in her monograph The Child in Spanish Cinema (2013), Sarah Wright argued for the centrality of the on-screen child to cultural memory and depictions of the past, with particular reference to the Francoist period. Wright’s work traces the Spanish cinematic child from the 1950s to contemporary democratic Spain, charting the evolution of the child from the the all-singing, all-dancing child stars of Francoist cinema (such as Marcelino and Marisol), via the child witness of the Transition and, later, within the historical memory boom (Ana Torrent; del Toro films), to the adolescents of contemporary democratic Spain still subject to repressive Francoist legacies (El bola; Camino). Erin Hogan’s The Two Cines con Niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in Over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955–2010) (2020) considers child-centerd cinema both under Franco and in democratic Spain, unpacking the distinct ways in which the child figure is utilized under diverse political circumstances. With Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Thomas makes a valuable contribution to the field, examining the multivalent character of the onscreen child through her focalization of this figure in the specific historical moment of the Transition. The value in Thomas’s work therefore lies not only in its sophisticated and insightful theoretical positioning of the cinematic child, but also with its wider implications for Spanish cultural studies and, in particular, the impulse to reevaluate the Transition and its legacies in the contemporary context. Inhabiting the In-Between commences with the assertion that “Children haunt the cinema of the Spanish transition to democracy” (3) and a detailed [End Page 480] analysis of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s cult horror classic ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976). While this is not one of the case studies that Thomas will focus on in the main body of her monograph, her selection of this iconic film as the starting point for her book is due to its foregrounding of the central themes she explores in the book: “the child’s otherness or difference from the adult, the fraught relationship between adults and children, and the way these are represented in Spanish cinema produced during this period of political turbulence, instability, and change that is itself coloured by the legacy of prior violence” (8–9). Thomas’s introduction also considers another emblematic filmic depiction of the child that does not constitute one of her main body case studies: Cría cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1976). For the author, this film is of vital importance to her study, given its conjunction of the child’s temporality with that of the nation, unpacking its projection into the imagined future of 1990s Spain in terms of how “the child protagonist serves as the nexus of both narrative and temporal instability” (13). Like the other films she will study over the course of the monograph, Cría cuervos cannot be reduced solely to its significance as “a means of understanding the Spanish nation’s relationship to its violent history” (19). Rather, the author states her aim to reposition these works in relation to “new scholarly debates across several fields,” both in terms of the reconsideration of the Transition within Iberian studies, and more broadly regarding cinematic representations of children in the fields of film and...

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