Fragmentation, Invisibility, and Political Devolution

In several vital respects, cinema has since its inception been marked by absence and loss and by a persistent tension between fragmentation and suture, visibility and invisibility, repression and representation. This tension is perhaps all the more acute in relatively peripheral and invisible cinemas, such as that of Spain, and even more so in the various cinemas that operate on the fringes of the nation state's official apparatus, such as that of Galicia.

On a general technical level, cinema provides a fragmented virtual take on reality, as a result of both the mechanical reproduction apparatus that magically tricks the human eye (the 24 frames per second produce a sutured ghostly illusion of an absent reality) and the particular narrative grammar of cinema based on continuity editing, which sutures a fragmented mosaic of images: the composition frame, the shot, the sequence. On a historical plane, cinema is also indelibly marked by fragmentation, because of the extreme fragility of the medium and the ephemeral nature of cinema, particularly in its first decades, complicated by belated or insufficient efforts at preservation. Any history of cinema will always be marked by a high degree of loss and fragmented remnants, a loss that means that cinema scholars and institutions aiming to reconstruct a meaningful whole must recognize such an aim as by definition an impossible enterprise. A history of cinema will always be an archaeological attempt at suturing the fissures and reconstructing the missing pieces of its own narrative. This situation becomes acute in cinemas that, in order to exist at all, have had to contend with major political, structural, and financial obstacles, as is the case in Galicia.

On a more culturally specific level, the historical mapping of cinema in Spain reveals a complex, fragmented picture composed of several singular cinemas, marked by particular political and economic developments as well as by cultural and linguistic diversity. As a mass cultural form cinema has been used as a major vehicle for Spanish nationalism at least since the Second Republic of 1931–36.