Mirant al cel (Eyes on the Sky): The (Im)possible Expiation of the Spectral Other

This article analyzes the contribution of the new Catalan documentary in the current process of reclaiming the collective historical memory repressed by Francoism and by the Silence Deal established during the political transition to democracy after Franco’s death. This analysis will consider some films that use the family metaphor as a national allegory to represent the plight of the Catalan nation. The main thesis of this study is to underline the need for reparation regarding the crimes committed by Francoism during and after the Spanish Civil War and the fact that such a reparation has not taken place neither in fiction nor in historical terms. This essay relies on the post-Derridian concept of “hauntology” as a theoretical framework to study the spectral textual encounters that mark the symptoms of an uninterrupted mourning process that appeals to the historical memory in search of dignity and closure. • https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/peripherica.1.2.3 22 Periphe–rica • A Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History Methodologically, this study offers a close textual reading of Jesús Garay’s film Mirant al cel (Eyes on the Sky 2008) as a perfect case study where the spectral conflict between victims and victimizers is acted out in the context of Barcelona and Catalonia and the series of urban mass bombings carried out by the Italian Royal Legion under the direct supervision of Il Duce, Mussolini. Garay’s film special relevance lies in the fact of its being one of the few documentaries that revisits those three dramatic days in March 1938 that became a tragic rehearsal of the massive urban aerial raids of the Second World War.


I. The historical context-The emergence of a new Catalan documentary: A few critical observations
In a conventional sense, documentary films deal with reality, that is, they use history and historical documents as their basic reference. In the case of Catalan cinema, historical truth, even its documentation, was not easy to be represented, even accessed, during the Franco years since the regime had practically hijacked the possibility of telling other histories beyond the official one. This long historical monologue, or to put it more properly, this long absence of a real historical discourse, was compounded in the Spanish and Catalan cases by the pact of silence that was more or less explicitly underwritten by the main political actors in the transition to democracy once the physical presence of the dictator disappeared in 1975. In short, it may be safe to say that the bulk of the best new documentary cinema to emerge in Catalonia since Franco's death runs counter to both historical silences: the one imposed by the dictatorship and the other one upon which the entire precarious edifice of Spain's new democracy was built. The words of Carla Subirana, one of the youngest filmmakers to appear in the context of the new Catalan documentary with her remarkable feature film Nedar (To Swim 2008) are quite clear in this sense: • Martí-Olivella I don't agree with the message from the transition that all we can do is to forget. I don't want for all these stories to remain forever in the shadows of the past. It was enough with the pain and fear felt by my grandmother. As somebody told me, this is "the rebellion of the grandchildren." (Subirana in Marimon; emphasis is mine) These grandchildren have decided to break that pact of silence once and for all. What I want to emphasize in this chapter is the dual reality expressed in Subirana's words, the need to recover the historical memory and the need to

II. Metaphor, Intertext, and Spectral Memory in Mirant al cel
Among the many genre bending documentaries that have emerged in Catalonia since the turn of the century and the arrival of the epochal work by Joaquim Jordà and José Luis Guerín mentioned above, Jesús Garay's Mirant al cel emerges as an example that takes a step further by not only fictionally and thus publically recreating private accounts of the historical past, but by imagining, and thus rendering visible, the Other's (impossible) expiation, that spectral encounter where, as Jacques Derrida formulated it, a kind of ultimate justice may be achieved: To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome… Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of concern for justice… One must constantly remember that the impossible ("to let the dead bury their dead") is, alas, always possible. Until that second coming-the end of history-, though, specters will not let up. They will continue to importune the remorseful memory of the living, asking for the arrears of an ever-outstanding debt. If the endurance of the grief of history as lived in each agent's particularity-social class, ethnic or racial others, women, oppressed national groups-is evidence of a melancholy disposition, of incapacity to renounce a bygone world, it is also clear proof that affect has survived the strictures of bourgeois abstraction and has returned to haunt the ruined spaces of our technologized postmodern fantasy. Specters can radicalize the present, whose roots they are. (Resina 3; emphasis is mine) Indeed, all the peacefulness of the present, symbolized by the audience applause upon the conclusion of Mario Brindisi's recitation of the Divine Comedy, becomes disturbed for the spectator of the film with the arrival and the mute interpellation of Manel Beltran's ghost, whose affective demand carries with it all the burden of his private history and of collective guilt. The film's entire efficacy in terms of its capacity to elicit an emotional response largely depends on the spectator's willingness to accept and to be moved by its hauntological appeal. 9 A different kind of appeal, although charged with a similar critical import, is the one established by Jesús Garay from the very beginning of Mirant al cel, when the camera softly pans over the colorful graffiti that cover the film's first and foremost location: the unmarked ruins of the anti-aircraft battery placed on top of the Turó de la Rovira-those "ruined spaces" mentioned by Resina. In fact, Garay's recurrent, careful, and caring shots of those graffiti and of the ruins they both mask and unmask constitute another "mute interpellation" of sorts. They seem to lie in an inbetween space, equidistant from both, the monumental ruins and their allegorical value as a legible connection between present and past, or from those other graffiti inscribed on the walls of ghettos or concentration camps, what Kathryn Sederberg calls the "rubble texts" that characterized the early expression of many holocaust survivors. 10 Here, the graffiti mark the site as one of marginal consumption thus effectively hiding its historical value as a true "lieux de mémoire/memory place." As Quim Casas notes, Garay himself mentioned his surprise when he found these abandoned remains while looking for shooting locations for one of his television series. The first montage of the film shows in its juxtaposition of the colorful graffiti of the old battery, a series of black and white photographs of purported victims of the city's bombings, and a panoramic shot of Barcelona framed by one of the holes in the ruined walls of the battery. What Garay seems to demand is not only the chance to look again into the past but the need to do it through the cracks of those unmarked ruins that constitute the city's own invisible traces, the spatial ghosts that coexist with the city's "technological postmodern fantasy" and that, from time to time, reappear to haunt it. That explains why the film's initial panning shot ends with a soft upwards camera movement that discovers the silhouette of a contemplative figure gazing into the sprawl of the city from "el lloc on es va intentar defensar-la, on ara només hi queden Here, of course, the monster is the living ghost of Maria's own grandfather, Manel Beltran, the young artillery corporal we see recreated as the young defender of his home, his city, and his country. Maria's pursuit of that spectral presence seems to be echoed by the dramatic hide and seek game that the film establishes between the two "imagined contenders" until their final climactic encounter amidst the "placid present" of the applauding audience after Brindisi's recitation of Dante's trip to hell. As mentioned earlier, the entire affective demand of the film lies on the spectator's acceptance of its hauntological structure. More than simply documenting the horror of the terrible bombings over Barcelona, Garay wants to document the spectator's emotional response (or lack thereof) in front of those events. He seeks to embody our (lack of) memory in front of the absent presence of Manel Beltran. That Manel Beltran's memory was already lost to the ravaging effects of Alzheimer's disease, a fact only tangentially inscribed in the body of the film, simply adds to the unrelenting need for recognition and reparation. Garay's intentions are clearly echoed in Quim Casas's critical appraisal, arguably the most accurate and thorough reading of the film to date: In the present time, the camera captures two ghostly figures in a different way.
Whereas in the scenes concerning the war the ageing of the image gives them an unreal feel, as if they were appearing among the dead, in those that take place in the present the effect is achieved through the actors' tired expressions, the places they move around in, the digital treatment of the light and the spectral appearance of Manel, a living ghost, a rhetorical figure from the past that must not be forgotten. Old Mario exists, he is real, it is he who has aged and not the images, but during his appearance before journalists and experts on Dante he seems to be the ghost of an implacable time who, without lost memories, even though he refuses to acknowledge the truth, returns to the city he saw burning from the sky. That he is a specialist on the author of The Divine Comedy is no coincidence, as the reading of some of the poet's verses will serve him as a form of expiation before travelling across the city to that point from which Manel looked at him, on the site of the anti-aircraft battery, now, seven decades later, a pile of stones covered in graffiti when perhaps it ought to be a place of permanent tribute and not of the poor forgotten remains of the time that changed everything, (Casas 75/166; Trans. Andrew Saucey; emphasis is mine) The circular ruins invoked by Jesús Garay by starting and ending his film at that same site of graffiti covering forsaken remains, far from suggesting a Borgesian or Nietzschean return of the same, becomes in itself a place of memory, a "lieux de mémoire," which Pierre Nora, as recalled by Christina Duplàa, defined as "espacios donde cohabitan la memoria y la historia" [spaces where memory and history coexist] (Duplàa 30). In fact, Nora makes a further distinction, visually illustrated in Garay's film: "Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events" (Nora 22). Again Duplàa elaborates on the historian's words: Memory is thus a process that starts in the past but that is lived from the present, whereas history is a secular and intellectual representation of the past that becomes attractive to our critical analysis. The kind of elitism inherent in this definition of history is confronted by the "popular" character of memory, which stems from and feeds on tradition, and, for many people, is based on orality as the only means of communication. Memory is thus collective and plural while, at the same time, individual, whereas history belongs to everybody and to nobody and claims a universal authority. (Duplàa 30) This distinction is crucial here since Garay's film does start from a past event that it wants to memorialize in the present, namely, those tragic bombings in March 1938 that gave Barcelona the dubious honor of being the first large European city to be randomly bombed in a massive attack, becoming a historical rehearsal for the future ones in London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mussolini's direct orders to hammer Barcelona with uninterrupted bombings and his belief "that the war might be won using terror" are documented in the film with the oral testimony of Italian journalist Federico del Monte who shows a "Telegrama di Arrivo" with Il Duce's orders to carry out those attacks. Del Monte's testimony contributes to the film's attempt to let the Other speak, or, at least, to imagine their response. Del Monte's words, thus, supplement the The infernal storm, with no respite, drags the souls with its plunder, twisting and beating them on. And like the starlings carried by their wings, in the cold, in dense flocks, so does that puff carry the bad souls from here to there, up and down; no hope ever comforts them, gives them a break, or the slightest pity.
And like cranes, singing their praises, forming a long line in the air, I saw them arrive, bearing cries of pain, shadows carried away by that storm. That is why I said to him; Master, who are those who punish the black air so? (1:10:46-1:11:38) Mario Brindisi's public expiation via Dante's excruciating portrayal of "the infernal storm" is dramatically compounded by the images of panic, havoc, and destruction of the "black air" created by the bombs over the city. Garay ends that infernal montage with another horrific document, this time the voiceover account of the Barcelona Firemen Chief whom we hear alongside an intensely dramatic "txalaparta" soundtrack: I ordered the immediate removal of the dead body of a woman who was in an advanced state of pregnancy, and who, due to the shock wave, had ended up hanging from the iron gate of the university, totally torn apart. (1:12:55-1:13:00) This is the same university where, in the fictional present, Mario Brindisi is reading Dante's verses. One would be hard pressed to imagine a better way of bringing back the past horror, of remembering the "dismemberment" of that atrocious attack. That is why Garay has Maria Beltran film part of her interviews with survivors of the bombings inside these refuges and why she sees Mario Brindisi himself visiting those underground labyrinths, a symbolic counterpart to his recitation of Dante's own entrance into the gates of Hell, itself a metaphoric itinerary that Brindisi acts out in search of his own expiation.

Another less prominent but very important intertextual element in
With the inclusion of Juan Goytisolo's Coto Vedado and its evocation of the writer's mother's tragic death in those very bombings that the film commemorates, Jesús Garay creates yet another small film-within-a-film that works likes a mise-en-abyme of its entire project. Indeed, the passage from personal memory into oral history via the direct testimony is duly illustrated when after a superimposition of Goytisolo's text we see the author himself giving a direct oral account of that crucial moment in his life. And yet, as he • Martí-Olivella himself ponders: "Es que el recuerdo de un recuerdo de un recuerdo es todavía un recuerdo? No lo sé. Yo creo que fue una imagen creada posteriormente por el remordimiento de no haber intervenido para que se quedara" [Is the memory of a memory's memory still a memory? I don't know. I think it was an image created afterwards by the guilt of not having intervened so that she stayed] (18:40-19:07). Ultimately, what Goytisolo suggests is the intimate connection between memory and mourning, the central focus also of Mirant al cel as it exorcises social guilt while forcing spectators to recreate historical memory, even if this is achieved via the fictional images or imagined ghosts that come back to haunt the present. As viewers of the film, we engage in a collective act of mourning that rests on the capacity to accept and respond to the emotional demands posed by these traces of the past in our lives. Like Maria Beltran's final act of throwing the ashes of his grandfather into the sky above Barcelona from that very ruined anti-aircraft battery where he defended the city, we, the spectators of the film, are also invited to pay tribute to our deceased loved ones in a conflict whose victims never received an official reparation. After all, as Derrida said: it is possible "to let the dead bury their dead." For a detailed analysis of that film and its relevance in the context of the historical memory debates, see Jorge Marí's "La hora perdida: memoria, olvido, reconciliación y representabilidad en España otra vez."