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The Memory of Southern European Dictatorships in Popular TV Shows
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2023
Extract
Ever since the ground-breaking historical mini-series Holocaust (1978), television has proven to play a major role in structuring the collective memory about the past.1 This medium has, moreover, displayed a capacity to trigger a collective rendering of, and coming to terms with, painful, hidden or forgotten aspects of the past. Media specialist Garry R. Edgerton has even argued that ‘television is the principal means by which most people learn about history’.2 Even though such assertions might be tempered by today's predominance of social media – especially in generational terms – an inquiry into the politics of memory in popular television is still relevant for the field of public history, as well as for memory studies. This is particularly pertinent when representing dictatorship in the European South. Alongside public history projects of all kinds (including museums, memorials, commemorative plaques and practices), filmic representations (be it for cinematic or television use) structure the collective imaginary about the recent past. This essay briefly discusses TV shows that deal with and shape public understandings of the dictatorships in Spain (the final phase of Francoism, post-1968), Greece (the Colonels’ dictatorship, post-1969) and Portugal (the final phase of the Estado Novo (New State), post-1968).
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References
1 See Kansteiner, Wulf, ‘Entertaining Catastrophe: The Reinvention of the Holocaust in the Television of the Federal Republic of Germany’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 135–62, 144Google Scholar.
2 Edgerton, Gary R., ‘Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether’, in Edgerton, Gary R. and Rollins, Peter C., eds., Television Histories. Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2001), 1–16, 1–2Google Scholar.
3 See Labanyi, Jo, ‘Review’, Screen, 48/3, 2007, 291Google Scholar.
4 In particular Vasilis Vamvakas and Kleio Kenterelidou, eds., Χρόνια Ελληνική Έντυπη Διαφήμιση, 1945–2015. Καταναλωτική κουλτούρα, κοινωνικά πρότυπα, στρατηγικές επικοινωνίας (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2021). Vasilis Vamvakas and Grigoris Paschalidis, eds., 50 χρόνια ελληνική τηλεόραση (Athens: Epikentro, 2018); also Vamvakas and Panayiotopoulos, Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του 80. Κοινωνικό, πολιτικό και πολιτισμικό λεξικό (Αthens: Perasma, 2010).
5 Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘Μια παράδοξη κληρονομιά’ [A paradoxical heritage], Kathimerini, 18 June 2017. The quote that triggered the controversy was the following: ‘The process of social modernization had, of course, begun before the dictatorship, but the latter accelerated it knowing that its acceptance to a large extent depended on economic growth and reinforced the tendency of people to seek happiness in the private sphere’.
6 It is no coincidence, therefore, that this fascinating story comes out strongly in filmic depictions of the Greek dictatorship: both Kostas Kapakas’ Uranya (2006) and the Loafing and Camouflage series (based on the eponymous and extremely influential comedy from 1984) focus on the military regime's connection to television.
7 Creeber, Glen, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 14Google Scholar.
8 On a theoretical treatise of ‘nostalgia’ see classic, Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar. On the core critique uttered against representations of 1968 in France and Italy focusing on ‘nostalgia’, see Bernardo Bertolucci's interview, ‘Dopo la Rivoluzione’, in Daniela Basso, ed., Il cinema, il Maggio e l'uopia. Les amants réguliers. Percorsi intorno al ‘68 (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), 12–22. Bertolucci, in fact, rejects these blanket accusations voiced against his own The Dreamers (2004) and defends the nostalgic vision as legitimate. The RAI-produced Italian drama La meglio gioventú (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003), an arthouse version of the average Italian family throughout the 60s and 70s, was equally criticised, despite critical appraisal and a prize at Cannes.
9 Loxham, Abigail, ‘Consuming the Past as a Televisual Product: Gender and Consumption in Cuéntame Cómo Pasó/ ‘Tell Me How it Was’, in Kornetis, Kostis, Kotsovili, Eirini and Papadogiannis, Nikolaos (eds), Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the ‘Long 1960s’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) 232Google Scholar.
10 On this issue see de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
11 Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; also see Kornetis, Kostis, Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the Long 1960s in Greece (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013)Google Scholar.
12 Kornetis, Kostis, ‘From Politics to Nostalgia – and Back to Politics: Tracing the Shifts in the Filmic Depiction of the Greek “Long 1960s” Over Time’, Historein, 14, 2 (2014)Google Scholar. For a full list of such films see op. cit. Also see on the subject Chalkou, Maria, ‘Childhood Memories, Family Life, Nostalgia, and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Greek Cinema’, in Willert, Trine Stauning and Katsan, Gerasimus, eds., Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2019), 185–99Google Scholar.
13 Interview with the author, June 2017. Also see an elaboration of this idea in Isaac Rosa, El vano ayer (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2005), 32.
14 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Cronica sentimental de la transición (Madrid: Debolsillo, 2005 [1985]). Fellow Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is equally critical of this approach by literary and filmic representations; however, he uses the same term (‘sentimental’) to criticise the opposite trend of promoting a Manichean version of recent Spanish history whereby the bad Francoist guys are ‘ugly, gross, macho, sexual maniacs, and animal abusers’: ‘The result of this . . . sentimental brand of memory is forgetfulness about the very thing one is trying to remember’, in this case the period of Francoism and the transition. Antonio Muñoz Molina, ‘Desmemorias’, El País, 6 Sept. 2008. Here I am using the translation by Ruth McKay in ‘The Good Fight and Good History: The Spanish Civil War’, History Workshop Journal, 70/1 (2010), 204.
15 On the issue of ‘retornados’ see the recent book by Christoph Kalter, Postcolonial People. The Return from Africa and the Remaking of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
16 Michael Rothberg, ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: “Chronicle of a Summer”, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor’, PMLA, 119, 5 (Oct. 2004), 1233–34.
17 Unpublished paper presented at the ‘Procesos transicionales en el paisaje europeo’ roundtable of the ‘Narrativas de la Transición a la Democracia en España’ conference in Salamanca, 3–4 June 2021.
18 Loxham, ‘Consuming the Past as a Televisual Product’, 227–39, 232.
19 Kate Ferris and Claudio Hernández Burgos, ‘“Everyday Life” and the History of Dictatorship in Southern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 52, 2 (2022), 123–35, 127.
20 See on the Spanish example Pamela Radcliff, Making Democratic Citizens in Spain. Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).