The inheritance of silence in Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (Saura 1976) and Julieta (Almodóvar 2016)

Abstract

Looking specifically towards child figures who serve as witnesses of death and its afterlives, this article mobilizes Esther Rashkin’s psychoanalytic work on the phantom to analyse the inheritance of silence as trauma between the mother/daughter pairings presented in Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (1976) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016). As Ana in Cría cuervos and Antía in Julieta both grow up in the shadow of a parent’s death, they are forced to confront the haunting legacy of premature death and the paralysing presence of silence in their family histories. Saura’s Ana and Almodóvar’s Antía must challenge the previous generation’s secrets, which have shaped their upbringings, through the use of imagination and fantasy in order to combat the silences they were raised in, with the ultimate goal of constructing a new family narrative. By forging a new female voice through these child protagonists, Saura and Almodóvar present an enduring intergenerational project for redefining maternity and femininity in the post-Franco era.