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

Abstract

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 onscreen child to cultural memory and depictions of the past, with par tic u lar reference to the Francoist period. Wright’s work traces the Spanish cinematic child from the 1950s to con temporary demo cratic Spain, charting the evolution of the child from the the allsinging, alldancing 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 con temporary demo cratic 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 childcenterd cinema both under Franco and in demo cratic Spain, unpacking the distinct ways in which the child figure is utilized under diverse political circumstances. With Inhabiting the InBetween: 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 par tic u lar, the impulse to reevaluate the Transition and its legacies in the con temporary context. Inhabiting the InBetween commences with the assertion that “ Children haunt the cinema of the Spanish transition to democracy” (3) and a detailed