As well as taking Spanish classes three times a week, I have just started a course at a university here on Political Violence in Cinema. There are about 30 of us in the class, mainly political studies students from the uni, and each week we watch a film that deals with political violence and then sit around and discuss it. It’s just my thing, I’m finding it very interesting and also pretty challenging. In the first class, we watched “Estado de Sitio”, which is a docudrama about the kidnapping of a US, erm, political operative, shall we say, in Uruguay in the early 1970s.

At the time Uruguay was a police state, and a supposedly non-violent political group called the Tupamarus kidnapped a few high profile foreigners. What was interesting was the development of one of the captives. Initially he is simply a worker from an international development agency. As he is grilled by his captors, we learn that officially he is a “telecommunications expert” for AID, a US government organisation ostensibly aimed at promoting development in Latin America. But he spends all day at the Uruguayan Police Headquarters, and the film shows him as being a key operative in training state agents in the art of torture.

The film itself was in French, and we watched it with Spanish subtitles. Youch. Having studied French all through high school, I found myself understanding many of the words I heard, but I had to read the subtitles to get the proper meaning. Very confusing, and very hard on the brain!

After the film there was a general discussion, which under other circumstances I would have joined, but my brain was too fried from the movie, and it was all I could do to follow what the others were saying. We didn’t talk too much about the film’s accuracy, which I thought was a shame. One review paper I found online described the entire film as a “monstrous manipulation”.

Nevertheless, it was very interesting to hear what people had to say.

Spain emerged from dictatorship in the mid-1970s, and the memory of repression is still very present in popular consciousness. Then of course there is ETA, the Basque separatist terrorist group that actively carried out terrorist attacks in Spain from the 1960s to it’s declaration of a ceasefire just a few months ago. Dictatorship, repression and terrorism: they’re pretty heavy weights on a national consciousness. These are topics for another post, but I found it interesting in the group discussion to hear echoes of these phenomena. Yet at the same time I heard the complaint, which is probably espoused by Political Studies students the world over, that in general people aren’t active enough, don’t protest enough, and are too preoccupied with fashion and following the crowd.

I will stop this here before I get carried away with a 3000 word essay. But watch this space for more thoughts on cinema, political violence, and the Spanish attitudes.

Other posts by Katie Llanos-Small