Soldiers of Salamina

Soldiers of Salamina, (David Trueba, Spain, 2004) an adaptation of Javier Cercas's bestselling 2001 novel, calls into question how the Civil War is represented. Predominantly set in Gerona in the present, Spain's 2004 Academy Awards foreign-language category entry, centres on Lola Cercas (Ariadna Gil), a journalist and writer who attempts to uncover the details of the execution of approximately fifty Nationalist prisoners and the escape of one of their group, the real-life writer and fascist ideologue Rafael Sánchez Mazas (Ramón Fontserè). Lola also becomes involved in the search for a young soldier who may have saved Sánchez Mazas’ life.

Utilising a variety of film forms, the line between reality and fiction becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish. In addition to fictional footage of the present and the Civil War, the movie includes footage of a real historical event with characters from the film superimposed. This collage of forms effectively blurs the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, between the ‘real’ and the ‘reconstructed’ or ‘re-presented’.

In doing so, Soldados de Salamina questions the possibility of constructing totalizing narratives, promoting in its place a more subjective approach to representations of the past. It represents the Civil War as far from black and white or easily accessible, suggesting that the conflict is part of a murky history that is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. 

The closing sequence consists of a slow-motion flashback to the young Republican soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas’ life; he dances slowly in the rain to the accompanying melancholic rendering of the pasodoble ‘Suspiros de España/Sighs of Spain’. The film concludes with a mid-shot of the rain-drenched soldier looking directly at the camera, pausing briefly before he turns his back to the screen: Soldados de Salamina invites the audience not to turn away from his memory, but to embrace it.

The release of Soldados de Salamina coincided with initial moves to uncover the mass graves which held the bodies of the Civil War dead, a movement which has grown and developed since. Trueba argues that ‘The public debate in Spain continues the ideological patterns that concurred in the war. We don’t have a mature democracy because we did not break with the Franco years.’ Soldados de Salamina is an important contribution to that debate.

DA