“Pa negre y los otros fantasmas de la postmemoria: El \'phantom\' y los intertextos con La plaça del Diamant, El espíritu de la colmena y El laberinto del fauno.” MLN 131 (2016): 517–535

This article argues that the film Pa negre (Villaronga, 2010) questions the recreation of intergenerational transmissions of memory structures after the Spanish Civil War by means of the “ghosts of history,” the traces left in the present by silenced past events, as theorized by Jo Labanyi. Pa negre revisits the motif of the birds in La plaça del Diamant (Rodoreda, 1962), the hidden and monstrous characters in El espíritu de la colmena (Erice, 1973), and the fairy tale morphology of El laberinto del fauno (del Toro, 2006), to show the tensions between the depiction of the “ghosts of history” and what I call “the other ghosts of postmemory,” a transgenerational transmission of which the affected wants to be set free in order to reaffirm his or her present self, which I theorize following the concept of the “phantom” developed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.