\"´Tenues límites entre la historia y las historias´: Reading Alicia Partnoy’s Textual and Visual Testimony, La Escuelita.\"

“Hybrid Spanish Cinema of the Crisis. Víctor Erice and Mercedes Álvarez: Documenting the real through fiction.” A draft version of this study, currently under revision for publication, was presented at Shattering Iberia: Cultural Responses to an Ongoing Crisis, a conference held at the University of Berkeley, California. Abstract: This article explores two hybrid films that reflect upon the ongoing Iberian crisis and its interconnections with the disappearance of personal memory. First, I place Víctor Erice’s “Vidrios partidos” and Mercedes Álvarez’s Mercado de futuros within the category of auteur documentary cinema, a “cinema of the uncertain” which here illuminates the impossibility of documenting absolute origins, be it the origins of capitalism as it was lived by the first Portuguese working class, or the origins of the current financial crisis. While these documentaries are highly aesthetized, self-referential constructs that point at their own “fictional ways of writing,” I argue that fiction becomes here the medium through which the real is documented. Additionally, I propose that, by obliquely calling out for practices of counter-memory of the crisis that have to do with the creative appropriation of space by citizens, these films demonstrate that the wide “memory industry” to which they belong is amnesiac in its own way. Ultimately, I claim that the full memorializing power of Erice and Álvarez’s cinema of the uncertain lies primarily in the original modes of artistic and social resistance that these two poetic documentaries not only record, but also at times enact, within the context of the Iberian crisis.