Women and violence in contemporary Spanish cinema: La vida secreta de las palabras (2005), Mataharis (2007) and Elisa K. (2010)

Abstract

Within the framework of the debate on violence against women in Spain, this article aims to analyse three Spanish films that constitute a turning point in the media and political configuration of the issue. The specialist literature agrees that, despite good intentions, the attention paid to the matter since the 1990s has reinforced rather than dismantled the cultural imaginary that sustains violence against women by placing them in the eternal position of victims. However, La vida secreta de las palabras, Mataharis and Elisa K. offer challenging narrative strategies to undermine this hegemonic grammar of recognition. Through our analysis, we will investigate how their approach is linked to an attempt to go against the grain of traditional technologies of representation and, hence, the sadism in narratives portraying gender violence (not only in Spain but in the international arena). Second, we will examine how, by framing that attempt within particular historical backgrounds that sustain (or have sustained) violence against women, the films, in the last instance, deal with the rewriting of historical memory.