History Turned Inside Out: Tensions between Body and Voice in the Female Characters of Spanish Cinema at the End of Spain’s Transition to Democracy

Abstract

This article compares the endings of three Spanish films made in the final years of the Spanish transition to democracy: Sweet Hours (Dulces horas, Carlos Saura, 1981), Evening Performance (Función de noche, Josefina Molina, 1981) and Vida/perra (Javier Aguirre, 1982). The three endings all share a common feature: the dislocation between the voices and bodies of their female characters, and the acousmatic divergence this produces. Drawing on Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmatic voice, and especially his revision based on the feminist postulates of authors such as Mary Ann Doane, the article identifies a correlation between the endings of these three films and Hélène Cixous’s theories about the relationship between voice, body and writing and the role they play in shaping women’s history. Using this theoretical framework, which also includes the theories of Teresa de Lauretis on the construction of female subjectivity, the aim of the study is to demonstrate that in the tensions between voice and body created by all three characters analysed, a space of representation emerges that establishes an alternative to the historical narrative of the Spanish transition to democracy.