Alejandro Amenábar’s view on a staunch enemy: The reconciliation of cinema with Miguel de Unamuno?

Abstract

Miguel de Unamuno is a ‘spirit agitator’. This is the self-definition of one of the most significant intellectuals in contemporary Spanish History. In his free, passionate and politically incorrect opinion, the subjectivity of these who observe the multiple factors that impact on society is noted; among them, the cinematograph, invention that detests and of wich he becomes a furious enemy. But his figure, over time and in a paradoxical way, is also going to be a source of attention from the cinema. Not only in terms of the adaptation of his novels to the big screen; also, his own life. It is precisely Alejandro Amenábar’s last film -Mientras dure la guerra (2019)-, wich leads us to pose a reflection: Have the cinema does the ability to redeem and forgive to person who, many times, was cruel to the medium? The approach that the director makes to the last months of the Basque thinker’s life contains a series of iconography and symbolic constants that fuse the historical reality of the beginning of the Civil War with the personal perception of particular situations and the filmic fiction. An interdisciplinary study will help to trace ways to answer this question.