Archives, Testimony and Place: Working Class Memory in Asturian Cinema

Recent Asturian films engage photographic archives not simply to recover histories marginalised under Francoism, but to reactivate them as collective, affective encounters. This paper examines La Calle del Agua (Celia Viada Caso, 2020), Vaca Mugiendo Entre Ruinas (Ramón Lluís Bande,2020), and El Cine, 5 (Elisa Cepedal, 2023), arguing that archival materials transform memory into socially shared experience rather than presenting the past as mere historical knowledge. Drawing on Halbwachs and Ricoeur, these films stage a passage from individual recollection to a collective mnemonic field, operating between personal memory and historical reconstruction through archives, testimony, and inhabited spaces. Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit provides a framework for understanding how these works reframe the past from the urgency of the present, foregrounding the histories of the defeated and the marginalised in opposition to contemporary processes of historical revisionism. Across their different formal strategies, the films reposition erased subjects as historical agents rather than peripheral figures. La Calle del Agua reconstructs the life and anti-fascist activism of photographer Benjamina Miyar through an investigative first-person dispositif that reads landscape as stratified memory. Vaca Mugiendo Entre Ruinas assembles archival photographs and testimony to construct a counter-history of Republican resistance in Asturias. El Cine, 5 foregrounds the testimonial practices of a mining community under dictatorship, transforming remembrance into a situated collective act. Together, these films position cinema as a site where suppressed histories are reactivated as shared political presence, opening questions about how the past is mobilised in the present.