Family cinema and emigration: Image, reconstruction and memory

Family cinema is a very revealing tool for us to inquire into a visual knowledge of an intimate and personal past, itself useful to rebuild customs that would help us understand how contemporary societies have evolved. Our work is based in considering the words of Patricia Zimmerman, its core location inside the 20th century’s audiovisual universe. For this author, the uniqueness of these movies lies in the way it is the viewer who takes over all audiovisual mechanisms. We propose to analyze an audiovisual piece that allows us to study in all its complexity a very concrete historical and social phenomenon: Spanish emigration during the second half of the 20th century, and how, within it, images were used to manage family memories or the reconstruction of the past.