1 . Still from the feature film Song to a lady in the shadow ( 2022 )
In this documentary I used photographs , letters from activists -including those that Clara herself sent to her friends and party comrades- , family films from the 1920s , 1930s and 1940s ( filmed by people from the Catalan and Valencian upper middle class as a means of contrasting and reflecting on the lack of images of the protagonist ) and the witnesses who knew her .
Clara had two brothers : Salvador -who died in the Battle of the Ebro- and Armand , who at the end of the Civil War began the route to take up exile in France . He enlisted as a worker in a French company and after being sent to two Stalags , he was sent to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp . He was murdered in Gusen , in May 1941 .
The years went by and I decided to rescue the valuable material I had about Armand Pueyo Jornet . Not only the testimonies from his children ( Albert and Eugenia ) and the photographs , but all the letters he sent to his wife Soledad Tartera i Vilanova .
Canción a una dama en la sombra situates us in the Spanish Civil War and in the Second World War through twenty-eight letters that Armand Pueyo Jornet wrote to his wife Soledad from when the retreat began to his time in the last Stalag -between 1939 and 1941- and fragments of El dolor ( War : A Memoir ) by Marguerite Duras , adapted by the Chilean playwright Marcela Torres .
In the films I have produced the family archive is used as a counter-shot to History told with an uppercase H . A family image does not only reveal the mood of those who appear in the film , but it also sheds light on the relationship between a document and its political context . The person filming has a perspective of class and genre that can be discovered in the images . That which is personal can also reveal that which is political .
Taking ownership is a subversive act . Assigning new meaning attacks images created by power . The trace of intention is erased when the images are taken to be re-edited and
REVIEW
81