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Between History and Memory: Creating a New Subjectivity in David Trueba's Film Soldados de Salamina

Based on the novel of the same title by Javier Cercas, David Trueba’s film version of Soldados de Salamina faithfully reflects the novel’s plot and major events. In both the filmic and literary texts the protagonist embarks on a search for the truth of history, a microhistorical approach that examines a specific traumatic event with the aim of elucidating details (people and their individual acts) ignored by broad historical representations. In the process, the novelist also lays bare the structure of the fictional text in order to demonstrate the impossibility of writing a real story. Despite the similarities of the two versions, the many changes effected by the filmmaker, as well as the nature of the film medium itself, provide sufficient reasons to examine Trueba’s work on its own merit. For one thing, the eminently visual language of film obliges a change from the dependence on the powers of verbal description to the use of photographic, mise-en-scène, and editing techniques in portraying psychic and physical information. For another, constraints on time and audience attention-span do not allow the repetition often put to very effective use in the literary text: film makes use of more dialogue not only to rapidly contextualize an event, but also to reduce the time needed to describe events and people. The reception of a visual text differs significantly from that of the written.