Historicidad y culpa en Muerte de un ciclista y Ca’ídos del cielo

Abstract

This article offers an explanation of Spain’s historicity, from the dictatorship to the consolidation of the democracy, by comparing the assassins of Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista (1955) and Ray Loriga’s Caídos del cielo (1994). The criminal acts affect the poetics of film and novel, which examination unveils the character’s temporality (Deleuze and Ricoeur) and guilt. This paper moves on to demonstrate how Bardem and Loriga’s poetics of composition replicate an image of the criminals’ historic condition conceptualized from the symbol of Adam’s fall. Its interpretation is later contrasted with the historicity of Spain, whose politics of memory in relation with the Civil War is affected by the oblivion of guilt (Franco’s dictatorship) and grounded on the contradictory idea of forgiveness (democracy).