Introduction

In the preceding chapters I have theorised the ventriloquial appropriation of the child protagonist's voice and body and the dialogism of the cines con niño. I turn my attention now to a particularly self-aware case of dialogism: adaptation. My focus will be on story, thus the narrative points of contact and departure rather than cinematic language, in two key films across the cines con niño that indicate the greater narrative appropriation of the cine con niño genre. Having explored in Chapter Three how Francoist cinema characterises Marisol as its ventriloquist's dummy in her third film Tómbola (Lucía 1962), we return to Marisol's first film in order to consider dialogism as narratological ventriloquism, or, following Bakhtin, ventriloquation. Subsequent oppositional filmmaking of constitutional Spain utilises the storytelling strategies of Un rayo de luz (A Ray of Light) (Luis Lucía 1960) for its political purposes. I argue that the cine con niño film Un rayo de luz and the nuevo cine con niño feature El viaje de Carol (Carol's Journey) (Imanol Uribe 2002) adapt the same nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary source text, Francis Hodgson Burnett's chil-dren's literature classic from 1885 Little Lord Fauntleroy, for opposing ideals of the two Spains.

The nature of the three texts that I analyse in this chapter calls for an intersectional approach that draws upon literary genre (Mikhail Bakhtin), film genre (Rick Altman), and adaptation theory (Deborah Cartmell, Julie Sanders, and Linda Hutcheon). Following Julie Sanders's terminology, I will examine the dialogism of adaptation and, in particular, the case of analogue and transposition between Marisol (Pepa Flores) and Carol (Clara Lago) in their respective feature-film debuts. These examples from the cine con niño and the nuevo cine con niño offer exceptional insight into the utilisation of the child protagonist in twentieth and twenty-first century Spain for contrary ideologies regarding family, nation, class, and gender.

Un rayo de luz and El viaje de Carol each participate in double-voiced discourse that addresses the national past and present. Lucía's feature, set and released in the 1960s, makes analogous mention of the conflict between the ‘rebels’ and the ‘reds’ in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. Uribe's feature is set during the Civil War (1936–9) but also dialogues with the prominent memory debate that led to the passing of the Law of Historical Memory five years later.