Familia Tipo Analysis

In the prologue to Familia tipo, Cecilia Priego explains the circumstances in which she produced her film. On a recent trip to Spain, she went to see family members and people her father knew. They gave her home movies, photographs, and letters from his youth. Upon seeing these materials, Priego comes to understand some of the decisions her father made during his lifetime. Ironically, the film’s title leads us to believe that we are going to learn about a “typical” family, entirely ordinary and unexceptional. However, Priego soon discovers that there is an exception to every rule. Behind the veil of normalcy that the title announces, there lurks a hidden story of her father’s other family—another wife and another daughter named Belén. In the

The film’s initial sequence establishes a ground zero for what is to come: the very first sound we hear is of an old-fashioned projector starting up; immediately thereafter we see images taken from a domestic archive whose contents will fuel the narrative from that point forward. The prologue’s intertitles, written in the first person, explain that these images actually come from sixteen-millimeter reels that her father’s family recorded in 1948. By the end of the prologue, someone (probably Priego) hangs a string of photos from a balcony, as if they were clothes hung out to dry: a women with a child; a recently married couple; a young woman’s face; the same child again, but this time with a man; another man carrying a child in his arms. All the photos are in black and white, except for the last one, the only one not shown in close-up: its color has faded; it shows a smiling little girl. The epilogue sequence returns to the same balcony. We are now able to confirm that the woman hanging the photographs was Cecilia Priego and the little girl her daughter. The film’s trajectory allows us to learn some things about the people and events pictured. The prologue and epilogue therefore function as mirror sequences that permit us to read the film holistically as an actualization of the family photo album. However, it is only in these bookended sequences that the photographs appear orderly and clear. In the interim, the director subjects her archival materials to a battery of operations whose goal is to denaturalize them, problematize their referents, or make them say something altogether