Repressed Memories and Desires: The Monstrous Other in Agustí Villaronga’s Pa negre

This article locates Pa negre’s aesthetics of the ghostly and the monstrous and its association with narratives of transgressive sexuality in relation to a variety of texts and films. Rather than focusing exclusively on historical or political accounts, this reading of Pa negre is based on the Freudian concept of the uncanny to show how the director draws attention to society’s fears about sexual difference. It suggests that in doing so, Agustí Villaronga denounces the mechanisms whereby the deviant socio-sexual Other has habitually been excluded, cleansed as it were, from the memory of the collective.