The people of Central Europe look at history from a specific angle: they come from small countries which are usually powerless to make developmental decisions, yet need to react to whatever political shifts and advances occur (usually at the instigation of a neighboring great European power). So the stories told here are not so much those of people heroically influencing the course of history but of those who cannot do much more but stand by and witness events; they are stories of the vulnerable and the powerless, the small and the weak, the pawns and the underdogs. The actions of these protagonists are marked by the overpowering consciousness of their own limitations.

...The key concern of East Central European cinema is the interplay between historical and social processes and the personal experience of these processes. It is within this relationship, tilted towards the individual, where most identity issues and existential insecurities are played out. The never ending identity quest is often accompanied by an underlying frustration; there is an ongoing friction between objective historical events and their critical appropriation that limits the range of choices available to the individual. This is part of an eternally unresolved process of identification where all subjective moves are ultimately determined by the dialectical interplay with history.

Well aware of the excesses and dangers of totalitarianism, filmmakers saw the making of 'apolitical' films as a matter of priority. The films that they opted for would often be about disturbances of intimate relationships rather than heroic confrontations or class struggles; they would focus ordinary everyday life and thus, in the context of imposed excessive politicization of the personal domain, deliver a covert political statement.

The middle-class genre film suggests the antinomy between Japanese modernity and rising nationalism in the 1930s, in the sense of a Japanese national subject's split between the call to modernize and the contradictory longings for the mythic cohesion of the past. The idea of 'the middle class' at the center of the genre worked to mitigate long-standing differences in social strata and in the particularities of Japan's interwar social transformation; the collective image of the middle-class served as a national identity for the modern subject. The middle class that emerged in interwar Japan referred less to a reconfigured labor force than to a new citizenry of a modern social transformation.

In a further reading of Chikako's sacrifice, the film deploys another parallel in an act of whispering that occurs as the film reveals Chikako's moonlighting. The scandal is revealed to Harue by Kinoshita; first he states, 'Chikako seems to be working as a barmaid after her daytime job... The rumor involves not only that... '; then he whispers the rest to Harue, although the information is not shared with the audience. At this point we might imagine Chikako is involved in prostitution or something worse. More whispering occurs in a later sequence, when Harue reveals the rumor to Ryoichi. She says, 'What would you do if your sister was not who you think she is?' Then she whispers to Ryoichi, and again, the film conceals the information from the audience. Ryoichi replies, 'What are you talking about? It's too ridiculous!' Harue continues, 'That's not all. Your sister has disgracefully become a barmaid.' This information, as delivered, effectively undercuts the possibility that Chikako's suspected disgrace involves prostitution, but leads the audience towards another possibility - that of Chikako's involvement with a Communist political group. The film encourages such a political inference by embedding details of a hidden social progressive narrative, as in an earlier scene of the police officer's inquiry at Chikako's office and later in a headline announcing the arrest of a criminal organization.

Finally, in an ultimate irony, the character's flight from the city at the end of ¿Qué hecho yo? though it marks the apparent fulfillment of their shared dream, reenacts the conclusion of the founding film of Spanish neorealism, José Antonio Nieves Conde's Surcos (Furrows, 1950). Hailed as the 'first glance at reality in a cinema of paper-maché', for its treatment of the problem of the rural exodus to the cities, in the hands of Falangist Nieves Conde, it also served as a cautionary tale regarding the moral corruption and destruction of family structures that awaited new immigrants to the city.

...Far from the instance of the postmodern denial of history through pastiche, as in Fredric Jameson's account of the mode, through its juxtaposition in filmic intertexts, the ironic American pastoral Splendor with the Spanish cautionary tale Surcos, ¿Qué hecho yo? casts suspicion on the workings of the cinematic imaginary. The longing for return is revealed as a return to the past of Francoism, a past Almodóvar's films disavow even as they actively re-evaluate its hold over the present.

Erice's film is preoccupied with the serial performance of self-representation, which (no matter how narcissistic) must inevitably be historicized. The film demonstrates that no matter what subject you are documenting (on canvas or on celluloid, on paper or video), you are still representing yourself and your medium and bearing witness to the historical and cultural moment that shaped your subjectivity. Like Innisfree, both López's painting and Erice's filmmaking capture the traces of what is perceived and remembered.

The troop's isolation in the Philippines is analogous to the isolation of the Francoist regime from other nations. The value of defending the empire to death is the latent hegemonic nationalist call. In the construction of the national ego ideal, the film narrative glorifies the 'conversion of the historical massacre into a religious sacrifice, one that is focused on the 'fetishization of virility and sacrifice.' Catholic orthodoxy is entwined with militaristic adventurism.

What is the reality that these two films try to 'normalize'? It is the reality of a shared political space, Spain, that still resists being reimagined and thus represented as a plurinational, multicultural, and heteroglossic community... They underline a common goal to reimagine the different languages and cultures of Spain as an essential richness rather than a constant source of national struggle.