Memory and the spectator in post-dictatorship Argentina: misreading D'Angiolillo's Potestad (2024)

Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Post-Dictatorship Argentina: Beyond Memory Fatigue:

Indiana University Press, 2019

This book's primary goal is to critically examine traditional approaches to testimonial cinema (trauma theory and subaltern studies), to propose an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics and theories of affect, and to re-read Argentine films produced between 1983 and 2016 from this latter standpoint. I expect that this renewed analysis will contribute to understanding the specific place of first-person narratives in contemporary Argentine culture and to overcoming the existing fatigue surrounding the topic (“el temita,” as Mariana Eva Perez, also known as “la princesa montonera,” has brilliantly called the fossilized discourse on the dictatorship). Although I focus on Argentina, my readings also apply to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to hegemonic, iconic accounts: Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian post-dictatorship narratives; accounts of apartheid South Africa; and Holocaust testimonies, to name but a few. I see Argentina as a case study for rethinking testimonial cinema in a larger context, one that goes beyond trauma and subaltern theories. I also believe that an approach combining semiotics and affect theories could be helpful in pursuing a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.

"Cinema and Recent Past in Argentina"

In Argentina, the last military dictatorship ruled between 1976 and 1983. Since the return of democracy in December of 1983, a variety of means have—to a large extent—made it possible to unravel and represent the horror endured during the years of the so-called “National Reorganization Process.” The aim of this presentation is to address the different discourse strategies used in motion pictures representing the kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance of persons during the last military dictatorship. To this end, I have selected Argentine films that, having been produced in different decades, allow me to trace an historical evolution in the treatment of this topic. These films portray the adaptation to life in illegal detention centers in different ways. From an analytical perspective, my starting point in each chapter is a “memory cycle” (Da Silva Catela 2006), a concept I shall often resort to, since it defines the different socio-historical periods in post-dictatorship Argentina.

Reclaiming the Narrative of a Generation: The Representation of Argentina’s Last Dictatorship Through Cinema

2020

Over 453 films have been made focusing on the topic of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), otherwise known worldwide as the Dirty War. This time period is characterized by the vile human rights abuses committed by the military junta against those who opposed the government, leading to the disappearances of 30.000 people, many of whom left children behind. These children were often forced to grow up, giving up their childhood, due to their parents' militancy. In the national story of the dictatorship, these children's stories and experiences have often been forgotten. This thesis will investigate the portrayal of the last Argentine dictatorship through cinema, from the perspective of children who grew up during the dictatorship, often children of the disappeared. These films often focus on the recreation of identity, their disappeared parents, and the loss of childhood innocence. Through fiction and documentary film, these filmmakers are able to use a self-reflexive process to recreate their identity and self-represent their own stories, rather than fitting into the narratives forced upon them.

The Silent Majority in Cinema about the Argentinian (Post)Dictatorship: Collective Responsibility, Desires of Repression and Micro-fascisms

Law, Culture and the Humanities: SAGE Journals, 2019

The article re-examines the problem of collective responsibility for state-sponsored violence, taking the latest Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) as a case study, a country that has also elaborated a proper theoretical frame to research the subject. Here I propose to think the issue of society’s implication in past violence in terms of the categories of desires of repression and micro-fascism, rather than the classical, Enlighted and heroic concepts of responsibility and resistance. To that end, the article analyses two very recent films of the Argentine cinema: The long night of Francisco Sanctis and Red. Both films address the situation of the ordinary people under systemic violence, exemplifying how societal desires and micro-fascist attitudes work to stabilise a repressive regime. The films’ focus on the desires of repression and micro-fascisms, I argue, draws attention the small fears, anxieties, resentments, and jealousies that constitute a society and represent the violent regimes’ conditions of possibility. I suggest the films were read less as films about the abuses of the past and more as productions that illuminate the elements of the past that made possible the resurgence of repressive discourses and neoliberal ideologies in the present.

Diary of a documentary in the making: filming the local imaginaries of post-dictatorship Argentina* Diario del making of de un documental: imaginarios locales de la posdictadura argentina

Comunicacion y Medios, 2019

Resumen Este artículo constituye el diario del proceso de pro-ducción de un documental que busca crear un mapa cinematográfico de los imaginarios locales de la posdictadura argentina. De este modo, traza el desarrollo y despliegue de un proyecto que utiliza el cine como medio, tanto en su recepción como en su po-tencial creativo para documentar y dar cuenta de ma-nera artística de fenómenos sociales que permiten comprender el multifacético, entreverado y polisémi-co conjunto de imaginarios sociales de la memoria de la dictadura cívico-militar argentina y la consiguiente transición democrática. Este viaje cinematográfico supone un ingreso al laberinto dantesco que se de-sarrolla en el espacio liminal entre lo imaginario y lo real. En este despliegue, experiencias vividas de manera íntima resuenan en demostraciones públicas del placer y del trauma que conducen a un espacio aún por definir entre el documental y la ficción. Abstract This article constitutes the diary of a documentary in the making, one that aims to create a cinematic map of the local imaginaries of post-dictatorship transition. The unfolding project it charts uses film as a medium-both its reception by audiences and its creative potential as a mode of documenting and expressing social phenomena artistically-in order to map and produce fresh understanding of the multifaceted and layered, polysemous set of social imaginaries of the memory of Argentina's civic-military dictatorship and the ensuing post-dictatorship transition to democracy. This cinematic journey into the Dantesque labyrinth of the imaginary unfolds in the liminal space between the imagination and the real. In doing so, intimate lived experience resonates through public displays of trauma and pleasure, taking us into a yet-to-be-defined space that is neither documentary nor fiction.

Projecting History: A Socio-semiotic Approach to the Representations of the Military Dictatorship (1976-1983) in the Cinematic Discourses of Argentine Democracy

Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham _ Supervisor Dr. Adam Sharman, 2000

This thesis analyzes a series of films that, in different ways, seek to represent the last Argentine dictatorship. The possibility of interpreting the thematic and formal recurrences of the films as a defining characteristic of a specific genre is posed as a first hypothesis. The second hypothesis postulates the possibility of relating certain aesthetic and rhetorical changes of the series to certain socio-political processes. After presenting a general overview of some of the various forms in which the relationship between cinema and society has been theorized before, the work proposes the instance of enunciation as a principle of articulation between textual and social systems, analysing the subjects involved in each of these levels and the relationship that can be established between them. The apparatus of enunciation (between textual figures), which can be related to the reading contract (between social subjects) can also be associated with the notion of genre. In this context, the thesis explores the possibility of a redefinition of cinematographic genres from the perspective of the Semiotics of Passions. Having established in the previous chapters the theoretical and methodological basis, the second part of the work consists of the analysis of the enunciation in the films of the corpus, in order to establish the main characteristics of the reading contract proposed to the spectator. The analysis starts with the consideration of the genre known in television as "docudrama", paying particular attention to the relationship between what is filmed and the "real", that this genre seeks to establish. This is followed by the partial conclusions of the analysis of the totality of films included in the corpus. A first systematisation of the general characteristics of the films considered allows for a definition of a new genre which we termed "documelodrama".

Politics of Memory: A Study in Latin American Revolutionary Cinema

Children, Broken Families, and National Trauma in Contemporary Dictatorship Films in Chile

The Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema, 2019

Iconic Fictions: Narrating Recent Argentine History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Films

Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina:Truth Forums and Arts of Dramatisation

Social & Legal Studies, 2017

Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ (2016) notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts of dramatisation’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in Argentina in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute, ‘candidates for truth’. Following Stengers’ provocations we argue that the various modes of staging the past conjure it up its violence in distinct ways, placing different constraints on how it can appear, using different material apparatus and probing it according to different values under different obligations and constraints. Based on observational research and interviews with key personnel – including lawyers, artists, forensic anthropologists, psychologists – we suggest that while each of the forums within this ecology is concerned with truth, how and what emerges as truth necessarily differs. What counts as evidence, what is understood as ‘successful’, what is dismissed as irrelevant, are all dependent upon the concerns of the forum, such that truths about Argentina’s dictatorship are not only ‘situated’ but also necessarily ‘partial’ forms of world-making. In an attempt to propose a shift from over-determined and usually binary lines of debate, we suggest these truths exist within an ‘ecology of practices’, to use Stengers’ term, insofar as these forums are not closed off from each other, but are becoming a web of often highly interdependent connections, wherein personnel, practices, audiences and resultant ‘truths’ travel.