Antonio Traverso

Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies

In a French arthouse film an Algerian man draws out a large kitchen knife and cuts his own throat. In a short Sri Lankan art video the goddess of destruction, Kali, and a woman soldier surface from the ocean and walk towards a small seaside village. Shaky images of a video documentary bear witness to the muddied streets and flooded buildings of a poor, black neighbourhood of the Southern United States. In a low-budget Australian film written and directed by an Indigenous filmmaker two homeless, petrol-sniffing Aboriginal youths walk aimlessly on the streets of an outback town. We encounter the modern world and its history via depictions of catastrophe, atrocity, suffering and death. During the past 100 years or so, traumatic historical events and experiences have been re-imagined and re-enacted for us to witness over and over by constantly evolving media and art forms. Perhaps due to the ubiquity and multiplication of such images and narratives in modern and post-modern culture, questions about the impulse to behold and depict both the suffering of others and of the self, as well as more general questions about the ontological status of the representation of trauma, have increasingly been raised within intersecting, inter-disciplinary fields of study over the past two decades.

Heading south, screening the South

Every day hundreds of people travel back and forth between southern countries. And with people travel cultures, experiences, memories and images. The Southern Screens project takes on a transversal south–south approach to the study of screen culture across transnational and transcultural territories. It seeks to create conditions for the generation, sharing and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the South as a specific kind of material and imaginary territory. It does so through the study of screen cultures in the global South, addressing the broad spectrum of cultural expression in both traditional and new screen media, including film, television, video and digital technologies.

Excavating La Moneda: cinematic memory and post-dictatorship documentary in Chile

ABSTRACT Nearly three decades after the end of the civic-military dictatorship led by General Pinochet, the documentary cinema of Chile has systematically embraced this country’s public memory project, exposing state-sponsored atrocities and their perpetrators, recovering survivors’ memories of loss, suffering and resilience, while continuing to challenge the collective conscience of Chileans. Post-dictatorship documentary in Chile has featured changing approaches, aesthetics, and themes, while persistently interrogating the relationship between the nation and its collective memory in the afterlife of the dictatorship through a filmic formal strategy of cinematic memory. Cinematic memory is defined here as a film’s deliberate use of style to articulate a distinctively filmic procedure of remembering experiences subjected to a politics of erasure. Thus, Chilean post-dictatorship documentaries seek an encounter with cultural memory via a filmic approach that can be described in terms of the Benjaminian metaphor of excavation. These post-dictatorship documentaries unearth tenuous material traces of the past through cinematic memory by focusing on the embodied return of survivors and other witnesses of atrocity to La Moneda, this nation’s government house, one of Chile’s most significant sites of memory.

Introduction: Cinema at the End of the World

At the Southern Screens symposium—convened by Antonio Traverso at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in October 2013, and subsequently documented in Critical Arts 29 (5) (2015)—it was decided that the symposium should be followed up with a broader conference. In November 2015, a collection of scholars from across the southern hemisphere, and some from the north whose interests are southern, gathered at Monash University, Melbourne, for the inaugural Cinema at the End of the World conference.1 With the Republic of South Africa, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, and the UK all represented, the conference proved wildly diverse in terms of topics and approaches, as well as sharing a common sense of camaraderie in one of the southernmost cities in the world. It was Chilean media academic and screen writer/producer Roberto Trejo who first suggested the title “El Cine del Fin del Mundo” (“Cinema of the End of the World”) when the idea of an international conference of this kind was being considered in Chile, around 2010. Trejo’s suggestion didn’t arise out of a vacuum, but drew on the well-established identity culture of the Southern Cone, particularly recognisable in the Patagonian region across southern Argentina and Chile. Indeed, in the southern Argentine region of Tierra del Fuego, the most diverse things are named after this imaginary of the extreme: there one can ride the historic Tren del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world train) from Ushuaia to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, read the Diario del Fin del Mundo (end-of-theworld newspaper), and even spend an evening listening to the Coro del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world choir). Similarly, one can appreciate artworks such as Argentine

La Flaca Alejandra: Post-dictatorship Documentary and (No) Reconciliation in Chile

Abstract This article focuses on the place of post-dictatorship documentary cinema within Chile’s process of transitional justice and, in doing so, gives preference to an agonistic understanding of political reconciliation over restorative notions. Chile is a nation where the process of political reconciliation after the 17-year-long dictatorship has been inherently entangled with an official prescriptive, restorative notion of national reconciliation, highly reliant on perpetrators’ impunity and vigorously rejected by survivors and their supporters. Post-dictatorship documentary cinema has largely uncovered and depicted the dictatorial state’s crimes, while offering testimonial space to survivors. Some films have interrogated the perspectives of the Pinochet supporter, the collaborator, and the perpetrator while wrestling with an open dialectics of confrontational and reconciliatory gestures. One such film is Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard’s La Flaca Alejandra ([Skinny Alexandra], 1994), which narrates the reconciliatory re-encounter of Carmen Castillo and Marcia Merino, former friends, revolutionary militants, and survivors, who went on to become, respectively, an exiled writer and a collaborator of the secret service. Structured as a reflexive first-person documentary of return—as the meditation of an exiled survivor who travels back to the scene of trauma in Chile—La Flaca Alejandra orchestrates an agonistic drama of unresolved gestures of confrontation and reconciliation.

Paine Memorial: A Visual Essay

Paine is a small agricultural community located 40 km south of Santiago, Chiles capital city. At the time of a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a lasting dictatorial regime in September 1973, one thousand people lived here. Violent repression against supporters of the overthrown government was unleashed across the country. When it reached Paine, it resulted in the selective arrest and subsequent execution or disapperance of 70 local men. They were the husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons, and brothers of those who remained and those who were still to come. A survey was conducted by the Association of Relatives of Disappeared and Executed Political Detainees of Paine in order to find out how many and who they were; the survey found that there were 1,400 relatives of victims across the generations. Built in 2004 to commemorate the 1973 victims, the Memorial de Paine is found on a narrow stretch of land located next to the highway that connects Paine with Santiago. One thousand wooden posts of various heights stand forming a topography that suggests the diverse nature of the areas landscape and people. Among the one thousand, 70 posts are missing. In the empty spaces, the widows, children, grandchildren and other relatives of the victims have created personal mosaics as part of a project of collective memory.1 Sara Ramírez, one of the memorials guides, had not been born when her father, Pedro Luis Ramirez Torres, was murdered by the military. This visual essay is constructed from still images and fragments of an interview with Sara Ramírez conducted in Paine in 2010.2 The essays images and text seek to elicit a reflexive and aesthetic response in the reader, calling their attention to the traumatic experience of the relatives and communities of political detainees who became victims of selective kidnapping, torture, summary execution, and disappearance. The visual-textual arrangement particularly focuses on the complex tension between no memory and re-constructed memory in the second and third generations of victims, who have grown up in a disfigured social landscape fatally marked by loss, silence, lack, fear and guilt. Of special significance for debates regarding ‘postmemory’ is the category ‘unborn children’, which emerged in the course of the interview, as used by Ramírez to refer to children of executed or missing political detainees born after their parents death or disappearance.3