Michael J. Lazzara

Filming Loss (Post-)Memory, Subjectivity, and the Performance of Failure in Recent Argentine Documentary Films

Two Argentine filmmakers of the postdictatorship generation have used the documentary as a space in which to question constructions of history, memory, and identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. Both projects foreground the idea of loss and the difficulties of writing a “truthful” version of the past when confronted by politically motivated “official histories,” temporal shift, ideological change, lost referents, and missed experience. Andrés Di Tella’s La televisión y yo (2003) questions the intersections among history, identity, and the media. In it the filmmaker’s identity, fragile and tenuous, is shown to be based upon memories of the television programs of his youth that he missed because of his family’s self-imposed exile during the Onganía regime. The film is a clear critique of globalization’s effects on subjectivity. Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) highlights the tenuousness of her identity by exploring the gaps and silences of memory. It raises key questions about “postmemory” and generational shifts and, more particularly, about how those at a generational remove from the traumas of dictatorship can comprehend these traumatic historical events and their own relationships to them.

Introduction: Telling Ruins

Between 2001 and 2005, displaced citizens from Bogota’s condemned El Cartucho barrio revisit their neighborhood, now under demolition for a new millennium park; they stage scenes that combine material remains and memories of their lives there with images of their homes’ destruction in progress. In 2007 Rio de Janeiro, members of the National Students’ Union take up residence in a deteriorated parking lot that once housed their long-demolished headquarters and organize a cultural festival to commemorate the union’s tumultuous past and reclaim the space as their own. In 2005, a photographic exhibit forces Lima inhabitants who chose to ignore the brutal violence that took place in the indigenous Andes between 1990 and 2000 to confront powerful images of fellow Peruvians surviving amid the material rubble of civil war. In post-Soviet Havana, citizens perform taxing physical labor just to keep themselves and the crumbling buildings they inhabit standing, acts of recycling that reconfigure revolutionary ideology and Cuba’s cultural past. In post-2001 Buenos Aires, writers collaborate with street trash recyclers in a struggle to survive economic crisis and turn refuse into art. In December 2006, Chileans passionately enact their angst over how to interpret Augusto Pinochet’s disintegrating remains.

What Remains of Third Cinema

Documentary filmmaking in Latin America today undoubtedly differs from the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. But what remains of “Third Cinema”? How do new strategies blend with old ones to create a kind of temporal hybridity in documentary film? How do new movements like Argentina’s cine piquetero (picket-line cinema) return us to the aesthetics of forty years ago? And how do they diverge? This chapter looks at these questions by considering the evolution from the 1960s to the present of two of Latin America’s most iconic cultivators of militant cinema, Fernando E. “Pino” Solanas (Argentina) and Patricio Guzman (Chile). The work of these filmmakers is placed into dialogue with the emergence of cine piquetero since the 1990s.

Kidnapped Memories: Argentina's Stolen Children Tell Their Stories

One of the most deplorable and characteristic aspects of Argentinas “Dirty War” (1976–1983) was the stealing of babies by military families or regime supporters. Approximately 500 children were “transferred” during this time period. Thanks to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, 108 children have had their identities restored to date. This article focuses on how child transfer in Argentina has affected the construction of memories at both the individual and societal levels. By studying a few well-chosen cases of children whose identities have been restored, I seek to characterize the different and often radically opposed ways in which the sons and daughters of disappeared leftist militants have told their stories and understood their experience. My goal is to identify some of the most capacious and emblematic memory scripts that have emerged to accommodate variegated individual biographies. From these cases, it becomes abundantly clear that what is in the “best interest of the child” has no easy answer. One important conclusion is that the stolen childrens memories (as young adults) are almost always a reflection of politically motivated, present-bound interests and manifest in tandem with the dynamics of Argentinas transition to democracy as a broader historical process.

Introduction: Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium

The upsurge in Latin American documentary film at the turn of the twenty-first century is undeniable. In a region that has made documentary films, in some form or another, since the end of the nineteenth century, fiction film has long eclipsed the documentary in terms of prestige and circulation. Yet signs indicate that this situation is changing. While documentary production in the USA enjoyed something of a boom in the 2000s—it now comprises about 10% of the market—in Argentina, as Jens Andermann has noted, documentary now accounts for about 40% of total film production.1 The reasons for this boom are likely many and may include factors such as: an increase in documentary festivals, the creation of alternative distribution channels, the relatively inexpensive nature of documentary filmmaking, the democratization of the “field” for aspiring filmmakers, the use of portable media and new technologies, and the advantages of documentary for dealing with urgent social, political, or economic issues.2 Moreover, this boom in documentary has been accompanied not only by increased academic inquiry about the documentary form, but also by sustained innovation in documentary filmmaking practices—practices that are increasingly reflexive, metacinematic, and that blur the line traditionally separating documentary from fiction film.

The Present Time

There has been an abundance of essays and academic articles written about your “case.” This reality, coupled with the fact that The Inferno is taught both in Chilean and foreign universities as a paradigmatic text on collaboration during the Pinochet regime, compels me to cite some critiques I have read and to give you an opportunity to respond.

Trauma and Writing

Readers of The Inferno understand how difficult it was for you to tell your story. You had to overcome many fears and personal obstacles. How would you characterize those fears?

The Militant, the Sympathizer

In the first part of The Inferno, you refer to your militancy in the Socialist Party. Reflecting from the present, why and for what were you fighting as a militant?

Masculinity and Femininity

In the course of your narration about being a functionary of DINA, you highlight the importance of seeming more masculine (and consequently, less feminine) to survive in a hypermasculine, hierarchical military space. What details can you provide about that experience?

Names, Dates, Places

In 1972, I ran into a neighbor of mine on the bus. I told him that I had just recently separated from my husband and that I was looking for work. He asked me if I knew how to type. I told him I did not, but that I could learn.