Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema: Brazil, Chile and Argentina 3031470699, 9783031470691

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema Brazil, Chile and Argentina Tatiana Signorelli Heise

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK John Sutton, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Tatiana Signorelli Heise

Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema Brazil, Chile and Argentina

Tatiana Signorelli Heise University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

ISSN 2634-6257 ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-031-47068-4 ISBN 978-3-031-47069-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Andrés Habegger/El (im)possible olvido (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, 2016) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Maui, Otis and Skye In memory of Scot and Azul—always

Acknowledgements

Support for this research has been provided by the Leverhulme Trust and the Carnegie Trust. Thank you, Andrew Tudor, for your unwavering encouragement and your patience in reading so many drafts of these chapters. Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Above all, thank you for being there. A big thank you to the filmmakers who inspired this book and agreed to be interviewed: Andrés Habegger, Lúcia Murat, Anita Leandro, Felipe Bustos Sierra, Flávia Castro, Emilia Silveira, Roberto Mader, Andrés Lübbert, Mariano Corbacho, Paula Sacchetta, Liss Orozco, Tuca Siqueira. Thank you also to Victoria Larrabeiti for our talk in Valparaíso. Thank you to Lisa Shaw for being such an incredible source of support for as long as I can remember. Thank you to Stephanie Dennison and Lucia Nagib. Thank you to Douglas Mulliken for your assistance with the task of compiling (what proved to be an endless!) list of post-dictatorship films from Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Thank you to Memoria Abierta in Buenos Aires, Memórias da Ditadura in São Paulo and Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos in Chile for our discussions and for offering me access to your resources. Thank you to my family in São Paulo and relatives in Santiago for your hospitality. Thank you to Mariano Mestman and Pablo Piedras for our conversations in Buenos Aires.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Clemente Peyrelongue for sharing your memories of 1970s Chile. Thank you to Alberto da Silva and colleagues at Sorbonne Unniversité Paris for your enthusiastic response to my presentation of an early draft of this book. Thank you to Mar Felices and Eirene Houston for inviting me to share aspects of this book with your audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Thank you, Luís Gomes, for inviting me to present a draft of this book at the Stirling Maxwell Seminar Series in Glasgow, and for Chloe Coldwell for letting me know that my paper inspired you to pursue your own research in the field. Thank you to colleagues and friends at the University of Glasgow’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures, especially Stephen Forcer, Michael Syrotinski, Paul Bishop, Luís Gomes and Laura Martin. Thank you to the History & Subjectivities Cluster for promoting a space where we could share our different perspectives on the subject of trauma, and to Liudmila Tomanek and Alessia Zinnari for our conversations. Thank you, Karen Lury. Thank you to the Research Office at the University of Glasgow for the administrative support. Thank you to Alice Carter at Palgrave Macmillan and to the reviewer of this book for your encouraging feedback and suggestions.

Contents

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Introduction: Cinemas of Memory

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Memory Frameworks: Dictatorship and Transition in the Countries of the Southern Cone

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The Rise of the Witness: The Informative Mode of Cinematic Remembering

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How We Remember: The Reflective Mode of Cinematic Remembering

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The Screened Self: The Diaristic Mode of Cinematic Remembering

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Imagined Pasts, Possible Futures: The Playful Mode of Cinematic Remembering

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Conclusion

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Cinemas of Memory

Rio, 28 October 2018. (…) When you were born, I had to look backwards. I did that to stop certain silences from creeping in between us and overruling our house, like they did between my father and my grandmother, between my father and me. Like they did in our country. Silences erase memory, they seal pacts of forgetting or forgetfulness. Silences are the roots of great family pains; they burn bridges between people, between countries and their histories. We need to regain the power to narrate ourselves. To open the black box and tell our own stories, rebuild our memories, reconstruct our collective unconscious. So that the past won’t haunt us anymore. Neither inside our house, nor outside. Carol Benjamin, Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil/I Owe You a Letter about Brazil (2019)

During my time in South America researching for this book, friends, relatives and acquaintances would often enquire about my interest in post-dictatorship cinema. On one such occasion, talking to my uncle in São Paulo, I told him that despite having been born and raised there in the 1970s, I had no personal recollections of the dictatorship, nor had I learnt anything about it in school, where the history curriculum on the period consisted of a list of the generals whose names and time in government we were supposed to memorize. As I explained to him, it was only © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_1

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as a student at ECA, the University of São Paulo’s School of Arts and Communication, that I learned more about the nuevo cine latinoamericano of the ‘60s and ‘70s and, by watching those films, formed a sense of what the dictatorship had been like. The scene from O desafio/The Challenge (Paulo César Saraceni 1965) when Maria Bethânia’s song ‘É de manhã’ bursts on the soundtrack to accompany the protagonist’s realization, as he drives along a coastal road, that after March 1964 no one would be safe again, was imprinted on my mind as if I had been in that car myself, listening to that song and sharing his despair. My uncle replied that it was a shame that Brazilian films never showed the ‘other side’ of the military regime, as he remembers it: the steady economic growth, high employment rates, reduced criminality…. This and other conversations revealed to me the extent to which the dictatorship remains on the minds of South Americans, whether in the form of selective and somewhat distorted memories, occasional calls for its return, at least in the Brazilian case, or a sense of profound loss for what these societies could have been if only the coups d’état had never occurred, as articulated in O desafio and so many later films. Unlike the directors of nuevo cine latinoamericano, their contemporary counterparts nurture no illusions about the power of cinema to transform the world, nor do they believe they can prevent the return of authoritarian forms of government by reminding us of their consequences. Their ambitions have been more modest, but their achievement no less significant: since the mid-1990s, they have created an extensive repertoire of memory-narratives about the dictatorships and their enduring consequences in Latin America, and have made the period known to many audiences, including those too young to have experienced it. These memory-narratives have been constructed out of carefully selected pieces, including images originally shot or remediated from archives, documents, objects, reflections, appraisals, thoughts, sensations, fantasies, stories—all of this material assembled in such a way as to lend meaning to an atrocious past and offer a sense of what it must have been like to endure life under, and after, a military regime. The reason why cinemas of the Southern Cone are of particular interest for questions of cultural memory is because these countries have been undergoing a unique post-transitional experience since the 1990s, marked by unprecedented debates about human rights violations, accountability for state crimes, the silencing of victims and the importance of remembering. Politically committed filmmakers have both helped to create,

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and benefited from, a political environment favourable to the production and dissemination of narratives about the dictatorships and their aftermaths. These filmmakers are moved by the desire to render visible what has remained hidden, to make reappear what has disappeared and to reinterpret historical actors and events from a present-day perspective. Many of their films have received significant popular and critical acclaim, circulated in international festivals and won prizes. Increasingly, their concern with documenting past atrocities in the region has been combined with an interest in participating in, and contributing to, new tendencies in filmmaking practices. This has led to the development of cumulatively innovative and creative ways of remembering South American dictatorships through film. Just as cinema constitutes a transnational medium par excellence, marked by the trans-border circulation of images, people, financing, distribution and circulation systems, so can the histories of dictatorships in Latin America be understood as an inherently transnational development associated with the Cold War. The term ‘post-dictatorship culture’ also carries strong transnational connotations. It refers to art, literature, memorials, museums, cinema, photography and other cultural works from Latin America that address the rise and consequences of the military dictatorships in the region. Nonetheless, the study of post-dictatorship culture has been typically approached through a national lens, that is, the memory discourses, practices and products arising in this context have most often been examined in relation to the countries from which they originate.1 Accordingly, one of the goals of my study is to address this gap

1 This book establishes a dialogue with burgeoning scholarship on South American postdictatorship cultures. Much of this scholarship has been marked by a tendency to examine cultural products strictly in relation to the national contexts in which they are produced. The prevalence of a national framework can be observed in works such as Lazarra’s Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006); Maguire’s The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (2017); Garibotto’s Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina: Beyond Memory Fatigue (2019); Furtado’s Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present (2019) and Atencio’s Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil (2014). Some collections have widened their scope to include more than one South American country. Significantly, however, these studies tend to exclude Brazil. Moreover, they reinforce methodological nationalism in their internal structure by having individual chapters or sections dedicated to separate countries. See, for example, Ros’ The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (2012) and Lessa and Druliolle’s The Memory of State Terrorism

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by moving beyond a national framework for remembering and adopting, instead, a transnational approach that sheds new light on ways in which mnemonic discourses about the dictatorship move across and beyond borders, whether these are national, cultural or linguistic. With this aim, this book positions itself at the intersection of film studies and memory studies, drawing upon scholarship from related fields written in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. Such an interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate thematic concerns in post-dictatorship cinema that have hitherto remained underexplored, for example, the rise of cross-cultural forms of solidarity, the emergence of new, hybrid identities associated with migration, exile and post-war experiences, and the enduring consequences of forced exile and transnational campaigns of state terror. Above all, such an approach allows me to identify similar patterns of strategies, practices and styles utilized by directors in South America and beyond. Finally, a transnational approach to memory also serves to draw attention to what the term appears to negate: the persistence of national forms of collective remembrance and their coexistence with transnational and transcultural tendencies. Before I move on to explore these concepts in more depth, however, I will start with a simple question: what is memory? One of the challenges of writing about memory is the sheer diversity of meanings associated with the term. In everyday language, memory means both something we allegedly have, like a neural mechanism, and our faculty to retain, store and retrieve past experiences. The term applies also to a range of artefacts and media, including photographs, handwritten letters and journals, home movies, posts on social media and the number of gigabytes in our smartphones. The semantic overload is further complicated by the range of approaches to memory in different disciplinary fields, most notably psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, geography, cultural studies, literary studies and media studies, all of

in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (2011). Two noteworthy exceptions are: Martín-Cabrera’s Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone Beyond Market and State (2011), a comparative analysis of detective novels and documentaries from Argentina, Chile and Spain; and Jelin’s (2010) essay ‘The Past in the Present: Memories of State Violence in Contemporary Latin America’, a key reference for Chapter 2 of the present book. My inclusion of Brazil alongside Chile and Argentina stems from a strategic decision to counteract the common view of these countries as ‘distant neighbours’ (as the popular expression suggests) due to linguistic and cultural differences. In academic scholarship focusing on post-dictatorship cinema, Brazil has been most often studied in isolation, and rarely included in discussions of the Southern Cone.

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which have developed their own definitions. In the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, memory is referred to as a practice (rituals, traditions, commemorations), a cultural creation (legends, stories, hymns), geographical locations (landscapes and sites of historical events), manmade buildings (monuments, memorials) and media (memoirs, novels, radio and television programmes, websites, videogames, etc.). It is often preceded by qualifying terms requiring further elaboration, for instance, ‘public’, ‘social’, ‘communicative’, ‘traumatic’, ‘cultural’, ‘national’ and ‘collective’. A discussion of the various meanings and descriptors of memory is clearly beyond the scope of this book. Rather, my goal here is to specify my own usage of the term and demonstrate why a transnational approach can produce a productive engagement with post-dictatorship cinema. I will start with a brief discussion of the paradigmatic concept of ‘collective memory’ and describe how it has paved the way for the development of a range of related perspectives throughout the twentieth century, one of which is central to this book: the narrative approach. I then examine the articulation of the narrative approach with a series of other concepts—cultural memory, mediated memory, transnational memory, and transcultural memory—before laying down the theoretical model that informs my film analyses: the four modes of remembering through film.

The Meanings of Memory: A Brief Discussion Discourses on memory in the Western world have been strongly shaped by the so-called archival or storehouse model, according to which memory is understood as a resource for encoding and storing past experiences and information. The origins of this model have been traced back to Antiquity, as illustrated in an often-cited passage from Plato’s Dialogues in which he has Socrates describe memory as a ‘block of wax’ in the human mind, upon which are etched all our impressions, knowledge and experiences. Reworked and reformulated by rhetoricians, philosophers and scholars throughout the centuries, from Aristotle and St. Augustin all the way to Hermann Ebbinghaus and Sigmund Freud in the modern period, the storehouse model inspired an enduring pattern of associations between memory, storage and imprinting technologies (Draaisma 2000; Brockmeier 2015). Despite its many variations, the key assumptions of the model remained unchanged until recently; namely, it implies that memory is something physically inscribed in the human mind, detached from

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its surroundings and independent of socio-cultural contexts (Danziger 2009, 30).2 A key reformulation of Plato’s metaphor was made by Freud in 1925, when he proposed that memory operated in similar ways to a ‘mystic writing pad’. Freud argued that unlike a slate or piece of paper, memory allows us to accumulate an infinite amount of content by erasing some of it, without nonetheless losing the permanent trace of the original imprint. Freud thereby emphasized that mnemonic processes involved both retaining and erasing information, a point that would influence the direction taken by cognitive psychology in subsequent decades and prefigure post-structuralist theories of the 1970s, namely, Derrida’s (1977) idea of memory as a palimpsest, a site where multiple layers of meaning are accumulated over time, and where the act of erasing a layer allows new ones to appear. Around the same time of the essay’s publication, a shift was taking place in the Western conception of memory as writers, philosophers and scholars of the likes of Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin sought to address the rising uncertainties and anxieties associated with modernity. In this context, one publication would emerge as a landmark for future discussions: French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, published in 1925 and partially translated to English in On Collective Memory (1992). Halbwachs had been inspired by philosopher Henri Bergson’s proposition in Matière et mémoire ([1896, 1991) that memory could be variable and unstable but, through his association with Emile Durkheim, he decided to apply the lens of sociology to examine how memory is embedded in, and structured by, social contexts. For Halbwachs (1992, 28), ‘It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’. He argued that because social interactions and exchanges are so fundamental to human existence, it is through socialization that we acquire our cognitive abilities, sense of identity, patterns of thought, knowledge and behaviour. Thus, Halbwachs turned away from philosophical reflections on the individual human mind to examine the social contexts, or frameworks, in which remembering occurs. A ‘social framework’ can be understood as a set of reference points—conventions, beliefs, concerns, moral codes, 2 Appropriated by cognitive psychology in the modern period, the main features of this model are ‘encoding’ (the act of ‘inscribing’ memory in a physical structure, like the tablet), ‘storing’ (the location where the inscription is allegedly maintained) and retrieval (the possibility of re-reading or recalling the inscription).

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worldviews, preferences—that help us to assign meaning and value to our personal experiences. They help us to determine what is meaningful and worthy of remembering, and how it should be remembered. As Halbwachs has argued, because these reference points are so vital to how we experience ourselves and the world around us, it is impossible for us to remember in a coherent fashion outside of a social framework. In this perspective, every memory we have, however personal, is linked to ideas we share with other people, groups, places, linguistic forms, in brief, the whole material and moral framework of the society of which we are part. For Halbwachs then, the act of remembering is not simply mediated by social groups but constituted by them: groups provide us with the social cues and cultural tools to remember, including language, images, references and symbols. Moreover, he argued that whereas individuals shape and adapt their memories according to the group, the group is, in turn, shaped by the individual contributions of each member who acquires, produces and reproduces its identity. ‘One might say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories’ (Halbwachs 1992, 40). Underlying Halbwachs’ central contention that even our most private individual memories are social is a key argument regarding the constructed nature of memory. For Halbwachs, our impressions, associations and reflections about the past are not like imprints in the human mind, as the storehouse model suggested, but rather, active selections and reconstructions in the present. The idea of memory as a construction gained purchase through the work of one of Halbwachs’ contemporaries, British psychologist Frederick Bartlett. Through a series of experiments, Bartlett demonstrated that all cognitive processes, including remembering, are an effort after meaning. In other words, individuals attribute meaning to past events by reconstructing them according to social conventions, personal interests, values and emotions in the present. Bartlett is interested in memory not so much for its capacity to reflect the past but for what it tells us about the remembering subject’s attitudes and experience of the past in the present. Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail

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which commonly appears in image or in language form. (Bartlett 1932, 213)

In Bartlett, remembering involves selecting, interpreting and organizing information according to ‘schemata’, mental structures that we acquire through socialization and use continuously to reconfigure our knowledge and behaviour. The act of remembering requires rendering the content of our memories meaningful within our existing frame of reference and narrative patterns, and this involves a series of strategies described by Bartlett as ‘simplification’, ‘blending’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘omission’. Elements that do not fit within our existing social conventions are either forgotten or progressively transformed until they can be assimilated. Bartlett thereby reinforced the idea previously emphasized by Freud that forgetting and remembering are both essential, interdependent operations of the mnemonic process. Bartlett’s view that memory is always mediated by culture became central to contemporary memory research. In the wake of Bartlett, many scholars came to understand that the way we remember is ‘suffused with conventions, with schematic, even stereotypical, renditions of the personal past, derived from countless sources, many of which are external to one’s own personal experience’ (Freeman 2010, 265). In brief, the theoretical discussions led by Bartlett, Halbwachs and others in the first half of the twentieth century laid the foundations for the development of a host of new conceptualizations of memory, culminating in what Andreas Huyssen (2003) has described as a ‘boom’ of interest in the subject in recent decades. Among the multiple perspectives that emerged around this period, one is especially helpful for investigating the ways in which cinema constructs memories of the dictatorial past: the narrative approach to remembering. From their distinct disciplinary backgrounds, scholars such as Paul Ricœur (1984), Hayden White (1987), Jerome Bruner (1991), Jens Brockmeier (2002), Charlotte Linde (2009) and Lucy Bond (2014) have all proposed that we conceptualize remembering as a process akin to creating and telling stories. As Bruner (1991, 4) has written, ‘we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on’. For Brockmeier (2002, 28), ‘our ability to localize ourselves in time and history – and this may be one of the basic functions

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of memory – seems to be grounded, both sociogenetically and ontogenetically, in narrative discourse’. Such a perspective can be associated with the ‘narrative turn’, a broad expression that describes the increased interest in the centrality of narrative in social and political life stemming from different areas of research, including history, social sciences and psychology.3 A well-known example, White (1973, 1987) has claimed that there is no such thing as historical writing, only historiographical texts, because historians do not simply discover past events, rather, they emplot them into certain modes of narrative prose discourse. The idea that narratives give shape to the temporal dimension of our experiences has also been central to Ricœur’s defence of narrative, as developed particularly in the first volume of Time and Narrative (1984). He has demonstrated that emplotment, the act of bringing together the diverse elements of an experience into coherent order, has a mediating function as it reconfigures the events, agents, and all other elements of experience and integrates them into a meaningful whole. Ricœur is especially interested in the different experiences of time that emplotment can generate, as exemplified in his analyses of modernist literature in the collection’s second volume. Similarly, Susannah Radstone (2005) makes a distinction between historical texts and ‘memory texts’ by highlighting the different ways in which they manipulate time. Whereas history is ‘commonly understood as the unfolding of events in broadly linear fashion, and historiography has been shaped by the linearity and the cause-and-effect structure of realist narrative’, memory texts organize time in more diverse ways, including non-linear, de-centred, circular, and fragmented structures, among other possibilities (Radstone 2005, 138). In Latin America, influential scholars including Chilean critical theorist Nelly Richard, Argentinean sociologist Leonor Arfuch and Brazilian literary critic Idelber Avelar have all in their different ways explored the relationship between narrative and history in post-dictatorship societies with resource to Walter Benjamin’s idea of history as a construction in service of present concerns.4 Meanwhile, oral historians in various contexts have challenged previous assumptions that interviews could provide direct access to past experiences and turned their attention instead to the ways individuals mediate 3 Matti Hyvärinen (2010) has proposed we speak of not only one, but many narrative turns unfolding across different disciplines at different times, from the 1960s onwards. 4 On Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism, see in particular his Selected Writings, Volume 3—1935–1938, edited by Eiland and Jennings (2003).

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memory through existing storylines, conventions and character types.5 For instance, after interviewing seventy retired factory workers about their recollections of Italy under fascism, Luisa Passerini (1987, 8) concluded that when someone is asked for their life memories, they draw upon preexisting storylines and ways of telling stories. Hence her understanding of memory as ‘transmission and elaboration of stories handed down and kept alive through small-scale social networks - stories which can be adapted every so often in a variety of social interactions, including the interview’ (1987, 19). Also from a social sciences perspective, Barbara Czarniawska (2004, 10) has argued that ‘narrative is the main form of social life because it is the main device for making sense of social action’. In sum, a narrative approach to memory points to the many connections between the acts of remembering and creating stories. First, narrative is what we do to past experiences as we seek to interpret, organize and communicate them in a coherent fashion. Crucially, this constructive process responds to the values, concerns and priorities of the present. Second, like storytelling, remembering is always shaped by our sociocultural environment. As we organize and interpret mnemonic material to render it intelligible to ourselves and others, we do so in accordance with existing ‘social frameworks’ (à la Halbwachs) or ‘schemata’ (in Bartlett). Third, narrativization is what enables us to grasp the complex web of actions, agents and events that take place over an extended period of time and establish logical connections between past, present and future. Finally, a narrative approach to memory emphasizes the mediated nature of remembering: when we remember, we do so by means of the tools available to us, including language, symbols, images and objects. Hence Radstone’s (2005, 135) suggestion that the past is mediated by, rather than recorded in, personal memory.

How Are Memories Cultural, Mediated, Transnational and Transcultural? If even our most intimate and personal memories are shaped by our social environments and cultural schemata, is there such thing as a ‘cultural memory’ outside, or independent from, the individual minds of

5 For instance, see Maynes et al. (2012).

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people? Astrid Erll (2011a, 98) has addressed this question by distinguishing between two interdependent processes, ‘cultural memory on the individual level’, and ‘cultural memory on the collective level’. She defines cultural memory as an umbrella concept ‘under which a number of cultural, social, cognitive and biological phenomena can be subsumed: tradition, archive, canon, monuments, commemorative rituals, communication within the family circle, life experience and neuronal networks’ (2011a, 99). In her view, just as there is no individual memory outside of, or separated from, culture, neither can there be a collective memory embodied exclusively in media and institutions, detached from human action. As she has written, ‘the “memory” of a sociocultural formation must be actualized and realized in, or appropriated through, organic minds’ (2011a, 98). In Erll’s account then, cultural memory emerges as the continuous interplay between the individual and the collective levels, with media operating as a switchboard between them. It is through media then, in the broadest sense of the word, that the personal memories of an individual or group can gain relevance and meaning in the social realm, and it is through media that mnemonic discourses can be shared and disseminated more widely. Similarly, Aleida Assman (2006) has argued that, in contrast to embodied and biographical forms of remembering, certain memories become independent of the bodies that experienced them and, through the use of media, cross over a ‘threshold’ to the cultural and political realm. Along these lines, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (2009, 1) have proposed that cultural memories ‘can only become collective as part of a continuous process whereby memories are shared with the help of symbolic artefacts that mediate between individuals and, in the process, create communality across both space and time’. The heightened awareness of the role of media in constructions of cultural memory has shed light on a problematic assumption held by previous accounts of collective memory, notably, that certain memory discourses can pertain to an entire society, culture, or nation. This assumption prevailed throughout the so-called ‘first phase’ of memory studies, when collective memory was often equated to national memory, as famously exemplified by Pierre Nora’s multivolume collection Les lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) about France’s obsession with its own past. Between the mid-1990s and 2000s, a period referred to as the ‘second phase’ of memory studies, such methodological nationalism was challenged by scholars who focused on the articulations of memory through various media, including photography, television, cinema, digital

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archives, museums and the internet.6 Their corpus of work sees memory as dynamic, rather than as attached to certain sites or communities. For instance, Alison Landsberg (2004) has coined the term ‘prosthetic memory’ to refer to the ways in which we appropriate memories of events that we see and feel through media, including movies and photographs, despite not directly experiencing those events. In turn, Marianne Hirsch (1992, 1997, 2012) has employed the term ‘postmemory’ to describe how individuals internalize the memories of dramatic experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them through photographs and stories. Similar to ‘prosthetic memory’, ‘postmemory’ is not something we encounter as a personal, lived experience, but as a memory we may internalize through sensorial experiences produced by media in the broadest sense. Finally, José van Dijck (2007) has examined the power of old and new technologies (from handwritten diaries to webcams, photoblogs and playlists) to penetrate everyday life and affect the relationship between private and public forms of remembering. Advances associated with globalization and the ubiquity of new media in everyday life have increasingly encouraged scholars to focus on the potential of mnemonic discourses to become unmoored from their original social groups and circulate more freely around the world. This ‘third phase’ of memory studies is characterized by transnational approaches that challenge what scholars perceive as a hitherto excessive focus on the geographically and culturally bounded properties of remembering (Garde-Hansen 2011). Chiefly among these studies are those that conceptualize memory as global (Assman and Conrad 2010), cosmopolitan (Levy and Sznaider 2002), digital (Garde-Hansen et al. 2009) and transcultural (Bond and Rapson 2014), and those that highlight the continuous movement and circulation of memories, as captured in Anna Reading’s (2016) ‘globital memories’, Andrew Hoskins’ ‘connective turn’ (2011, 20), Astrid Erll’s ‘travelling memories’ (Erll 2011b) and Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memories’ (2009). These new approaches particularly refute previous assumptions of the nation as ‘the natural container, curator, and telos of collective memory’, to focus instead on the increased movement and dissemination of memories (De

6 For a summary of this development in the field, see Garde-Hansen (2011, 5).

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Cesari and Rigney 2014, 1). As Lucy Bond et al (2017, 1) explain: ‘Previously thought to be anchored in particular places, to be lodged in particular containers (monuments, texts, geographical locations), and to belong to the (national, familial, social) communities it helped acquire a sense of historical continuity, memory has, in the last few years, increasingly been considered a fluid and flexible affair’. In some of these studies, the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ are used interchangeably and without a clear distinction. For example, in Bond et al. (2017, 3), ‘transnational’ seems to be implied in ‘transcultural’, defined as the ‘transmission, circulation, mediation, and reception of memory between and beyond ethnic, cultural, or national groups’. Hence ‘transcultural’ is used in a broad sense to signify a departure from orthodox approaches which locate memory as the geographically and culturally bounded property of particular groups, communities or nations (Bond et al. 2017, 3). The conflation of these terms is problematic, and I echo calls for a clearer analytical distinction between them (Brunow 2015; Rothberg 2014; Törnquist-Plewa 2018; Wüstenberg 2019). As Rothberg (2014, 129–30) has pointed out, both ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ refer to the crossing of borders, ‘but the borders to which they refer – those of nation-states and those of cultures - are by no means isomorphic’. In his own usage, transnational memory refers to ‘the scales of remembrance that intersect in the crossing of geo-political borders’, whereas transcultural memory ‘refers to the hybridization produced by the layering of historical legacies that occurs in the traversal of cultural borders’ (2014, 130, emphasis in the original). In other words, if ‘transnational’ calls for a consideration of the scales at which memory operates (local, regional, national, transnational or global), ‘transcultural’ implies cultural blending and hybridization. Building on Rothberg’s distinction, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (2018, 202) has observed that ‘no culture is a discrete container and thus all are in some sense hybrid’, a comment that resonates with older critiques of the ‘container model of culture’ popularized in the nineteenth century.7 For instance, in an essay titled ‘Transculturality - The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’ (1999), German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch argued that the conception of cultures as ‘closed’ and ‘bounded spheres’ had always been more utopian than empirical, but with the impact of migration and globalization in 7 The ‘container model of culture’ was popularized by German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803).

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the modern period, it becomes untenable. He applied the term ‘transcultural’ to highlight the multiple ways in which all cultures are largely characterized by mixes and permeations and inevitably entangled with one another. Despite not mentioning Welsch, Törnquist-Plewa’s argument resonates with his view of transculturality and pushes it further through her proposition that we restrict ‘transcultural memory’ to those cases in which there is not only the hybridization of memories in the crossing of cultural borders, but also the emergence of new types of cultural communities and belonging (2018, 302). In her view, the possibility of new forms of identities fostered through transcultural encounters is what distinguishes it from ‘transnational memories’, which she defines simply as ‘memories shared across national borders’ (2018, 302). In TörnquistPlewa then, ‘transcultural’ is used in a more restrictive sense to signify ‘hybrid memories occurring in the transversal of cultural boundaries with a transformative power to create new or modified identities and solidarities’ (2018, 311). She correctly highlights one of the problems in using ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ interchangeably, namely that, although many transnational forms of memory do have the potential to foster new forms of cross-cultural identifications and solidarity, this does not always in practice occur.8 In the realm of cinema, Törnquist-Plewa’s definition helps us to distinguish between those films that foreground the rise of new identities and solidarities across cultures and those in which transnationality refers simply to funding or circulation. My own usage of ‘transnational’ is more closely aligned with the manner in which the concept has developed in film studies. Here, as in my previous work, I draw upon the categorizations developed by scholars such as Deborah Shaw (2013), Mette Hjort (2010) and Tom Zaniello (2007) to distinguish the various ways in which films can be regarded as ‘transnational’ by examining a whole range of elements associated with industrial practices and the film text: production, distribution, reception, thematic concerns and aesthetics, among others. Shaw’s classification of ‘filmic transnationality’ is the most comprehensive yet. Among fifteen categories, she includes the ‘national’ to remind us that, even in a globalized world, ‘much film is made for domestic audiences, focuses on specific local issues, and relies on modes of narration that may not appeal to international audiences’ (2013, 64). In turn, Hjort 8 In a previous essay I examined one area in which such potential is frustrated, Brazilian post-dictatorship cinema. See Heise (2020).

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suggests using ‘transnational’ as a scalar concept that allows for the recognition of strong or weak forms of transnationality. She makes a further distinction between ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ transnationality, that is, films with deliberately salient evidence of transnational properties, and those whose transnationalism might easily pass unnoticed. Like these two authors, I reject the binary opposition between ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ and adopt instead the kind of ‘co-national both/and’ approach defended by Ulrich Beck (2006, 62) to highlight that a transnational perspective is not ‘anti-national’ and does not undermine the relevance of the national. Indeed, as Hannerz (1996, 6) has pointed out, ‘transnational’ has the tendency to draw attention to ‘the continued significance of the national’, and this partly explains my preference for the term. As I have previously argued, in the context of cinema more generally, and post-dictatorship cinema in particular, an attentiveness to the ways in which national processes, actors and organizations continue to impact the construction of collective memories about the past is crucial (Heise 2020). After all, contrary to what might be implied in the idea of a transcultural or transnational turn, nation-centred discourses and practices have not been replaced or superseded by newer forms of memory work; rather, these forms co-exist and continuously interact.

Aims, Theoretical Framework and Structure of This Book The tensions between national and transnational forms of remembering through film will become apparent throughout this book, but particularly in Chapter 2 where I examine ways in which the recent histories of South American nations are simultaneously interconnected with one another and embedded in their respective national contexts. In the same chapter, I describe the frameworks for remembering that have shaped discourses about the dictatorial past in the region: ‘salvation and demons’; ‘humanitarian’; ‘oblivion’ and ‘unsatisfied memory’. These frameworks have helped to shape, and have in turn been shaped by, the filmic discourses about the past examined in the following chapters. In Chapters 3 to 6, the discussion about ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ becomes an underlying thread, rather than the focus of study. In other words, my aim here is not to determine to what extent the films, or the memories by them constructed, are national or transnational, even though this will become apparent throughout my discussion. Rather, by taking a

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transnational and comparative approach, my aim is to examine patterns of similarity and difference in the ways in which conflicted memories of the past have been addressed in the three countries, whether these memories have been framed in local, national or regional terms. In so doing, I respond to calls for greater attention to the ‘media specificity’ of memory, that is, I approach films not simply as media capable of replicating the look or shape of the past, but as constructs that result from entangled discourses, iconographic traditions, narrative formulae and specific media technologies and their devices, as proposed by Dagmar Brunow (2015, 6). My findings are based on a corpus of approximately 200 films produced since the mid-1990s that chart the rise and aftermath of the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Through close attention to their thematic concerns, representational modes, stylistic tropes and conventions, I have identified what I call four modes of remembering through film (or cinematic modes of remembering): informative, reflective, diaristic and playful. Each mode draws attention to the properties of the medium that make it relevant for the construction of memory. Hence, to speak about a cinematic mode of remembering is to be attentive to genre conventions, temporal structure, editing, mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, performance, setting and so on, while highlighting the type of memory discourse that is generated by, and implicated in, these formulations. Like any medium, film represents what Erll (2011c, 2) refers to as ‘the contents, workings, fragilities and distortions’ of individual and collective memory by coding it into aesthetic forms and narrative structures. In other words, memories are not simply represented or articulated in a film; they are constituted through it. Hence a cinematic mode of remembering relates to how certain representational strategies shape the construction of memories. In this way, we can speak about how the various modes of remembering construct different pasts, or versions of the past. Finally, to speak of cinematic modes of remembering means also to be aware of memory as a construction in the present, that draws upon the schemata or frameworks in the surrounding environment. Post-dictatorship films tell us as much about concerns, priorities and values of the socio-political context in which they are made, as they do about the dictatorial past. It is important to highlight that these modes are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive. Their difference is more a question of degree and emphasis than quality. Rather than separate categories, they are best

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understood as operating along a continuum where each mode incorporates and reformulates features from the one before. As we will see, an individual film normally contains aspects of two, sometimes three modes, but one of them tends to prevail. These points will become clearer through the film analyses in Chapters 3 to 6. Out of the larger corpus of films, ten have been selected as case studies and various others will be referenced when relevant. As with any interdisciplinary work, my theoretical and methodological toolbox is eclectic. Alongside scholarship in memory studies, this book draws upon theories in film studies, photography, trauma studies, sociology, psychology, transitional justice and philosophy. It has been informed by extensive fieldwork facilitated by grants from the Carnegie Trust and the Leverhulme Trust which allowed me to spend periods of study in South America where I conducted face-to-face interviews with film directors and professionals working in the field of cultural memory. This research material is used selectively throughout each chapter to substantiate my arguments about the ways in which films shape our understanding of the past. The conversations with filmmakers have been particularly useful because, as we will see, post-dictatorship films are typically made by individuals whose lives have been impacted by the dictatorship in one form or another, be it in the position of former militants, exiles, relatives or children of victims of state violence, or as bystanders. Our interviews explored questions relating to the personal and political motivation behind a film, what the director sought to achieve, the kinds of challenges they faced, the ethical considerations involved and the reasons that make cinema a particularly relevant medium for remembering dictatorship. All films examined in this book fall under the rubric of ‘auteur film’ as defined in the French tradition: they express the personal vision and the creative goals of a director who exerts a high level of control across all aspects of the filmmaking process, including research, writing, editing, voiceover narration, etc. They also fall under the broad label ‘documentary’, although some films deliberately complicate the definition of this term as they cross over to fiction (a distinctive feature of the playful mode, as we will see).9 Although fiction films have undoubtedly played a major 9 As film scholars have argued for many years, it is impossible to establish a rigid or clearcut distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘documentary’ cinema. In my usage, ‘documentary’ applies to films perceived as such by relevant stakeholders, including the filmmaker(s),

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role in revealing something of the histories of South America dictatorships to audiences all over the world (take, for instance, Luis Puenzo’s Oscarwinning La historia oficial /The Official Story [1985]), I agree with those who claim that a more sustained and in-depth engagement with questions of remembering has occurred in the realm of documentary (Traverso and Crowder-Taraborrelli 2013; Aguilar 2008, 2012; Piedras 2011; Amado 2005; Furtado 2019). The reasons for this are manifold, starting with the greater independence of documentary from the imperatives of the entertainment industry and commercial channels of distribution, a point central to Luis Martín-Cabrera’s (2011) discussion of political documentary in Chile and Argentina. The wide range of aesthetic possibilities opened up by the medium also makes it particularly effective for the construction and discussion of memory: testimonies, interviews, photographs, audio recordings, documents, archive footage, in brief, ‘an entire visual and auditory arsenal for mourning work’, as Gonzalo Aguilar (2008, 156) has put it. Coupled with the greater space for formal experimentation not permitted to ‘sponsor-constrained’ fiction film directors (Traverso and Wilson 2014, 2), the relatively inexpensive costs of documentary and the rise of digital technologies for production and distribution have further encouraged independent filmmakers to embrace the format. In doing so, they have continued a long tradition that stems from the 1960s nuevo cine latinoamericano, when documentary became a primary tool for charting ‘the submerged, denied, devalued realities of an intricate palimpsest of cultures and castes separated and conjoined by an arbitrary network of national boundaries’ and as an instrument of ‘cultural exploration, national definition, epistemological enquiry, and social and political transformation’ (Burton 1999, 6). In terms of style, some of the staples of documentary filmmaking introduced in that period have remained central,

distributors, critics and audiences. It is worth noting that, in English-language criticism, the qualifier ‘narrative’ has been placed before ‘film’ to signify ‘fiction film’. Contrary to this outdated (and, in my view, highly problematic) division, I take the view that ‘narrative film’ is not the same as ‘fiction film’. Rather, a narrative film is one that seeks to render past actions and events intelligible and meaningful by shaping them into a story, or several stories, regardless of whether these actions and events occurred in the historical past (factual narratives) or not (fictional narratives). Many documentaries are narrative in the sense that they tell stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order. This statement is if course not true of all documentaries (for instance, observational documentaries operate differently), but it is applicable to all films analysed in this book.

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namely, the use of testimonials and archive material variously sourced (e.g., newsreels, audio recordings, newspaper clippings, photographs). Indeed, one of the key features of post-dictatorship documentary is the recycling and reworking of older media, a concept described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) as ‘remediation’. Building on this concept, Erll and Rigney (2009, 4) have claimed, ‘Just as there is no cultural memory prior to mediation, there is no mediation without remediation: all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics’. Post-dictatorship documentaries are especially given to remediation, yet the ways in which they recycle existing material and their purpose for doing so vary significantly from film to film. This brings me to a relevant point raised by Brunow (2015). With reference to Michel Foucault, she points out that memory has often been regarded as a form of counter-practice with a capacity to contest or subvert official historiography, in the same manner that some forms of filmmaking, including documentary, have been conceptualized as a counter-practice for the advancement of alternative social agendas (Brunow 2015, 10–11). Julianne Burton’s discussion of the ‘social documentary in Latin America’ is a case in point, for she describes it as a source of “counterinformation” for those without access to the hegemonic structures of world news and communications; a means of reconstructing historical events and challenging hegemonic and often elitist interpretations of the past; a mode of eliciting, preserving, and utilizing the testimony of individuals and groups who would otherwise have no means or recording their experience (…). (Burton 1999, 6)

Although this statement aptly captures the uses of documentary in the region, it relies on an inherent binarism between essentialist notions of ‘hegemonic/counterhegemonic’, ‘history’/‘memory’, ‘mainstream’/ ‘marginal’, ‘centre’/‘periphery’. Following Brunow’s proposition, I avoid the automatic assumption that post-dictatorship films constitute ‘counterpractice’ and approach them as the result of an awareness of, and ongoing dialogue with, the various interpretations of the past that circulate in the public sphere. These interpretations include official discourses propagated by the state, memory work by cultural institutions and the work of other artists, intellectuals and professionals in the field.

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A Note on Trauma As discussed throughout the book, witness testimony became a central means through which survivors, eyewitnesses and relatives of victims could communicate their experiences of the past and confront official narratives. The ability to articulate traumatic memory has been essential to this process, after all, trauma, and its manifold long-lasting ramifications—psychological, physical, intergenerational—emerged as unequivocal evidence of the violence exerted on the bodies of citizens who refused to comply with state authorities or were suspected of doing do. Yet, as we turn our attention to representations of trauma on film, certain questions arise. In film studies, as in arts and humanities disciplines more generally, trauma has been primarily conceptualized in terms of a Freudian-based model that sees it as a pathological and delayed response to an event (or series of events) so overwhelming that is bypasses normal processes of cognition and lodges itself directly in the psyche. The original event becomes unknowable and unrepresentable because it is not consciously registered at the time of occurrence; the mind is unable to encode, process and store it as narrative memory. The origins of the wound remain unknown, despite their lasting presence and invasiveness in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, repetitive compulsions and other symptoms. According to this framework then, trauma is an experience so extreme that it defies language and representation. However, if trauma leads to ‘a crisis of representation’, as famously advanced by Cathy Caruth (1996), how is it possible for us to learn about, confront and understand a violent past? More recently, scholars have proposed alternative frameworks that move away from the ‘fixation on trauma as the ultimate limit of representation’ (Kaplan and Wang 2004, 4) to explore the corporeal and affective dimensions of memory. These alternative interpretations rely on neurobiological studies such as Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014) to suggest that trauma, as a corporeal and physiological type of memory, manifests itself primarily through pre-cognitive bodily responses, thus making an excessive focus on the verbal, semantic and linguistic aspect of trauma survivors’ testimonies counterproductive. Accordingly, Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson (2013) propose the framework of affect theory as an alternative for understanding the different ways in which traumatic memories can be communicated through the body itself, bypassing language (2013, 17). This proposition has been taken up,

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for example, by Magdalena Zolkos (2013), in her re-reading of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary Shoah (1985), based on testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Her analysis distinguishes itself from previous studies of this film through her greater attention to the ways in which non-verbal elements such as the silence, movement and other forms of corporeal expression by survivors tell us about their traumatic experiences. She claims that such elements, typically read by trauma scholars as ‘indicative of trauma’s non-representability and as the breakdown of meaning’, are in fact better studied from the perspective of ‘affect’, defined as ‘the emotional and visceral dimension of the inner life of the subject’, and ‘a shift in the bodily capacity for action’ (2013, 60). Zolkos suggests that what occurs within silence and narrative failure is not so much unrepresentable but, rather, outside language. Through this lens, the act of witnessing becomes something more complex than simply giving a narrative account of past experiences; it is best understood as ‘a bodily and affective act’ (Zolkos 2013, 65). Accordingly, a central argument in my book concerns the capacity of film, as an essentially audio-visual medium, to convey experiences of trauma not only through the verbal accounts of eyewitnesses but also, and sometimes mainly, through the sensory and embodied types of memory they articulate via gesture, facial expression, movement and voice tone. Specific properties of the medium, such as framing, camera movement and close-up, become relevant in this respect because of their ability to guide the viewer’s attention to paralinguistic forms of communication that cannot be easily represented in other media, like the written memoir or the novel. A further argument proposed in this book concerns the creative solutions deployed by filmmakers to represent experiences of trauma through a combination of documentary and fiction genres (horror and avant-garde, for instance) and intermedial approaches that combine film with photography, theatre and performative arts, among others. These points are elaborated in Chapters 4 to 6. In what follows I begin, in Chapter 2, by exploring the historical, social and political contexts in which the cinema of memory emerged. Then, in the following chapters I examine in detail each of the four modes of cinematic remembering as exemplified in a series of close analyses of selected films. Chapter 3 explores the informative mode through two case studies of films which are straightforward examples of ‘national’ cinema: Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia (David Blaustein 1996)

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and Hércules 56 (Silvio Da-Rin 2006). The three other modes of remembering emerged somewhat later, following a ‘memory boom’ that brought with it a certain ‘fatigue’ (Garibotto 2019) in relation to established forms and discourses, particularly the witness testimony prominent in the informative mode. The overabundance of this form in national truth commissions, television programmes and other media led filmmakers to interrogate memory, rather than accept is as a given, and to explore its meanings and operations. At the same time, they engaged with a global renewal in the aesthetics and practices of documentary. Accordingly, the new modes of remembering that emerged since the mid-2000s are marked by greater degrees of transnationality. In Chapter 4, I introduce the reflective mode in relation to Patricio Guzmán, internationally recognized as one of the leading documentarians of our time, and then look in detail at two exemplars: Sebastián Moreno’s La ciudad de los fotógrafos /The City of Photographers (2006) and Anita Leandro’s Retratos de identificação /Identification Portraits (2014). In Chapter 5, I discuss the diaristic mode through the analyses of three transnational co-productions, El (im)possible olvido/The (Im)Possible Forgetting (Andrés Habegger 2016), El color del camaleón/ The Colour of the Chameleon (Andrés Lübbert 2017) and Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil /I Owe You a Letter about Brazil (Carol Benjamin 2019). Finally, in Chapter 6, I explore films in the playful mode through case studies of Deslembro/Unremember (Flávia Castro 2018), Teatro de guerra/Theatre of War (Lola Arias 2018), and Ana. Sem Título/Ana. Untitled (Lúcia Murat 2020). If we think of transnationality in terms of an axis where ‘transcultural’ sits on one end, and ‘national’ on the other, it will become apparent throughout this book that post-dictatorship cinema runs across the whole line, with some films positioned firmly on the ‘national’ side, others closer to the ‘transcultural’, and the majority somewhere in the middle.

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Maguire, Geoffrey. 2017. The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Martín-Cabrera, Luis. 2011. Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone Beyond Market and State. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. 2012. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nora, Pierre (ed.). 1984–1992. Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Passerini, Luisa. 1987. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piedras, Pablo. 2011. Modos de explicar el mundo histórico en documentales argentinos de las últimas décadas. Política y História 8 (2): 210–223. Radstone, Susannah. 2005. Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory. History Workshop Journal 59: 134–150. Reading, Anna. 2016. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ros, Ana. 2012. The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2014. Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings: The Case of Post-Holocaust Germany. In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Anne Rigney, 123–148. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Shaw, Deborah. 2013. Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Transnational Cinema.’ In Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison, 47–66. Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2018. The Transnational Dynamics of Local Remembrance: The Jewish Past in a Former Shtetl in Poland. Memory Studies 11 (3): 301–314. Traverso, Antonio, and Kristi Wilson. 2014. Introduction: Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America. In Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America, ed. Antonio Traverso and Kristi Wilson, 1–12. Oxon, New York: Routledge. Traverso, Antonio, and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli. 2013. Political Documentary Cinema in the Southern Cone. Latin American Perspectives 40 (1): 5–22.

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van Dijck, José. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. London: Penguin. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality—The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. London, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Wüstenberg, Jenny. 2019. Locating Transnational Memory. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 32: 371–382. Zaniello, Tom. 2007. The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Economic Order. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zolkos, Magdalena. 2013. “Un Petit Geste”: Affect and Silence in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, 59–79. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Filmography Ana. Sem Título/Ana. Untitled. 2020. Lúcia Murat. Brazil. Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia. 1996. David Blaustein. Argentina. Deslembro/Unremember. 2018. Flávia Castro. Brazil, France. El (im)possible olvido/The (Im)Possible Forgetting. 2016. Andrés Habegger. Argentina, Brazil. El color del camaleón/The Colour of the Chameleon. 2017. Andrés Lübbert. Chile: Germany, Belgium. Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil /I Owe You a Letter about Brazil. 2019. Carol Benjamin. Brazil, Sweden. Hércules 56. 2006. Silvio Da-Rin. Brazil. La ciudad de los fotógrafos /The City of Photographers. 2006. Sebastián Moreno. Chile. La historia oficial /The Official Story. 1985. Luis Puenzo. Argentina. O desafio/The Challenge. 1965. Paulo César Saraceni. Brazil. Retratos de identificação/Identification Portraits. 2014. Anita Leandro. Brazil. Teatro de guerra/Theatre of War. 2018. Lola Arias. Argentina, United Kingdom.

CHAPTER 2

Memory Frameworks: Dictatorship and Transition in the Countries of the Southern Cone

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the countries of the Southern Cone underwent extended political conflict in which military and paramilitary forces were pitted against leftist resistance. Transnational developments linked to the Cold War generated a period of unprecedented suffering in the region in the form of clandestine detentions, persecution, torture, forced disappearance, murder, exile and other kinds of human rights violations. As Maria Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael Lazarra have written (2016, 4), ‘From the pain of exile, state terror, and the defeat of the revolutions, a cinema of memory and political protest emerged that, though born in these years, continues to flourish in the present’. To better appreciate how such a ‘cinema of memory’ has flourished in the Southern Cone, I will start with an overview of the military dictatorships in each country and underscore the inherently transnational character of these developments, as well as their ‘locatedness’ (Radstone 2011) in national contexts. Far from a being comprehensive survey, my aim is to offer a basic understanding of the rise and consequences of the military regimes across the region before I move on to describe the various interpretative frameworks that have arisen in response to these conflicted pasts.1 These competing memory frameworks constitute the ideological foundation for the cinematic modes of remembering discussed in subsequent chapters.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_2

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On March 31, 1964, a military coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically elected President João Goulart and initiated a military dictatorship that would last 21 years. In Chile, the violent military takeover of 11 September 1973 ended the socialist government of President Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of a dictatorship that lasted until 1990, when a negotiated transition restored democracy. In Argentina, the 1976 military coup had been preceded by decades of social unrest and political violence, including a recent dictatorship (1966–1973). Democracy was restored in 1983, following growing pressure from human rights groups and the discrediting of the military authorities in their failed attempt to claim sovereignty over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands.2 In each of these countries, as elsewhere in Latin America, the military coups d’état were supported by conservative sectors of the middle and upper classes, the Catholic Church and private corporations, for whom military intervention was deemed necessary to reduce the power of social movements and trade unions. The coups were backed by the United States, whose foreign policy envisaged military regimes as an effective strategy for resisting the emergence of leftist political tendencies on their southern doorstep. Although the specific historical developments and motives that led to dictatorial governments are peculiar to each nation, the basic features of these regimes were similar: citizens were denied fundamental civil and political rights; the media were censored; and the major news outlets owned by private corporations became complicit with the regime by limiting information, manipulating public opinion and covering up state crimes. All three countries experienced unprecedented repression, including the persecution of perceived enemies of the state, kidnapping, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, forced disappearance, murder and exile. The clandestine nature of these operations was another key feature, as was secrecy and denial of knowledge and responsibility by the authorities. Bodies of victims were routinely buried in unmarked graves, incinerated or thrown into the sea.3 The similarities between these historical events are, of course, not coincidental. Despite having distinct histories, geographical features, ethnic compositions and political structures, the interconnectedness of Chile, Brazil, Argentina and other countries in Latin America can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when European colonization initiated the systematic exploitation of natural resources, slavery and elimination of native peoples. After their respective gaining of independence from colonial rule, each country developed as a separate nation-state with their

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unique combination of cultures, ethnicities and languages. Nonetheless, the borders that separate them have always remained ‘highly porous’ (Jelin 2010, 63). These interconnections became especially prominent in the course of the twentieth century, when intensification of social contradictions caused by capitalist development encouraged the rise of previously disorganized strata, including campesinos (peasant leagues) and labour unions. The politicization of class conflict increased after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, when leftist groups struggling against inequalities clashed with conservative forces, resulting in the cycle of dictatorships described above. In brief, I concur with a perspective that sees the spread of dictatorships in Latin America as not so much a simple rupture of democratic order, but as an interlude aimed at rebuilding the capitalist politico-economic order by replacing the ‘constitutional’ state with a coercive, military one (Lowy et al. 1985, 13). From a cultural perspective, as these societies transitioned back to democratic rule in the 1980s and 1990s, they entered a wider sociocultural process often referred to as the ‘globalization of historical memory’, whereby questions of remembering and forgetting past atrocities came to the fore across different regions of the world including Latin America, parts of Europe, South Africa, Japan, Korea and the former Soviet Union, as argued by Andreas Huyssen (2000, 2003) and Arturo Arias and Alicia del Campo (2009). During this period, the global movement of memory discourses was fostered by a media culture that shaped their content in terms of transnational debates about human rights, transitional justice and collective responsibility, with the Holocaust serving as a ‘universal trope’ for understanding institutionalized violence (Huyssen 2003, 23). As I demonstrate in this chapter, the kind of memory work that developed in Argentina, Brazil and Chile has indeed been shaped by global debates and, in turn, helped to shape them. Yet, as Huyssen (2003, 26) has remarked, if memory discourses appear to be global in one register, ‘in their core they remain tied to the histories of specific nations and states’. In other words, the political and social sites that give rise to memory practices are still fundamentally national in character, not global or post-national. Huyssen’s claim resonates with my argument that, although the wave of military dictatorships that swept Latin America was a transnational phenomenon, the frameworks within which the dictatorial past has been remembered and addressed in popular culture, institutional discourses and academic scholarship have been predominantly national. Recently however, sociologists and cultural studies scholars have moved

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away from a national perspective to examine the ways in which the dictatorial histories of the countries of the Southern Cone are interconnected, but without losing sight of their origins in specific local contexts (Jelin 2010).4 As Luis Martín-Cabrera (2011, 17) has emphasized, a transnational approach does not substitute the study of each national culture, but rather supplements these histories by offering new points of articulation. His perspective echoes Elizabeth Jelin’s (2010, 61) assertion that, although the historical events associated with the military regimes are doubtless anchored in the nation-state, ‘they are not bound by it’. Jelin (2010) has highlighted four processes that require a transnational lens to be adequately understood: the continuous movement of political exiles across national borders; the coordinated campaigns by state officials to persecute, capture and murder political opponents; the rise of transnational networks of solidarity and resistance against the military dictatorships; and democratic transitions. In what follows, I discuss each of these processes by drawing upon Jelin’s considerations and raising further aspects that will substantiate my analysis of the competing frameworks for remembering the dictatorship.

The Movement of Exiles Across National Borders While military intervention in the countries of the Southern Cone was welcomed by certain sectors of civil society for whom a period of military rule was thought necessary to protect their economic interests, for the majority of the population the coups d’état were experienced as a brutal rupture of everyday life and the beginning of a prolonged period of terror and uncertainty (Stern 2004). Fear of persecution encouraged thousands to flee and seek refuge in neighbouring countries. For those deemed enemies of the state, including left-wing politicians, militants, artists and intellectuals, exile was not a choice but an imposition. It is difficult to calculate exact numbers because the definitions of ‘exile’ and ‘refugee’ vary from study to study; some authors exclude individuals who left voluntarily, while others adopt a broader concept of exile as anyone whose departure was triggered by the political regime, whether or not they were deported.5 Based on the latter definition, Romina Miorelli and Valentina Piersanti (2021, 1) have estimated that, in Argentina, between 300,000 and 500,000 citizens fled the country and, in Chile, one million. In Brazil, estimates vary between 5000 and 10,000 (Machado, 1979). Exiled

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citizens from diverse socio-economic strata and geographical regions relocated across Latin America (mainly Mexico), Europe (France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden), North America (Mexico, Canada and the United States), Africa (Algeria) and Australia. Settling into a host country was often preceded by ‘serial exile’, the tendency to move from one country to another (Miorelli and Piersanti 2021; Machado 1979). For instance, the rise of the socialist party Unidad Popular in Chile and subsequent election of President Salvador Allende (1970–1973) drew a substantial number of Brazilians to that country between the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the Chilean coup, these exiles escaped to Argentina only to find themselves, three years later, trapped in yet another military regime from which they were again forced to flee.

Transnational Campaigns of State Repression Another fundamentally transnational aspect of the South American dictatorships were the coordinated campaigns by state agencies to identify, persecute, torture and eliminate political opponents. The most notorious of these was Operación Condór (Operation Condor), an alliance formed by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia between 1974 and 1983, as detailed in John Dinges’ (2005) comprehensive account based on interviews and documentation obtained from the United States National Security Archives.6 According to Dinges, the US-supported campaign facilitated an unprecedented sharing of information and coordination of operations against adversaries in the six countries.7 As well as cross-border operations to capture, torture and interrogate opponents in South America (e.g., leftist guerrillas, members of human rights organizations, pro-democratic politicians, church leaders and those who had supported former legally elected governments), Operation Condor carried out surveillance and persecutions in Europe and the United States. In the post-dictatorship period, particularly after the discovery of documentation held by the Paraguayan secret police in 1992 (known as Archivos del Terror), many human rights activists, lawyers and journalists like Dinges, set out to investigate the origins and workings of the transnational campaign.

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Transnational Networks of Solidarity and Human Rights Further transnational aspects of the struggle against dictatorship are found in the rise of solidarity networks and the framing of their political resistance in terms of a global language of human rights. As Jelin (2010) has argued, before the 1970s social and political conflicts in the region had been interpreted mainly in terms of class struggle, national liberation or revolution. It was only during the dictatorial period that social actors began to define their anti-dictatorial demands and denunciations of state repression through a discourse of human rights—a ‘paradigmatic revolution’, in Jelin’s words (2010, 67). Thus, there developed a wideranging human rights movement in the 1970s through the articulation of local resistance groups and international organizations.8 For Manuel Bastías Saavedra (2013), the Chilean coup served as the main catalyst for such collaboration. He writes that when the thousands of refugees who had escaped military regimes in other parts of Latin America (mainly Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay) experienced persecution by the Chilean authorities, the same organizations that had previously helped to relocate refugees mobilized new efforts to protect them.9 Hence Saavedra’s (2013, 90–92) contention that the robust international response to the Chilean coup was triggered not so much by the concern to protect Chilean nationals, but first and foremost by the need to ensure that exiles would be safeguarded in accordance with the principles laid out in international agreements. As he demonstrates, this initial intervention paved the way for a more active international stance against state repression which stimulated the development of an effectively transnational infrastructure for human rights across the region: ‘the Chilean [refugee] crisis laid the foundations of what came to be a centre of sustained transnational and transcontinental relations in the promotion and defense of human rights’ (2013, 102). Within this infrastructure, the World Council of Churches (WCC) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) became especially prominent. In partnership with local groups, they established the Comité Nacional de Ayuda a los Refugiados/National Committee for Aid to Refugees (CONAR) to negotiate solutions to the problems affecting refugees. This initial focus on refugees then shifted to providing relief for Chilean nationals and establishing refugee centres in Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico, among others (Saavedra 2013, 98). As

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the main channel of communication and support between Europe and Latin America, the WCC established a model of human rights operations that was replicated throughout the continent. For Saavedra (2013, 101), the main beneficiary of this new infrastructure was Argentina, where grassroots groups such as the Asemblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos/Permanent Assembly for the Human Rights (APDH), Movimiento Ecuménico de Derechos Humanos/Ecumenic Movement for Human Rights (MEDH), Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo became major players in pressuring for democratic return. In Brazil, the WCC played a key role in denouncing state terrorism through its liaison with local activists. From its Geneva headquarters, it enabled a small group of São Paulo-based lawyers, journalists and clergy investigating cases of forced disappearance to establish an office in Brasília where their underground bulletin Clamor developed into an ambitious project. Between 1979 and 1985, the group accessed and clandestinely photocopied official records from the military courts to expose the repressive mechanisms of the state. Their resulting report, Brasil Nunca Mais (1985), provided evidence of 1800 cases of torture, identified 444 perpetrators and became an instant bestseller, with 41 editions published to date.10

Transition to Democracy In all three countries, return to democracy was by no means a linear or consensual process. Rather, it was characterized by periods of advance in the human rights struggle followed by retreat, marked by conflicting priorities and demands. After each step towards truth and justice, conservative forces reacted strongly to prevent future developments and sometimes to halt the process altogether. In general, actors on the political left promoted an open policy of condemnation of human rights abuses, while those aligned with the conservative right believed that postponing or even forgetting issues relating to State violence would facilitate addressing some of the urgent political problems of the present. Each in their own manner, Chile, Argentina and Brazil faced the difficult decision that, as Roehrig (2009, 723) has observed, confronts every government emerging from military dictatorship: to hold state agents accountable for their crimes, or forego prosecution in the interests of reconciliation and political stability. On the one side, there are those who defend the view that a successful transition to democracy requires leaving past atrocities

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behind and seeking reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators. As we shall see, this ‘reconciliation’ line of reasoning prevailed in Chile and Brazil, with expressions such as ‘virar a página’ or ‘dar vuelta la pagina’ (turn the page) often evoked to emphasize the need to reach consensus and focus on the future. The dominant belief, particularly among conservative right-wing groups, was that forgetting was necessary to allow wounds to heal. However, as subsequent history in these countries has shown, wounds did not automatically heal, especially for victims and families for whom the failure to prosecute meant unfinished mourning. On the opposite side, critics of the reconciliatory view argue that facing the past and bringing perpetrators to justice is an essential step towards real democracy. They argue that prosecutions help to establish the rule of law, bring closure to a tragic past and create a deterrent effect for future abuses (Roehrig 2009, 724–725). Such a view was more prevalent in Argentina where, relative to other countries in the region, larger parts of civil society refused to reconcile and continued to demand legal prosecutions. Argentina is often highlighted as a singular case, the only country where military officials were brought to trial immediately after the collapse of the dictatorship. A key factor that made such a ‘ruptured’ transition possible was defeat in the Malvinas/Falklands war. The military were delegitimized for both the loss of the war and their disastrous mismanagement of it, and this severely limited their power to influence the conditions of democratic transition. In Chile and Brazil, where such delegitimization did not occur, the armed forces retained enough influence to negotiate their own exit from power. To date, Argentina has been the only country to vigorously punish those responsible for state violence; Chile has been marked by partial impunity and, in Brazil, impunity has been total. While a full comparative elaboration is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter, the sections that follow briefly examines these processes by focusing on each nation in turn, starting with Argentina’s ‘ruptured’ transition, then moving on to Chile’s ambiguous path to democracy and finally Brazil’s unfinished mourning.

Argentina’s Ruptured Transition Out of all the South American countries emerging from a military dictatorship, Argentina advanced the furthest in terms of reckoning with past atrocities and addressing the legacy of human rights abuses. This distinctiveness has been attributed to numerous factors, most notably,

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the military authorities’ loss of power and credibility after the Malvinas/Falklands debacle. Another key factor was the continued presence of human rights protests throughout the 1980s, such as those organized by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. In his presidential campaign, Radical Party candidate Raúl Alfonsín committed to addressing the demands of these groups and to seek justice for victims and their relatives. The distinctive structure of the judicial system in Argentina, which granted significant autonomy to judges, also provided more leeway for prosecutions than elsewhere in the region (Sikkink 2011, 82). The first major steps taken by President Alfonsín after his inauguration were the annulment of a self-amnesty signed by the military authorities and the establishment of the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de las Personas/National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) to investigate violations committed between 1975 and 1983. CONADEP heard over a thousand witness testimonies and inspected approximately fifty clandestine detention centres. Its report, released in 1984 under the title Nunca Más (Never Again), exposed the features and scale of the repressive system and established the responsibility of the state for 8960 cases of disappearance during the period, noting that this figure was likely to be an underestimate. Nunca Más became a bestseller and gained further public attention when the military juntas were brought to trial in 1985. The significance of the juntas’ trial in advancing transitional justice is not to be underestimated. It established responsibility for crimes at the top level of the military government and opened the path for future prosecutions involving lower-ranking officials (Sikkink 2011, 75). Moreover, the televised broadcast of victims’ testimonies and court proceedings helped to convince the population of the scale of the military government’s criminal activities and to establish a relative consensus about the past—something that did not occur in Chile or Brazil. Nonetheless, the trial did not automatically lead to further advances. Pressured by the military and fearing that further prosecutions might lead to another coup, Alfonsín passed the laws of Obediencia Debida (Due Obedience) in 1986 and Punto Final (Full Stop Act) in 1987, which effectively stopped future trials. President Carlos Menem (1989–1999) further retreated in the struggle for memory and, with a view to appease the armed forces and restore their trust in the government, issued a series of pardons to convicted military officials between 1989 and 1990. Despite the apparent equilibrium that marked the following decade, human rights activists persevered in their struggle. As Kathryn Sikkink

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(2011, 77) has observed, Menem’s politics of oblivion had ‘the paradoxical effect of multiplying the memories of atrocities and thus spurring further action’. She uses the term ‘boomerang effect’ to describe the process whereby grassroots groups such as Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and Asociación de Ex-Detenidos Desaparecidos reached out to international allies to gain leverage and to bring renewed pressure from the outside. ‘When Argentine groups were blocked by amnesty laws from pursuing trials in their domestic courts, they did a judicial version of the boomerang: they sought out judicial allies abroad to pressure their government at home’ (Sikkink 2011, 77). Such a judicial intervention unexpectedly reinvigorated the memory struggle in 1998, when Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón requested the indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who was then in London for a medical procedure. The arrest warrant was based on Pinochet’s involvement in Operation Condor, focusing on a specific case that connected Spanish investigations into crimes committed in Argentina and Chile (Roht-Arriaza 2006). Because these were considered crimes against humanity, judge Garzón argued for universal jurisdiction, under which principle any court of justice can prosecute a perpetrator regardless of their nationality or the place where the offence was committed. Following the indictment, Pinochet was deprived of his diplomatic immunity by the House of Lords and detained in London, where he remained under house arrest for 504 days. Although the demands for extradition to Spain were unsuccessful and Pinochet was ultimately released on ‘compassionate’ grounds (he was deemed too old and infirm to be prosecuted), his arrest had significant global repercussions. It helped to bring renewed attention to the scale of the crimes committed in the Southern Cone and demonstrated that justice could be initiated anywhere in the world under the principle of universal jurisdiction Accordingly, inspired by the Spanish example, courts in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland revived their attempts to seek accountability for crimes committed against their citizens by Argentine military officials, as documented in Naomi Roht-Arriaza’s (2006) comprehensive account. Back in Argentina, the human rights struggle gained new momentum after the election of President Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007), whose leadership was key to removing the legal and institutional obstacles that had prevented judicial proceedings (Roehrig 2009, 735). Kirchner immediately pushed to annul the Due Obedience and Full Stop Laws (both declared unconstitutional by the Argentine Supreme Court in 2005) and

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successfully reversed the ‘official doctrine’ that had prevented extradition of Argentine officials for prosecution abroad. In 2004, the Federal Court of Buenos Aires reopened cases associated with the former clandestine detention centre based at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada/The Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA) and appropriated the building for the purpose of creating a ‘Memory Space for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights’. The ESMA museum was inaugurated by Kirchner’s wife and successor President Christina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), who took forward his commitment to memory politics.11 Since the early years of its democratic transition then, Argentina has helped to establish a culture of human rights in the region and to bring hope to other countries that it was still possible to address past atrocities. Most significantly, Argentina pioneered the two main accountability mechanisms that would become the basis for transitional justice in many other parts of the world: national truth commissions and prosecutions of former government leaders for the violation of human rights. As Sikkink (2011, 250) has observed, the ‘diffusion’ of these strategies for transitional justice across the globe has been helped by the movement of activists, lawyers and relatives of victims through exile and professional networks.

Chile’s Ambiguous Path to Democracy Compared to Argentina’s clear rupture with the legacies of the military regime, Chile’s path to democracy has been slower and more ambiguous, marked by periods of upsurge in memory work followed by retreat and oblivion. Whereas Argentineans achieved a consensual acknowledgement of past atrocities soon after the ousting of the military junta, in Chile the deep politico-ideological divide that had separated the population since the early 1970s continued to play out during the seventeen years of dictatorship and well beyond democratic transition (Huneeus and Ibarra 2013). In their determination to safeguard the neoliberal economic project developed by the military authorities, supporters of the former regime favoured formulaic approaches to the past that would offer some suggestion of public reckoning with human rights abuses while blocking further advances (Stern 2010). Meanwhile, human rights groups and associations of victims and their families demanded a more direct and thorough reckoning with the past. As a consequence of the ongoing

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struggle between these opposing sides, a ‘rolling impasse’ (Stern 2010, 360) often prevailed. In further contrast to Argentina, where the military was severely weakened by the Falklands/Malvinas defeat, the power structure in Chile remained relatively unchanged during the first years of civilian government. As Steve Stern (2010) has observed, the 1989 referendum that ousted General Augusto Pinochet created a democratic opening, not a straightforward path to reckoning with the past. In his protected position as Army Commander, Pinochet retained considerable power to negotiate the terms of transition and to maintain a firm presence in Chilean everyday life. The semi-authoritarian 1980 Constitution and the neoliberal model for economic growth developed during the dictatorship remained the legal and socio-economic foundations of the country. Furthermore, an Amnesty law signed in 1978 to protect military officials from facing prosecutions made it impossible to achieve accountability for gross human rights violations in the earlier stages of transition. This is why the Chilean transition is often referred to as a case of ‘pacted’ or ‘negotiated’ transition. Indeed, a política de los acuerdos (politics of agreement) between the former military leaders and the new administration characterized the first ten years of post-authoritarian rule by the Centre-Left coalition Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia y la Alianza por Chile (Coalition of parties for Democracy and the Alliance for Chile), which governed Chile from 1990 to 2010. The concertación faced the paradox of reconstructing a democratic project based on the principles of social justice and equality while still preserving the economic and political model inherited from the dictatorship (Núñez 2016, 182– 183). Accordingly, official memory politics during the 1990s was marked by reconciliation, the main goal of which was to settle political divisions and reach some type of compromise that could appease human rights activists while avoiding dramatic changes that might jeopardize the neoliberal regime of privatized growth. Exhortations to ignore the past were bolstered by the so-called ‘economic miracle’ in the early 1990s, when Chile experienced 7% growth rates, controlled inflation, and a strong presence of foreign capital and large investments in infrastructure. As one concertación senator has put it, the economic success of the transition was so spectacular that it required Chileans to ‘not look back’ (Hite et al. 2013, 12). Because of such ideological and institutional restrictions, some scholars have questioned the appropriateness of qualifying Chile’s transition as

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‘negotiated’. For Felipe Agüero (1998, 2003), the terms of democratic return were not so much negotiated but imposed by the military forces in agreement with a constitution that they had themselves written. Stern (2010) has similarly argued that there were no pacts as such, but rather, a complex balancing of forces between the continued pressure of human rights groups and resistance by the ruling classes. For Stern, this ‘structure of impasse’ hindered a consensual acceptance of the past but nonetheless generated what he calls a ‘creative frictional synergy’: each time right-wing forces attempted to close the memory question or, when ‘the overall tone of cultural life suggested the time had come to leave the past behind’, civil society actors regathered their efforts and increased their demands for truth and justice (Stern 2010, 3). For Stern, it was this ongoing friction, rather than any pacts or negotiations behind closed doors, that enabled slow but gradual advances in reckoning with the past. The first such advance was the establishment of the Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation) by President Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994). Known as the ‘Rettig Commission’ after the chairman, its mandate was to document the deaths and disappearances under the dictatorship by working closely with national human rights organizations and collecting testimonies of relatives and witnesses. Its concluding report included a list of recognized victims and recommended a series of social repair initiatives. The Rettig Commission represented an important but insufficient step in the struggle for memory. It had no subpoena powers and focused solely on cases of deaths and disappearance to the exclusion of cases of torture, kidnapping, exile and political persecution. Significantly, it did not reveal the names of perpetrators. Moreover, by framing state repression as a direct response to left-wing militant groups, the final report divided the responsibility for state violence between victims and aggressors. As Martín-Cabrera (2011, 22) notes, ‘placing equal responsibility on both victims and aggressors was apparently the price for reconciliation and represents the extent to which Chileans could have justice’. He refers to the famous televised speech in which President Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) declared that Chileans would have ‘justicia en la medida de lo posible’ (justice as far as possible). A decade later, critics would interpret this phrase as summarizing the Chilean transition as a whole: limited investigations to appease human rights demands while foregoing punishment of the armed forces (Ossa 2016). The Rettig Commission illustrates the reconciliatory tone of the concertación government and what Stern (2010, 373) has referred

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to as the ‘formula and wedge’ dynamic of the Chilean transition: while the conservative classes sought formulaic solutions to the problem of memory, that is, to address the past ‘quickly and narrowly, more or less reactively, only to declare it closed and marginal’, human rights groups used these solutions as a wedge to push for further advances. Indeed, despite being insufficient on its own, the Rettig Commission provided enough momentum for activists to continue their struggle. After the publication of its report, the crimes committed by the military authorities became more openly discussed in the public sphere, including public debates, the publication of memoirs, testimonial work, novels, academic monographs and films. The government announced follow-up plans focusing on reconciliation, but these and other discussions were overshadowed by a series of attacks on right-wing politicians, most notably, the 1991 assassination of senator Jaime Guzmán, one of Pinochet’s closest advisors and the leading author of the 1980 Constitution (Wilde, 1999). As Wiebelhaus-Brahm (2010, 55) has written, ‘Fearing continued violence and instability, six months after the release of the Rettig report, Aylwin declared the period of reconciliation over’.12 The deadlock of the mid-1990s was broken by a series of ‘irruptions of the past in the present’, as Wilde (2013) has referred to them: events that tore through collective inertia and forced Chileans to confront the past, including, for instance, the discovery of human bones from the clandestine graves where the disappeared had been buried. The unearthing of human remains symbolized a past that continued to haunt the present and testified to the reality of state terror that the military forces and the political right systematically denied. Hence, despite attempts to close the memory question, Chile’s past has refused to stay buried, and even under hostile conditions activists continually sought new allies, often among mid-level politicians. The transformation of former torture centre Vila Grimaldi into a peace park in 1997, for example, was a product of collaboration between activists, municipal government, congressmen, and some executive branch actors. Despite these discrete advances, critics tend to characterize the first decade of concertación as dominated by moves towards oblivion. Hesitance by the justice system in prosecuting military officials prevented a more effective reckoning with the past, and the dominant opinion seemed to be that excessive focus on the past might jeopardize Chile’s economic progress by undermining investor confidence. But then, as occurred in Argentina, the impasse was broken in 1998 with Pinochet’s detention in London.

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In her analysis of the cumulative impact that the ex-dictator’s arrest and detention had on the judicial systems of Chile and neighbouring countries, Roht-Arriaza (2006) has demonstrated that transnational prosecutions are inevitably dependent on, and mediated by, national aspects. In other words, domestic politics and legal frameworks can facilitate or prevent the struggle for justice. She observes that, in the United Kingdom, the ex-dictator’s arrest might not have occurred without the presence of a Labour government which included many opponents of the Chilean military regime. In Chile itself, reforms in the judicial system and amendments to the Constitution in the late 1990s paved the way for an environment more favourable to human rights concerns and a rise in criminal cases brought against high-ranking military officers. Chilean courts devised new legal strategies to prosecute based on international law, by overruling the Amnesty Law and citing the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearances (Lutz and Sikkink 2001). As politicians, judges, lawyers and the press were influenced by the transnational prosecutions, the ‘pact of silence’ was broken and the culture of impunity seriously undermined. Public revelations of financial irregularities and tax fraud involving Pinochet and his family further eroded public confidence in the military. In the context of this new ‘season of memory’ (Wilde 2013), President Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) was forced to challenge the future-orientated agendas of the concertación and establish a second truth commission, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture. Headed by Bishop Sergio Valech, it collected over 35,000 testimonies of victims and detailed the institutionalization of torture during the military regime. However, as in the case of the Rettig Commission, the names of perpetrators were not made public. For Martín-Cabrera (2011, 95), this refusal to publicize the names reflected the government’s new strategies for perpetuating impunity, ‘relying on exhaustive control of information, rather than on the categorical denial of information’. Nonetheless, the Valech Truth Commission provided a stronger basis for shared historical memory in Chile and encouraged more advances in public memory and social understanding of the past in the decade that followed. As a further ‘memory knot’, Pinochet’s death in 2006 set in motion a series of new legal processes against former military personnel (Stern 2010). Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice continued throughout the 2010s, with an increasing number of survivors and victims’ relatives coming forward to speak openly about the past. Hundreds of ex-military have been found guilty in trials

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before ordinary civilian courts and many are currently serving prison sentences, including high-ranking officials linked to DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional/National Directory of Intelligence) and the CNI (Central Nacional de Informaciones/National Information Centre). Most notably, former head of DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, died in 2015 while serving a sentence of 500 years for his responsibility for human rights violations. Despite these advances, however, thousands of cases of enforced disappearance remain open. In 2020, an overwhelming majority of Chileans voted in support of a new constitution to replace that established by Pinochet, on the basis that it was not compatible with democratic order.

Brazil’s Unfinished Mourning As in Chile, the armed forces in Brazil remained a powerful institution long after the return to civilian rule in 1985, while its re-democratization process has also been referred to as ‘negotiated’ or ‘pacted’. The main difference between the two countries lies in the Brazilian government’s extreme delay and limitations in reckoning with past atrocities and addressing human rights demands. Survivors and relatives of victims had to wait a full decade before the government introduced a first, limited initiative towards memory politics, a financial reparation programme for families of the disappeared in 1995. Another seventeen years would pass before a national truth commission was finally established in 2012. As we have seen, Chileans and Argentineans achieved some measure of justice with the prosecution and sentencing of military officials found guilty of crimes. By contrast, in Brazil no officials have ever been brought to trial, due to the refusal of successive governments to revoke an Amnesty Law established in 1979 which granted full amnesty to political activists and military officials alike. The reciprocal Amnesty Law laid down the conciliatory tone of the Brazilian transition as it determined that the new government would safeguard the legitimacy of its predecessors and protect military authorities from investigation, trials and criminal punishment (Payne et al. 2011; Teles 2005; Schneider 2011; Atencio 2014). Most critics argue that the lack of judicial prosecutions has meant that Brazilians have never experienced a clear rupture with the legacy of the dictatorship. This lack of an effective rupture and the prevailing culture of impunity may help to explain why, three decades after the end of the military regime, Brazilians elected for president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023),

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a retired military captain who has repeatedly declared himself in favour of the dictatorship and its practices of institutionalized torture. In seeking to understand the peculiarities of the Brazilian transition, scholars generally highlight four reasons for the permanence of the Amnesty Law and the apathy of the population in relation to its dictatorial past. First, the covert nature of the Brazilian dictatorship, which sought to maintain an outer appearance of being ‘democratic’ by retaining some aspects of democratic rule, albeit in a distorted manner (Atencio 2014; Teles 2020). This included, for instance, indirect elections, which led to a succession of generals in the presidency; an authorized opposition party; and a weakened congress until 1968, when the regime intensified control through a series of repressive measures known as the ‘coup within the coup’. Second, the military regime lasted longer in Brazil than other countries in the region, including a ten-year period of political opening up (known as ‘slow, gradual and safe political opening’), initiated by President Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) and taken forward by his successor, President João Figueiredo (1979–1985). This extended process contributed to the sentiment among the population that the new civilian government did not signify so much a rupture with the past as a continuation of the military’s own plans for the country. A third factor that continues to discourage direct confrontation with the past was the relative success of the military government’s programme of conservative modernization, which boosted economic growth through foreign loans, while deepening social inequalities (Singer 2014; Prado and Earp 2003). Brazilian GDP tripled between 1965 and 1980, making it the eighth largest economy in the world. Heavy investment in urban development, infrastructure and industrialization encouraged large sectors of the middle classes to disregard the regime’s atrocities and reap the benefits of a strong economy. Although the ultimate cost of the alleged ‘Brazilian miracle’ came in the form of hyperinflation, a devalued currency and one of the worst wealth distributions in the world, it nonetheless served to legitimize the regime for long enough to generate an ambivalent, if not altogether positive, attitude to the military rulers. As Schneider has written, significant parts of the population ‘retain a positive image of the military dictatorship as they remember it as a time of economic growth and modernization, despite repression’ (2011, 205). A survey conducted by polling institute Datafolha ahead of the 2018 presidential election concluded that 32% of respondents believed the dictatorship

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had more positive effects than negative ones; among wealthier respondents, a positive perception of the dictatorship was reported by 48% (DataFolha 2018). A further aspect that differentiated the Brazilian dictatorship was the relatively lower number of direct victims of state violence (in their hundreds, rather than the thousands reported in Chile and Argentina), which has arguably made accountability less of an immediate concern after democracy was restored (Schneider 2011, 200; Payne et al. 2011). Public misperception of the Brazilian dictatorship as less violent than that of other South American regimes has originated the popular term ditabranda, ‘bland dictatorship’. Moreover, as Nina Schneider and Rebeca Atencio (2016, 18) have observed, most Brazilians tend to find that the level of violence in the present, including routine killing of citizens by the police, is so extreme that it overshadows any concern with the past. The reduced willingness of the population to confront the legacies of state violence does not mean that Brazilians passively waited for the military authorities to negotiate their exit from power. From the mid-1970s onwards, many grassroots groups, including the black and indigenous movements, feminists, the student movement and civil rights activists, seized on the government’s rhetoric of ‘political opening’ to reorganize themselves with the support of international organizations such as the Red Cross. In the early 1980s, the combination of an economic downturn and restrictive salary policies provoked a cycle of strikes by metalworkers in the ABC region of São Paulo, led by then union leader Luís Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva. These attracted other civil groups, including artists, intellectuals, clergy and liberal politicians, and quickly developed into mass rallies across the country demanding immediate presidential elections under the banner ‘Diretas Já’ (‘Direct Elections Now’). The demand was ultimately rejected by the authorities, but civilian rule was nonetheless conceded in the 1985 elections through the choice of Tancredo da Almeida Neves, a strong supporter of re-democratization.13 The Diretas Já movement would come to full fruition in 1988, when a new democratic Constitution was passed that included direct elections. In 1989, Brazil held the first popular elections for President in twenty-five years. Demands to revoke the Amnesty Law during this period were rare. As Atencio (2014, 12) has written, influential voices not only from within the regime but also from the opposition and the media called for moderation, fearing that Brazil might experience the same level of polarization as Argentina. She argues that the fear of a backlash from the armed forces was such that, for most

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Brazilians, ‘an official reckoning with past state violence seemed beyond the realm of the fathomable’ (Atencio 2014, 12). In the early 1990s, the discovery of human remains in a clandestine mass grave in the state of São Paulo forced the state to take a first step toward reckoning with past crimes. Pressured by the families of victims, President Luiz Fernando Cardoso signed the ‘Law of the Disappeared’ (1995) which recognized state responsibility for 136 political disappearances and the right of relatives to financial compensation (Teles 2005; Santos 2009; Napolitano 2015). The law also allowed for the identification of further victims to be submitted to the Comissão Especial sobre Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos/Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances). As Atencio (2014, 16–17) has observed, despite Cardoso’s status as a ‘bona fide opponent of the military regime’, he avoided the creation of anything that might resemble a truth commission: ‘the Cardoso administration opted for an initiative that had all the makings of a formulaic closure: the state would pay its “debts” and close its book without undertaking an official investigation’. In 2002, a second programme known as Amnesty Commission extended reparations to a larger group of victims not covered by the Law of the Disappeared, including survivors of torture (Payne et al. 2011, 30; Schneider and Atencio 2016, 17). Continued pressure from human rights groups, in collaboration with international organizations such as the Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos/Interamerican Court for Human Rights (CIDH) yielded further limited results, including the Plano Nacional de Direitos Humanos (PNDH), a series of proposals for the development of human rights in Brazil, albeit with no legal status. It was only in its third edition, signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2009, that the PNDH contained specific policies concerning the right to memory and truth (Napolitano 2015). Lula’s two terms as president (2003–2006; 2007–2010) brought about a significant shift in memory politics. Many of his appointed officials were, like himself, former leftwing militants persecuted by the state, including Dilma Rousseff, his named successor (2011–2014, 2015–2016). His government championed transitional justice measures and pushed for the state to recognize the atrocities committed during the dictatorship. From the mid-2000s, Brazil inaugurated an unprecedented ‘turn to memory’ as it abandoned the discourse of ‘reconciliation by institutionalized forgetting’ in favour of a new discourse based on ‘reconciliation by institutionalized memory’

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(Atencio 2014, 17). State initiatives included the creation of memorials (for instance, Memorial da Resistência in 2009), monuments and plaques to commemorate victims, the transformation of former clandestine detention centres into sites of memory, educational programmes and the publication of Direito à memória e à verdade (Right to Memory and Truth 2007), an extensive report based on an 11-year investigation by the Comissão Especial sobre Mortos e Desaparecidos. Brazil’s turn to memory culminated with the establishment of the Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), a national truth commission tasked with investigating all human rights violations committed by state agents between 1946 and 1985. Proposed by the PNDH in 2009 and inaugurated by President Rousseff in 2012, the CNV was the first time that the government undertook a thorough and comprehensive investigation into Brazil’s two military dictatorships. The two and a half years of investigation concluded that 434 deaths and forced disappearances had occurred during the military regime (while stressing that further investigation was required to reflect the total number of victims) and identified the names of 377 perpetrators. The reaction of human rights groups and victims’ relatives to the report was uneven: some expressed their support through esculachos (public performances to shame known perpetrators), while others accused it of leaving the question of justice unresolved. Nonetheless, it has been generally agreed that despite its shortcomings the CNV succeeded in attracting unprecedented interest in the question of memory and human rights debates, as evidenced by the intense media coverage it received. Such memory politics was short-lived, however. After thirteen years in power, the PT suffered a severe backlash with the emergence of a series of allegations of political corruption. Between 2014 and 2015, the combination of corruption scandals, a deteriorating economy, record unemployment rates and a series of failings in public policy generated widespread anger which manifested itself in mass protests against the government. These protests saw the rise of far-right discourses that had remained inert since before 1964, calling for military intervention and the return of authoritarian rule (Teles 2020; Pinho and Santiago 2014).14 Despite representing a minority, these voices help to illustrate the increasingly polarized political landscape of mid-2010s Brazil. The aggressive campaign to impeach Rousseff gained unstoppable momentum and concluded with her removal from office in 2016 on charges of administrative misconduct. Generalized popular discontent continued during her replacement’s term and set the stage for the election of far-right

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populist Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed ‘Trump of the Tropics’ for his ideological affinities with the US President. As observed by one critic, with ‘a long record of outlandish and derogatory statements on homosexuality, race, and women [Bolsonaro has] capitalized on a message of political change at the cost of democracy and human rights’ (Pinazza 2018). His presidency reversed key advances made in the realm of human rights, indigenous rights, environmental policies and worker’s rights. For those engaged in memory work, it was a fatal blow. As president, one of his first measures was to call for ‘appropriate commemorations’ of the 1964 military coup, reversing the eight-year ban on ceremonies to mark the anniversary imposed by Rousseff. His education ministers proposed curriculum changes to represent the military regime in a favourable light and deny the occurrence of human rights violations.15 Many critics have attributed the popularity of Bolsonaro and his revisionist discourse to Brazil’s general failure to properly reckon with the dictatorship years. For Idelber Avelar (quoted in Foggin 2019, np), of all the Latin American countries that had military dictatorships, Brazil’s memory work has been ‘the most precarious and most incomplete’, ‘full of holes, tainted by forgetting and silence’. Such ‘interrupted mourning’, he argues, greatly explains the rise of Bolsonaro to power. To summarize then, processes of reckoning with past dictatorships in the Southern Cone have been complex and uneven. Institutional measures of transitional justice such as truth commissions, reparations, prosecutions and memorialization have been conditioned by the specific socio-economic and political circumstances of each country, as well as the transnational dialogues and exchanges between them. Civil actors acting in response to their respective national contexts have continually reached out to international partners for leverage and support. This dialectical relation between the national and transnational becomes apparent as we examine not only the historical events themselves, but also the subjective meanings ascribed to these events by the various groups who experienced them from diverse ideological perspectives. The explanatory discourses for the past and their ongoing struggle for legitimacy are the focus of the following section.

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Frameworks for Remembering the Dictatorial Past The various interpretations of South America’s conflicted pasts can be understood in terms of Maurice Halbwach’s (1992) argument that we organize and interpret mnemonic material in accordance with existing ‘social frameworks’ and, even more significantly, through Michel Foucault’s (1975, 25) assertion that interpretations of the past are intricately tied to relations of power. As he has observed, ‘if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles’. These struggles over the meanings of the past, or ‘guerres de mémoire’ (memory wars), as Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson (2008) refer to them in the French context, imply divergent accounts of what happened, questions about why those events occurred and who is entitled to speak for them in the present (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). Accordingly, in the countries of the Southern Cone, interpretations of the past produced by the state have been frequently contested by grassroots groups, victims and their relatives. Lazzara’s (2006, 25) observation that dissenting voices from marginal, less powerful social positions in Chile have offered important critiques of the official politics of forgetting is applicable to virtually any postauthoritarian society. Yet, as we will see, memory battles are rarely a simple case of ‘subaltern truths’ competing against ‘official lies’, or ‘popular memory’ versus ‘official historiography’. The relationship between these types of memory discourses is more complicated, and there are various reasons why some of them in a given period and become ‘emblematic’, the term Stern (2004) has applied to the integration of ‘loose, personal memories’ into wider social discourses and their elevation to a hegemonic status. Occasionally, and maybe paradoxically, groups from opposing sides of the political spectrum converge towards the same framework, and some frameworks continue to hold power over significant lengths of time despite continued attempts to undermine them. In relation to Chile, Stern (2004, 2006, 2010) has identified four main frameworks through which citizens interpreted military intervention in their country and its long-lasting effects. The first two emerged in the immediate aftermath of 1973. Conservative middle- and upper classes who supported Pinochet framed the coup as the ‘salvation’ of Chile from Marxist socio-economic ruin, while the majority of the population experienced it as a brutal ‘rupture’ of everyday life and the beginning of terror and uncertainty. The ‘rupture’ framework was gradually supplemented by

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a third, in which the dictatorship is seen as a time of political ‘persecution, awakening and resistance’. To this framework, military authorities and their supporters responded with a fourth, ‘memory as a closed box’, in which the prevailing logic was that leaving the past behind was necessary to rebuild democracy and deal with the more urgent demands of the present. Stern’s typology somewhat overlaps with the periodization that Jelin (2010) has established to understand the memory stages in the Southern Cone more widely. In what follows, I draw upon and combine these two perspectives with those of other authors to examine the competing memory discourses in the region through a broader, transnational lens. My terminology has been adapted to convey the pertinence of these frameworks in relation to Chile, Brazil and Argentina.

Salvation and Demons Stern’s ‘memory as salvation’ framework has been paramount in all Latin American countries that experienced dictatorships, its hegemony maintained through tight control of mainstream media, censorship and repression of dissenting opinion. The ideological pillars of this framework (and of the military regimes more generally) were established by the National Security Doctrine (NSD) taught in military academies throughout the Americas, most notably, the Panama-based Escuela de las Americas, created by the United States during the Cold War with the ostensible aim of improving ties with armed forces in the region (Crenzel 2011; Comblin 1977).16 The NSD maintained that the most pressing threat to the security of Latin American states was the internal spread of communism supported by foreign allies, notably the Soviet Union and China. Military officials who adhered to this doctrine viewed any left-leaning movement, or indeed anyone who did not openly support the regime, as an enemy to eradicate. Through nationalistic declarations and slogans, military authorities emphasized their role as ‘heroes’ who defended the nation against the communist threat and restored social order (Jelin 2010, 64–65). Left-wing militants and their sympathizers were cast as pathogens that had to be removed so that the nation could prosper and achieve its full potential (Bell 2014). In Brazil, a few days after General Castelo Branco (1964–1967) rose to power, the significantly named ‘Operação Limpeza’ (Operation Clean-Up) arrested an estimated 50,000 citizens targeted as ‘communist’ or ‘subversive’, including leftist military officers and politicians, liberal

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members of the clergy, labour organizers and peasant league members (Neto 2018, 59; Skidmore 1988, 55–57). Since then, the armed forces have continued to justify the 1964 coup through the euphemistic imperative to ‘clean the house’. A similar idea of restoring national order was employed in Argentina, where the military junta referred to their own government as a process of ‘reorganization’, ‘Proceso de Reorganización Nacional’. Indeed, shortly before leading the coup, General Jorge Rafael Videla told an audience of military leaders that ‘As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure’ (Bernstein 2013). As a final example, after bombarding La Moneda palace in Santiago, a member of the Chilean military junta declared that ‘the work of the government consisted in extirpating the Marxist cancer that threatened the organic life of the nation, through extreme measures, until the last consequences’ (Errázuriz 2009, 140). This salvationist discourse and its metaphoric representation of the nation as a ‘house’ that required cleaning, or a ‘body’ threatened by ‘cancerous growth’ invites associations with biopower, a concept that Foucault (1976) developed to describe the power that modern states have over the life and health of entire populations. Biopower has been predominantly understood as productive and positive, aimed at collective well-being, but Foucault (1976, 255) has pointed to an inherent paradox: in its ambition to ‘make live’, foster and optimize life, biopower silently calls for the exclusion and death of the population’s undesirable ‘other’: ‘(…) the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, the abnormal), is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer’. For Foucault, racism is the political tool employed by modern states to divide populations in biological terms and justify the extermination of those groups deemed inferior. With reference to the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, he extended this logic to any mechanism used to separate a population from its undesirable others. Post-Foucauldian scholars like Giorgio Agamben (1998) and Achilles Mbembe (2019) have revisited biopower to highlight, for instance, the right of sovereign states to kill with impunity (Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’) and the creation of ‘death-worlds’ where unwanted populations survive in sub-human conditions (Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics’). More directly relevant to this discussion is Vicki Bell’s (2014) application of biopolitics to understand the tactics used by the Argentinean military junta to rationalize and justify its crimes. It was in the name of healing,

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Bell (2014, 22) observes, that the Junta prescribed ‘the surgical removal’ of those who criticized the regime. By the late 1970s, once institutionalised practices of mass kidnappings, torture and murder in Latin America had become more widely known, the military’s master narrative lost purchase. It did not disappear, however. In the Argentinean context, it might seem reasonable to suppose that this discourse would fall apart with the publication of Nunca Más (1984), but the report itself contained an updated and slightly modified version of it, which would soon become popularly known as la teoría de los dos demonios , ‘the two demons’ theory. In its prologue, Nunca Más explained the political turmoil of the 1970s in terms of an apocalyptic clash between leftist guerrilla warfare and the more systemic, rationalized, extra-legal and ‘infinitely worse’ violence of the military forces. Despite drawing attention to the disproportion between institutionalized state violence supported by a national army and the violence of leftist guerrilla groups, the text nevertheless posited a symmetrical relation between the two and explained state terrorism in terms of a continuous escalation (Jelin 1994). The main differentiator from the salvationist rhetoric was the admission of partial culpability for the ‘excesses’ committed by the state. Roberto Berdún, a CONADEP archivist and one of the most vociferous critics of its prologue, would later comment that its reference to the ‘two demons’ theory was ‘inadmissible, given that the 500 pages that followed demonstrated that state terrorism was the only one demon’ (Página 12, 2014). Nonetheless, the theory remained the main interpretive framework for political violence in Argentina for over a decade, embraced by such disparate groups as survivors, the media, artists, intellectuals, politicians and even some ex-militants themselves (Crenzel 2013, 5). It resonated across the Southern Cone more widely. In Chile, conservative groups continue to interpret the brutality of Pinochet’s rule as necessary to combat the ‘demon’ of the Left, an idea revived by the ex-dictator himself in his famous Carta a los chilenos (Letter to the Chilean People), written in 1998 during his detention in London and widely disseminated in the Chilean press and internet (Pinochet 1998). In Brazil, the equivalence between leftist armed warfare and state violence was implicitly accepted across the political spectrum by supporters of the 1979 Amnesty Law. More recently, the ‘two demons’ theory was invoked by members of the Brazilian armed forces to protest against the 2012 National Truth Commission and demand that ex-leftist militants be investigated alongside military officials (Oliveira and Reis 2021).17

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The Humanitarian Framework As we have seen, civil groups worked relentlessly and often at considerable risk to support victims and raise awareness of the realities of the military regime. The language of human rights, still incipient in the 1970s, became the main framework through which these groups conceptualized their resistance. ‘Memory, truth and justice’ became the banners of the movement and, through the slogan ‘never again’ stamped on posters, pamphlets and banners, activists implied that the accumulation of information about state crimes was the key condition to avoid their repetition. ‘“Remember, so as not to repeat” became a cultural imperative’, Jelin (2010, 69) has written.18 An emphasis on victimhood was the key strategy of human rights organizations for galvanizing popular support. However, through its unequivocal embrace of the victim-survivor figure, this framework unwittingly erased all traces of left-wing politics from the conflict. Such depoliticization was reinforced by many ex-militants themselves who, concerned with the stigmatization, silenced their own political agency to highlight their condition as victims, a strategy implicitly encouraged by human rights groups. Hence Alejandra Oberti’s and Roberto Pittalunga’s (2006, 19) ironic comment that, according to most of these organizations, out of all the 30,000 desaparecidos-detenidos in Argentina, all were regarded as ‘innocent victims’. As the authors have argued, in the attempt to highlight the victimhood of everyone who suffered the effects of state terrorism, these organizations contributed to the removal of leftist political militancy and warfare from memory discourses. Such perspective is echoed in Tessa Lacerda’s (2016) discussion of the humanitarian framework in the Brazilian context. She reminds us that leftist activists who suffered state-perpetrated violence as a consequence of their decision to confront the military regime were at least partially aware of the risks they were taking, and therefore had some responsibility over their destiny. Hence her assertion that they were ‘not merely sacrificial objects, but political agents’ (2016, 184).

The Framework of Oblivion By the 1990s, political equilibrium seemed to prevail in the Southern Cone. The calls of conservative groups and politicians for their respective societies to ‘close the memory box’ (Stern 2010) had been largely successful, based on the idea that sufficient compromises had been

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reached and the time had arrived to focus on the more pressing challenges of the present. As Jelin (2010, 70) observed, the need for economic growth and stability overshadowed concerns for dealing with past grievances, and the strong push of neoliberalism ‘called for an image of normality, based on democratically elected governments and on some degree of certainty and reliability’. The pardons granted by President Menem in Argentina, the politics of agreement in Chile and the widespread acceptance of the compromise laid down by the Brazilian Amnesty Law are all evidence of the 1990s equilibrium. In this context, Jelin (2010, 70–71) writes: There was little room for emotional remembrances of the past, which had to be silenced or even better, forgotten (…) In each of these countries, there was promise of a future in which the past was exactly that, a past that had already passed away; perhaps a painful past, but one that was already surpassed.

Unsatisfied Memory: New Questions, New Demands The fourth and last framework combines a range of new perspectives and concerns emerging soon after, and partly as a response to, the prevailing oblivion of the 1990s. On the institutional level, a broadening of the human rights agenda was encouraged by the rise to power of left-leaning politicians who had been personally victimized by state repression and/ or who had themselves struggled against the dictatorship through political militancy or as guerrillas.19 As we have seen, these leaders pushed for initiatives that reopened the memory question and created space for new concerns relating to dictatorship. On a grassroots level, forgetfulness was challenged by persistent ‘irruptions of memory’ (Wilde 2013) the most notable of which was Pinochet’s 1998 detention and its wideraging effects. The ex-dictator’s fall from grace opened the way for more ‘diverse and nuanced’ memories in Chile (Lazzara 2006, 3). In Argentina, the struggle for memory was reinvigorated by the arrival of new actors on the political scene, namely, the sons and daughters of desaparecidosdetenidos who joined the militant organization H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio/Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence). Since the mid-1990s, H.I.J.O.S. has expanded its activities to reach counterparts in the Southern Cone and beyond. Their demands to name and shame

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perpetrators, often expressed in creative public demonstrations (escraches in Argentina; furnas in Chile; and esculachos in Brazil), helped to illuminate experiences of the dictatorship that had been excluded from state discourses and the media, most notably, the intergenerational transmission of trauma (Jelin and Sempol 2006). In addition to H.I.J.O.S., social movements focusing on race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality adopted the language of human rights to raise questions about the democratic value of contemporary Latin America and denounce longstanding social injustices and inequalities. Many of these movements demanded a reframing of the memory question to understand the wave of military dictatorships as not so much historical rupture, but continuation of the systemic forms of structural violence caused by centuries of authoritarian rule. What distinguishes this memory framework from the previous three is its greater heterogeneity and open-endedness. As we have seen, the salvation, humanitarian and oblivion frameworks are based on easily recognizable structures and tropes: the military saving the nation from an internal enemy; the victim–survivor dyad; and the need to forget and start anew. By contrast, ‘unsatisfied memory’ suggests the persistent battle for memory that takes up new forms and raises new questions incessantly, an idea well expressed by Alice Nelson (2011, 340) when she writes that ‘memory formation is nothing if not a conflictual mobile process: less a static repository of meanings from the past than a radically contested dynamic of rethinking relationships between the past and the present, potentially bringing out tentative links, new readings, or alternative interpretations’.

Concluding Remarks As Gustavo Furtado (2019, 178) has written, the similarities between the histories of the countries of South American countries has found expression in the ways in which documentary cinema has participated in the struggle for memory. Indeed, the cinemas of memory addressed in this book have emerged in dialectical relationship with the various interpretative frameworks for remembering the dictatorship, and in dialogue with a wider, predominantly leftist inclined, post-dictatorship arena of cultural production. In a study of the convoluted relationship between memory and justice in Spain and the Southern Cone, Martín-Cabrera (2011, 15) has argued that an appropriate response to a conflicted past requires ‘a radical distinction – indeed, a degree of antagonism – between the state

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and the victims of state terror’. He rejects the kind of conceptual model in which multiple memory discourses compete to produce meaning in relation to the dictatorial past, by arguing that it ‘mimics the economic model of a market of competing commodities’ and excludes from analysis ‘those memories that are not easily symbolized due to their traumatic nature’ (2011, 14). For Martín-Cabrera, the systematic forced disappearance of people leaves ‘an excess of signification’ that haunts the present indefinitely and impedes us from closing the past. In his view, the ‘absent presence of the desaparecidos’ remains forever outside any typology of memories (2011, 15). Nonetheless, he finds examples of the necessary antagonism between state discourses and popular culture in two kinds of cultural production, detective novels and political documentaries. As he writes, these works produce alternative histories and offer a notion of justice ‘diametrically opposed to state-sponsored accounts of the past and to the pervasiveness of impunity that defines post-dictatorship societies in general’ (2011, 4). Hence, although Martín-Cabrera discards the idea of competing memory frameworks, he nonetheless reinforces a central argument made by its proponents about the key role that popular culture has played in remembrance of the dictatorial past. Most scholars agree that cultural production does not replace legal and political mechanisms of transitional justice but constitutes a necessary complement to these by conferring alternative meanings on the past and keeping the struggle for memory alive (Jelin 2002; Atencio 2014; Heise 2015; Schneider and Atencio 2016; Villalón 2016). Such an argument underlies the essays published in a special edition of the journal Latin American Perspectives centred on the subject of collective memory in the region. From their different theoretical standpoints, the contributing authors examine the many ways in which artistic and cultural works in Latin America have helped to generate an understanding about the dictatorial past, encouraged reflection, promoted remembrance, expressed dissent and challenged misleading versions of events. In the introduction to the volume, Villalón (2016, 4) stressed that ‘artistic and cultural expressions and arenas have been “indispensable to break the silence” and played a decisive role in keeping memories and mobilization for justice thriving’. She does not establish a hierarchy between popular culture and institutional measures for truth and reconciliation, neither does she see them as completely separate. Rather, she conceptualizes cultural production ‘as part and parcel of these long-term complex processes’ and reminds us that cultural products cannot escape the socio-political

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and historical context from which they emerged (2016, 4). I concur, for in my understanding post-dictatorship cinema in Brazil, Chile and Argentina has not always emerged in direct opposition to state-sponsored accounts, nor outside established frameworks for remembering. Rather, it has developed in response to, and ongoing engagement with, existing memory discourses and institutional practices, following a dynamic similar to what Atencio (2014) has described, in the Brazilian context, as ‘cycles of remembering’. For Atencio, cultural memory of the dictatorship surges in cycles, in dialectical relationship with institutionalized mechanisms of transitional justice. Her consideration also applies to other countries in the Southern Cone where artists, writers, intellectuals, filmmakers and others working on post-dictatorship memory have often utilized the momentum generated by certain state mechanisms (for instance, the publication of the Nunca Más report in Argentina, or Brazil’s National Truth Commission) to further the debate by introducing new themes, questions and modes of remembering. Many of these films have received support from the government for their production and distribution. In Brazil, for instance, the project Marcas da Memória (Traces of Memory), introduced by The Ministry of Justice in 2008, has been instrumental in promoting documentary films that help to construct memories of the dictatorial period. In Chile and Argentina, the FONDART (Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes/National Fund for the Development of Culture and Arts) and INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales/ National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), respectively, have also played a crucial role. Given the complex relationship between institutional policies, cultural memory and film production, it is difficult to see how post-dictatorship cinema could maintain a position of radical antagonism to any state-sponsored initiative, as suggested by Martín-Cabrera. This argument will become clearer in the following chapters, where I examine the emergence of each cinematic mode of remembering in turn while paying attention to the socio-historical context in which films have been made, distributed and received.

Notes 1. For more comprehensive analyses of the processes of reckoning with past dictatorships, see Payne et al. (2011) in relation to Brazil; Stern (2004, 2006, 2010) in the Chilean context and Crenzel (2011) in relation to Argentina.

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2. Military governments controlled Latin American countries for significant periods from 1964 to 1990, and in some cases prior to the Cuban Revolution. In addition to the three nations discussed here, these were: Bolivia (1964–1982); Ecuador (1963–1966; 1972–1978); El Salvador (1948–1984; 1979–1984); Guatemala (1963–1966; 1969–1985); Honduras (1963–1966; 1972–1982); Panama (1968–1989); Paraguay (1954–1989); Peru (1968–1980) and Uruguay (1973–1984). 3. In Brazil, an estimated 20,000 civilians were tortured between 1964 and 1985, and 464 were murdered or disappeared, according to the CNV (Comissão Nacional da Verdade/National Truth Commission). In Chile, proven cases of death or disappearance by state agents amount to 3000; torture victims exceed 12,000 and detentions add up to over 82,000. It has been argued that these official figures grossly underestimate the real number of victims. According to Stern (2010, xxiii) a credible estimate for torture victims surpasses the 100.00 threshold. Human rights organizations estimate the number of detenidos desaparecidos in Argentina at 30,000; they estimate that circa five hundred babies and children of the disappeared were appropriated by the repressive forces. Argentina’s dictatorship distinguishes itself from that of other countries of the Southern Cone by the number of victims and the wider use of forced disappearance as a strategy for dealing with perceived opponents of the state (Crenzel 2011, 8). 4. A transnational approach has been adopted earlier by political scientists and historians seeking to trace the interconnectedness of military governments in the region. See Loveman (1999) and Remmer (1989). 5. The UNHCR defines ‘refugee’ as a person who ‘owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country or return there because there is a fear of persecution’ (UNHCR 2010, 14). 6. See also McSherry (2005). 7. As demonstrated by Dinges, Condor originated in Chile’s Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a secret intelligence agency headed by Colonel Manuel Contreras and supported by the CIA.

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

The US government provided the training and technology for a centralised computer database that enabled DINA to expand its operations beyond Chile by liaising with military forces in the region. These groups include Argentina’s Asemblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos/Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, or APDH; Madres de La Plaza de Mayo/Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and international partners such as the World Council of Churches (WCC), Amnesty International (AI) and the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Mainly, the WCC (World Council of Churches); the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees); and the ICAM (Intergovernmental Committee for European Migrations. For an analysis of Clamor, see Samorone Lima (2003). Critics of Kirchnerismo have argued that the Kirchners have co-opted memory politics as a tool to rebuild the hegemonic consensus threatened by Argentina’s economic crises. See also Quinn (2001, 400–401). Neves died before taking office, but civilian government was secured through his Vice-President José Sarney (1985–1990). These far-right protests called themselves ‘Marchas da Família’ to emulate the anti-government protests organized by businessmen, landowners, the Catholic Church and conservative sectors of the middle class to supported military intervention against President João Goulart (1961–1964). As a senator in 2016, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to impeach President Rousseff to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the deceased military general who had tortured her in the 1970s. Bolsonaro has often described the military dictatorship as a period of full employment, security and respect towards human rights; he has also frequently stated that one of the biggest errors of the dictatorship was to torture its opponents but not kill them. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Defense, Emilio Crenzel (2011, 10) states that 3676 Argentine military officers were trained in U.S. military academies during the Cold War era. Uruguayan president Julio María Sanguinetti (1985–1990; 1995– 2000) was one of the main proponents of the theory, which he used to defend the armed forces’ brutal repression of the Tupamaros guerrilla in the 1970s.

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18. See also Villalón (2017). 19. During their time as university students, the Kirchners in Argentina militated in the FUR (Federación Universitaria de la Revolución Nacional/University Federation of the National Revolution). Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010; 2014– 2018) was tortured by the authorities and forced into exile. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010; 2023– ) was a leading public opponent of the military state in the 1970s and his successor President Dilma Rousseff (2010– 2016), an ex-member of the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla VARPalmares (Vanguarda Revolucionária Palmares/Armed Revolutionary Vanguard), was tortured in prison.

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(1967–1973). In O Brasil Republicano. O tempo da ditadura: regime militar e movimentos sociais em fins do século XX. Vol. 4, ed. Jorge Ferreira, Lucilia de A. N. Delgado, 208–241. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Quinn, Joanna R. 2001. Dealing with a Legacy of Mass Atrocity: Truth Commissions in Uganda and Chile. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 19 (4): 383–402. Radstone, Susannah. 2011. What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies. Parallax 17: 109–123. Remmer, Karen L. 1989. Military Rule in Latin America. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Notre Dame, IN: Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School, 1993), tr. Phillip E. Berryman, vol. 1, pp. 48–49. Roehrig, Terence. 2009. Executive Leadership and the Continuing Quest for Justice in Argentina. Human Rights Quarterly 31 (3): 721–747. Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2006. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Saavedra, Manuel Bastías. 2013. The Unintended Legacy of September 11, 1973: Transnational Activism and the Human Rights Movement in Latin America. Iberoamericana 13 (51): 87–103. Samorone Lima. 2003. Clamor: a vitória de uma conspiração brasileira. São Paulo: Objetiva. Santos, Cecília M. 2009. A Justiça a serviço da memória: mobilização jurídica transnacional, direitos humanos e memória da ditadura. In Desarquivando a Ditadura: Memória e Justiça no Brasil V.2, ed. Cecília M. Santos, Edson Teles, and Janaína de Almeida Teles, 472–495. São Paulo: Hucitec. Schneider, Nina. 2011. Breaking the ‘Silence’ of the Military Regime: New Politics of Memory in Brazil. Bulletin of Latin American Research 30: 198–212. Schneider, Nina, and Rebeca J. Atencio. 2016. Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil: The Double-Edged Role of Artistic-Cultural Production. Latin American Perspectives 43 (5): 12–28. Sikkink, Kathryn. 2011. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. Singer, Paul. 2014. O processo econômico. In Modernização, ditadura e democracia (1964–2010), ed. Daniel Aarão Reis (183–231). Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva. Skidmore, Thomas E. 1988. Brasil: de Castelo a Tancredo, 1964–1985. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Stern, Steve J. 2004. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Durham: Duke University Press.

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CHAPTER 3

The Rise of the Witness: The Informative Mode of Cinematic Remembering

A common feature of the military regimes in the Southern Cone was the use of clandestine methods for dealing with perceived opponents and the systematic erasure of any vestige of the crimes and violations committed by the state. To borrow an expression Dori Laub (1991, 75) has applied to the Holocaust, the military authorities sought to produce ‘an event with no witness’ by destroying evidence of their own crimes. Silence, censorship, misinformation and denial were the strategies utilized to manipulate public opinion and ensure impunity for perpetrators. In this context, the testimonial accounts by survivors and their relatives became the main propeller of the struggle for truth and justice. As Arias and del Campo (2009, 8) have claimed, ‘testimony became the core of the initial reconstruction of truth, helping in the recovery of the traces that allowed for the defence of detainees and the demands that the state reveal the whereabouts of those illegally arrested’. With the publication of the Nunca Más report (1984) in Argentina, eyewitness testimony gained official status as the principal means for establishing ‘public truth’, in contrast to the ‘individual truths’ that had been previously restricted to the private sphere of those directly affected by state violence (Crenzel 2011, 97). Likewise, in Chile and Brazil, where processes of reckoning with past atrocities were slower and more restricted, first-person testimonies were

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_3

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nevertheless also central to breaking the silence imposed by the authorities and producing evidence for reparation programmes and national truth commissions. In the earlier stages of the democratic transition then, the act of bearing witness was strongly tied to the moral and political imperative ‘saber toda la verdad’ (‘to know all the truth’), as Claudia Feld (2000, 78) has described it in the Argentinean context. As each society moved towards greater acknowledgment of state crimes, bearing witness became associated less exclusively with the need to denounce atrocities to achieve justice, and more with a desire to inform the population and produce collective memories of atrocities to ensure that they would not be repeated (Jelin 1994). Accordingly, witness testimonies moved beyond the judicial sphere to inspire a range of cultural productions, including literary memoirs, television programmes, plays and documentaries.1 Like their literary counterparts, documentaries sought to compensate for the silence, lies and denial that had prevailed, by offering audiences the promise of reliable knowledge. They were aligned with what Bill Nichols (1991, 3–4) has called ‘discourses of sobriety’ produced by disciplines such as politics, history, economics and anthropology, whose relation to the real is regarded as ‘direct, immediate and transparent’, however problematic this assumption may be.2 In the context of Argentina, Pablo Piedras (2011, 214) has suggested that during the 1980s and 1990s documentary filmmakers gained status as they took on a role hitherto reserved for historians, that is, the role of investigating recent events and piecing information together to build a logically ordered narrative about the past. Such a view of the documentary filmmaker as a historian was also prevalent in the Brazilian context, as illustrated by director Silvio Da-Rin’s (2016) definition of documentary as a ‘tool to register historical events’ and thereby contribute to a shared understanding of the past. Da-Rin’s stated goal with his own documentary Hércules 56 (2006) was to help audiences learn about aspects of Brazilian history that remained hitherto unknown, especially among younger generations, and to counterweight discourses about armed militancy that either romanticized it or vilified it. The film is named after the aircraft that flew from Brazil to Mexico carrying fifteen political prisoners released in exchange for US ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, who was kidnapped in 1969 by members of the revolutionary armed groups ALN (Aliança Nacional Libertadora/National Liberation Alliance), MR8 (Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro/Revolutionary Movement

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8th October) and DI-GB (Dissidência da Guanabara/Dissidence of Guanabara). One of the first Brazilian documentaries to foreground leftwing resistance, it was received by critics as a ‘serious’ film and a welcome response to the Oscar-nominated blockbuster O que é isso, companheiro?/ Four Days in September (Bruno Barreto 1997), in which anti-dictatorship resistance was represented as an action-packed thriller (Fernandes 2013). Da-Rin’s view echoes those of many of his contemporaries in Brazil and Argentina for whom documentary filmmaking is a reliable means to transmit knowledge about the past through an orderly, coherent narrative. This perspective is central to what I call the informative mode of remembering through film, whose raison d’être coincides with the aims of testimonial narratives more generally: to disclose information about historical events through witness testimony, persuade audiences about the atrocities of dictatorship, and generate collective memories about the past. In terms of documentary conventions, structure and aesthetics, the informative mode can be understood with reference to Nichols’s (1991) influential taxonomy of documentary, more specifically what he initially called ‘interactive’ films. Such films are based on an interaction between filmmaker and film subjects which takes the form of a conversation, interview or testimony. These interactions are often combined with archival material to introduce a broad perspective on a historical topic from the point of view of those with extensive knowledge about it, as he explained in an earlier work: Interactive documentary stresses images of testimony or verbal exchange and images of demonstration (images that demonstrate the validity, or possibly, doubtfulness of what witnesses state). Textual authority shifts toward the social actors recruited: their comments and responses provide a central part of the film’s argument. Various forms of monologue or dialogue (real or apparent) predominate. The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of situated presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and other (Nichols 1991, 44).

Nichols (2001, 2010, 2017) later split the ‘interactive’ into two separate categories, the ‘participatory’ and the ‘performative’, to establish distinctions between the type of knowledge they produced. ‘Participatory’ films present a broad perspective or argument about the historical world, whereas ‘performative’ ones focus more emphatically on specific lived experiences, with less inclination to make overarching arguments

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or generalizations. One of his examples was, appropriately for this study, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo/The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Susana Munoz and Lourdes Portillo 1985), the first documentary about the women who confronted the Argentinean State with their demands for justice and accountability for their disappeared children. The testimonies of the mothers are combined with footage of their protests and with extracts from TV newsreels and government propaganda illustrating the government’s attempt to undermine their claims. As Nichols has written, Munoz and Portillo ‘adopt a highly participatory relationship with the mothers who risked their lives to stage public demonstrations during Argentina’s “dirty war” (…)’. The filmmakers ‘draw out the personal stories of the mothers whose courage led them to defy a brutally repressive regime’ (Nichols 2010, 190). Elsewhere, Nichols (2017, 152) stressed that the sequences in which the mothers bear witness to their experiences of loss and suffering are ‘performative’ moments in a film whose overarching principle is ‘participatory’. In Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo then, a prevailing ‘participatory’ mode is punctuated with segments of the ‘performative’. As I will demonstrate, this is a characteristic pattern in the informative mode of remembering more generally. The informative mode can also be understood in terms of Toni De Bromhead’s (1996) documentary categories, namely her ‘informational’ documentary, the primary goal of which is to construct a verbal thesis or argument about the historical world supported by factual information. As she explains, this type of film is typically made by politically committed directors who ‘wish to deliver a clear and uncompromising message with the minimum space open to ambiguity’ (1996, 13). Although the director and subjects may be openly passionate about the film’s topic, emotion and drama remain secondary and subordinate to the intellect, since ‘the primary intention (…) remains one of informing’. This description captures a distinctive feature of the informative mode, the concern with imparting information and providing social-political analyses about the dictatorial past. In Argentina, examples of the informative mode include Miguel Perez’s two-part documentary La república perdida/The Lost Republic (1983, 1986), a panoramic tableau of historical events in Argentina through a compilation of archive footage and voiceover narration. David Blaustein’s Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia (1996), discussed below, is similarly concerned with reconstructing historical events that led to the Dirty War in Argentina, but in this case, textual authority

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shifts from an omniscient voiceover to the social actors whose verbal testimonies are combined with historical footage to construct an overarching argument. The testimonies of witnesses are also at the core of Blaustein’s Botín de Guerra/Spoils of War (2000), which tells us of the struggles of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo to find their kidnapped grandchildren, and Mariana Arruti’s Trelew (2003), about the execution of sixteen political detainees who attempted to escape prison in 1972. In Brazil, Mariguella: retrato falado do guerrilheiro/Mariguella: Spoken Portrait of a Revolutionary (Silvio Tendler 2001), Tempo de resistência/Time of Resistance (André Ristum 2003) and Vlado: 30 anos depois /Vlado, 30 Years Later (João Batista de Andrade 2005) are among several documentaries that tell us about leftist resistance to dictatorship through a combination of witness testimony and archive footage. Despite their thematic variations, these films converge to produce an audio-visual record of the experiences of those whose voice had been hitherto marginalized or excluded from dominant historical discourses. In Chile, we find a slightly different emphasis. Aspects of the informative mode can be found in many documentaries produced in the earlier stages of democratic transition (from the 1990s to the early 2000s), for example, Carmen Luz Parot’s El derecho de vivir em paz/The Right to Live in Peace (1999), which combines omniscient voiceover narration, testimonies and archive footage to chart the biography of an icon of Chilean popular culture, folk singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, assassinated by the military authorities in 1973. The documentary’s reportage style, informed by Parot’s former career as a journalist, is also present in Estadio Nacional /National Stadium (2001), which tells us about the conversion of Chile’s national stadium into a concentration camp immediately after the coup. The film has been described as ‘the first in-depth journalistic investigation on the topic’ (Medina-Sancho and Olavarria 2013, 162). Other examples include Gloria Camiruaga’s La venda/The Blindfold (2000), based on the testimonies of ten women survivors of torture; and Actores secundarios /Secondary Actors (Jorge Leiva and Pachi Bustos 2004), in which present-day secondary students interact with former activists who protested against the dictatorship in the 1980s through tomas , the taking over of schools to demand educational reform. All these films rely on the talking witness as a guarantor of historical truth to foreground memories hitherto excluded in state discourses. However, if we consider the modes of cinematic remembering in terms of a continuum, as I have proposed, then these films are situated closer to the reflective

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because, rather than simply relay information, they invite us to think about processes of remembering. For example, the opening sequence of Estadio Nacional shows present-day Chileans approaching the stadium where they will vote in the 2000 presidential elections. The camera pans and shows a group of protestors chanting ‘Here people were tortured! Here people were killed’, before focusing on a woman who recalls her traumatic experience as an ex-prisoner in the stadium and describes contemporary Chile as a place ‘full of contradictions and tainted by amnesia’. Later, the director accompanies ex-prisoners as they walk inside the stadium, and films their reactions as they experience a chain of mnemonic associations. Some of them point to the scratches and marks left on the walls that, despite the many layers of paint that have been used to conceal them, remain visible, like persistent traces of a traumatic past in the present. In contrast to films in the informative mode, in which memory is treated as a storehouse of information, Estadio Nacional conflates present and past and represents the dictatorial period in terms of its continuities with contemporary Chile. Similarly, Actores secundarios juxtaposes the 1980s tomas with student protests in the present to highlight that the inequalities and injustices in the country’s education system have not ended with the dictatorship. One explanation for the stronger and earlier presence of a reflective mode in Chile lies in the country’s highly ambiguous and conflicted process of democratic transition, which arguably encouraged a more critical engagement with the question of memory from the outset. The ongoing friction between human rights groups demanding memory on the one hand, and ruling classes favouring oblivion on the other, helped to place questions about who remembers and how we remember in the forefront of public debate, and such questions inevitably made their way into cultural production. From the earliest stages of the democratic transition, rather than seek to ‘document’ the past, Chilean filmmakers approached memory as a regime of power and a process subject to negotiation. A further reason that explains Chilean filmmaker’s early adoption of a reflective mode lies in the high number of filmmakers who fled the country and lived in exile, where they continued to make films during and after the dictatorship. Indeed, some of the most prominent films about Chile’s tumultuous past have been produced or co-produced in other countries by exiled directors including Patricio Guzmán, Miguel Littin, Carmen Castillo, Cecilia Cornejo and Marilú Mallet. The geographical and cultural distance of these directors from their homeland arguably

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encouraged them to develop new perspectives informed by critical reflections on the workings of memory, as I will discuss in Chapter 5. Moreover, working abroad has also encouraged them to engage sooner and more systematically with the renewal of documentary language developed in Europe and North America. Such renewal was delayed in Brazil and Argentina due, in large part, to obstructions to the film industry imposed by political and economic censorship. Furthermore, as Paula Félix-Didier et al. (2002, 86) have argued in the context of Argentina, being faced with a reality that was so paradoxical, contradictory, and confusing made it impossible for filmmakers to distance themselves enough to arrive at a more ‘creative treatment of the form’. That is, the most pressing concern of filmmakers in Argentina and Brazil was not aesthetics or cinematic language, but rather, reliable information and a straightforward ‘well-articulated narrative about the past’, as Gonzalo Aguilar has observed. For Aguilar (2012, 111), what was at stake for these directors was not style, ‘or how to articulate audio-visual language with historical discourse’, but rather, a thorough discussion about history. Hence Aguilar’s (2012, 113) disparaging observation that the ‘didactic and normative’ style of these documentaries made them the filmic equivalents of ‘school textbooks’. Aguilar’s comparison is pertinent not only because of these documentarians’ greater concern with the informative value of documentary but because, rather like textbooks, informative documentaries tend not to interrogate what it means to remember; rather, they bank on memory as a reliable source of factual knowledge. As we have seen, a central goal of informative films is to foreground the experiences of groups hitherto excluded or marginalized from discourses of collective memory fostered by the state. Initially, filmmakers approached the past in primarily national terms, that is, they maintained their focus on their respective national societies. Many of their films were supported by state funding and shown in the domestic market with limited or no distribution beyond. Towards the late 2000s, as increasing information surfaced about the connections between the military states in the Southern Cone and support received from the United States, filmmakers widened their scope to explore the dictatorship from new, transnational perspectives. A notable case in point is Uma operação chamada Condor/An operation called Condor (2007), in which investigative journalist and director Roberto Mader interviews dozens of witnesses, survivors and lawyers to document the transnational campaign

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of state terrorism between intelligence agencies in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. As another example, in O dia que durou 21 anos /The Day that Lasted 21 Years (2013), Camilo Tavares teamed up with his father, journalist Flavio Tavares, to make a radical revision of Brazil’s past in the light of recent findings about the US’ foreign policy during the Cold War. Through interviews with experts in both countries and extensive archival research in the US Department of State and the CIA, the film reframes the Brazilian dictatorship as a historical process developing across and beyond national boundaries. Flavio Tavares was one of the ex-militants interviewed by Silvio Da-Rin in Hércules 56. In terms of its style and thematic concerns, this documentary shares much in common with Blaustein’s Cazadores de utopías made in Argentina a decade earlier. Both sought to counteract state-imposed silence in their respective countries by addressing an aspect of the past that had been repressed, the political agency of those who fought the dictatorship. Both were directed by former militants: Blaustein was a member of the Argentine left-wing Peronist guerrilla organization Montoneros, and Da-Rin a militant in the far-left guerrilla VAR-Palmares (Vanguarda Revolucionária Palmares/Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). The active involvement of these directors in the armed struggle is not, however, made explicit in their films. They act instead as silent facilitators whose role it is to draw upon the personal knowledge of eyewitnesses and validate their accounts with extensive historical footage. In what follows, I use these two documentaries as case studies to advance my discussion about the informative mode of remembering.

Cazadores de utopi´as: Confronting the ‘Two Demons’ In the years that followed Argentina’s return to democracy, discussions about political violence were largely dominated by the ‘two demons’ theory, according to which the repressive apparatus of the state emerged as a necessary reaction to the violence of armed leftist organizations. One of the damaging effects of this theory was the framing of political violence as extraneous to society and unrelated to any prior historical processes. As Bietti (2008, 6) has argued, the ‘two demons’ effectively removed the political from political violence: ‘the political expression of the class struggle was reduced to an absolutely negative type of violence, depoliticized and separated from the social historical processes

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that gave rise to it’. Such depoliticization was reinforced by the stigma that surrounded armed militancy, leading many ex-guerrillas to silence their political engagement and foreground instead their experience as victims. As one former member of Montoneros interviewed in Cazadores de utopías has explained, ‘there was no place from which ex-militants could speak publicly about their experience’. Michel Pollack (1989, 5) has stated that ‘traumatic memories wait for the propitious moment to be expressed’. Accordingly, although the Nunca Más helped to establish consensus about the massive scale of human rights violations committed by the Argentinean junta, it was only in the mid-1990s that a more inclusive framework emerged that could encompass a wider range of memory discourses, including those of former members of armed organizations. The official pardon granted by Carlos Menem to ex-militants and state officials alike opened up a new space for debate and encouraged many ex-militants to come forward and share their stories. As Aprea (2015, 163) has observed, this period generated a ‘voluntad de escuta’ (a willingness to hear) among the population, and what had previously been sustained as an underground memory began to take up space in the public sphere. Hence, as testimonial texts became more prolific, ex-militants who had previously foregrounded their condition as victims started to reclaim their political agency and identity. In this context, Blaustein stated that he made Cazadores de utopías to ‘start talking about the unspoken’; his assistant and researcher Mercedes Depino was even more emphatic in her assertion that ‘one of our first intentions was to destroy the theory of the two demons’ (Waynefeld and Quintín 1996, 19–20). Cazadores de utopías was produced by the INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cinematografia y Artes Audiovisuales/National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), the main source of funding for Argentine film, and released on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the military coup. The film combines archive material sourced from militant documentaries and newsreel footage with the testimonies of thirty-four witnesses, all of whom are former members of the Montoneros, ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo/Revolutionary Army of the People or) or FAR (Frente Anarquista Revolucionario/Revolutionary Anarchist Front), or sympathizers with the armed left. The film begins with an event that the Montoneros consider the catalyst for their organization: the 1955 bombing of the Plaza de Mayo by anti-Peronist military forces that killed 200 civilians and led to President Perón’s removal from power.

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Footage of the bombing is combined with the audio recording of a famous speech in which Perón denounced the ‘vile acts’ of the armed forces and called for popular resistance: ‘To violence we must respond with greater violence’. With this prologue, the film introduces its overarching thesis: armed warfare was the necessary response to an increasingly violent and repressive government. The testimonial accounts provide a chronologically ordered overview of key events in Argentina from the 1960s to the 1980s: the rise of a Peronist campaign for their leader’s return in the 1960s; the 1969 Cordobazo uprising against the military government of Juan Carlos Onganía; the execution of sixteen leftist militants who attempted to escape Trelew prison in 1972; the 1973 massacre of leftist Peronists who had gathered at Ezeiza Airport to welcome Perón’s return from exile; leftist Peronists’ increased disillusionment with Perón’s alliances with the far right; Perón’s death in 1974; the chaotic presidency of Isabel Perón and the rise of the anti-communist militia ‘Triple A’, which persecuted and killed over 1000 Argentineans and forced the Montoneros underground; finally, the ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983), presented in the film as the culmination of all previous events, and the dismantling of leftist resistance. Even this brief synopsis includes only some of the historical landmarks addressed in Cazadores de utopías. Throughout its two and a half hours, the documentary covers many more, resulting in what feels like an encyclopaedic summary of Argentine history in the latter half of the twentieth century. As in most talking-witness films, there is a clear primacy of the spoken word over the visual register. Its ‘zero degree’ style, derived from television journalism, ensures maximum receptivity and listening: the framing of the witness in medium or close-shot (that is, mid-chest frames or facial close-ups), the camera remains static, and the witness’s gaze is directed at an oblique angle past the camera while he or she speaks to an attentive listener who remains unheard and unseen. The centrality of the witness and overreliance on the spoken word has led many critics to disregard talking-witness documentaries as ‘unimaginative and uncinematic’ (Sarkar and Walker 2009, 2), a charge that, as we have seen, has been frequently applied to post-dictatorship documentaries in the 1990s and early 2000s. The desire to convey knowledge in a didactic manner is apparent not only in the film’s minimalist visual style but also in the factual, informative content of the witness testimonies. The interviewees in Cazadores de utopías act as ‘transmitters of knowledge’, that is, even as they occasionally refer to their personal involvement in historical events, their focus

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remains on the event itself and its socio-political repercussions, rather than on their personal stories or subjective experiences. The frequent use of the first-person plural ‘we’ or ‘us’ is telling in this respect: witnesses speak as spokespersons on behalf of their militant organizations, rather than as unique individuals with personal stories. For example, a former Peronist Youth militant recalls her participation in the 1969 Cordobazo uprising as ‘a great satisfaction for all of us who hadn’t thought that a popular rebellion by the working classes was possible’. Following her recollection, another ex-militant reflects on the impact that the uprising had on the Peronist Youth: We realized that people were under such conditions of subjugation that demanded an extreme measure. There were no other alternatives. How can you fight a government whose fundamental instrument is violence with peaceful actions such as those proposed by the trade unions?

As illustrated here, the view of the past from a more general and plural perspective is enhanced by the socio-political analyses that accompany descriptions of historical events. This impersonal and seemingly objective style of narration is reinforced in the documentary’s structure: the testimonies follow a linear and chronological order, with no significant gaps or overlaps. They are intercut with archive footage to offer a maximum of information in short bursts of time, avoiding repetition. In this way, each testimony is placed within a larger discourse to which it contributes a distinct piece of factual information, resulting in a cohesive, unilinear historical narrative. This pattern is illustrated in a sequence focusing on the radicalization of leftist Peronists into its armed guerrilla branch, the Montoneros, and their first major operation: the kidnapping and murder of Lieutenant General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu in June 1970. Ex-Montonero Antonio Riesta explains: ‘The option for armed struggle came slowly (...) You almost don’t realize when you stop being a member of a political party to become part of a commando. The elite section of Peronism was selected to be part of the vanguard (…) because they were the boldest. All our politico-military operations fell within the profile of “vanguard”. That’s why the assassination of Aramburu was deemed acceptable. We were killing an executioner.’

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[Cut to Maria Luisa Montaldo, whose testimony proceeds in linear temporal sequence to describe how Argentineans perceived the assassination.] ‘Aramburu’s assassination didn’t have big consequences. “The son of a bitch is dead” - that’s basically the summary of what people thought.’ [Cut to Andrés Framini, whose view reinforces those of Riesta and Montaldo.] ‘I’m against political crime (…) But Aramburu’s murder was an exception, it was a fair crime because his background as an executioner was wellknown.’

The sequence concludes with the reproduction of a televised speech by Perón in which he defends the use of violence in struggles for national liberation: ‘Violence in the hands of the people isn’t violence, it’s justice’. This sequence exemplifies the two prevailing editing techniques in Cazadores de utopías, continuity and evidentiary. Continuity editing links the testimonies temporally, each witness picking up the story from where it was left. In turn, evidentiary editing generates the impression of a convincing argument, as illustrated by the combination of the two positive appraisals of Aramburu’s killing, followed by archive footage of Perón’s speech in which he frames violence as ‘justice’. This sequence supports Aguilar’s (2007, 23) observation that, despite a large number of witnesses interviewed in Cazadores de utopías, their voices constitute a ‘canon or chorus’. In other words, the testimonies are brought together not to show different perspectives, but rather to construct a consistent point of view, ‘as if the witnesses had taken turns to construct a deliberately homogeneous discourse’ (Aguilar 2007, 23). The next example shows how the combination of evidentiary and continuity editing helps to create a tight correspondence between testimonies and archival footage and maintain a hierarchical relation whereby the former has primacy over the latter. In their respective testimonies, ex-union leader Gonzalo Leonidas Chavez and ex-Montonero Ricardo Fernandez tell us of the growing popular resistance against the dictatorship in the late 1970s and 1980s.3 Chavez: ‘Resistance was led by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the workers’ movement, the Peronist Youth and the armed organizations that still existed then.’

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[Cut to archive footage of the strike in April 1979 as Chavez’s voice continues on the soundtrack.] ‘The first general strike was held on April 27, 1979’ [Cut back to Chavez] ‘when over a million and a half workers went on strike.’ [Cut to images of the strike in April 1979. Cut to the testimony of Fernandez, who proceeds chronologically.] Fernandez: ‘In July 1981, we take another violent measure, similar to that of April 1979. Another strike…’ [Cut to footage of the July 1981 strike showing marches and picket lines.] ‘(…) with similar characteristics to the previous one, organized by trade unions, with the watchwords “Peace, Bread and Work.”’ [Cut to images of the strike; people march on streets holding large banners.] ‘(…) This precedes 20 March 1982, when there is a decision to march to the Plaza de Mayo to demand return to democracy…’ [Cut to footage of the mass protest on 20 March 1982.] ‘Repression was considerable and there was a great military operation to prevent people from reaching the Plaza.’ [Cut to footage of soldiers trying to stop people from pushing through barriers.] ‘(…) In the streets I saw a different attitude, people standing strong against the military’. [Cut to images of people confronting soldiers, walking past mounted police towards the Plaza de Mayo. Cut back to Fernandez.] ‘This was very significant and encouraged the junta to take a more radical step to save the military process. (…) They decided to take over the Malvinas.’

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[Cut to televised footage of a public speech in which the military junta announce their decision to occupy the South Atlantic islands. Cut to footage of Argentinean soldiers landing in Port Stanley by helicopter.]

As suggested here, the archive imagery serves to illustrate, support and authenticate what the witnesses tell us. The indexical relation between these images and the historical events generates the impression that, as we watch Cazadores de utopías, we can see history itself unfold before our eyes: first the marches and demonstrations, with military soldiers unable to stop the people; then the junta announces the war; then troops land in the Falklands, and so forth. In this way, the past is represented as a seamless flow of events, with no gaps, contradictions or inconsistencies. Cazadores de utopías thus reproduces the tendency of talking-witness films to use archival material as visual evidence of what the witness says and eradicate any doubts about accuracy or authenticity. Such an ‘illusion of a recoverable past’ as Roxana Waterson (2007) has described it, can be understood with reference to Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s (1999) ‘remediation’, the recycling of existing media such as found footage. Documentary films typically use remediation to forge an impression of ‘immediacy’, that is, a seemingly transparent window onto the past, by ignoring the presence of the medium and the act of mediation. In other words, archival images in Cazadores de utopías serve like windows onto the past. In the same vein, the status of witness testimony as a form of truthtelling is taken for granted. There is no indication in the film that what the witnesses tell us are, in fact, memories, biased, subjective, fallible and contingent on the present. As Paula Rabinowitz (1993, 133–134) has observed, while oral accounts in documentaries can be engaging and uniquely informative, they can also be partial and misleading. This in itself is not the problem, Rabinowitz argues; the problem arises when the filmmaker fails to register the partiality of testimonial accounts and grants them the appearance of ‘wholeness’. Cazadores de utopías does in fact register its partiality in favour of armed guerrillas; it does so in the opening sequence via graphic titles that state: ‘The recovery of our memory could be neither dispassionate nor impartial’. However, the statement does not specify exactly whose memory ‘our memory’ relates to: the Argentinean armed guerrillas, the victims of state violence, or the Argentinean people as a whole? As we have seen, every aspect of the film—its informational tone, macro-historical approach, evidentiary and

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continuity editing, chronological structure, and use of archive footage as illustration—suggests that what we see and hear constitutes a complete and accurate rendering of Argentina’s past. Hence the appearance of ‘wholeness’ or totality generated by Cazadores de utopías, despite the signalling of its own partiality. Significantly, when each witness is introduced, graphic titles inform us of their name and political role in the 1970s, but no information is provided about their current lives or occupation. Their accounts are strictly focused on the past as if the present when the film was shot had no bearing on how events were remembered. As Raúl Beceyro (1997, 143) has written in his critique of the film, witnesses speak ‘as if they were positioning themselves back in the moment when the events discussed took place. They all speak as if time had stopped, as if the film’s present, the moment when the film is made, when they all speak, did not exist’. There are, however, two sequences that break with the film’s didactic approach and move closer towards Nichols’ ‘performative’ category by foregrounding affect, emotion and bias. Through their mise-en-scène and cinematography, these two sequences signal to us that what the witnesses say are not factual truths, but personal memories and reflections, shaped by subjectivity and open to interpretation. The first of these is an extended testimony by ex-Montonero Graciela Daleo in which she describes her imprisonment and torture at the ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada/Naval Higher School of Mechanics). Unlike the frequent intercutting that characterizes the rest of the film, Daleo’s testimony appears in its full integrity, a likely indication of its special status. The mise-en-scène also differs. Instead of the mid-chest framing utilized in other testimonies, a full body shot shows Daleo seated cross-legged and barefoot on a barren mattress on the floor, against a dilapidated wall. This setting evokes an idea of captivity as if to bring our imagination closer to her past experience. As she tells her story, the full body shot is replaced by increasingly tighter close-ups of her eyes and facial expressions, which generates the conditions for viewers to engage with Daleo on an emotional level. In terms of the content, Daleo’s testimony goes beyond the straightforward description of her imprisonment to explore the sentiments, sensations and thoughts that she experienced at the time. Her enunciation is punctuated by pauses, tears and hesitation, thus focusing attention on the persistent effects of trauma on the present. Hence, unlike the rest of the film, which invites us to become immersed in the events recounted as if the present did not exist, Daleo’s

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sequence positions us firmly in the moment of remembering and draws our attention to the difficult emotions evoked by this act in the present. The second distinctive sequence in Cazadores de utopías occurs towards the end when ten witnesses provide a retrospective appraisal of the armed struggle. Here too, the testimonies signal to us a temporal distance between the ‘here and now’ of the enunciation and the ‘there and then’ of the revolutionary struggle. The tighter framing and extreme facial close-ups invite us to relate to the witnesses as individuals, rather than as spokespersons for their respective organizations. However, unlike Daleo’s unique account, the discourse that emerges from these various individual accounts is surprisingly homogenous, as if they were making the same statements, but with different wording. These statements can be summarized into four main points. First, guerrilla warfare was a necessary response to the systemic injustices imposed by the state, an idea well captured in Chavez’s observation that armed warfare ‘was imposed on us, we didn’t choose it’. Second, the 1970s are remembered as an epic decade, ‘a space of dreams and utopias’, as Dinora Gebennini describes it, or ‘luminous’, in Luis Salina’s words. Third, militants regard themselves in heroic terms, as exemplified by Ricardo Velazco’s statement: ‘Right or wrong, misguided, we were a generation that gave everything’. Finally, militants are unanimous that although the armed struggle cost many lives, the overall balance was positive, as expressed in the film’s closing statement ‘it was worth it’, by Luis Salinas. In this sequence then, the film’s prevailing concern with imparting information gives way to an interest in the witnesses’ more personal reflections and interpretations. Despite the stylistic and thematic distinctiveness of these two sequences, however, they do not conflict with the documentary’s overall discourse. Daleo’s testimony represents the experience of all militants victimized by the state and helps to galvanize the viewer’s support for victims. In other words, her role in the film is to speak on behalf of all victims and thereby consolidate the film’s ‘good-versusevil’ structure. As for the closing sequence, it serves to consolidate the construction of a shared, consensual perspective that underlines Cazadores de utopías. In Gustavo Aprea’s (Aprea 2015, 172) words, the film ‘promotes a hegemonic explanation for the past with little differences in perspective. (…) it ends up reinforcing an institutionalized view of the history of the organization that changes little over the years and marginalizes dissident voices’. Such a view echoes those of Aguilar (2007, 27) and Nicolás Prividera (2014, 278), both of whom have criticized the film

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for its acritical reproduction of the same discourses that the Montoneros themselves had forged in the 1970s. The strengths of Cazadores de utopías have nonetheless been recognized by authors such as Laura Rodriguez (1999, 298), for whom the documentary has successfully challenged the theory of the ‘two demons’ and introduced a much-needed historical and political perspective on narratives about Argentina’s past. In Alejandra Oberti’s and Roberto Pittalunga’s (2012) view, the film helped ex-revolutionaries to move beyond the position of victimhood and reclaim their history of armed struggle. The problem, as we have seen, is that Cazadores de utopías confronts the theory of the ‘two demons’ only to replace it with another grand narrative that casts the Montoneros in a heroic light. Its overreliance on a Manichean structure and lack of any serious criticism of the armed left results in a unified perspective that portrays guerrilla warfare as the only and inevitable response to state repression. Moreover, as reiterated in the closing sequence, the film idealizes the 1970s and nostalgically refers to the decade as an exciting, ‘epic’ period when all possibilities were open, or even as ‘wonderful years’, as described by one of the witnesses.

´ Hercules 56 ’s Shared Remembrance of the Armed Struggle A further case of the informative mode of remembering, Hércules 56 echoes many features seen in Cazadores de utopías: the didactic, ‘history lesson’ approach aimed at communicating knowledge; in-depth social and political analyses of the reasons that led to the emergence of leftist armed struggle and its downfall; an orderly narration of the past by the witnesses, supported by archival material; and the attempt to persuade viewers of an overarching argument in which the armed left appears in a positive light. Like Cazadores de utopías, Hércules 56 is marked by Nichols’s ‘participatory’ category but includes brief and limited ‘performative’ sequences that allow us to forge closer emotional engagement with the witnesses’ personal experiences. Similar to its Argentinean counterpart, Hércules 56 was produced with the support of government funding in a context of renewed public interest in the dictatorial period and a greater willingness to hear the experiences of former leftist militants. After decades of institutionalized amnesia forged by the 1979 Amnesty Law, by the mid-2000s Brazil had initiated a new politics of memory marked by unprecedented

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debates about human rights violations and the importance of remembering. This delay partly explains why a documentary so thematically and stylistically similar to Cazadores de utopías would only be produced in Brazil a decade later. Despite their similarities, there are some important differences between the two films. First, rather than rely exclusively on the testimonies of exguerrillas, Hércules 56 includes members of other political groups, such as the student movement, trade unions, political parties and workers’ movements, and this greater diversity in political affiliation and socio-economic background contributes to a more complex and nuanced discourse about leftist resistance. Second, instead of filming all testimonies individually, Da-Rin organized a group discussion with five ex-guerrillas and invited them to collectively articulate their thoughts, memories and analyses. Finally, the director introduced some degree of reflexivity into the film by leaving equipment and crew, including himself, briefly visible in a handful of scenes. In what follows I discuss each of these features in more detail. Hércules 56 tells us of the 1960’s armed struggle in Brazil by focusing on its most notorious operation: the kidnapping in September 1969 of US ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick, by the guerrilla groups ALN, MR-8 and DI-GB. In exchange for the ambassador’s safe release, the groups demanded the release of fifteen political prisoners and the dissemination of an anti-government communiqué in the heavily censored media. The film is structured upon two narrative axes: a round table with five ex-guerrillas who performed this operation, and individually shot interviews with nine of the fifteen prisoners released in exchange for the ambassador. The film’s siding with the guerrilla groups is made explicit through an anonymous voiceover reading from the communiqué in which the kidnappers explained their goals and ideology: Mr. Burke Elbrick represents in our country the interests of imperialism which, along with the big bosses, landowners and bankers, maintain the regime of oppression and exploitation. The interests of these groups in getting richer and richer have created and maintained the policy of low salaries, the unjust agrarian structure and institutionalized repression. Therefore, the kidnapping of the ambassador is a clear warning that the Brazilian people will not give them respite (…).

The communiqué is read over archive images that corroborate its content, for instance, acts of police brutality against civilians on the

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streets. With this ideologically charged opening sequence, the film invites us to interpret the kidnapping of the ambassador as the ex-guerrillas themselves perceived it: a revolutionary act, rather than a crime or terrorist operation. Accordingly, this conceptual distinction is the first topic that the five ex-guerrillas discuss around the table. They then provide a macro-historical overview of the socio-economic and political developments of the 1960s that culminated with the military regime becoming more repressive on the one hand, and the Left becoming more radical on the other. This overview lays the groundwork for a discussion, later in the film, about how the idea of the kidnapping originated, how they performed it, and how it ultimately led to the increased brutality of the regime and the dismantling of all leftist opposition. The decision to film the ex-guerrillas as a group and invite them to produce a collective testimony has two noteworthy effects. First, it draws our attention to remembering as an inherently social process, as famously theorized by Halbwachs (1992). Unlike the testimonies in Cazadores de utopías, which seem to arise spontaneously, in Hércules 56 the ex-guerrilla’s recollections emerge dialectally in the continuous backand-forth of questions, provocations, disagreements and confirmations among the group. Their collective act of remembrance is exemplified in the following scene when each ex-guerrilla draws upon their personal memories to construct a shared narrative about how the kidnapping was originally conceived.4 Paulo de Tarso Venceslau (ALN): ‘The idea of the kidnapping only occurred to us because four of our leaders were in jail.’ Daniel Aarão Reis (ALN): ‘Yes, the idea of releasing prisoners is inseparable from the kidnapping. However…’ Franklin Martins (DI-GB/MR-8): ‘No, this was not a determining factor at all.’ Manoel Cyrillo (ALN): ‘The exchange of prisoners turned out to be the easiest demand for the dictatorship to accept.’ Venceslau: ‘Yes, but there’s something you mustn’t forget. (…) We had considered carrying out another operation in the headquarters of the Military Justice department…’ Reis, laughing: ‘Wladimir sent us some desperate messages saying, “please don’t do that, we will all die”’. [At this point, Cyrillo introduces the controversial idea that although the kidnapping had been planned by DI-GB, ALN had been fully responsible for its execution. He requests validation from the group: ‘Isn’t it

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true?’. Through dialogue, other members negotiate the terms for accepting this contentious point.] Martins: ‘I don’t think so.’ Reis: ‘We formed an alliance’. Martins: ‘It was in the interest of everyone (…) we had to it jointly because it was a major operation.’ [Nodding and other signs of agreement are expressed by all around the table.]

As illustrated here, the ex-guerrilla’s reunion provides a social framework within which they can retrieve, select and interpret their individual memories. By generating such a social framework, Hércules 56 emphasizes that the act of remembering is triggered by the presence of others who share the same experiences. Moreover, the film makes visible the tensions and negotiations that arise as the group members decide what recollections and ideas should be included in their joint narrative. For Halbwachs (1992), one of the central functions of remembering within a collective context is identity formation and, within this context, what is remembered must correspond to the interests and self-image of the group. In other words, collective memories originate from shared communications about the meanings of the past anchored in the life worlds of individuals who took part in the communal life of the group (Kansteiner 2002, 188). In the above sequence, when faced with the potentially threatening recollection made by Cyrillo that one of the guerrilla organizations could have performed the kidnapping without the support of the other, the group’s immediate reaction is to neutralize this idea by emphasizing the joint, collaborative nature of the operation. Identity is key here: their identity as a cohesive ‘alliance’ is reinforced as they smooth out discrepancies and reach a consensual view. This interactive and cooperative dynamic is further emphasized in a later sequence when ex-guerrillas recall the day of the ambassador’s release and a stressful drive to the Maracanã stadium in three separate cars, followed by the police: Martins: ‘It was the morning of 7th of September. The released prisoners had arrived in Mexico. Our goal had been met, the manifesto had been broadcast, we cheered: “We won!” “Ok, we won, but how do we get out of here and go back home?”’ [Laughter and nods around the table]. Martins continues: ‘We thought: “Let’s do it at the end of the football match”. It seemed like the best option.’

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Claudio Torres: ‘I don’t know if you remember, but you were in my car.’ They all speak at the same time, trying to determine who was in which car. Torres: ‘My car was behind the ambassador’s. I waited for the light to turn red and, when it did, I jumped the traffic lights and the police car behind me couldn’t get through because of the traffic flow from the stadium’. Martins: ‘So, when Claudio crossed the intersection, you guys didn’t? Venceslau confirms. Martins: ‘So you stayed behind and held the machine gun out of the window.’ Torres and Venceslau speak simultaneously: ‘No, the police did!’ Torres: ‘I told Toledo and Gabeira to get down, because I thought we were going to get shot. Then I stopped at the red light’. Martins: ‘The police car was behind you.’ Venceslau: ‘Right behind me’. Martins: ‘Then… you crossed the intersection.’ Venceslau: ‘We did, and they turned.’ Cyrillo: ‘No, no, no.’ Torres: ‘No, they came after us.’ Martins: ‘No, they were escaping from us.’ Martins: ‘When you jumped the red light, we noticed the police behind Paulo’s car. Bené turned to me and said: “Let’s attack! Accelerate, overtake, then brake and drop a bomb while I shoot them with the machine gun”. I looked at him and thought… “This isn’t going to work…” [Everyone laughs] But we didn’t have time to argue so I said, “Let’s do it.” Fortunately, the police went the other way.’ Torres: ‘The car with the ambassador carried on. I followed and watched as he got out to leave. I got out and walked over to him to say goodbye.’

The sequence concludes with archive images of the ambassador’s arrival at his Rio de Janeiro home after his release, surrounded by the press. By making visible the negotiations, disagreements and appeals for confirmation within the group, the scene makes it apparent that recollections of past experiences are not faithful recordings of the past, but active selections and reconstructions in the present. This and other sequences are ‘performative’ in Bruzzi’s (2000) usage of the term, that is, they indicate that enacting for the camera is an inherent part of the documentary. After

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all, during their reunion the ex-revolutionaries do not simply remember in a spontaneous manner, rather, they respond to the director’s cues and perform their act of remembering in a way that will appeal to a particular audience, in this case, the group itself, Da-Rin, and ultimately the film’s audience. The studio-like setting in which the discussion occurs and the presence of film equipment and crew briefly visible within the frame are further reminders that this meeting did not occur spontaneously but was deliberately organized and performed for the cameras. These reflexive strategies draw attention to the filmmaking process and prevent us from experiencing the ‘illusion of a recoverable past’, of the type generated by Cazadores de utopías. In the documentary’s parallel thread, the individually shot interviews with the ex-prisoners, a more conventional talking-witness style is employed. Reflexivity is limited to a brief ‘making of’ prologue that shows interactions between the director and witness before each interview. In these interactions, Da-Rin invites the witness to watch a piece of footage on a handheld monitor. Although the footage is not revealed to us, we can imagine its content from the ex-prisoners’ reactions: surprise, amusement and nostalgia: Flavio Tavares: ‘Ah, this was in Mexico!’ Mario Zanconato: ‘This was Pampulha! No… Rio. Was this in Rio?’ Maria Augusta: ‘Look, that’s me over there, haha!’ José Dirceu: ‘I don’t remember any of this; can you believe it…’

Hence, this prologue reflexively highlights the filmmaking process and draws attention to the distance that separates the time of the film’s shooting from the events discussed. This act of drawing attention to the medium, or ‘hypermediacy’, as Bolter and Grusin (1999) call it, is brief, however. After the making of prologue, the film resorts to the conventional pseudo-monologue of talking-witness documentaries and Da-Rin remains offscreen. The documentary’s two narrative threads, the ex-guerrillas’ reunion and the individual interviews with ex-prisoners, are connected through parallel editing to establish synchronicity and causal connections. For example, when ex-guerrillas recall writing up a list of the political prisoners whom they wanted the authorities to release in exchange for the ambassador, their discussion is intercut with individual recollections, by each of these ex-prisoners, of the precise moment when they learned

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that their name had been included on the list. A further editing technique, crosscutting, is used to generate suspense, for instance: as each ex-prisoner recalls the tension they experienced during the flight to Mexico, their testimony is intercut with the ex-guerrillas’ discussion of how they planned and performed the ambassador’s release. As demonstrated in these two examples, the film establishes a continuous temporal and cause–effect relation between the events reported by the two groups. Evidentiary editing is used to match the verbal accounts with archival imagery. When, for example, ex-prisoner Vladimir Palmeira tells us about the rise of public demonstrations against the military regime in 1968, his voice is carried over archive footage of the specific events he describes. Hence, as in Cazadores de utopías, archive images are remediated to evoke ‘immediacy’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999), or a transparent window onto the past. Through Hércules 56’s editing strategies then, the armed struggle in general, and the kidnapping in particular, are constructed as a linear and causally linked chain of events in which each action provokes and leads on to the next one. Like Cazadores de utopías, Hércules 56 favours a macrohistorical approach that focuses on major historical events and public figures. It tells us nothing about the ex-militants’ individual identities, biographies or personal experiences beyond militancy. As in Cazadores de utopías, the witnesses serve as conduits of knowledge whose firsthand experience in leftist resistance grants them the authority to tell us about historical events. As we have seen, the main difference in relation to Cazadores de utopías is the group discussion, which highlights the act of remembering as a collective process, the diversity of opinion arising from it, and brief moments of self-reflexive filmmaking. Diversity is also favoured by the decision to include ex-militants from various political groupings within the Left, some of whom were opposed to guerrilla warfare, as they tell us. By revealing such differences, Hércules 56 contributes to a more sophisticated view of the left-wing resistance against the dictatorship than a film like Cazadores de utopías, where the discourse produced by witnesses is uniform and monolithic. Furthermore, it sheds light on a key factor that contributed to the downfall of the Brazilian Left: the fractures and conflicts among its various groupings. In a study of Hércules 56, Fernandes (2013) has argued that although it generates space for dissenting voices, it nonetheless proceeds to undermine them through what he calls a ‘logic of consensus’: each time a divergent view is introduced, it is immediately followed by one or

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more testimonies that counterpoise it and reinforce the overall argument that the film seeks to promote, according to which armed resistance was ‘victorious’ despite its defeats. Such ‘logic of consensus’ becomes more prominent in the documentary’s final sequences, when, similar to Cazadores de utopías, ex-guerrillas are asked to make a retrospective appraisal of the armed struggle. When reflecting on the degree to which the armed Left failed, the responses range from two extremes: a critical view articulated by ex-militant José Dirceu, and the positive assessments made by all other ex-militants emphasizing the value and legacy of the struggle. Asked by the director (offscreen): ‘Do you think that the decision to take up arms against the dictatorship was correct?’, José Dirceu is decisive: ‘It was a disaster. We were defeated on all fronts. (…)’ This exchange is followed by numerous testimonies that undermine Dirceu’s appraisal and qualify the defeat in favourable terms by emphasizing values traditionally associated with military warfare, such as bravery, heroism, integrity, loyalty and self-sacrifice. These testimonies also highlight the long-term beneficial effects of the armed struggle on Brazilian society. Such an appraisal is well captured in ex-militant Flávio Tavares’s statement: We gave the best we had. We didn’t hide under the bed. All other political groups hid under the bed: the corporate sector, the unions (…) The armed struggle operated in the wrong way, but it was a generous gesture. We gave the best we had: our lives.

To this, Cyrillo adds that the kidnapping was ‘one of the most important answers the Brazilian people have ever given to what the United States government represents’. Venceslau notes that the kidnapping succeeded in breaking the silence imposed by censorship and turning the population against the military regime. The film concludes with Martins’ assessment: In terms of the results, the guerrilla was a disaster. Many people died. But in terms of what it produced for the future, it was very positive. Brazil is much better today than it was twenty or thirty years ago. I think we contributed. Is it because we kidnapped the ambassador? No, it’s because we fought. The kidnapping was one step in this struggle.

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Hércules 56’ s main argument, encapsulated in the above statement, echoes the views articulated in the closing sequence of Cazadores de utopías, according to which the armed struggle ‘was worth it’. For Fernando Selyprandi Fernandes (2013), such a heroic view of the armed struggle replicates a discourse that became prominent among Brazilian intellectuals and historians in the early 2000s, which suggested that the main goal of 1960s armed groups was, simply, the return to democratic government. The original revolutionary goals of guerrilla groups, including land reform, educational reform, improved access to health care and education, wealth redistribution and a socialist or communist government, are severely underplayed in these discourses. In this way, the 1960s revolutionary struggle is reduced to democratic resistance, as if the guerrillas had fought for nothing more than the return to the institutionalized order. This redefinition of leftist warfare as a preparatory phase for democracy makes it possible for us to view leftist guerrillas as ultimately victorious, despite their historical defeat. Fernandes (2013, 60) argues that, by reproducing such discourse, Hércules 56 makes its own positive appraisal of the armed struggle and erects a ‘monument’ to it: ‘the overall tone of the documentary is the celebration of the armed struggle as a landmark of Brazil’s present-day achievements’.

Concluding Remarks The relevance of Cazadores de utopías and Hércules 56 in foregrounding the role of leftist militancy in South America cannot be overstated. In their respective national contexts, they initiated a long overdue discussion about revolutionary movements, reclaimed the political agency and identities of former guerrillas, and introduced hitherto marginalized perspectives.5 In doing so, they laid the foundations for other filmmakers, many of them newcomers, to examine the past from even more diverse perspectives, embrace innovative documentary strategies and seek a deeper exploration into what it means to remember. The criticism directed at these two films points to a problematic feature in the informative mode more generally, that many of these newcomers would identify and address in coming years: the overreliance on memory as an explanatory system to produce ‘discourses of certainty’, as Piedras (2011, 215) has described it. As we have seen in Cazadores de utopías, despite the biases and partiality of the various witnesses, their testimonies leave no gaps, nor is there any dissent or conflicting perspective. The film relies on

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a model of memory as a container where events, facts and information can be safely stored and streamed on demand, like high-fidelity recordings. Its cohesive structure and continuity editing serve to smooth over a fundamental aspect of memory formation, particularly the memories of groups, as noted by Zelizer (1998, 3): these types of collective memories must allow for some degree of omission and rearrangement of details about the past, and they often push aside accuracy to accommodate broader issues of identity. In other words, in the attempt to reclaim the political identity of former revolutionary groups, Cazadores de utopías homogenizes their discourse. The same occurs to some degree in Hércules 56, but in this case, the round-table discussion does suggest a more sophisticated model of memory as conversation or shared narrative, assembled through the interaction of group members. In this part of the film at least, memory comes across as a more active process, conditioned by the needs of the present. However, the unstable and unpredictable nature of memory is undermined in the film’s editing, which smooths over gaps and inconsistencies and selectively organizes parts of the dialogue to build a consensual narrative. As we have seen, the critical perspectives that do differ from the film’s overall argument are undermined and blunted. The result, in both films, is a cohesive and conclusive portrayal of the past as if it were a static and stable sequence of events. Advancing Halbwachs, Motti Neiger et al. (2011, 4) have observed that collective memory ‘rests on the assumption that every social group develops a memory of its past; a memory that emphasizes its uniqueness and allows it to preserve its self-image and pass it on to future generations’. Accordingly, I have demonstrated that Cazadores de utopías and Hércules 56 construct alternative memories of the dictatorship by highlighting the heroic contribution of left-wing guerrilla groups in the struggle for democracy, a positive self-image that contrasts with their prior view as ‘subversives’ and ‘terrorists’. Yet, in doing so, they stabilize the memory of these groups into a monolithic ‘counter-memory’ that excludes, or minimizes, dissident voices. They are thereby more closely aligned with ‘commemoration’, one of the ‘abuses of memory’ according to Paul Ricœur (2004). As the philosopher has argued, remembering ‘quickly veers off into commemoration’ when it strives for a finite, completed version of the past (Ricœur 2004, 408). This point is echoed in an essay in which Hércules 56 is cast as the primary example of the wider tendency in contemporaneous Brazilian documentaries to adopt a ‘monumental approach’ to leftist resistance that

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effectively puts a stone over the past (Fernandes 2013). Writing in relation to memory discourses in the Southern Cone more broadly, Nelly Richard (2000) has similarly resorted to the metaphor of the ‘monument’ to warn against the risks of describing the past in accurate terms, with little room for gaps, doubts or divergent interpretations. As she has written, the logic of the monument is the nostalgic contemplation of a heroic past and its reification in a ‘commemorative monolith that petrifies memory’ (2000, 11–12). Indeed, monuments exist to be honoured and celebrated, not probed or questioned. Hence, the problem with many films in the informative mode of cinematic remembering is that their cohesive discourse of certainty tends to calcify the past and close it to further analysis. By erecting a monument to celebrate dictatorial resistance, the two documentaries studied here may unwittingly reinforce discourses of forgetting and conciliation that encourage us to look towards the future. After all, as Ann Rigney (2010, 346) has aptly observed, to bring remembrance to a conclusion is, de facto, already to forget.

Notes 1. Examples of testimonial writing from Argentina include La voluntad /The Will (Anguita and Caparrós 1997), a series of interviews with members of armed guerrillas; Ni el flaco perdón de dios/ Not Even the Slim Forgiveness of God (Gelman and La Madrid 1997), which compiled testimonies from children of the disappeared; and Calveiro’s Poder y Desaparición/Power and Disappearance (1998), which combines her own first-hand experience of imprisonment and torture with the testimonies of other survivors to produce a broad analysis of the repressive system. From Chile, Tortura y resistencia en Chile/Torture and Resistance in Chile (Rojas et al. 1991) was the first extensive compilation of stories of torture survivors; El infierno /Hell (Arce 1993) and Mi verdad/My Truth (1993) were written by ex-militants who became collaborators of the regime after torture. In Brazil, Gabeira’s O que é isso companheiro/What’s Going On, Comrade? (1979) became a best-seller and inspired the Oscarnominated film of the same title, translated into English as Four Days in September (1997); other examples of testimonial include Os carbonários: memórias da guerrilha perdida/The Carbonari: Memories of a Lost Guerrilla (Sirkis, 1980); Ventura’s 1968, O Ano que não

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2.

3. 4. 5.

terminou/1968, The Year that Never Ended (1988) and Tapajós’s Em câmara lenta/In Slow Motion (1977). The view of documentary filmmaking as having a more ‘direct’ or ‘transparent’ relationship to the historical world has been the subject of much debate; see Bruzzi (2000) for an overview. Parts of the dialogue have been omitted for the purpose of clarity and space. Parts of the dialogue have been omitted for the purpose of clarity and space. To learn more about the impact of Cazadores de utopías in the Argentine context, see Oberti and Pittaluga (2012).

References Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2007. Maravillosa melancolía. Cazadores de utopías: una lectura desde el presente. In Cines Al Margen: Nuevos Modos de Representación en el Cine Argentino Contemporáneo, ed. Maria José Moore and Paula Wolcowicz, 17–32. Buenos Aires: Libraria. Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2012. La historia más allá del cine (el documental argentino y el retorno de la democracia). Archivos De La Filmoteca 70: 107–117. Anguita, Eduardo and Martín Caparrós, 1997. La Voluntad: Una Historia de La Militancia Revolucionaria En La Argentina, 1966–1973, Tomo I . Buenos Aires: Norma. Aprea, Gustavo. 2015. Documental, testimonios y memorias. Miradas sobre el pasado militante. Buenos Aires: Manantial. Arce, Luz. 1993. El infierno. Santiago: Planeta. Arias, Arturo, and A. Alicia del Campo. 2009. Introduction: Memory and Popular Culture. Latin American Perspectives 36 (5): 3–20. Beceyro, Raúl. 1997. Cine y política. Ensaios sobre cine argentino. Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Bietti, Lucas Manuel. 2008. Memoria, violencia y causalidad en la Teoría de los Dos Demonios. El Norte: Finnish Journal of Latin American Studies 3: 1–31. Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Calveiro, Pilar. 1998. Poder y Desaparición: Los Campos de Concentración en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Colihue.

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Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP). 1984. Nunca Más. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Persona. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA. Crenzel, Emilio. 2011. The Memory of the Argentina Disappearances: The Political History of Nunca Más. New York: Routledge. Da-Rin, Silvio. 2016. Entrevista para CP-DOC, Memórias do Cinema Brasileiro. [Audiovisual resource]. Faculdade Getúlio Vargas Archive. De Bromhead, Toni. 1996. Looking Two Ways: Documentary Film’s Relationship with Reality and Cinema. Højbjerg: Intervention Press. Feld, Claudia. 2000. El ‘rating’ de la memoria en la televisión argentina. In Políticas y Estética de la Memoria, ed. Nelly Richard, 77–86. Santiago: Cuarto Propio. Félix-Didier, Paula, Leandro Listorki and Ezequiel Luka. 2002. The New Documentary: The Act of Seeing with Your Own Eyes. In New Argentina Cinema: Themes, Auteurs and Trends of Innovation, ed. Horacio Bernardes, Diego Lerer, Sergio Wolf, 81–91. Buenos Aires: Fripesci. Fernandes, Fernando Selyprandi. 2013. O monumental e o íntimo: Dimensões da memória da resistência no documentário brasileiro recente. Estudos Históricos 26 (51): 55–72. Gabeira, Fernando. 1979. O que é isso, companheiro? São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Gelman, Juan. 1997. Ni el flaco perdón de dios: hijos de desaparecidos. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jelin, Elizabeth. 1994. The Politics of Memory: The Human Rights Movement and the Construction of Democracy in Argentina. Latin American Perspectives, 21 (2): 38–58. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies. History and Theory 41 (2): 179–197. Laub, Dori. 1991. An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival. In Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, 75–92. New York: Taylor & Francis. Medina-Sancho, Gloria, and Margot Olavarria. 2013. Spaces Recovered by Memory: Film Language and Testimony in Parot’s ‘Estadio Nacional.’ Latin American Perspectives 40 (1): 161–169. Merino, Marcia Alejandra. 1993. Mi verdad: ‘más allá del horror, yo acuso...’. Santiago: ATG. Neiger, Motti, Oren Meyers, and Eva Zandberg. 2011. On Media Memory: Editors Introduction. In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, ed. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary, 1st ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2010. Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2017. Introduction to Documentary, 3rd ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Oberti, Alejandra and Pittaluga, Roberto. 2012. Memorias En Montaje. Escrituras De La Militancia Y Pensamientos Sobre La Historia. Santa Fe: María Muratore Ediciones. Piedras, Pablo. 2011. Modos de explicar el mundo histórico en documentales argentinos de las últimas décadas. Política y História 8 (2): 210–223. Pollack, Michel. 1989. Memória, Esquecimento, Silêncio. Estudos Históricos 2 (3): 3–15. Prividera, Nicolás. 2014. El país del cine: para una historia política del cine argentino. Villa Allende: Los Ríos. Rabinowitz, Paula. 1993. Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory. History and Theory 32 (2): 119–137. Richard, Nelly. 2000. Presentación. In Política y estéticas de la memoria, ed. Nelly Richard, 9–14. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Ricœur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rigney, Ann. 2010. The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 345–356. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rodriguez, Laura. 1999. Los usos del pasado: El peronismo y la década del 70, los Cazadores de utopías. Historia y Comunicación Social 4: 289–308. Rojas, Paz, Patricia Barceló, and Katia Reszczynski. 1991. Tortura y resistencia en Chile: estudio médico-político. Santiago: Emision. Sarkar, Bhaskar, and Janet Walker. 2009. Introduction: Moving Testimonies. In Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, 1–34. London: Routledge. Sirkis, Alfredo. 1980. Os Carbonários: Memórias da guerrilha Perdida. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Tapajós, Renato. 1977. Em câmara lenta. São Paulo: Alfa-Omega. Ventura, Zuenir. 1988. 1968, O Ano que não terminou. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Wainfeld, Mario and Quintín. 1996. El mundo se incendiaba. Entrevista con David Blaustein y Mercedes Depino. El Amante Cine 5 (49): 18–21.

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Waterson, Roxana. 2007. Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Memory. History and Antropology 18 (1): 51–73. Zelizer, Barbie. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Filmography Actores secundarios /Secondary Actors. 2004. Jorge Leiva and Pachi Bustos. Chile. Botín de Guerra/Spoils of War. 2000. David Blaustein. Argentina. Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia. 1996. David Blaustein. Argentina. El Derecho de Vivir em Paz/The Right to Live in Peace Carmen Luz Parot’s (1999), Estadio Nacional /National Stadium. 2001 Carmen Luz Parot. Chile. Hércules 56. 2006. Silvio Da-Rin. Brazil. La república Perdida I /The Lost Republic I. 1983. Miguel Perez. Argentina. La república Perdida II /The Lost Republic II. 1986. Miguel Perez. Argentina. La Venda/The Blindfold. 2000. Gloria Camiruaga. Chile. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo/The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. 1985. Susana Munoz and Lourdes Portillo. Mariguella: retrato falado do guerrilheiro/Mariguella: Spoken Portrait of a Revolutionary. 2001. Silvio Tendler. Brazil. O dia que durou 21 anos /The Day that Lasted 21 Years. 2013. Camilo Tavares. Brazil. O que é isso, companheiro?/Four Days in September. 1997. Bruno Barreto. Brazil. Tempo de resistência/Time of Resistance. 2003. André Ristum. Brazil. Trelew. 2003. Mariana Arruti. Argentina. Uma operação chamada Condor/An Operation called Condor. 2007. Roberto Mader. Brazil. Vlado: 30 Anos Depois /Vlado, 30 Years Later. 2005. João Batista de Andrade. Brazil.

CHAPTER 4

How We Remember: The Reflective Mode of Cinematic Remembering

By the mid-2000s, filmmakers in the Southern Cone encountered a sociopolitical environment more receptive to debates about the dictatorial past. In Chile and Argentina, testimonial narratives by witnesses and survivors of dictatorial regimes had become widespread in the public sphere and resulted in a veritable ‘boom of memory’ in the form of truth commission reports, television programmes, memoirs, audio-recordings, memorialization, special supplements in magazines (Hite et al. 2013, 8; Ros 2012, 5; Wilde 2013, 31; Garibotto 2019, 2–4). In Brazil, despite the relative delay, a ‘new politics of memory’ initiated by the state served to reinvigorate the struggle for memory via new programmes and incentives for post-dictatorship cultural production (Schneider 2011; Atencio 2014). Parallel to these developments was a wider ‘subjective turn’ that, following post-structuralism and the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged scholars, intellectuals, writers, and artists to turn their focus away from macro-history and large collective movements of class and nation, and take new interest in microhistory, autobiography, identity, and small acts of everyday life (Sarlo, 2005). In the field of documentary, this shift represented a revalorization of individual experience as a legitimate source of knowledge. The positivist ideals of objectivity that had dominated the form for most of the twentieth century were increasingly replaced with new practices that laid bare the director’s own positionality © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_4

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vis-à-vis the events filmed and emphasized its performative and subjective aspects. As film scholars have often noted, despite any claims to objectivity, documentaries have always been inherently marked by subjectivity, regardless of whether this was made explicit (Bruzzi 2000; Nichols 1991, 2010). However, it wasn’t until the late 1970s and beyond that subjectivity became more widely accepted as an intrinsic, and even desirable feature of documentary (Renov 2004; Lane 2002; Rascaroli 2009). This shift was spearheaded in Europe by the cinema-verité movement, which goal was to capture everyday events and interactions without a preconceived script, and often by foregrounding interactions between filmmaker and film subjects. Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1961), a collaboration between anthropologist filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, is a prime example. The film tells us about the innermost thoughts, fears and aspirations of ordinary Parisians through conversations with its directors. In the United States, avant-garde directors including Andy Warhol and Lithuanian born Jonas Mekas played a key role in dismantling documentary’s presumption of objectivity and turning their lens onto autobiographical explorations of the self. In Latin America, Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer/Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later (1984) pioneered a tendency that would only take off in the region a decade later. Shot in the cinéma-verité style, the documentary charted the director’s investigation into the 1962 murder of a peasant leader through conversations with the people who knew him. Coutinho started shooting in 1964 but, like many politically committed directors at the time, was interrupted by the Brazilian authorities and had his film participants persecuted. Juan, como se nada hubiera sucedido/Juan, As If Nothing Had Happened (Carlos Echeverría, 1987), which charts a reporter’s investigation into the kidnapping and disappearance of a university student in Bariloche, and Lúcia Murat’s Que bom te ver viva/How Nice to See you Alive (1987), in which the director interviews eight women survivors of torture like herself, can also be regarded as precursors of the tendency towards more subjective and personal forms of documentary.1 Like Murat, filmmakers around the world aligned with identity politics helped to drive documentary’s subjective turn, particularly feminist directors who embraced autobiographical modes to politicize personal issues including sexuality, family dynamics and relations in the workplace (Kuhn 1982; Butler 2002; Kaplan 2000; Everett 2007; White 2015). As part of these developments, directors increasingly used self-reflexive strategies to expose the material conditions in which

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films were made and included aspects of the filmmaking process usually excluded from the frame, for instance, interactions between director and crew, the act of shooting and editing, and so forth (Ruby 2005). Such developments were facilitated by progressive advances in technology, from the introduction of lightweight cameras and synchronous sound in the 1960s to video equipment in the 1980s. From the mid-1990s, digital cameras, easy-to-use editing software and the internet led to a veritable boom in autobiographical forms of expression, culminating with the rise of personal blogs, vlogs, podcasts, social media and online platforms such as YouTube. While in the realm of documentary the ‘subjective turn’ has led to refreshingly new forms and practices, in the wider public sphere it has arguably contributed to the ‘hypertrophy of memory’ of which Andreas Huyssen (2003) has written, an obsession with memory and witnessing in the Western world. In South America, the overabundance of first-person testimonies produced a certain reticence and fatigue towards the practice, particularly among intellectuals who queried its status as a form of ‘truthtelling’ about the past (Garibotto 2019, 2). Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo is a case in point. Her 2005 book Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Subjetivo (Time Past: The Culture of Memory and the Subjective Turn) soon became a reference point for post-dictatorship scholars and filmmakers alike, reinforcing historian Annette Wieviorka’s (1998) view that writing history demands critical distance and the use of intellectual capacities that go beyond personal experience. While Wieviorka was concerned with the negative impact of testimony in the discipline of history, Sarlo’s critique examined its impact on cultural discourses more generally, including literature, print media and film. As with Wieviorka, her criticism was not so much of the testimonial genre per se, but of its fetishization as a truth-telling device. Sarlo has drawn attention to Susan Sontag’s observation that ‘perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking’ and turned it into a maxim: ‘es más importante entender que recordar, aunque para entender sea preciso, también, recordar’ (‘to understand is more important than to remember, yet to understand it is also necessary to remember’) (2005, 26). Furthermore, with reference to Primo Levi, she argued that the goal of testimony should not be to articulate absolute knowledge about the past, which it can never do, but simply to provide us with the raw material of indignation (2005, 42–47). Hence, although Sarlo criticized the overprivileged

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status of testimonial narratives, she nevertheless acknowledged their value in transmitting knowledge and provoking empathic understanding. Sarlo’s critique is helpful for understanding the emergence of new modes of cinematic remembering since the early 2000s. As public awareness about the dictatorial period increased and information became widespread, filmmakers’ previous concern in documenting the past was gradually replaced by a desire to explore how the dictatorial past is remembered. In other words, there was a shift of attention from memory as content to memory as process. As part of this shift, documentarians engaged in a critical reassessment of testimony and broadened their perspectives to include questions such as what constitutes memory, how we remember, who is entitled to remember and what compels us to forget. Such inquiries have encouraged filmmakers to develop new strategies that include (and often combine) aspects of the ‘essay film’, autobiography, autofiction, theatrical performance, video art and photography. The variety of films that resulted from these combinations cannot be overstated, but for heuristic purposes they can be grouped into three further modes of cinematic remembering. The reflective mode is the focus of this chapter. The diaristic and playful modes will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. If, as Sontag (2003, 103) has stated, ‘too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking’, films in the reflective mode combine both cognitive operations as they invite us to take a contemplative and self-aware approach to memory. Indeed, Ana Ros (2012, 5) has used the term ‘self-aware memory’ to describe the increased attention of writers and filmmakers to remembering as an active, open-ended process informed by the needs and priorities of the present. Ros’s main interest is in cultural works produced by the ‘post-dictatorship generation’, those who grew up under military regimes, typically (but not exclusively), sons and daughters of detenidos-desaparecidos. As members of this generation came of age in the early 2000s, they revitalized the struggle for memory by questioning institutionalized narratives and addressing subjects that had typically been left aside, including left-wing political violence and the role of bystanders (Ros 2012, 5). I concur with Ros and others for whom the renewal of memory debates in the early 2000s has been due, in great part, to the arrival of a new generation on the political scene (Blejmar 2017; Ros 2012; Maguire 2017). Nonetheless, their works are only one aspect of a wider picture that includes the sustained contribution of filmmakers, writers and artists of diverse ages, who may or not have blood

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ties with victims of state violence. In my view, the new modes of remembering that have emerged since the early 2000s are rather the result of a cross-generational dialogue in which directors of diverse ages, nationalities and levels of experience have shared an interest in challenging established discourses, experimenting with documentary language, exploring hitherto unexplored aspects of the past and, above all, self-reflectively interrogating what it means to remember. Accordingly, in this and the following chapters I draw attention to this dialogue by studying films made by members of the post-dictatorship generation alongside those produced by directors not necessarily identified as such, including Patricio Guzmán, one of the leading documentarians of our time and a key reference for filmmakers interested in post-dictatorship memory.

Guzmán’s Passion for Memory Some of the best known and most critically acclaimed documentaries about the Chilean dictatorship have been authored by Patricio Guzmán. Since his three-part opus La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1975– 1979), which documented the rise and fall of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government, Guzmán has made sustained contributions to postdictatorship culture. His Chile, memoria obstinada (1997), has arguably sparked reflections on memory and the prolific activity of filmmakers interested in renewing documentary language. The film charts Guzmán’s return to Chile from France, where had lived since the Chilean coup, to capture the reactions of viewers to extracts from The Battle of Chile. The film’s recurring strategy is the juxtaposition of sequences from the former documentary (for example, images of the presidential palace La Moneda in flames) with images of the same location shot in the contemporary period (i.e., an intact and peaceful La Moneda in the present). By establishing a visual contrast between the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here and now’, Chile, memoria obstinada conveys the passage of time and the idea that although the past may not be visible, its traces continue to haunt the lives of the Chilean people, as exemplified by those interviewed in the film. The ‘hypermediacy’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999) in these sequences is noteworthy, for rather than create an illusion of unmediated access to the past through historical images, Guzmán encourages us to experience the medium itself and reflect on how these images can activate and shape memory.

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Since then, Guzmán has taken his explorations on memory in new, unexpected directions, particularly with his trilogy Nostalgia de la luz/ Nostalgia for the light (2010), El botón de nácar/The pearl button (2015) and La cordillera de los sueños /The cordillera of dreams (2019), the defining feature of which is the use of poetic metaphors linking Chile’s unique geography with memories of its troubled past. In Nostalgia de la luz, Guzmán takes us to the Atacama Desert where astronomers study galaxies light years away through powerful telescopes. The film suggests that, because of the time it takes for light to travel across those unimaginable distances, the astronomers’ telescopes allow them to look into the very distant past—into the memory, as it were, of the universe. A parallel is made between this quest for our cosmic origins in the sky and the search for human bones in the desert, where the bodies of victims of forced disappearance were scattered and buried during the dictatorship. There, Guzmán meets two women in their seventies who continue to dig for the remains of their loved ones in the sand, and a survivor of five concentration camps who made detailed sketches of his prisons from memory. He concludes the film with an affirmation about the value of memory because, as he tells us in voiceover, ‘those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moments. Those who have none don’t live anywhere.’ The idea that landscapes and places accumulate layers of historical meaning over time is revisited in El botón de nácar. This time, Guzmán looks into Chile’s coastline to trace a historical continuation between the genocide of indigenous Kaweskar people of Patagonia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the victims of political violence under Pinochet. In one scene Guzmán’s voice is heard saying in an intimate, poetic tone: ‘It is said that water has memory. I think it also has a voice.’ As if to reinforce this point, the sound of rivers, lakes and waves becomes the soundtrack for the telling of the country’s violent history, including the concentration camps built along the shoreline and the disposal of human bodies thrown into the Pacific. Water is thus represented as a muted witness to the crime of forced disappearance that, as the film reiterates, did not start with the dictatorship. A related allegory is developed in La cordillera de los sueños, but this time Guzmán turns to the Andes mountains as perennial witnesses to various forms of destruction— political, economic, social, environmental—committed before, during and after Pinochet. Drone shots of the director’s childhood home in Santiago,

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intact from the outside but a roofless collection of debris inside, establish further metaphorical resonances with the violent forgetting imposed during the dictatorship and more recently under neoliberal governments. This is Guzmán’s most personal film to date, and one that explicitly voices his mourning for the lost Chile of his childhood and for all the hopes and dreams that vanished with it. Grief is expressed via sorrowful music on the soundtrack and voiceovers where Guzmán contemplates the Andes as a recorder of history. ‘If the mountains could talk’, he wonders, ‘what wisdom would they reveal, what would they tell us about the past?’. To summarize, Guzmán’s trilogy, as his work in general, is a meditation on memory, loss and the passing of time. Despite their melancholic tone, his films suggest that a different future is possible, but contingent on our ability to understand and engage with the past. Guzmán’s continued influence in the realm of post-dictatorship cinema cannot be overstated. At the time of writing this book he was in São Paulo, where he taught a series of workshops about documentary filmmaking and gave talks at a film festival dedicated to his oeuvre, aptly titled Paixão de Memória (Passion for Memory). He expressed this passion in one of his talks, stating that ‘Life is memory, everything is memory. There is no present time and everything in life is remembering’. This statement reminded me of the lyrical voiceover reflections that became a trademark of his films. They also reminded me of the thoughtful reflections on memory made by another documentarian, Sebastián Moreno, a self-proclaimed member of the post-generation who directed his own trilogy of films focusing on remembrance, forgetting and historical accountability in his native Chile. Like Guzmán, Moreno approaches the past with gravitas and nostalgia, and like his predecessor he eschews sentimentality through a critical questioning of what it means to remember and the value of remembering for the present and future generations. In the first film of the trilogy, La ciudad de los fotógrafos /The City of Photographers (2005), he invited a group of photojournalists to recollect the first wave of anti-dictatorship demonstrations in the 1980s, when they took to the streets of Santiago to document the repression of protestors by the military police. In Habeas Corpus (co-directed with Claudia Barril, 2015), Moreno spoke to members of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate for Solidarity), the human rights organization that provided legal, medical and humanitarian assistance to hundreds of victims and their relatives. Finally, with Guerrero (2017), the director accompanied Manuel Guerrero Antequera on a journey back to Hungary,

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where he grew up in exile, to confront painful memories of his father, a member of the Communist Party brutally murdered in what became known as one of the most notorious acts of violence under Pinochet.2 All three films illustrate the main feature of the reflective mode of remembering, memory as a topic of discussion. La ciudad de los fotógrafos is a particularly interesting case in point because it invites reflections on the capacity of visual media, namely photographs, to seemingly capture and freeze moments from the past. Moreover, the documentary is a direct example of the cross-generational dialogue mentioned earlier, borrowing many features from Guzmán’s films, including the director’s voiceover reflections on the topic of memory, the use of ‘in situ’ testimonies and the insertion of still images to open up discussions about the past. Finally, La ciudad de los fotógrafos shares Guzmán’s concerns with the spatial dimensions of memory, in particular the ‘memory sites’ where memory is lived and embodied (Palacios 2014, 109). This time, however, the Chilean landscape of Guzmán’s trilogy is replaced by the photograph as a silent witnesses to the violence and destruction caused by dictatorship.

Evidence and Emotion in La ciudad de los fotógrafos Produced with the support from the Chilean government’s Consejo Nacional de La Cultura y Las Artes (Nacional Council for the Arts and Culture) and winner of several international awards, La ciudad de los fotógrafos tells the story of the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independentes (AFI), a guild formed in Santiago to protect photojournalists who covered the anti-Pinochet protests in the 1980s. In the prologue, Moreno speaks to us in a warm, deep tone similar to the one we hear in Guzmán’s trilogy. He reveals that one such photographer was his own father, Pepe Moreno, and that the pictures taken by Pepe and his peers constitute an unofficial archive of events that the state tried to suppress through silence and censorship. He explains that these photographs were the means through which he constructed his own memories of the city where he grew up. Despite having been born in the 1970s, he explains, his childhood recollections are too fragmented and evasive to help him to form a coherent narrative of the period. Similar to Guzmán’s films, Moreno’s disembodied presence can be read in terms of what Piedras has called an ‘epidermal’ first-person

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approach (Piedras 2014),3 the purpose of which is to convey the director’s interest and involvement with the film’s topic, without engaging in the more in-depth kind of autobiographical strategy found in diaristic films (discussed in Chapter 5). Accordingly, Moreno’s firstperson prologue gives way to a polyphonic narrative based on interviews with various photographers and the images they produced. Moreno’s voiceover returns only briefly to comment on some of these images and reaffirm the idea, stated in the beginning, that photographs can revive the past. For instance, he tells us: ‘When I recall my childhood, many things are a blank. When that happens, I go back to the photographs. Things reappear (…) I recapture those landscapes, smells, moments. I reencounter the city that my father photographed.’ As Moreno contemplates each photograph, he highlights the differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and suggests that to know the past we must remember. ‘Where is the city that my father photographed? What things did he see that are no longer here?’, he asks. The answer is in the photographs. These are displayed in full screen and enhanced via various techniques (zooming, panning, sliding and cropping) that invite us to perceive them in detail and appreciate their aesthetic qualities. The soundtrack combines melancholic guitar strings with the testimonies of photographers who, each in their own way, recall the personal risks they took in their determination to produce evidence of Pinochet’s crimes. Hence the documentary’s remediation of archive photographs is accompanied by discussions about the context in which they were produced. In turn, these discussions are illustrated with moving images of the photographers in action, remediated from found footage. We see younger versions of themselves venturing out onto the streets with their cameras strapped to their necks, running to capture a shot, staring through their lenses and handling strips of film. In their interviews, the photographers recall the difficulty of acquiring film and the need to rely on supplies from international news agencies. One scene explores the photographic laboratory at the University of Chile, where their photographs were developed and later stored; a subsequent scene shows photographers chemically developing a large print that they then mount onto a wall. In this way the medium of photography is remediated and foregrounded as a product and process, in line with Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (1999) ‘hypermediacy’. At the same time, it highlights the capacity of photographs to generate ‘immediacy’, the illusion of unmediated access to the historical world, as captured in Oscar Navarro’s

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comment in the film: ‘When someone sees a photograph and realizes it is a photograph, they can longer deny what they see’. Navarro here echoes classic theories on the medium as developed by the likes of André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, all of whom have underscored the capacity of photographs to seemingly reproduce a moment in the past due to their indexical quality. As Barthes (1981, 76) has famously written, in photography one can never deny that ‘the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past’ (italicized in the original). Photographs attest to both the existence of the referent and its anteriority, and this explains the role the medium has historically played in documenting acts of violence. Indeed, the unofficial archive produced by AFI members captured a range of such acts: a civilian is savagely beaten by a group of policemen; military tanks charge against pedestrians with water cannons; children protect their faces from teargas; mothers hold up banners with the emblematic ‘Dónde están’ to claim justice for their disappeared. The evidentiary status of photographs is further elaborated in a sequence with Luis Navarro, author of the first fotografía de denúncia (denunciation photograph) that brought the reality of the Chilean dictatorship to the outside world. Navarro’s testimony is filmed by the ruins of a mine in Lonquén where, in November 1978, he photographed the bodily remains of fifteen agricultural labourers who had been kidnapped and disappeared by the authorities five years before. Navarro’s photographs helped to identify the victims and make the population aware of the governments’ criminal practices. Disseminated by La Vicaría de la Solidariedad, they helped inspire the first wave of civil resistance that turned Santiago into a battlefield in the 1980s.4 The sequence begins as the camera zooms into a print of Navarro’s photograph; on the soundtrack, the director recollects his impressions of the image upon seeing it as a child: ‘I thought it was a castle… long afterwards, I learned it was a mine full of dead bodies’. The image shows a crowd staring at the stone furnaces where bodies were found. A cut takes us to Lonquén, where a handheld camera follows Navarro along a track. He recalls the day he took the photograph and explains that, soon after, the mines were destroyed by the authorities and all traces of the crime removed. After a montage with several other photographs of the event, we meet Helena Maureira, whose four sons were found dead in the mine. Back in Lonquén, Navarro walks to the same spot from which he took the photograph. A point-of-view shot emulates the exact framing he used, but instead of the mine, all

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we see are ruins. Navarro holds up a copy of the photograph and the camera zooms into it, until it fills the screen. The stylistic device used here, whereby the camera matches the framing of a photograph and then fills the composition with the original image, conveys the film’s invitation for us to think about and with memory, a central feature of the reflective mode. As José Miguel Palacios (2014, 116) has written in his analysis of the film, this device articulates the idea that ‘if emblematic places [like Lonquén] have been emptied of the signs that constituted their historical and political meaning, it is the role of the film image to refill that space’. He draws upon Nora’s ‘lieux de mémóire’ in his observation that Lonquén operates as a site where memory ‘crystalizes’. Indeed, as reiterated in Navarro’s testimony, Lonquén retained the power to symbolize the horrors of the dictatorship long after the bodies were found, and even after the furnaces were destroyed and all historical traces of the crime removed. By combining Navarro’s photographs with his ‘in situ’ testimony, the film underscores the persistence of memory and its capacity to restore continuity between past and present. As Palacios (2014, 117) reminds us, ‘the work of memory implies both a present-tense and a presence, that is, a continuity from the remains of the past in the present, and an irruption of those remains in the form of a presence’. In what follows, I will elaborate on this idea with reference to another sequence in which the same stylistic device recurs. Halfway through the film, the screen is filled with the image of a crowd of protestors emerging from a subterranean passage as they chant and march towards the camera. Our gaze is drawn to the centre of the frame where a dove peace symbol is stamped on the banner held by frontline protestors. The dove is arguably the photograph’s ‘punctum’, as Barthes would call it: an element that ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’ (1981, 26). Moreno comments: ‘I was 13 years old when Priest André Jarlan was murdered. (…) Many people went to his funeral, it was a long procession to the cemetery. I didn’t go, but as I look at this photograph, it’s as if I had been there’. A tracking shot then follows photographer Alvaro Hoppe as he walks along the city centre, then stops at a corner where he recalls a demonstration: ‘Everything was quiet as it is now, then all of a sudden people started to chant: “bread, jobs, justice and freedom!”’. He claps and simulates the chanting of the crowd, a recording of which is then reproduced in the audio track as if activated by this recollection. ‘If anyone sees me doing this now, they’ll think I’m crazy’, he jokes, reinforcing the contrast between then

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and now. Hoppe crosses a street and briefly glances to his right; a cut leads to a point-of-view shot that, as we expect from the rules of continuity editing, replicates his view. However, the film reflexively plays with this convention and instead of revealing what Hoppe sees in the present, replicates, through archive footage, what he sees in a flashback from the past: two policemen brutalizing a civilian. This visual play is yet another way in which La ciudad de los fotógrafos continually stresses the contrasts between then and now and self-reflexively presents itself as a film about memory. When Hoppe arrives at the spot from which he took the photograph of the funeral march, he holds up a print copy of it. The device used in Navarro’s sequence reoccurs here, as an over-the-shoulder camera mimics the framing of the photograph and simultaneously shows its contents (protestors crowding the boulevard) and the current view of the same boulevard, now empty. An audio recording of the protest on the soundtrack creates an incongruous effect: the sounds of police sirens, clapping and chanting are at odds with the now quiet thoroughfare. Hoppe moves the photograph closer to the camera until it occupies the whole frame. This time, the perfect correspondence between the sounds of the protest and its visual representation invites us to become fully immersed in that moment—as if we too, like the director, could imagine ourselves in the ‘there and then’, and form a memory of that moment through its photographic representation. The scene is suggestive of Hirsch’s (2012) observation about the power of photographs to reanimate the past: they enable us, in the present, ‘to see and touch the past’, an experience that the filmmaker himself describes in relation to the image of the funeral march. It also brings to mind Bolter and Grusin’s (1999, 5) point about the oscillations between ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’: as the photograph fills the screen to the soundtrack of the funeral march, we are seemingly immersed in an experience of the past, or ‘immediacy’. However, the illusion is broken with the distinctive click of a camera shutter, which brings us back to the experience of the medium, or ‘hypermediacy’, in the ‘here and now’. To cite Barthes again, when we look at a photograph, what we see ‘is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution (…) but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real’ (1981, 82). In other words, every photograph attests both to a presence and an absence: the presence of the referent in the past and its absence in the present. The suggestion in La ciudad de los fotógrafos is that memory is the means through which we

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can bridge the otherwise unsurmountable distance between presence and absence contained in every photograph. In this sense, the film aligns itself with the perspectives on photography developed by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (2008). In his writings on images of the Holocaust, Didi-Huberman has argued that the meanings we attach to a photograph depend on the ways we have been taught to see. If we look at a photograph of a traumatic historical event as the mere representation of what once was, he claims, we reduce it to the status of documentary evidence and group it with all that is already known about those events. If instead we interrogate photographs and engage with their formal qualities, we can move our gaze beyond what the image shows and imagine what isn’t there. Hence the importance Didi-Huberman attaches to imaginative investment: ‘to remember, one must imagine’ (2008, 30). Accordingly, the sequence built around Hoppe’s photograph of the funeral march captures a crucial idea in La ciudad de los fotógrafos: to know the past through photographs, we must engage memory, and memory requires an active investment of our thoughts, emotions, and imagination. This idea is further developed in the film in relation to photographs of the disappeared. Helena Maureira, whose sons were found dead in Lonquén, invites the director to film the two altars that she built in her home from where she contemplates the framed portraits of each family member. Maureira tells us that these portraits help her to evoke the presence of her sons and experience ‘una sensación de madre’ (‘a sensation of motherhood’). With their phantasmagorical quality, each portrait feels like an emotional punch, an invitation for us to imagine the horrors undergone by the victims and their loved ones. Much has been written about the uses of photography in relation to practices of forced disappearance in the Southern Cone (Taylor 1997; Langland 2005; Feld and Mor 2009; Bell 2014). It was through images that such criminal practice became known to the world, namely the demonstrations in which mothers, wives and relatives wore portraits of the disappeared pinned to their chests. In her observation on the relevance of these portraits for anti-dictatorship resistance, Nelly Richard (2000, 165–166) has drawn a line from Barthes to Derrida to argue that, with their capacity to ‘freeze’ a moment in time, photographs share with ghosts and spectres the same ambiguities of presence-absence, real-unreal, visible-intangible. To Richard, the ‘presence-effect’ of photograph is what makes it so suitable for representing the crime of forced disappearance, as

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exemplified by many artists, filmmakers and photographers who incorporated the medium into their work. As an example, in La ciudad de los fotógrafos photographer Claudio Perez describes his work in a current project whose goal it is to include images of every detenido desaparecido in the archives of human rights organizations. For Perez, the absence of photographs in these archives is akin to a ‘double disappearance’. Determined to make the victims reappear and ‘devolverles a la vida’ (‘return them to life’), he contacts their families to request images that capture an ordinary instant or a cherished moment when they are, for example, playing the piano or cutting a child’s birthday cake. In addition to the inclusion of these photographs in human rights archives, Perez reproduces them onto tiles for the pictorial memorial Muro de la Memoria on the outskirts of Santiago. The public display of these photographs evokes a sense of presence for each desaparecido, thus reclaiming their historical existence. Perez’s use of photographs that show something of the victim’s quotidian is noteworthy. As Richard (2000, 167–168) has written, images pulled out from family albums convey the act of tearing someone away from the course of their lives, an abrupt and violent ‘cut’ in their biography. To take images from the original context of the family album and to use them in a memorial like Muro de la Memoria (and, by extension, the documentary), is to divert these photos from the private realm and convert them into instruments of public protest, where they acquire new political connotations. One such connotation, Richard observes, is the caesura between family and nation. Whereas the nation is normally regarded as an extension of the family unit, the photographs of individuals torn away from their families by the state point to an irrevocable rift between the two instutions. This idea is captured in the film through a comment that Perez makes, standing by the Muro de la Memoria: ‘You start feeling that there is a missing person within you, because… within every family, within the whole of Chile there is a detenido-desaparecido’. Perez thus revises the idea of Chilean national identity to suggest that the main element that connects every Chilean, above and beyond any ethnic, cultural or linguistic trait, is the collective trauma of forced disappearance. He also touches on a central idea articulated in La ciudad de los fotógrafos: although the past is irretrievable, with only photographs as reminders, it nonetheless continues to disrupt the present with its demands for accountability for unresolved injustices, conflicts and absences.

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One way in which the film emphasizes the continued impact of the past in the present is by focusing on the emotional response of the photographers to the memories they relay. Although the events described are in the past, their emotional response points to the enduring relevance of those events in the present of the film’s making.5 The prioritizing of subjectivity is evidenced in a scene when Jorge Ianiszewski comments on the photograph he took of José Manuel Parada’s funeral in 1985. Upon receiving the print, Ianiszewski is visibly moved: he raises his eyebrows, sighs, drops his head into his hand and tears up. He then gestures the need for a pause and hides his face, laughing nervously. A pause ensues. His silence, sorrowful gaze and gesture express the wave of emotion that engulfs him. Such ‘testimonial gesturality’ provides a bridge between knowing and not knowing, as Zolkos (2013, 78) has written: when language fails, gesture becomes ‘a performative act that compensates for, or offsets, the unavailability or inaccessibility of traumatic memories, and the aporias of narrativization and recollection’. Through medium closeup, the film provides access to the display of simultaneous, fugitive and conflicting emotions on Ianiszewski’s face. Although we cannot comprehend the totality of his experience, we can nonetheless be affected by it and imagine his internal negotiations, the subliminal perceptions and all the other cognitive-emotional operations involved in the process of remembering such a painful event. The effectiveness of the close-up in this scene is worthy of comment. Drawing on Béla Balázs, Renov (2016, 241) has equated the close-up to a ‘magnifying glass’ that allows the involuntary responses of the body of the filmed subject to ‘emerge as a rich and multimodal expression of memory and emotion that words alone cannot capture’. This function is especially relevant in survivor testimonies, he noted: ‘Here too gesture or embodiment – especially facial expression – displays a capacity to convey memory, suffering and trauma outside of and beyond language’ (Renov 2016, 244). The ‘deeper gaze’ of the closeup provides access to subjective processes that lie beneath consciousness and evade language, hence Renov’s (2016, 245) consideration of this device as particularly well-suited to ‘producing a visceral understanding and engagement for audiences’. After the emotional pause, Ianiszewski goes on to describe his close friendship with Parada, and the shock he felt when confronted with the news of his murder. Parada was one of three university teachers whose bodies were found with their throats slit on a roadside near Pudahuel airport. Ianiszewski’s photograph captures a moment in the funeral when

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friends and family gathered around his coffin to sing ‘The International’. The image shows them holding each other’s hands and elbows as if bracing themselves against the horror. With their eyes closed, eyebrows raised, and mouths open in an ‘o’, they appear to be wailing rather than singing, an effect which makes the image even more poignant in its expression of suffering. This photograph and the discussion that accompanies it tell us much more about the loss and grief felt by Chileans during the dictatorship than would description of the socio-political processes that provoked them. This sequence illustrates key aspects in La ciudad de los fotógrafos, and in the reflective mode more generally. Despite providing a clear enough portrait of the dictatorial period, the film is less interested in making historical and socio-political analyses than in conveying how people felt, and continue to feel, in relation to those events. The documentary relies on the same formula of witness testimony plus archival images that, as we have seen, characterize films in the informative mode, but with a key difference: the primacy of the verbal commentary is reversed, and the remediated images became the focus of attention. The same occurs in Retratos de identificação, where archival photographs serve as prompts for witnesses to remember a painful past. This time, however, the director asks no questions and, by positioning herself as a silent witness, produces unexpected effects on the witnesses’ processes of remembering.

Making the archive speak ˜ in Retratos de identifica C¸ao Produced by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) with financial support from the Brazilian government’s programme Marcas da Memória (Traces of Memory), Anita Leandro’s Retratos de identificação (2014) also examines the relations between memory and photography but, in this case, the nature and origin of the photographs are very different: they are surveillance and prisoner photographs produced by military agents in the 1960s and 1970s with the goal of eradicating left-wing opposition. A film scholar at the UFRJ, Leandro decided to make the documentary when, after decades of pressure from human rights organizations in Brazil, a new law (‘Lei de Acesso à Informação’, 12.527/2011) established the public right of access to information held by the government, including the vast material produced during the dictatorship: police inquiries, surveillance reports, prisoner

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mugshots, statements, autopsies and so forth. Leandro stated that despite the new legislation, the chaotic dispersion of this material across different archives made it virtually inaccessible.6 As she has written, the archive is not a place where systematic knowledge is stored; it is, rather, chaos: The truth does not wait for us in neat, complete form in the archive (…). More than a safe place that protects us from the ignorance about the past, the archive, a convergence of different possible routes to go back in time, is a field that we cross without knowing for certain where we will arrive. (2015, 113)

Her observation brings to mind Aleida Assmann’s (1999) distinction between ‘storage’ and ‘functional’ memory: the first term describes a mass of unused and disjointed elements that, despite having been considered worthy of preservation in an archive, may well be forgotten. Through adequate processing, assemblage, and interpretation, these elements may become connected to ‘functional’ memory which resonates with, and speaks to, social groups. Indeed, in our interview Leandro stated that her main goal with the film was to curate the material retrieved from the archive and render it meaningful and relevant for the general public; in Assmann’s terms, a transformation from ‘storage’ to ‘functional’ memory. In the course of her two-year research, she was especially drawn to the photographs of a 24-year-old medical student and leftist militant named Dora (short for Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcellos), who had been imprisoned between 1969 and 1971. Leandro recognized Dora from two documentaries made in Chile in 1971: Brazil, A Report on Torture (Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler) and Não é hora de chorar/No Time for Tears (Luiz Alberto Lanz and Pedro Chaskel).7 Both documentaries compiled interviews with a group of Brazilian political prisoners released in Santiago in January 1971 in exchange for Swiss Ambassador Giovani Enrico Bucher, kidnapped by guerrilla group VPR (Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária/Popular Revolutionary Vanguard) a month prior. All prisoners had been tortured. In her testimonies for the two films, Dora described her reasons for joining the armed struggle and the brutality that she suffered and witnessed in prison. Dora’s story became the starting point for Retratos de identificação. From there, Leandro researched the lives of three other ex-prisoners who had been close to the young woman. Former militants Espinosa (Antônio Roberto Espinosa) and Chael (Chael Charles Scheirer) shared with Dora

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the house where the three of them were arrested on 21 November 1969. As recounted in the film, after a violent confrontation with the police, they were taken to a clandestine detention centre and tortured for several days. Chael died during one of the torture sessions, a crime that the Brazilian authorities have systematically denied. Espinosa and Dora survived. Upon her release, Dora met Guarany (Reinaldo Guarany) in Chile and the couple lived together first in Santiago then Berlin, where Dora’s posttraumatic stress disorder became worse and culminated with her suicide in 1976. Retratos de identificação combines testimonies of the two survivors, Espinosa and Guarany, with newly found archive material and extracts from the 1971 interviews with Dora. Leandro shot the testimonies individually, in the conventional style of medium close-ups, static camera and frontal address to the filmmaker. Leandro remains silent offscreen, but her presence is subtly sensed each time she hands a copy of archival material to her interviewees and in their reactions to her. The director’s method for prompting testimony is unusual: she asked no questions and relied entirely on photo-elicitation, a technique used in qualitative research to evoke deeper emotions, memories and ideas in interviewees (Glaw et al. 2017). In their separate interviews, Espinosa and Guarany were invited to look, touch and comment on the material without any further cue, while the camera captured their reactions. Stuart Hall’s (1991, 152) suggestion that the ‘past cannot speak, except through its ‘archive’’ resonates with Leandro’s stated desire to ‘make the archive speak’, as she recounted in our conversation. Like Moreno in La ciudad de los fotógrafos, she was less interested in formulating a thesis about the dictatorial past than in exploring the singularities of personal experience: My goal was to use the archive as a mediator of memory. By doing so, I hoped to avoid ready-made discourses, something that frequently occurs when ex-militants well-versed in left-wing politics give testimony. My film subjects are both intellectuals: Espinosa is a professor of Political Sciences, and Guarany is a published author. They both have elegant ready-made statements about the military dictatorship. But these kinds of statements tend to work as a shield that protects the subject from exposing their personal experiences, which can be too painful and traumatic to share. That’s why I chose a different method.8

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Arguably, the ‘ready-made discourse’ that Leandro refers to here is what we typically find in informative films. As seen in my discussion of Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia (David Blaustein, 1996) and Hércules 56 (Silvio Da-Rin, 2006) in Chapter 3, ex-militants are known to make eloquent statements about the history of the armed struggle and the worthiness of their cause. Leandro wanted to explore other dimensions of experience that had not yet been attended to and produce the more subjective kinds of knowledge that Nichols (2010, 203) has described in relation to his ‘performative’ category: Performative documentaries bring the emotional intensities of embodied experience and knowledge to the fore (…). If they set out to do something, it is to help us sense what a certain situation or experience feels like. They want us to feel on a visceral level more than understand on a conceptual level.

As discussed in Chapter 5, informative films tend to incorporate some ‘performative’ sequences to add interest and emotional engagement. In the reflective mode, the ‘performative’ quality is consistent throughout, as these films are more concerned with the subjective experiences of witnesses than the factual information they convey. One of the consequences of this prioritization of affect over conceptual knowledge is a greater degree of unpredictability in the filming process; the filmmaker must remain consistently attuned to the ‘here and now’ of subjective experience rather than with events narrated. Unconstrained by questions, Espinosa and Guarany were free to remember whatever aspects of the past they considered relevant and meaningful to them at the time the film was shot, and Leandro responded by adopting a flexible directorial role, whose demands changed significantly in response to the nature of each testimony. In the film’s first half, Espinosa narrates his testimony chronologically, as a causally linked chain of events, and uses it as a forum to expose the lies and secrets on which the official report about Chael’s murder has been based. Leandro takes the role of investigator, advocate, juror and judge: she corroborates his statement by cross-cutting it with found footage of Dora’s interview and juxtaposes it with two pieces of evidence retrieved from the archive, a post-mortem report and a photo negative. Through editing, she forges a dialogue between Dora and Espinosa that reaffirms their version of events:

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Dora (extract from Não é Hora de Chorar): Espinosa:

‘It was around six a.m. The torture continued. When it was around seven… there was total silence in the room.’ ‘Chael’s screams stopped’.

The film cuts to an insertion of the post-mortem report which describes Chael’s injuries in detail and concludes that he died from internal haemorrhaging and blood infiltration in the abdominal area. The report’s conclusion contradicts the official death inquiry signed by the police, which claimed that Chael had died from injuries acquired to the chest when resisting arrest. We then see the second piece of evidence found by Leandro, the negative of a mugshot taken a few hours after Chael’s arrest. It shows Chael naked from the waist up, his torso intact. A cut shows the same photograph but now in its developed form, with greater clarity and definition. Again, the absence of any wounds or marks on Chael’s chest directly contradicts the police version. A new meaning is produced when these two pieces of evidence, the post-mortem and the mugshot, are superimposed and combined with Espinosa’s voiceover reading of the post-mortem. Very slowly, the cropped image of the report fades out and dissolves into a close-up of Chael’s face. By the time Espinosa reaches the report’s concluding statement, Chael’s face fills the whole frame, his frozen gaze staring directly at us. This audio-visual technique brings to mind Richard’s (2000, 165) comment about the phantasmagorical aspect of a photograph and its ‘presence-effect’: Chael symbolically emerges from beyond his death, meticulously described in the post-mortem, to speak about the abuses, cover-ups and illegal manoeuvrings of the military state. This is one way in which Leandro enacts her desire to ‘make the archive speak’: she uses montage, the act of combining images in unexpected ways to produce meanings that cannot be conveyed by any of those images alone, to perform a symbolic trial of the perpetrators. She concludes her trial by revealing, in large titles at the centre of the screen, the full names of the military officials responsible for torturing the three prisoners and murdering Chael. We also learn, via titles, that the main perpetrator and author of the false death inquiry, Captain Celso Lauria, was summoned to testify at the National Truth Commission in January 2014, but refused. This climactic sequence is followed by Guarany’s testimony focusing on his and Dora’s struggle to cope with the traumatic effects of prison and

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exile. He recounts their condition as ‘stateless’ in Germany, their sentiments of displacement and isolation, Dora’s increasingly severe PTSD and his own sense of failure for not having saved her. His testimony is de-centred and non-linear, marked by pauses and ellipses. In the film’s second half, Leandro confronts the ethical challenge of working with survivors of trauma: how to generate a ‘space of confidence’ (Jelin 2012, 347) to recall trauma while, at the same time, avoiding retraumatizing or exploiting the survivor’s pain. When I asked Leandro about this challenge, she replied that filming testimonies of trauma poses a double risk: the risk of exposing the survivor to further pain and the counter-risk of negating their desire to speak. As she explained, testimony is an act of consent: ‘When someone agrees to share their traumatic memories on film, they do so out of a desire or need to speak, and this desire is often linked to an ethical commitment to speak on behalf of those who are unable to speak for themselves’. Yet, as she observed, a risk nonetheless remains, because the filmmaker cannot predict what kind of psychological effect will be brought forth in the process of bearing witness. The main question for me was not whether to film the testimonies, but how to film them. I realized the need to offer an escape-valve, a gap or window through which my interviewee could get away. It’s not a prison, it’s a film. If the witness changes their mind halfway through and decides there is not going to be a film, then there isn’t one.

Her statement highlights her willingness to grant her film subjects considerable control over the filmmaking process.9 The mutual trust and agreement developed between them becomes especially evident in the scenes when Guarany refuses to speak, or talks about the difficulties of speaking. Sensitive to his need and consistent with her ‘no-questions’ approach, Leandro allows him the metaphorical escape valve and waits in silence. At one point she hands Guarany a photograph of Dora. He hesitates and warns: ‘This is going to be a problem, talking about Dora’s death. In a normal conversation with you, I might even be able to speak, but seeing her picture…’ He says he kept no mementos of Dora for fear that her memories might cause him greater psychological damage. There is tension in the room as Leandro faces her aforementioned ‘double risk’: to ignore Guarany’s warning might violate his need to forget, but to change the topic might obstruct his desire to speak. Leandro’s silence conveys that the choice is his, and he does speak. ‘Dora was finishing

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her medical degree, she was settling in. She was top of her class and spoke perfect German. One day, she broke down (…) she had a fit, and during this fit she smashed a Brazilian guy’s house’. The director’s sensitive responsiveness to his testimony is articulated visually through editing. Over his voice, she superimposes Guarany’s and Dora’s prisoner mugshots side-by-side as if to convey their emotional closeness. The meaning is reiterated in the next frame, where another pair of portraits, this time in profile, are turned towards each other. A cut back to the interview room reveals a jumpy and fidgety Guarany. He hesitates and shakes his head as he recalls that Dora had been discharged after three months in a psychiatric hospital; despite her apparent recovery, her nightmares had worsened. ‘I thought I could control the situation, so I said “Dora, we’ll get out of here. I’ve got the passports; I just need to get them stamped (…) We’ll go to Mozambique or Angola, somewhere sunny… And…’. In an abrupt move, he stands and leaves the room. The camera registers nothing but the wall for what feels like a lengthy period. The extended silence, broken by occasional background noise, offers plenty of time for us to be affected by the pathos of Guarany’s absence without fully grasping its meaning. Finally, he returns, mutters ‘Sorry’ and launches straight back into the testimony. As he starts to recollect what he now considers an ‘error of judgement’—his overestimation of his own capacity to rescue Dora and the tragic consequences that ensued—he is ostensibly overwhelmed by affect.10 ‘I should have asked for help… I would never have been able to change her mind about such a serious decision… I should have asked for help’. This scene raises an important point about Retratos de identificação, and indeed any documentary dealing with traumatized subjects: the relevance of non-verbal communication and the effectiveness of the audio-visual medium in capturing them. I briefly touched on this point in my discussion of La ciudad de los fotógrafos, in relation to the scene with Ianiszewski. In that scene, as in Guarany’s testimony here, the use of a static camera, medium close-up and frontal address maintain our focus on the subject’s facial expressions, corporeal movement, and gesticulation. What I find relevant is not so much the meanings conveyed by these para-linguistic elements, but the fact that they are cinematically treated as a central part of bearing witness. Non-verbal communication is one of the most understudied and misunderstood elements of testimonial documentaries, particularly documentaries that address trauma. Such disregard may be attributed to an excessive focus on verbal communication and

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speech (the linguistic content of what is said) to the detriment of enunciation (how it is said). It may also be understood in terms of the dominant Freudian-based model of trauma in literary criticism famously advanced by Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), which emphasizes the ‘unrepresentable’, ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unknowable’ aspects of traumatic memory. As argued in Chapter 1, recent scholarship has proposed alternative models for understanding traumatic memory that focus more on its corporeal and affective dimensions. Affect theory (Atkinson and Richardson 2013) and neurobiological accounts by the likes of Bessel Van der Kolk (2014) and Paul Conti (2022) are cases in point. Another interesting model for conceptualizing trauma has been developed by Michelle Balaev (2008, 158), whose interpretation of the meanings of silence in literary works is especially relevant here. Against the dominant conception of silence as a sign of a breakdown in communication, she argues that silence can sometimes derive from a conscious refusal to speak or to remember, an interpretation that highlights the survivor’s agency. From this perspective, Leandro’s decision to film Guarany’s empty chair and his silence can be understood as a means to highlight his agency as arbiter and curator of his own memories. Indeed, Leandro suggested that her inclusion of ‘empty time’ in the film stems from her own view of silence and withdrawal as intrinsic and necessary parts of bearing testimony: ‘Silence generates the conditions for listening. It is the pause, the moment when the person thinks about what they have just said, considers what they are going to say… Remembers something, forgets something else’.11 Leandro hereby questions the traditional binary division that equates silence with forgetting and utterance with remembering. In her praise of the eloquence of a filmed silence, she echoes Zolko’s (2013, 73–74) suggestion that we rethink the relationship between silence and verbalization in testimony as ‘not only non-oppositional, but also as mutually indebted, reciprocal and cross-contaminated’. In the two scenes discussed here, the greater attention to the corporeal expressiveness of the subjects generates optimal conditions for us to observe how trauma operates in the present or, as Anne Rutherford (2013, 86) puts it, the point where ‘the present-ness of traumatic memory erupts through the surface of discourse’. These scenes depict not so much the contents of memory (which, as suggested in the two films, are never fully accessible or representable) but the emotional and cognitive labour

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involved in the act of remembering. Hence, through their renewed attention to bodily, affective forms of communication, La ciudad and Retratos open up new ways of engaging with traumatic pasts.

Prisoner Mugshots, Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics So far in my discussion of Retratos de identificação, I have focused on the strategies used to ‘make the archive speak’ and elicit testimony through photographs. I will now turn to a closer examination of the archive images and the new meanings generated by their remediation in the film. Like Moreno, Leandro remediates existing media to create new meanings but, in this case, there is no ‘immediacy’ or experience of the past. Rather, Retratos de identificação is consistently focused on ‘hypermediacy’, the experience of the medium, to emphasize that material produced by the state for the purpose of intimidation and repression can be refashioned to render visible those very abuses. ‘Hypermediacy’ is particularly prominent in the scenes that show the film subjects handle print copies of the photographs and react to their touch and appearance. For instance, when Guarany comments on the poor state of a print, the camera zooms in to examine its flaws and texture, thereby making us aware of the condition of the photograph as a material object requiring preservation. In other scenes, the film subjects express estrangement, surprise and curiosity at the sight of their own photographed image: Espinosa (laughing): Guarany:

‘Yes, I look very threatening here.’ ‘Front and profile… these are definitely not family pictures.’

The distinction Guarany makes here between family pictures and prisoner photographs, easily recognizable through the use of framing conventions, is noteworthy. As Richard (2000) has written, family pictures insert the person in a biographical narrative that solidifies social bonds through the ritual of the family album. By contrast, identification portraits remove the person from their social context to display them as subjects regulated by law, under the impersonal register of social control. In doing so, they perform a type of power that, as described by Gilles Deleuze in

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‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ (1992, 5) at the same time ‘individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and moulds the individuality of each member of that body’. The practice of photographing prisoners has a well-documented history. Since the nineteenth century, such practice became part of a systematic effort to regulate the growing presence of ‘dangerous classes’ and ‘delimit the terrain of the other, the terrain of social deviance and pathology’ (Sekula 1986, 7). Drawing on Michel Foucault, Alan Sekula has argued that criminal identification exemplifies the deterrent and repressive side of biopower.12 The existence of an enemy or criminal ‘other’ is the basic premise for the existence of any military regime, and indeed, any military institution in general. But if we respond more carefully to Foucault’s (1998 [1976]) writings on the paradoxical logic of biopower, we can see how prisoner photographs operate both repressively and productively. In their repressive, negative mode, they remove the referents’ individuality, subtract them from the population and subject them to disciplinary power. But they also produce the deviant or ‘subversive’, so as to encourage law-abiding citizens to recognize their threatening other. I will illustrate this point in relation to three types of images displayed in Retratos de identificação: surveillance images, a ‘wanted’ poster, and prisoner mugshots. The opening sequence shows a series of photographs of Dora taken clandestinely by undercover military police. These images are accompanied by captions that refer to her as a ‘ target’ and describe her every move, for instance: ‘At 9 am the target stopped to have a coffee’. The sequence exemplifies the subtraction of Dora’s personal and political identity and her inscription in the notion of a ‘target’ or criminal to be watched, followed, hunted down and imprisoned. In line with the biopolitical mode of power, the military state hereby ‘produces’ its enemy. Hence, even before their arrest, militants like Dora were photographically encoded within discourses of deviance and criminality. Indeed, to make the threat publicly known, ‘wanted’ posters with photographs of leftist militants were widely employed by military governments. Displayed in public spaces and reproduced in print media and on television, they served to simultaneously intimidate militants and warn the wider population about the risks of engaging in political activities. As Rachel Hall (2004, 2) has observed, wanted posters fulfil all the requirements of a disciplinary machine; as a textual equivalent of Foucault’s Panopticon,

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they encourage all eyes to direct their gaze to a particular face and function as ‘a tool for locating and returning missing bodies to their appointed cells’. In Retratos de identificação, we see one such poster featuring a mugshot of Chael alongside those of seven other militants. The caption reads: ‘Wanted: murderous terrorists. After robbing and killing several fathers of family, they are at loose. Warn the police if you see any of these individuals. Help us to protect your life and your family’. The poster illustrates the military’s biopower logic whereby to defend and enhance the well-being of the population, the state must control, arrest and kill undesirable others. The images and captions establish the distinction between lives worthy of being protected (the law-abiding paterfamilias disengaged from politics and loyal to the State) and lives marked for disposal. It highlights the exclusionary logic utilized by the regime, whereby if one wants to live, the ‘other’ must die. Finally, it points to the ways in which the state implicated its own citizens in the so-called war against the militant Left. Appealing to the (mainly male) citizen’s sense of duty as ‘father of family’, state officials asked the population to collaborate by helping to identify militants and becoming informers. The mugshots used in these posters—the retratos de identificação of the film’s title—are in effect disciplinary portraits, anthropometric images that reproduce an individual’s physiognomy for the purpose of identifying, documenting and filing. Scholar and filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias (2017, 233), who has herself directed a documentary about prisoner mugshots produced under the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974) in Portugal, writes that these images are characterized by an ‘aesthetic of transparency’: despite their seeming neutrality, they are strongly codified from a technical point of view.13 As she explains, their repeated use of specific conventions of framing, angle and distance makes us oblivious to the conditions in which they were produced and acts as a veil that prevents the image from being seen for what it is.When faced with a prisoner mugshot, it is difficult for us to see anything other than ‘suspect’, ‘outlaw’ or ‘criminal’. Such perception is observed by the witnesses in Retratos de identificação when they react with estrangement to previously unseen images of themselves produced by the police (‘I look very threatening here’). Identification portraits condense individual prisoners into a single, general category, ‘the enemy’, thereby performing a crucial stage in

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the process through which a person is reduced to an absolute victim. This idea, developed by Hannah Arendt in ‘Mankind and Terror’ (1994 [1953]) and advanced by Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) description of the ‘homo sacer’, refers to a life that can be eliminated with full immunity, without the killers perceiving that they are committing a crime. The first stage of any genocide or mass murder is de-subjectification and dehumanization of its victims. As depicted in Retratos de identificação, the act of photographing prisoners in a range of situations—before and after their arrest, clothed and naked, bruised and wounded, from various angles and framings—is a key part of a process that strips a person from all layers of private and public life, including citizenship, political loyalty, social relationships, emotional expression, and freezes them into the reified figure of the prisoner: anonymous, indistinguishable, one in a series of many to be destroyed. In brief, the transformation of a person into an object devoid of meaning and subjectivity is what facilitates the exercise of full powers over life and death. As we learn in Retratos de identificação, the extensive photographic material produced by the state was accompanied by other documentation—investigation reports, surveillance material, police statements, inquiries, medical examinations, autopsies—all of which contributed to the states’ power-knowledge over its opponents. By inviting the survivors to examine these photographs, and by combining them with material from other sources, Leandro reverses the military regime’s mechanisms of biopower and performs a radical re-interpretation of the archive. Remediated into her film, the photographs ‘leaked’ their original purpose and laid bare the repressive methods of the state. As she observed, each photograph became the signifier of a regime so certain of its own impunity that it did not hesitate in producing extensive evidence of its own crimes.14 Hence, if one of the purposes of photographing prisoners was to subtract and eliminate their subjectivity (an extension of the physical process of disintegrating a person’s psyche through torture), the film performs the opposite move: through montage and witness testimony, it sutures and reintegrates the photographed bodies and faces with the personal histories, political beliefs, emotional lives and affective relationships of ex-militants. This reconstruction of identities is comparable to the work of Claudio Perez in La ciudad de los fotógrafos, whose photographic mural, as we have seen, restores to life Chile’s victims of forced disappearance. In their reassessment of biopower, post-Foucauldian thinkers such as Agamben (1998) and Esposito (2008) have emphasized thanatopolitics,

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the politics of death, as its murderous underside. Murray (2018, 718) proposes instead that we reconceptualize this concept and see it as a positive form of resistance: If biopolitics is a productive power that necessitates or silently calls for death as the consequence of “making live”, then thanatopolitics is not merely the lethal underside of biopolitics but is itself a productive power in the voices of those who biopolitical power “lets die”.

In this perspective, thanatopolitics becomes a means of challenging regimes that condemn citizens to death by refusing to dismiss or forget those deaths. As Murray asks, how might those deaths ‘rise up, and haunt, the spaces of biopolitical production, to critically disaffirm the ways in which biopolitics not only occasions but also tolerates a certain threshold of death as its modus operandi?’ (2018, 718). In this context, Retratos de identificação and La ciudad de los fotógrafos perform their own form of thanatopolitics as they highlight the costs that citizens paid for the military project of ‘restoring order’ in their respective countries. The photographs of the deceased remediated in these films expose the fault lines of biopolitical regimes that delivered death to some in the name of prosperity for others. In Retratos, Chael’s and Dora’s posthumous claims, created through montage, are part of the film’s ‘reckoning with the dead’, as suggested by Murray (2018, 719): an effort to account for our own complicity in such regimes. In La ciudad de los fotógrafos, Perez’s Muro de la Memoria with its hundreds of portraits of the disappeared achieves the same effect, as he himself articulates: ‘(…) within every family, within the whole of Chile there is a detenido-desaparecido.’

Concluding Remarks Sarlo’s (2005) suggestion that testimony be used not necessarily as a form of ‘truth-telling’, but as a means to provide the raw material of indignation, helps us to appreciate how the testimonial genre is reworked in the reflective mode. As I have demonstrated, testimony here is no longer tied to the function of recording events and imparting factual information; it is more closely aligned with the goal of forging emotional engagement with, and understanding of, subjective aspects of personal experience. Through my analyses of La ciudad de los fotógrafos and Retratos de identificação, I have also demonstrated how the archive can be transformed

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through its remediation through film: the unofficial’ archive produced by Chilean photojournalists in the first case, and the surveillance documents produced by the Brazilian military in the second. Drawing on conceptualizations of the archive as an instrument of power in Foucault and Derrida, Assmann (2008, 102) has written ‘The archive is the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past’. Advancing on her statement, Brunow (2015) argues that although the archive has been traditionally understood as a top-down instrument linked to institutions of power (for instance, the state), it can also operate as a counter-practice to challenge hegemonic narratives, particularly when used by minority or grassroots initiatives. As she has written, ‘the archive is not a space in which facts remain unchanged, but a process in which knowledge and facts are continuously recreated and transformed’ (2015, 37), a point illustrated in both films studied here. With reference to Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) ‘hypermediacy’, I argued that, in reflective mode, photographs and other archival material do not merely illustrate or recuperate memory; rather, they become historical objects in their own right and play a central role in activating memory through the engagement of emotion, cognition and imagination. Finally, in addition to this mnemonic function, I argued that archival images of the dead and disappeared, once remediated into the context of a film, can provide a radical, ‘thanatopolitical’ re-interpretation of the past. Such re-interpretation does not result in a conclusive or stable narrative of the kind that characterizes informative films. Instead, reflective films focus our attention on the personal stories of survivors and victims, to remind us of the various ways in which the past continues to haunt the present: through unresolved injustices, catastrophic losses, trauma and unfinished mourning. By doing so, they highlight what Zizek (1991, 21–23) has described as ‘the return of the living dead’, or ghosts of a historical past that return to the present as a symptom of an unresolved, terrible crime. As we will see in the next chapter, the remediation of archival material to produce new meanings and the use of testimony to access a person’s subjectivity are also key to the diaristic mode of remembering. This time, however, filmmakers step from behind their cameras and into the spotlight to become protagonists, witnesses and narrators of their own stories.

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Notes 1. Piedras’s (2011) reading of Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido helpfully contrasts it with ‘totalizing discourses’ of films like Cazadores de utopías and positions it as a precursor of future tendencies in Argentine documentary. Chilean video artist and filmmaker Gloria Camiruaga’s short La venda (The Blindfold, 2000) is comparable to Murat’s Que bom te ver viva. It is based on interviews with ten women brutally tortured by the military authorities. 2. On March 30, 1985, Manuel Guerrero Ceballos’s body was found near Pudahuel airport, alongside those of Santiago Nattino and José Manuel Parada, with their throats slashed. The triple murder became known as Caso Degollados (Slit-Throat Case) and provoked widespread indignation. 3. El cine documental en primera persona. Pablo Piedras: Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2014. 4. The Hornos de Lónquen became an emblematic case of collective memory in Chile, addressed in other films including Moreno’s own Habeas Corpus (with Claudia Barril), and Hornos de Lonquén (Luís Díaz Bahamondes, 2011). 5. Emotions cannot be remembered as such. If we try to remember how we felt on a particular occasion, we can come up with a description or narrative to describe it, but if we try to reexperience the emotion, then it is no longer a memory, but a present emotional state. 6. Personal communication with author. 7. Luiz Alberto Sanz was one of the seventy released prisoners. Like the rest of the group, he remained in exile until the 1979 Amnesty Law made it safe for them to return to Brazil. While in exile, he made three films about the dictatorship, released in Brazil in the DVD format as part of the project Arquivos da Ditadura, coordinated by Anita Leandro. 8. Personal communication with author. 9. In our conversation, Leandro described being struck by unpredictability during the interviews, particularly the moment when Guarany abruptly stopped talking and keft the room. She and her two-man crew were uncertain of how to proceed. ‘We left the

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camera running, without knowing if he would return. I was terrified that they might stop recording; they were terrified I might tell them to do so. We stood there and we waited, in silence.’ Affect can be defined as a visceral force, ‘generally other than conscious knowing (…) that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’ (Siegworth and Greg 2010, 1). Personal communication with author. Alongside Sekula, there is an extensive body of work examining the historical incorporation of photography into police identification techniques. See, for instance, Caplan and Torpey (2001). Filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias’s article about prisoner photographs relates to her own film Luz Oscura (2017) which centres on mugshots produced by the Portuguese military police during the dictatorship of Salazar. Personal communication with author.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Mankind and Terror. In Essays in Understanding: 1930– 1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, 297–306. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C.H Beck. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. Canon and Archive. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 97–107. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Atencio, Rebeca J. 2014. Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Atkinson, Meera, and Michael Richardson. 2013. Introduction: At the Nexus. In Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, 1–20. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Balaev, Michelle. 2008. Trends in Literary Trauma Theory. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41: 149–166. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Bell, Vikki. 2014. The Art of Post-dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina. Abington, New York: Routledge. Blejmar, Jordana. 2017. Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in PostDictatorship Argentina. Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brunow, Dagmar. 2015. Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Butler, Alison. 2002. Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. London, New York: Wallflower. Caplan, Jane, and John Torpey. 2001. Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. John Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Collins, Cath, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant. 2013. Introduction: The Politics of Memory in Chile. In The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet, ed Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant, 1–10. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Conti, Paul. 2022. Trauma The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. London: Vermillion. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. 59 (October): 3–7. Dias, Susana de Sousa. 2017. A Sort of Microscope of Time: Decelerated Movement and Archive Footage. In Thinking Reality and Time Through Film, ed. Christine Reeh and José Manuel Martins, 230–244. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney. 2009. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 2009. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos. Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Everett, Wendy. 2007. Through the I of the Camera: Women and Autobiography in Contemporary European Film. Studies in European Cinema 4 (2): 125– 136. Feld, Claudia, and Jessica Sites Mor (eds.). 2009. El Pasado que Miramos: Memoria e imagen ante la historia reciente. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

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Foucault, Michel. 1998 [1976]. The History of Sexuality 1, The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin. Garibotto, Verónica. 2019. Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina: Beyond Memory Fatigue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Glaw, Xanthe, Kerry Inder, Ashley Kable, and Michael Hazelton. 2017. Visual Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Autophotography and Photo Elicitation Applied to Mental Health Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16: 1–8. Greg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Siegworth. 2010. An Inventory of Shimmers. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Siegworth, 1–28. London, Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Rachel. 2004. Danger and Desire: Instrumental Realism in the History of the Wanted Poster. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. Hall, Stuart. 1991. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-War Black Settlement. In Family Snaps, ed. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, 152–164. London: Virago. Heise, Tatiana. 2015. The Weight of the Past: Trauma and Testimony in Que bom te ver viva. New Cinemas 13 (2): 107–122. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2012. Sexual Abuse as a Crime Against Humanity and the Right to Privacy. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 21 (2): 343– 350. Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.). 2000. Feminism and Film. London: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Annette. 1982. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge. Lane, Jim. 2002. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Langland, Victoria. 2005. Fotografía y memoria. In Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Ana Longoni, 87–91. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Leandro, Anita. 2015. Montagem e História: uma arqueologia das imagens da repressão. In A sobrevivência das imagens, ed. Alessandra S. Brandão and Ramayana L. de Sousa, 103–120. Campinas: Papirus. Maguire, Geoffrey. 2017. The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, Stuart J. 2018. Thanatopolitics. In Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, 718–719. London: Bloomsbury.

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Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill. 2010. Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Palacios, José Miguel. 2014. Residual Images and Political Time: Memory and History in Chile, Obstinate Memory and City of Photographers. In New Documentaries in Latin America, ed. Vinicius Navarro and Juan Carlos Rodríguez, 107–121. Piedras, Pablo. 2014. El cine documental en primera persona. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Rascaroli, Laura. 2009. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower. Renov, Michael. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London. Renov, Michael. 2016. The Facial Closeup in Audio-Visual Testimony: The Power of Embodied Memory. In Preserving Survivor’s Memories. Digital Testimony Collections about Nazi Persecution: History, Education and Media, ed. Nicolas Apostopoulos, Michelle Barricelli, and Gertrud Koch, 238–248. Berlin: Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft. Richard, Nelly. 2000. Imagen-recuerdo y borraduras. In Política y estéticas de la memoria, ed Nelly Richard, 165–172. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Rojas, M. Claudia. 2001. La tumba de los asesinados en los hornos de Lonquén. In Volver a la memoria, ed. Raquel Olea and Olga Grau, 79–104. Santiago: LOM/La Morada Ros, Ana. 2012. The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruby, Jay. 2005. The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Form. In New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, 34–47. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rutherford, Anne. 2013. Film, Trauma and the Enunciative Present. In Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, 80–102. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Sarlo, Beatriz. 2005. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Schneider, Nina. 2011. Breaking the ‘Silence’ of the Military Regime: New Politics of Memory in Brazil. Bulletin of Latin American Research. 30: 198–212. Sekula, Alan. 1986. The Body and the Archive. October 29 (39): 3–64. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War.’ Durham: Duke University Press.

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Van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. London: Penguin. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. London: Duke University Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 1998. L’ère du témoin. Paris: Pion. Wilde, Alexandre. 2013. A Season of Memory: Human Rights in Chile’s Long Transition. In The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet, ed. Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant, 31–60. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, London: MIT Press. Zolkos, Magdalena. 2013. “Un Petit Geste”: Affect and Silence in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, 59–79. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Filmography Brazil, A Report on Torture. 1971. Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler. Chile. Cabra marcado para morrer/Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later. 1984. Eduardo Coutinho. Brazil. Cazadores de utopías /Hunters of Utopia. 1996. David Blaustein. Argentina. Chile, memoria obstinada/Chile, Obstinate Memory. 1997. Patricio Guzmán. Canada, France, Chile. Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer. 1961. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. France. El botón de nácar/The pearl button. 2015. Patricio Guzmán. France, Spain, Chile, Switzerland. Guerrero. 2017. Sebastián Moreno. Chile. Habeas Corpus. 2015. Sebastián Moreno, Claudia Barril. Chile. Hércules 56. 2006. Silvio Da-Rin. Brazil. Hornos de Lonquén/The Furnaces of Lonquén. 2011. Luís Díaz Bahamondes. Chile. Juan, como se nada hubiera sucedido/Juan As If Nothing Had Happened. 1987. Carlos Echeverría. Argentina. La batalla de Chile I: La insurrección de la burguesía/The Battle of Chile I. 1975. Patricio Guzmán. La batalla de Chile II: El golpe de Estado/The Battle of Chille II. 1976. Patricio Guzmán. Chile. La batalla de Chile III: El poder popular/The Battle of Chile III . 1979. Patricio Guzmán. La ciudad de los fotógrafos /The City of Photographers. 2005. Sebastián Moreno. Chile.

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La cordillera de los sueños /The cordillera of dreams. 2019. Patricio Guzmán. Chile, France. La Venda/The Blindfold. 2000. Gloria Camiruaga. Chile. Luz Oscura/Obscure Light. 2017. Susana de Sousa Dias. Portugal. Não é hora de chorar/No Time to Cry. 1971. Luiz Alberto Lanz and Pedro Chaskel. Chile. Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the light. 2010. Patricio Guzmán. France, Germany, Chile and Spain. Que bom te ver viva/How Nice to See You Alive. 1987. Lúcia Murat. Brazil. Retratos de identificação/Identification Portraits. 2014. Anita Leandro. Brazil.

CHAPTER 5

The Screened Self: The Diaristic Mode of Cinematic Remembering

The reinvigoration of memory politics in the early 2000s was met, in the realm of documentary, by the desire to innovate practices and approaches in line with transnational tendencies. Such innovation was manifested in diverse ways, including those reformulations of the testimonial film that gave rise to the reflective mode of remembering discussed in Chapter 4, as well as others which I will discuss in this and the following chapter. The present chapter focuses on a specific category that gained prominence first in Chile and Argentina and subsequently in Brazil: first-person, autobiographical documentaries, referred to here as the diaristic mode of remembering. Broadly speaking, the term ‘first-person’ applies to documentaries in which the filmmaker overtly acknowledges her subjective position by addressing the spectator through voiceover narration, onscreen presence and/or point-of-view shots, among other possibilities. Not all first-person documentaries are autobiographical; the latter occurs when the director becomes the film’s focal point, featuring not only as the subject making the film, but as the subject matter of the film. Unlike, say, La ciudad de los fotografos /The City of Photographers (Sebastián Moreno, 2006), where the director’s first-person address is subtle and intermittent, with the focus remaining on the experiences of others, autobiographical documentaries systematically place the spotlight on the subjectivity of the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_5

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director herself to address her memories, family history, life experiences and personal struggles.1 Despite the ubiquitousness of first-person documentary around the globe, it has not propagated uniformly. Hence Laura Rascaroli’s (2009, 18) description of it as a ‘transnational form, made by international filmmakers in dialogue with one another, but also one which has its own local histories and individual embodiments’. Accordingly, the arrival of first-person documentary in Argentina and Brazil has been somewhat delayed, a phenomenon that can be explained in terms of the various forms of obstruction imposed by military governments on local film industries, including political and economic censorship, withdrawal of state-sponsored subsidies for the production and distribution of films and the persecution of artists and filmmakers. In the mid-1990s, as these obstructions had been removed and new forms of state-led incentives and legislation helped to revive the film industries in the region, politically committed filmmakers embraced the documentary as a medium to relay information about the dictatorship in a straightforward manner, using well-established conventions that would facilitate communication with audiences, hence the prominence of the informative mode of remembering during this period.2 A different pattern developed among documentarians working abroad, particularly exiled Chilean directors. The new socio-cultural environments in which they found themselves, with greater freedom of expression and access to new sources of funding and distribution, provided fertile ground for aesthetic and thematic experimentation (Pick 1987, 1990).3 Moreover, the experience of exile, characterized by cultural and language differences, separation from family and friends, as well as sentiments of loss and failure, encouraged some of these filmmakers to examine the dictatorship through a deeply personal lens, long before their counterparts at home embraced similar approaches. For instance, in Journal Inachevé/Unfinished Diary (1982), Marilu Mallet uses poetic voiceover narration and observational camera to depict her feelings of isolation and frustration as she sheds her identity as an antidictatorship revolutionary in Chile to become an artist and housewife in the suburbs of Montreal. Described by Pick (1987, 66–70) as an ‘autobiographical essay’, the film pioneered the diaristic mode of remembering discussed in this chapter. Also structured in the form of a diary, Chilean novelist and director Antonio Skármeta’s Si viviéramos juntos /If We Lived Together (1983) depicts his integration within a community of artists in Berlin, where he and his family were exiled. Two decades later, former

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MIR militant Carmen Castillo would follow a similarly autobiographical route with Calle Santa Fe/Santa Fe Street (2007). The documentary narrates her trajectory from the moment she witnessed the murder of her husband by Pinochet’s soldiers in Santiago in 1974, to the late 1980s when, prompted by her father’s illness, she returned to Chile to confront her painful past and, by extension, that of her country.4 Calle Santa Fe incorporates a central feature of the reflective mode discussed in Chapter 4, namely, an interest in memory as a process and topic of exploration. However, it distinguishes itself through the addition of a first-person, autobiographical dimension. Like Castillo, other filmmakers who worked abroad seized opportunities to develop new practices and aesthetics popularized in international film festivals and schools. Their greater openness to these transnational trends did not mean, however, that they were immune to the influence of their filmmaking peers at home. As Piedras (2011) has demonstrated, subjective approaches to filmmaking emerged in Argentina both as a response to, and in continuity with, practices developed in the 1990s by the likes of David Blaustein. He cites the cases of directors María Inés Roqué, Alejandra Almirón and Nicolás Privideras, all of whom have claimed that Cazadores de utopías / Hunters of Utopia (1995) both inspired them and set the groundwork for them to develop their own authorial approaches to remembering the dictatorship (Piedras 2011, 217).5 Indeed, Prividera (2014, 279) has stated that he made his autobiographical documentary M (2007) partly in response to Blaustein’s film. In the Brazilian context a similar point was made by directors Flávia Castro and Emilia Silveira in our separate conversations. Both directors stated that because the need to impart information about the dictatorship had sufficiently been met by the mid-2000s, they felt encouraged to approach the dictatorship from new, more personal perspectives. Moreover, they both found that traditional documentary formats had reached a point of saturation, and this encouraged them to explore new possibilities of the medium attuned to international trends. What these statements suggest is that the new cinematic modes of remembering that emerged since the mid-2000s are best understood in terms of both rupture and continuity with the informative mode, rather than in complete opposition to what came before. This will become clearer as I outline the main thematic and stylistic features of the diaristic mode. In so doing, I follow Alisa Lebow’s (2012) suggestion that we see firstperson documentary as a set of related yet distinct practices, rather than a homogeneous style.

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Out of the several studies on first-person and other essayistic forms of autobiographical filmmaking, Jim Lane’s The Autobiographical Documentary in America (2002) and Laura Rascaroli’s The Personal Camera (2009) are especially useful to my discussion. In the context of North America, Lane (2002) has distinguished several types of personal filmmaking, including what he calls the ‘journal entry film’ and ‘autobiographical portraiture’. The former is shot like a diary and ordered chronologically to depict some kind of personal crisis in the director’s life. In contrast, his ‘autobiographical portraitures’ are less concerned with chronicling everyday life than in constructing a self in relation to family members and the external world. More eclectic in terms of structure and style, ‘autobiographical portraitures’ are like collages juxtaposing voiceover narration, interviews, audio recordings, home movie footage and still photographs. In the context of post-dictatorship documentaries, these two categories often overlap in the diaristic mode following the filmmaker’s attempt to deal with a personal crisis triggered by family secrets and relationships torn apart by the dictatorship. They are eclectic in terms of structure and style, like Lane’s ‘autobiographical portraitures’; for instance, they follow diachronic arrangements to expose the filmmaking process, including the director’s direct address to the spectator explaining his or her reason for making the film, and they disrupt a chronological order of events through temporal leaps to the past prompted by mementos. These mementos consist of remediated media from the director’s personal life, including family albums, photographs, home movies, letters, found footage and toys. My use of the term ‘diaristic’ is drawn from Rascaroli (2009), for whom the ‘diary film’ is a stylistically and thematically diverse sub-genre that often merges with cognate forms, such as the home movie, the essay film, the travelogue and the self-portrait. As she observes, the diary film can be: a repository of everything, of the banal as well as of the momentous; it integrates public and private; it is capable of accommodating and not reconciling different stylistic registers, from the banal to the sublime; it makes a record of time passing; it reorders events and records details; and is reflective and self-reflexive. (Rascaroli 2009, 131)

A defining feature of these documentaries is the pact they establish with the viewer through which they present themselves as the director’s diary. Such a pact may be conveyed through various means, including: the

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film’s title, as in the case of Journal Inachevé and Diário de uma busca; the documentary’s enunciative voice, which filters everything through the filmmaker’s sensibility and point of view; and voiceover narration, through which the filmmaker simultaneously addresses us, viewers, and him or herself. Voiceovers in the diaristic mode are intimate, confessional and poetic, much like a diary, and the interviews are characterized by informality and improvisation. Testimonies are filmed in a manner that draws our attention to the witness’s bodily language and emotional reactions, thus focusing not only on the content of what is said, but how it is said and experienced. Another key feature of the diaristic mode is the juxtaposition of material sourced from both personal and public archives, and an understanding that both constitute relevant sources of the director’s enquiry into the past. Hence, handwritten letters become just as valuable as official documentation, and family photos receive the same historical weight as newspaper clippings. This juxtaposition points to the thematic crux of all documentaries in this mode: the intricate connections they establish between the private and public, the personal and political, the intimate and collective. In other words, diaristic films tell us about the long-lasting, wide-ranging effects of political violence on the lives of the filmmaker and her family, but without losing sight of their wider social implications. They document their directors’ quest to reintegrate families severed by the dictatorship and come to terms with the irrevocable losses it has caused, all the while reminding us that despite its uniqueness, the story of one family torn asunder by the dictatorship echoes the stories of many others. Enquiry into the past manifests itself in various ways. In some cases, the director investigates the life of a parent who was disappeared or murdered by the authorities. María Inés Roqué’s Papá Iván (2004), Nicolás Prividera’s M (2007), Germano Berger-Hertz’s Mi vida con Carlos /My Life with Carlos (2010), Flávia Castro’s Diário de uma busca/Diary of a Search (2010) and Mariana Arruti’s El padre/The Father (2016) are cases in point. However, more than a crime investigation or piece of research into the parent’s militant past, these films are motivated by the directors’ need to come to terms with the ways in which their own lives have been profoundly shaped by events which they have not directly experienced, as captured by Hirsch’s (2008) concept of ‘postmemory’. As a further feature, in their attempt to understand their conflicted family histories and reintegrate fractured identities after trauma, these directors often travel across long geographical distances to visit mnemonic sites

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such as the childhood home, or the location where the parent was last seen. For instance, in Mi vida con Carlos (2010), director Berger-Hertz travels from his home in Spain to Chile then Canada where he talks to family members about the killing of his father by Pinochet’s ‘Caravana de la Muerte’ (Death Convoy) in the Atacama Desert in 1973. The film climaxes with an emotional reunion in the desert where the director and his uncles mourn their tragic loss. Cross-border travel is also present in Diário de uma busca, which charts the director’s journey from Brazil to Chile, Argentina, France and Venezuela, on parts of which she is accompanied by her mother or brother. As part of this trip she revisits the various houses, embassies and refuges where she lived, in an attempt to reconstruct her unusual childhood as the daughter of leftist militants fleeing repression. As Berger-Hertz does in Mi vida con Carlos, Castro tells us in diaristic fashion about her emotions, doubts and insecurities in relation to the filmmaking process. In these and many other diaristic films, the conversations between the director and their family members are so intimate and sensitive that they resemble a form of family therapy.6 The exploration of family secrets and conflicting encounters with relatives is also the theme of La quemadura/The Burn (René Ballesteros, 2010). A former psychologist in Chile, Ballesteros was completing a postgraduate cinema degree in Paris when he decided to film his attempts to contact his estranged mother who had, three decades prior, abandoned him and his sister to start a new life in Venezuela. A recurring motif in the film are audio recordings of their long-distance phone calls over a black screen, but instead of generating closeness, the mother’s disembodied voice reaffirms their estrangement. She has no memory of her life in Chile and her questions to Ballesteros seem trivial (‘How tall are you?’). Supported by his archivist and librarian sister, the director turns to the only traces left by their mother in Chile: a collection of books published by Quimantú, an editorial project funded by Salvador Allende to improve literacy among the poor. As the siblings discover, their parents used to collect these books and stamp their names on them, but their mother’s name had been erased from most. A parallel is thus established between these two forms of erasure: the destruction of Quimantú by Pinochet’s government (the books were confiscated and destroyed in a fire, hence the ‘burn’ of the film’s title) and the mother’s decision to flee and delete all memories of her life in Chile, including memories of her children. The ‘burn’ also alludes to the wound that her departure inflicted on the family, a wound so painful that no one dared to mention

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it. The director’s attempt to come to terms with these interrelated pasts, his family’s and the country’s, are punctuated by sequences shot in a Paris swimming pool where he tentatively learns how to swim. The unusual framing of these sequences, which slices his body in half (e.g., a pair of legs underwater), conveys the idea of a fragmented and disintegrated self, commonly expressed in the diaristic mode. Indeed, like Ballesteros, many directors find themselves torn between personal authenticity and loyalty to the family: on the one hand, they wish to honour their personal truth by revealing family secrets and confronting trauma; on the other, they want to respect family members’ desire to erase a painful past. In Maria Clara Escobar’s Os dias com ele/The Days with Him (2013), the daughter’s internal conflict marks her relationship with her father, a philosopher, dramaturg, ex-revolutionary and torture survivor exiled in a small village in Portugal where he relishes his solitude and ‘absolute anonymity’, as he tells her. As implied in its title, the film charts the director’s days spent in her father’s house where she tries to learn about his past, their relationship before he left (of which she has no memory) and, by extension, Brazil’s recent history, aspects of which remain unknown to her. Her attempts are thwarted by his lack of belief in her project and his reluctance to answer her questions. He challenges her and unwittingly sabotages the film by turning it into a vehicle to showcase his own artistic and intellectual abilities. Their frustrating interactions are intercut with observational sequences of his reclusive life, and the insertion of Super8 footage of cheerful family gatherings that, as the director emphasizes in voiceover, are not hers. Os dias com ele points to another dimension of ‘postmemory’ described by Hirsch (2008, 12), the ‘long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma’. This and other diaristic films foreground how members of the post-dictatorship generation have endured the consequences of intergenerational trauma both during their childhood and later as adults, when they began looking for answers through their filmmaking practices. In many cases, however, the director’s need for answers is unmet and their quest remains unresolved. As suggested in La quemadura and Os dias com ele, the past is just too painful to remember. In other more recent films, a family member’s refusal to cooperate with an inquisitive filmmaker derives not from trauma or avoidance of emotional pain, but from the need to conceal their own complicity

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with the military regime. El pacto de Adriana/Adriana’s Pact (Lissette Orozco, 2017) is a case in point. The documentary tells us of the director’s discovery, throughout the five-year process of making the film, that she has been deceived and manipulated by her apparently loving aunt, Adriana Rivas. Resident in Australia, Rivas was accused of kidnapping and torturing detainees during the time she worked as secretary to the head of Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Manual Contreras. Videocalls between the two women register the breakdown of their once close and affectionate relationship as Rivas vehemently denies her participation in, and awareness of, the crimes of which she is accused, despite irrefutable evidence found by her niece. The conflicted feelings of a filmmaker when confronted with a family member’s criminal past is also the topic of 70 y Pico (2016), this time in the Argentinean context. Director Mariano Corbacho breaks the family silence about the role that his grandfather Héctor Corbacho (nicknamed Pico) has had in the kidnapping and murder of leftist militants known to him through his role as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Buenos Aires in the 1970s. In the opening sequence, interactions between the director and his siblings show their contrasting attitudes. His sister insists that she doesn’t want to know about Pico’s past and that she will always see him as nothing more than her beloved grandfather; his brother expresses a similar stance. By contrast, Mariano is unable to ignore the mounting evidence about Pico’s participation in state crimes that emerges through the testimonies of victims’ friends and relatives. He interviews his grandfather throughout the film but, as his questioning becomes increasingly direct, Pico shuts down and refuses to participate any further. These intimate personal explorations into family histories are also inherently political. As Berger-Hertz has stated in relation to Mi vida con Carlos, his challenge was to tell, through the story of his own family, the stories of thousands of Chileans (DVD pressbook). Similarly, in Dias com ele, when her father asks the director what her film is all about, her response is incisive: ‘personal and historical silences’. Indeed, through their examination of family silences and secrets, these filmmakers shed light on many aspects of the historical past that had remained underexplored in previous works. As they do so, they negotiate their way around complex ethical questions and practical dilemmas. How to understand a traumatic event the memory of which has been repressed by the victim? How to confront family members who may have played a part in the perpetration of crimes and abuses? How to reconstruct memories that

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have been thwarted by denial, evasion or amnesia?7 In what follows I explore these questions through a closer reading of three films: El (im)possible olvido/The (Im)Possible Forgetting (Andrés Habegger, 2016); El color del camaleón/The Colour of the Chameleon (Andrés Lübbert, 2017) and Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil/I Owe You a Letter About Brazil (Carol Benjamin, 2019).8

Filming Absence in El (im)posible olvido Andrés Habegger has taken a personal approach to South America’s conflicted past in all his films to date, including (H)historias cotidianas /Quotidian Stories (Argentina, 2001), where he interviewed other adult children of detenidos desaparecidos like himself, and Imagen Final/ The Final Image (Argentina, Chile, Sweden, Denmark, 2009), where he accompanied a journalistic investigation into the murder of a SwedishArgentinean cameraman by Pinochet’s soldiers in Santiago. When we talked about the sensitive nature of his work and the emotional skills it requires, Habegger humorously likened his practice to that of a ‘visual therapist’. I find the metaphor particularly insightful for the diaristic mode of remembering because, as we shall see, directors often find themselves, like therapists, in a complicated emotional terrain where they pose challenging questions to their subjects and invite them to revisit traumatic experiences. In the case of Habegger, after applying his skills as ‘visual therapist’ to examine the impact of political violence on the lives of others, he decided to turn the camera on himself and confront his own childhood trauma. However, when he tried to remember what his childhood had been like, all he found were blanks, gaps and forgetfulness, as he states in the beginning of El (im)posible olvido. The (im)possibility of remembering and its flip side, forgetfulness, became the focal point of his film. El (im)posible olvido depicts Habegger’s attempt to retrieve memories of his father Norberto Habegger, a journalist, author and Montonero militant who disappeared after boarding a flight from Mexico City to Rio de Janeiro when Habegger was nine years old. It opens with a selfreflexive prologue, typical in the diaristic mode, in which the director tells us about the goals of the film and the filmmaking process more generally. Habegger and crew drive around Mexico City’s International Airport until he asks them to stop and film his as he enters the building. An old photograph fills the screen: it shows nine-year-old Habegger with

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his father, moments before Norberto boarded the plane (as we learn via voiceover). The film cuts to contemporary images of the airport captured by the crew, as instructed by the director. Habegger wanders through the building but fails to recall anything of his last day with Norberto. In the absence of memories, he resorts to speculation and material vestiges from the past, in which a diary he wrote around the time of his father’s disappearance and a collection of family photographs are particularly prominent. The diary’s cover, a logotype of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, bears historical significance, as the director tells us. The Argentinean dictatorship seized on the popularity of the championship as an opportunity to gain political legitimacy and undermine dissent, but the Montoneros reacted through a strategic campaign to raise awareness of state repression and garner support for their cause. The film hints at the active role that Norberto played in this campaign but strays away from this line of enquiry to focus, instead, on how the period was experienced by him as a child. Habegger flicks through his old diary and reads the entries in the hope that they will trigger his memory. One entry reads: Tuesday, 13th June. I’m back from school, mom and Dad aren’t home. I’m alone, I cook myself something to eat. (…) Now it’s 2.20 in the afternoon. At 2.35 I turn on the television. I’ve turned on the television and now I cook chicken with potatoes. I set the table and I eat. My Dad should be home soon. I ate only the chicken because the potatoes were bad. My father arrived. (…) My Dad is writing a letter. Now my Dad and I are watching television together.

From another entry: ‘Dad hasn’t arrived yet. That’s strange. I’m watching TV. It’s 9.25 p.m. and Dad still isn’t home. I’m scared. Dad arrived (…) we played’. As suggested here, the diary entries reveal little beyond a child’s perspective on his daily existence. Beneath their apparent banality, however, they point to the extent to which his existence revolved around the expectation of seeing his father, and his terror at being left alone. The chronological sequencing of events and assiduous inclusion of dates and times before each entry brings to mind the ‘unfolding of a present-tense’ that Lane (2002, 46) has observed in relation to ‘journal entry’ films. As Habegger tells us in the film, despite not having any memories of the events of which he wrote, or indeed of the act of writing, he is aware that his former compulsion to register and archive his days was

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part of an attempt to secure a sense of reality at a time when his world was falling apart. As the diaries fail to activate any memories, Habegger turns to Flora, his mother, and two paternal uncles to help him piece together his past. Through these conversations, Habegger learns that his parents separated due to his father’s militancy and that, after going underground and moving houses every week, Flora was eventually found and kidnapped by military agents. After her release, she fled with her son to Mexico and Norberto visited them there four times before disappearing. These conversations between Habegger and his mother are shot with fluid camerawork and close-ups that create a sense of intimacy, a two-shot framing conveying their emotional closeness and tension. Extreme closeups draw attention to Flora’s unease as she tells her story, a stylistic choice that reminds us that, when it comes to trauma, the past is rarely a finished business, but always part of the ‘here and now’. In psychotherapy, the construction of a life narrative is one of the means through which clients work through trauma. Accordingly, Habegger tries to forge a solid narrative about his family’s past and make it real by imbuing it with sensations and images, as he explains in voiceover. He uses family photographs as clues to find his own memory sites, places charged with emotional and mnemonic significance. For example, he travels to Mendonza where he tries to locate one such site depicted in a photograph. When he stops at a road closure, he shows the photograph to a road guard and asks for help finding the location, which the guard identifies as Puente del Inca. Habegger then asks him if the place still looks the same. The guard points at the photograph and says: ‘It looks like that, but it’s all changed. That’s only a memory’. This naïve yet meaningful statement makes the director smile. There seems to be a recognition here that the whole film revolves around the idea that a photograph can ‘be’ a memory, or at least produce memory, but this is not the case. Indeed, when Habegger arrives at Puente del Inca, his memories continue to evade him, despite the photograph’s Barthesian ‘has been’ quality. He concludes the scene with a reflection: ‘Childhood disappears but the photographs remain, telling us that the moment did exist. But my memories don’t come. How do you film what is no longer there?’ This question informs his next trip, this time to Brazil, where he tries to investigate what might have happened to Norberto after his plane landed in Rio de Janeiro. In a visit to the state archive Memórias Reveladas,

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Andrés receives a large file relating to the Brazilian authorities’ persecution of his father in the 1970s, but it contains no information about his disappearance. Later in the same trip, Andrés is contacted by members of the Brazilian National Truth Commission with fresh information from testimony by a high-ranking Brazilian colonel. The testimony confirms that, as part of Operation Condor, an Argentine citizen was kidnapped in Rio de Janeiro, sedated and flown to Argentina, where he was sent to a clandestine detention centre. However, the citizen is unnamed, and Andrés’s quest remains therefore unsolved. He reflects on the paradox of making a film, a quintessentially visual medium, about absence: Rio de Janeiro is very attractive and tempting for the camera. I filmed the most beautiful images I found (…). But this city gives me a feeling of emptiness and I don’t know which images can convey this state of mind. I don’t know how to film an absence.

The lack of answers propels the director into a crisis. Back in Buenos Aires, he has another difficult conversation with his mother and interrogates her choice to have children. He then resorts to an old ritual of theirs and asks her to read him Tarot cards. As Flora explains, the card he picked is a signal of crisis and upheaval: Everything you’ve built collapses. While you try to work out the situation, it feels as though the world is crashing around you, everything vanishes, nothing is stable. You must close this chapter because it’s already finished. You need to start a new one. Understand?

A cut shows a home movie of the director playing with his two young children, as if in response to his mother’s statement. In voiceover, he says he is aware of what the new chapter in his life is about, but he must first return to Mexico to see the place where he was last photographed with his father. During a visit to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, he carefully calculates the spot where his father had stood for their picture and, with the help of a local photographer, tries to reproduce the image by standing on the very spot. Over a collage of the two almost identical photographs placed side-by-side, past and present, he concludes: ‘Maybe I wrote the diary to leave a record… so I wouldn’t forget. Now I think that the most effective way to remember something is to film it’.

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´ 9 Reconfiguring Trauma in El color del camaleon The idea that filming something can help us to remember it is equally central to Andrés Lübbert’s El color del camaleón. Indeed, for the Belgian-Chilean director, filmmaking is the only means through which remembering can occur. Despite having grown up in Belgium and being younger than Habbeger by over a decade, Lübbert’s career has many parallels with the Argentine director. Like Habegger, Lübbert has made many documentaries about the impact of the South American dictatorships on the second-generation, but this time focusing on Chile. In Búsqueda en el silencio/Search in the Silence (2007), Lübbert interviewed sons and daughters of Chilean exiles like himself to understand the impact that intergenerational trauma has had on their lives. As its title suggests, the film explores the difficult paradox that arises when a person’s need to know their own history clashes with their parents’ equally powerful need to forget a traumatic past. As one daughter explains, her ex-militant mother’s refusal to talk about her imprisonment in Chile caused a significant rift in their relationship. Towards the end of the film she describes the experience of intergenerational trauma caused by exile: ‘Psychologists tell us that the trauma that exiled people experience is transmitted over three generations. We are the second. Less traumatized than the first, but we have many things to resolve’. The desire to resolve the legacy of trauma in his own family motivated Lübbert’s following film, La realidad/The Reality (2009). The ten-minute short is based on a testimony written by his father as part of psychotherapy treatment received in 1979. As Lübbert explains, he received this document from his paternal uncle, Orlando. The testimony describes in detail the atrocities that Jorge suffered when he was a twentyone-year-old technician working for a state-owned telephone company in Santiago: he was abducted, taken hostage by agents of the Chilean secret service multiple times, and forced to work for them through torture and death threats to his family. As we learn via voiceover, despite not knowing about his father’s past, Lübbert grew up witnessing its tragic consequences, including Jorge’s insomnia, addictions, instability and long withdrawals from family life. Jorge never told his son about the causes of his trauma and his reasons for going into exile, and these silences damaged their relationship. In voiceover, Lübbert expresses his frustration and inability to grasp reality when the past remains unknown: ‘Can you tell me what reality is? Can you tell me what reality was?’. His constant

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alternation between Flemish and a heavily accented Spanish signals his sentiment of being torn between his Belgian identity and his unidentified Chilean roots. In a combative tone, he asks: ‘Why did my father lie? Or why does he not recall anything of this period, of this reality? (…) At first, everything seemed to make sense, when my uncle told me the story… I could put together the pieces of the puzzle. But now I don’t know what to think. (…) I don’t think I can leave this story behind’. The metaphor of the puzzle, referred to in this passage and reiterated visually throughout the film, conveys Lübbert’s need to find the missing pieces from his father’s past, much as Habegger attempted to do in El (im)possible olvido. After completing a master’s degree in audio-visual Arts in Brussels in 2010, Lübbert received funding to make his first feature-length documentary. He approached his father again and, this time, Jorge agreed to talk. When I asked Lübbert what might have prompted this change, he said that the possibility of making a film with an appropriate budget and professional crew reassured his father that it would be done ‘in the right way’, and by someone whom he trusted. Lübbert also believed that his father’s job as a war cameraman made him feel safer around a camera than anywhere else: For some people, the camera represents a barrier. In our case it was the opposite: it served as a sort of protection. When we were shooting, my father would talk, but as soon as I switched the camera off, he’d stop. After we completed the film, he never spoke again.

Trauma theory has repeatedly drawn attention to the importance of an ‘empathetic listener’ (Laub 1992; Jelin 2003; Heise 2015) in the act of bearing witness; indeed, such is the role that Andrés plays in this film. The analogy of the ‘visual therapist’ comes to mind, for Andrés does indeed combine the roles of director, therapist, and son. It is through his highly sensitive and empathetic approach that Andrés succeeds—partly, at least— in breaking through his father’s barriers of trauma-induced amnesia and begins the reconstruction of a horrific past. He opens El color del camaleón with a voiceover confession to his father that simultaneously informs us about the film’s purpose: ‘I never had the chance to really know you until today. We don’t have the relationship I would’ve liked to have had. (…) I tried to talk to you but your silence… I don’t know what to do with it. (…) This story started for me 12 years

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ago’. As in this example, the director frequently deviates from a strictly first-person narration to include a second-person address through which an imagined dialogue is established with his father. The confrontational tone formerly used in La realidad is replaced by a warmer, compassionate voice of the son turned visual therapist. As a further sign of his transformation, Andrés abandons his native Flemish to fully embrace Spanish, still accented but now fluent. The metaphor of the puzzle from the short film reappears here in a scene in which filmmaker leans over a pile of photographs, documents, letters and books scattered over the floor, like pieces of a past jigsaw waiting to be reassembled. Andrés explains that his quest began twelve years prior, when he first travelled to Chile to interview family members for his student project, Mi padre, mi historia (2004). Extracts from this short documentary, combined with home movies depicting the father–son relationship, convey the extent to which Andrés’s life has been marked by the incomprehensible behaviour of his elusive father and his own quest to understand it. The shooting of El color del camaleón started in 2012 in former East Berlin. We learn that that this is where Jorge arrived in 1978, after escaping Chile with the help of the German embassy. Andrés’s uncle Orlando, already exiled there at the time, recalls that when Jorge arrived he was psychologically and emotionally destroyed. Fast forward 35 years, Jorge’s return to the city triggers flashes of memories, but he still refuses to talk. The more his son probes, the more he evades: ‘I won’t talk about it now, in this corner. I’ll talk on another occasion, in another place’. (…) ‘No, I won’t say any more now (…) Give me some breathing space. This is not an interrogation, okay?’. This dialogue illustrates both the power dynamic whereby father and son argue over the control of the film (in a manner reminiscent of the daughter–father relationship in Dias com ele), and the dilemma faced by many directors in the diaristic mode: how far can we push someone to remember what they absolutely wish to forget? Jorge’s impulse to forget is foregrounded in scenes when he evades the camera, ignores questions, stares in silence or simply asks his son to stop filming. When they travel to Santiago to reconstruct Jorge’s trajectory, Jorge rebels and tries to take over the direction of the film. An experienced cameraman himself, he instructs Andrés on how to frame the shot, what to do with the camera, and so forth. When the director tries to interview him, Jorge walks out of the frame and takes the equipment. ‘I will interview you instead’, he tells Andrés, who simply smiles and lets himself be filmed. Andrés reclaims control over the images by superimposing his

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own voice over them: ‘We came here for you to tell me your story. Why won’t you speak? If I didn’t pressure you to speak, this would be a silent film’. Through these and other voiceovers, we have access to Andrés’s most intimate thoughts and feelings; namely, his desire to know his father and his frustration when this does not occur. Moreover, the voiceovers represent the conversations that Andrés wishes he could have with his father but does not. For instance: ‘I can’t seem to connect with you, you seem elsewhere…’; ‘When I touch your arm, I sense so many repressed feelings. Your natural reaction is to walk away, but you don’t have to, I’m here’. These examples further highlight Andrés’s qualities in his role as ‘visual therapist’: acceptance, empathy, patience and support. As the film progresses, this sensitive approach begins to take effect and Jorge finally breaks through the barriers of forgetfulness. As Jorge begins to remember and talk, however, his son-director becomes increasingly troubled and terrified. As in his previous film, Andrés turns to the testimony produced by Jorge during his therapy sessions in 1979. The content therein is so brutal that, as Andrés explains, the only way for him to process his own trauma is to ‘channel it into something and to interpret it’. This idea of reinterpreting traumatic memories or channelling them into a creative outlet is known in psychology as ‘positive reappraisal’, that is, the act of imbuing a painful experience with new meaning to render it more manageable. Accordingly, the very act of making a film can be understood as Andrés’s attempt to reappraise an intolerable past and create a narrative that he can at least partly control. It is perhaps not coincidental that, as Jorge’s memories come to the fore, Andrés’s directorial input becomes more imaginative and creative. He blurs the lines between documentary and fiction and uses the disturbing questions about his father’s past as the basis for an investigative thriller.10 Who is the chameleon of the film’s title? Was Jorge a victim or a perpetrator? Did he torture anyone? Did he kill? Such fears are expressed by Andrés in voiceover: I used to think your story was similar to that of your exiled friends: a revolutionary, a dreamer. But then I realized your story was different and difficult to understand (…) I’m afraid of what I may discover, but I need to know the truth (…) What were you capable of? It’s difficult to see you as someone potentially dangerous.

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As a lone detective, Andrés follows the leads provided by the letters, documents and photographs scattered in his apartment. A Chilean voice actor is hired to perform Jorge’s younger self by reading his testimony. The film acquires a darker tone, with suspenseful music and dim lighting to convey the director’s dread. Gradually, the facts about Jorge are revealed, complete with all the thriller tropes: kidnappings, captivity, political conspiracy, cover-ups, psychopathic criminals, secret agents, spies and the like. Once Andrés understands that his father’s collaboration with DINA was not a choice, but a survival strategy, the film resumes its diaristic tone and the Lübberts turn their attention to the most difficult part of their quest: the physical and psychological torture that Jorge endured as part of the sadistic training programme to dehumanize him and force him to collaborate with the Chilean state. They visit the sites where these atrocities occurred, including clandestine detention centres and a morgue where Jorge recalls being forced to witness the torture and dismemberment of victims’ bodies. Supported by the ‘visual therapist’, Jorge does not simply recall these experiences, but works through them in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, that is: after each recollection, Jorge and Andrés reinterpret events in the light of new knowledge and rewrite their narrative. This process of narrativization is not unlike the therapeutic process undergone by Jorge in 1979, during which he produced his testimony. But this time, the medium of film allows a further elaboration through sound and images. For instance, during their visits to each site, point-of-view shots emulate Jorge’s gaze while relevant extracts from his testimony are read by the voice actor. Remediated images and footage from various sources, including Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Jorge’s own videoart film Día 32/Day 32 (1982), serve to illustrate the psychological warfare that state agents used to desensitize Jorge and strip him of all moral reference.11 In voiceover, Andrés provides the kind of compassionate summarizing statements used by psychotherapists when helping clients to reframe their circumstances: It must have been extremely hard for you to stare death in the eye when you were so young. To know that some individuals had the power to decide over other people’s lives, and you were powerless to do anything about it… like a movie unfolding before your eyes. You can’t change it; you can only watch it.

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I have argued elsewhere that although the concept of ‘working through’ has most frequently been associated with individual processes of recovery, it can also have political implications (Heise 2015). Accordingly, the political implications of Jorge’s and Andrés’s working through are highlighted in their visits to the places where Jorge was tortured, now turned into memorials. Michelle Balaev’s (2008, 159–160) argument about the importance of place in trauma literature is also useful here. She has argued that an attention to place offers new ways to examine the broader social and historical implications of trauma and move away from the dominant psychological model which sees trauma as exclusively psychological. As she has argued, places are spaces imbued with meaning. This perspective helps us to understand that a site like the Villa Grimaldi memorial, used in the film as a setting for Jorge’s traumatic recall, is a place heavily loaded with personal, cultural and historical significance. The Lübberts’s visit to this site therefore represents the convergence of many layers of memories: individual, transgenerational, collective, national and historical. Responses to traumatic events often make the protagonist turn inward in their struggle with the past, yet this ‘inward glance’ is typically paired with a growing awareness of the external world. In this way, as Balaev (2008, 164) writes, ‘trauma is both a personal and cultural experience linked to place because the reorientation of the self is paired with a re-evaluation of one’s relation to society, thus expanding the identification between self and world’. In El colór del camaleón, Jorge’s remembering occurs in places that have been radically transformed since his departure. Through Chile’s decades-long process of reckoning with the past, many former torture camps like Villa Grimaldi were transformed into public memorials where atrocities committed by the state were duly acknowledged and the dignity of victims restored. The film illustrates the importance of this process of re-signification to help individuals like Jorge re-evaluate the meaning of their own experiences and begin to restore their relationship to society. This point is reiterated when Jorge and Andrés join hundreds of Chileans on the streets of Santiago in a public commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the military coup. They walk alongside demonstrators carrying anti-dictatorship banners and artwork, chanting ‘Justice! Truth! No to impunity!’. The chants and banners remind us that, despite its tragic uniqueness, the Lübbert’s family history resonates with those of thousands of other victims of state violence. As if to stress this idea, a series of long-shots show Andrés’s and Jorges’s bodies merging with the

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mass of protestors decrying the injustices of the country’s not-so-distant past. These connections between the personal and the political are highlighted again towards the end, when father and son walk into the Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos, a major locus in the struggle for memory in the Southern Cone. There, they talk to Javier Rebolledo, a journalist who specializes in human rights violations. The camera highlights the political context of this conversation by filming Jorge against the backdrop of the museum’s iconic floor-to-ceiling mural made up of thousands of photographs of victims of the dictatorship. As with Balaev’s (2008) suggested attention to place, these and other sequences shot on location reinforce the sense of a shared trauma and imbue Jorge’s memories with new meaning through greater awareness of the wide scale of institutionalized violence and repression.

Inaccessible Pasts in Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil The intersections between family stories and national history are also the focus of Carol Benjamin’s Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil. The director explores the long-lasting impact that her father’s imprisonment has had on the rest of the family by establishing a parallel between two inaccessible pasts, her father’s and her country’s. As she explains via intertitles: My country has historical documents that are still untouched and kept in a sort of black box. A black box, as I’ve always called my father: someone who has locked the past inside himself. Most of the evidence of what happened during the dictatorship has been destroyed. An entire cache of documents remains inaccessible, to this day.

Connections between family and nation, private and public, personal and political, are reiterated throughout the film, in a manner that resonates with Lane’s ‘self-portraiture’ documentary. Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil relies on a range of media sources to reconstruct the past: home movies, personal letters and emails, archival material, newspaper clippings, television footage and old family photographs. Faced with her father’s refusal to speak about the past, these media become the key leads in the director’s quest. Central among them is an old tape recording from a Swedish television news report. Shot in 1976, the tape

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shows her uncle Cid on the runway of an airport; he runs towards a figure descending from a plane (Cesar, who would become Carol’s father) and they embrace at length. Carol has spent much of her life trying to understand her father’s mysterious past. The little she knew came from her paternal grandmother, Iramaya. As we learn in the film, when Cesar was arrested for his antidictatorship activities in 1971 at the age of seventeen, Iramaya abandoned her life as a ‘quiet, law-abiding mother’ to become a fierce human rights advocate for his survival and release. Further extracts from the Swedish television report summarize the story: despite being too young to stand trial, Cesar was sentenced to thirteen years in jail, of which he spent three and a half in solitary confinement. Iramaya’s relentless campaigning finally yielded results when, pressured by Amnesty International, the Brazilian authorities released him in 1976. Cesar was banned from the country and flew to Stockholm to join his brother Cid in exile. Like many films in the diaristic mode of remembering, in Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil the journey into the past is both figurative and literal. The first journey we see is Cesar’s, in 1976, as captured in the remediated footage of the Swedish news report. In 2016, at the time of the film’s shooting, Carol herself travels to Sweden where she tries to reconstruct his life in exile. She explains her goal through a voiceover reading of an email sent to Cesar: Rio, February 2016… I’m going to Sweden for the movie (…) I’m going to visit the Amnesty International Office and look for images relating to your case. I feel enthusiastic, but have mixed feelings, as always. Frustrated with everything I wish I could share with you but cannot. I don’t want to disrespect your decision not to participate in the film, and I hope this email doesn’t come across as insistence. I’m going to Stockholm to retrace your steps, and if you could give me some leads, I am open. How do you feel about these questions? Your loving daughter, Carol.’

As suggested here, there are many similarities between Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil and El colór del camaleón, specifically the director’s attempt to gain closeness with an elusive father and her gentle, persuasive approach. A notable difference, however, is Cesar’s refusal to participate. In an interview for the BBC, Carol has explained the dilemma she faced when Cesar announced that he not only refused to participate

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in her film, but wished she wouldn’t make it. She feared repeating something that her grandmother had done in the past, albeit unwittingly, as she took control over Cesar’s experiences and became an unauthorized spokesperson for his life story. Yet, as Carol explained, her need to make the film was too compelling to ignore. A few months into the project, she watched the live broadcast of the impeachment vote that ousted President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016. In it, a still relatively unknown congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, justified his vote by paying homage to the man who had tortured Rousseff during the dictatorship. This event reinforced Carol’s understanding of the importance of making her film not only for herself, but for many Brazilians who ignored their country’s criminal past. Despite his unwillingness to participate, Cesar responded to Carol’s email with the requested information about his life in Stockholm. This is read by the director in voiceover as she travels to each location where he lived, and films it. Some of these scenes are shot in blurry Super 8, thereby giving us the impression of an old homemade movie, as if Carol were trying to recapture Stockholm the way her father himself had experienced it. At the Swedish branch of Amnesty International, she receives a large file with documents and photographs, and speaks to case workers who supported her grandmother’s struggle to save Cesar. One such worker, U.N. human rights expert Thomas Hammarberg, describes Iramaya as a ‘one-woman version of all the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo’, an allusion to the fact that, unlike her counterparts in Argentina, Iramaya acted alone, without the support of a grassroots movement. Through these interviews and extensive archival material, the film depicts Iramaya’s campaign which culminated with her son being selected Amnesty International’s ‘prisoner of the year’ in 1976 and, through the attention that this generated, led to his release. Carol then turns her attention to an unexpected consequence of Iramaya’s work with Amnesty International: her lifelong epistolary friendship with one of its members, Marianne Eyre. Through a series of conversations shot in Marianne’s home in Sweden and the voiceover reading of letters written by Iramaya, Carol begins to understand her family’s complicated history. Her grandmother’s letters initially focused on Cesar’s imprisonment, but increasingly came to reveal other aspects of her personal life, including the breakdown of her marriage and, some years later, the existential crisis she experienced when her sons finally returned from exile. The extent to which Iramaya lived through her sons,

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especially Cesar, becomes apparent in her minute descriptions of his time in prison. She describes the sadistic treatment to which he was continually subjected, his loneliness, psychological deterioration and struggle to stay sane by observing the habits of insects and lizards in his cell and obsessively counting calendar days. The director reconstructs this disturbing narrative by juxtaposing the voiceover reading of the letter with sounds and images that emulate Cesar’s experience. This strategy is comparable to Lübbert’s thriller-like interpretation of his father’s testimony, but this time, the cinematic conventions are closer to those of an avant-garde horror film. For instance, as the director reads about her father’s confinement, a blurry and amorphous figure turns into a sliver of light under a door, followed by images of ghost-like shadows and insects crawling over decrepit walls. On the soundtrack, shrieks and eerie music contribute to the disturbing quality of these scenes. The horrors that Cesar endured in prison were never spoken about to the rest of the family. Carol reveals that, although she understands his intention to protect and separate them from the past, the legacy of trauma was nonetheless transmitted. She juxtaposes old family movies and historical footage to emphasize the ways in which the silences in her family became the manifestation, on a micro-historical level, of Brazil’s difficulty in reckoning with its own past. For example, footage of Carol’s second year birthday party in 1988 is intercut with footage of the ceremony that introduced Brazil’s new constitution that same year, a key step towards democracy but also a symbol of the reconciliation politics that ensured the impunity of perpetrators. Carol’s reflection on the ways in which her personal story was shaped by the country’s political history becomes particularly explicit in the final sequence, introduced via intertitles informing us of Jair Bolsonaro’s infamous 2016 speech in which he lauded a known torturer. The intertitles bring this event up to date: ‘In 2018, that same congressman was elected president on a military ticket that celebrates the memory of the dictatorship’. A cut takes us to a sequence shot via a camera attached to Carol’s body as she swims with her son in the open sea. The innocence and playfulness of her child, captured in a continuous point-of-view shot, contrasts with the gravity of her speech, which is simultaneously addressed to her sons, like a letter, and to her future self, in diary fashion.

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Rio, 28 October 2018. (…) When you were born, I had to look backwards. I did that to stop certain silences from creeping in between us and overruling our house, like they did between my father and my grandmother, between my father and me. Like they did in our country. Silences erase memory, they seal pacts of forgetting or forgetfulness. Silences are the roots of great family pains; they burn bridges between people, between countries and their histories. We need to regain the power to narrate ourselves. To open the black box and tell our own stories, rebuild our memories, reconstruct our collective unconscious. So that the past won’t haunt us anymore. Neither inside our house, nor outside.

With this last sentence, the camera pans from the child over to the beach, showing people and houses in the distance, as if to reiterate the film’s continuous movement from the inside to the outside, from the private to the collective.

Concluding Remarks With reference to Habegger’s analogy of the ‘visual therapist’, I have alluded to the idea of filmmaking as a process akin to therapy, that is, the therapeutic qualities of making a documentary about one’s own relationship to a violent past. Such qualities have been highlighted by many directors themselves. For instance, by the end of El (im)posible olvido, Habegger comes to terms with the lack of memories from his childhood and turns towards the new chapter in his life, conveyed through his onscreen interactions with his young children. The sequence suggests that, despite his failure in retrieving memories of his childhood, the process of making the film has nonetheless brought about positive change. Similarly, Lübbert closes El colór del camaleón with a statement about the personal transformation he underwent in the course of making of this film: ‘I learned Spanish, I became Chilean. I’ve not only found a new connection with my father, but also with myself’. He has further elaborated on these transformations elsewhere, by stating that the film helped him ‘to cure in great measure’ his own trauma and that shooting the film with his father had been ‘a healing experience for both of us, and as a result, we also became much closer than before’ (in Traverso 2018, 10). Carol Benjamin has similarly stated that the process of making her film resulted in a more open and healthier relationship with her own children (BBC 2021).

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Films are, of course, not therapy, and with rare exceptions (e.g., René Ballesteros), filmmakers do not have formal training in psychology. I borrow Habegger’s metaphor of the ‘visual therapist’ simply to highlight the many parallels between psychotherapeutic processes and the diaristic mode of remembering, including: the centrality of intimate conversations about a conflictual past; the sustained focus on the psychological and emotional effects of trauma; attempts to work through trauma via recall and narrativization and the quest to improve relationships and re-establish affective bonds that have been disrupted by catastrophic historical events. This attention to psychological phenomena in the diaristic mode calls to mind a concern that many scholars, including Lebow (2013, 258), have identified in relation to first-person documentaries: is the rise of such atomized modes of self-expression indicative of a neoliberal culture marked by extreme individualism and a self-absorbed preoccupation with the self? Lebow confronts such charges by inviting us to interrogate the ways in which first-person documentaries are, indeed, political. It is not within the scope of this chapter to assess the political value of first-person documentaries in general, but if we narrow the question to films in the diaristic mode, the answer is clear. Through the personal lenses of a director’s life experiences, these films tell us about the ongoing consequences that repressive political regimes have had on victims and society more widely, and the perils of societal forgetfulness. As well as addressing politics in their content, these films are political in the sense that they ‘enact politics’ (Lebow 2013, 258–259), that is, they put into practice the memory politics led by survivors, victims’ relatives, and human rights and grassroots organizations since democratic transition. Furthermore, many of these documentaries invite us to critically assess the leftist revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s and interrogate what has become of their collective aims in the present. Hence, as I have demonstrated, far from simply being an outlet for the selfexpression of individual experiences, diaristic films help us to understand the ways in which individual traumatic experiences emerge from broader historical forces and resonate with the experiences of many others. The sequences that connect the personal and political dimensions of experience (for instance, when Habegger goes to the archives of Memórias Reveladas where his father’s file is kept alongside those of thousands of other victims of Operation Condor, or when the Lübberts join street demonstrations in Santiago), function as a call for us to understand that trauma has important societal and political implications, as does the act of

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talking about experiences of terror and abuse. After all, as Schauer et al. (2005, 4–5) have argued, post-conflict peace and reconciliation hinge on the willingness of individuals to remember and to tell the truth about terrible experiences, as well as the willingness of societies to listen. Whereas all post-dictatorship films enact memory politics by bearing testimony to a violent past, what distinguishes the diaristic mode is the filtering of all elements and information through the filmmaker’s personal lens. The voiceovers, point-of-view shots, intertitles, onscreen presence of the director remind us that everything we hear and see originates from a subjective viewpoint. The value of this approach lies in the invitation for us to learn about the past from a very specific, embodied and partial perspective. We learn about historical events as they have been lived by a small number of persons whose experiences we come to know intimately through in-depth access to their subjectivity. In other words, they draw upon what Balaev (2008, 155) has called, in the literary context, ‘the trick of trauma in fiction’: an individual protagonist expresses a unique personal experience at the same time that she represents events historically experienced by a larger group or society. Accordingly, films in the diaristic mode employ one of the main tenets of fiction, the personalization of a story and its conveyance through a protagonist or small number of characters. In so doing, they provide viewers with the ideal conditions for us to develop a strong empathetic response to their experiences, referred to by Smith (1995) as ‘levels of engagement’: emotionally compelling stories, a recognition of the protagonists’ subjectivity and spatio-temporal alignment with their experiences.12 Furthermore, our awareness that the protagonists of these films are not fictional, but historical subjects who have indeed survived the experiences described, arguably adds a further layer of empathetic engagement. In our interview, Habegger described the strong emotional responses to his film in Brazil and Argentina. The post-screen discussions and Q&As generated a sense of shared experience and encouraged many spectators to come forth with their own memories of the period. ‘They responded to the intimate, confessional climate of my film… By showing my own vulnerability and telling my story, I may have encouraged them to become vulnerable too. Many viewers saw their own stories reflected in my film’. Similarly, after screenings of El colór del camaleón in Chile, Lübbert met

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with audience members eager to share their own experiences of the dictatorship: ‘Their reactions were diverse but all very intense. (…) I must have received hundreds of hugs from very emotional people, not only torture victims but also children of victims and even children of perpetrators’ (…) (in Traverso 2018, 9–11). Lübbert believes that first-person documentaries like his have been effective in promoting an intergenerational dialogue, a point also touched upon by Flavia Castro in our interview. She commented on the overwhelming praise that Diário de uma busca received among university students. Many of them reported to her that, after seeing the film, they finally ‘got’ what the dictatorship had been all about and how it must have felt like to have lived through it. As one spectator put it, ‘Your film makes us feel like we are in it’. These examples illustrate Rascaroli’s (2009, 191) claim that first-person documentaries give rise to a dialogue with the spectator, or what she refers to as ‘a shared space of embodied subjectivity’. Building on this point, Lebow (2013, 258) has argued that when a documentarian makes a film about a deeply personal theme, ‘s/he is at once speaking for and about him/herself, while speaking to and with much larger and indeed politically relevant and resonant collectivities. Moreover, s/he can be said to be addressing an even broader audience with the potential for identification that transcends such particularisms’. It is her view that the first-person mode of documentary ‘creates the ground for an engagement with, if not participation in, a collectivity much larger than the self’ (Lebow 2013, 258). Therefore, it could be argued that is because of and not despite their focus on intimate, personal experiences that films in the diaristic mode have the potential to mobilize viewers, generate solidarity and, possibly, promote an ethical and political stance. A final aspect worth noting in relation to the diaristic mode is the insistence of filmmakers in pursuing memories in circumstances in which remembering seems impossible, such as individual amnesia (self-imposed or involuntary), fossilized family secrets, recalcitrant witnesses, collective denial and the like. Perhaps the most vital way in which these diaristic films enact memory politics is through their assertion that combating oblivion is necessary even if memories are imprecise and incomplete. It is better to remember imperfectly and incompletely, than to not remember at all.

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Notes 1. In a previous study I have demonstrated the key role that women filmmakers have played in developing first-person approaches to documentary in the region, with a focus on Brazil. See Heise (2020). 2. For an overview of the various state-led incentives, policies and legislation introduced in the 1990s to promote the film industries in the region, see Tamara Falicov’s Latin American Film Industries (2019). She demonstrates that in most Latin American countries the state has remained the main source of funding and support through organizations such as Brazil’s National Film Agency (Ancine) and the National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) in Argentina. She also addresses the role of tax incentives and legislation to promote partnerships between state and private sector. 3. Zuzanna Pick (1987) has estimated that, between 1974 and 1987, 155 films were produced by Chilean filmmakers exiled in sixteen countries. The number of exiled directors from Argentina and Brazil was comparably smaller. 4. For an analysis of the film, see DiGiovanni (2012). 5. Alejandra Almiron has elaborated on this point elsewhere (Gómez 2015). It is also noteworthy that Blaustein has helped to produce many films made by younger directors, including Roqué’s Papá Iván and Habegger’s (H) historias quotidianas. 6. The word ‘resemble’ is important here. Films are not therapy, as directly expressed by many directors themselves. For instance, in our interview, Castro stated that she sought the support of her film to ensure the necessary level of detachment. Berger-Hertz has stated that his goal was to make a film, not family therapy (Pressbook Mi vida con carlos ). 7. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur (2004) writes about the carefully crafted strategies of elusion and evasion that serve to protect the self against the return of unbearable memories. Indeed, one of Ricœur’s most relevant contributions in this influential work is the dialectical relation he establishes between memory and forgetting: forgetting is not the opposite of memory, and every act of remembering implies forgetfulness.

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8. Throughout the film analyses I may refer to the directors by their first name to avoid confusion with other family members featuring in the film. 9. I will refer to Andrés Lübbert by his first name to avoid confusion with Jorge Lübbert, his father. 10. In an interview published at the time of his film’s release, Andrés stated that he had been partly inspired by the Oscar-winning Das leben der anderen/The Lives of Others (2006), which depicts the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the STASI, the secret police of the former East Germany. As he watched the German thriller, his suspicions that his father had been spied upon by the STASI increased (Fredes 2017a, b). 11. Jorge Lübbert made this and other experimental shorts when he was a student in Louvain. Through a montage of war footage and advertising images, Day 32 conveys the recurring nightmares and ensuring mental breakdown of an incarcerated individual. 12. To understand the way viewers respond to characters in fiction films, Smith (1995) has pointed to three ‘levels of engagement’ that correspond to a range of cognitive, emotional and attitudinal responses. ‘Recognition’ refers to the information that allows the spectator to recognize characters as individual narrative agents. The second level, ‘alignment’, refers to ‘the entire range of possible articulations of spatio-temporal attachment and subjective access’ to characters, that is, all techniques through which a film aligns the spectator with the experiences of the character, including POV shots, voiceover narration, extreme close-ups, flashbacks, emotive music and so forth (Smith 1995, 143). ‘Recognition’ and ‘alignment’ are the pre-conditions for the third level of engagement, ‘allegiance’, which pertains to the empathetic response spectators develop in relation to a character as a result of their emotional investment and positive moral evaluation.

References Balaev, Michelle. 2008. Trends in Literary Trauma Theory. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41: 149–166. BBC. 2021. What My Father Wouldn’t Tell Me. Outlook. Available at https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09hmf4b. Accessed 14 Feb 2022.

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DiGiovanni, Lisa R. 2012. Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Chile: Gender and Nostalgia in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 21 (1): 15–36. Falicov, Tamara. 2019. Latin American Film Industries. London: Bloomsbury. Fredes, Rodrigo. 2017a. Andrés Lübbert, cineasta: “Tenemos derecho a preguntarles a nuestros padres qué pasó” La Juguera. Available at https://lajugueramagazine.cl/andres-lubbert-cineasta-tenemos-derecho-apreguntarles-a-nuestros-padres-que-paso/. Fredes, Rodrigo. 2017b. Andrés Lübbert, Cineasta: “Tenemos Derecho A Preguntarles A Nuestros Padres Qué Pasó”. https://lajugueramagazine.cl/ andres-lubbert-cineasta-tenemos-derecho-a-preguntarles-a-nuestros-padresque-paso/. Accessed 31 May 2023. Gómez, Natalia Castro. 2015. La pulsión del montaje: entrevista con Alejandra Almirón. Revista Montaje, 4. https://www.revistavisaje.co/la-pulsion-delmontaje-entrevista-con-alejandra-almiron/. Accessed 31 May 2023. Heise, Tatiana. 2015. The weight of the past: Trauma and testimony in Que bom te ver viva. New Cinemas 13 (2): 107–122. Heise, Tatiana. 2020. Women’s memories of political violence in Brazilian cinema. In Gender-Based Violence in Latin America and Iberian Cinemas, ed. Rebeca Maseda García, María José Gámez Fuentes, and Barbara Zecchi, 26–42. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29: 1. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2003. State Repression and the Struggles for Memory. London: Latin American Bureau. Lane, Jim. 2002. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press. Laub, Dori. 1992. ‘Bearing witness, or the vicissitudes of listening’. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–73. New York: Routledge. Lebow, Alisa. 2012. Introduction. In The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, ed. Alisa Lebow, 1–11. London: Wallflower Press. Lebow, Alisa. 2013. First Person Political. In The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, 257–263. London: BFI & Palgrave. Pick, Zuzana. 1987. Chilean Cinema: Ten Years of Exile (1973–1983). Jump Cut 32: 66–70. Pick, Zuzana. 1990. Chilean Documentary: Continuity and Disjunction. In The Social Documentary in Latin America, ed. Julianne Burton, 109–130. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Piedras, Pablo. 2011. Modos de explicar el mundo histórico en documentales argentinos de las últimas décadas. Política y História 8 (2): 210–223. Pressbook. Mi vida con Carlos. DVD, Cine Directo.

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Prividera, Nicolás. 2014. El país del cine. Córdoba: Los Ríos. Rascaroli, Laura. 2009. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower. Ricœur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schauer, Margarete, Frank Neuner, and Thomas Elbert. 2005. Narrative Exposure Therapy: A Short-Term Intervention for Traumatic Stress Disorders After War, Terror, or Torture. Gottingen: Hogrefe & Huber. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Traverso, Antonio. 2018. Post-Dictatorship Documentary in Chile: Conversations with Three Second-Generation Film Directors. Humanities 7 (8): 1–16.

Filmography (H)historias cotidianas /Quotidian Stories. 2001. Andrés Habegger. Argentina. 70 y Pico. 2016. Mariano Corbacho. Argentina. A Clockwork Orange. 1971. Stanley Kubrick. United States. Búsqueda en el silencio/Search in the Silence. 2007. Andrés Lübbert. Belgium, Chile. Calle Santa Fe/Santa Fe Street. 2007. Carmen Castillo. Chile, Belgium, France. Das leben der anderen/The Lives of Others. 2006. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Germany. Día 32/Day 32. 1982. Jorge Lübbert. Belgium. Diário de uma busca/Diary of a Search. 2010. Flávia Castro. Brazil. El (im)possible olvido/The (Im)Possible Forgetting. 2016. Andrés Habegger. Argentina, Brazil. El color del camaleón/The Colour of the Chameleon. 2017. Andrés Lübbert. Chile, Germany, Belgium. El pacto de Adriana/Adriana’s Pact. 2017. Lissette Orozco. Chile, Colombia. El padre/The Father. 2016. Mariana Arruti. Argentina. Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil /I Owe You a Letter About Brazil. 2019. Carol Benjamin. Brazil, Sweden. Imagen Final/The Final Image. 2009. Andrés Habegger. Argentina, Chile, Sweden, Denmark. Journal Inachevé/Unfinished Diary. 1982. Marilu Mallet. Canada. La ciudad de los fotógrafos /The City of Photographers. 2006. Sebastián Moreno. Chile. La quemadura/The Burn. 2010. René Ballesteros. France, Chile. La realidad/The Reality. 2009. Andrés Lübbert. Belgium. M . 2007. Nicolás Prividera. Argentina.

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Mi padre, mi historia/My Father, My Story. 2004. Andrés Lübbert. Belgium, Chile. Mi vida con Carlos /My Life with Carlos. 2010. Germano Berger-Hertz. Chile, Spain. Os dias com ele/The Days with Him. 2013. Maria Clara Escobar. Brazil, Portugal. Papá Iván/Father Iván. 2004. María Inés Roqué. Argentina. Si viviéramos juntos /If We Lived Together. 1983. Antonio Skármeta. Germany.

CHAPTER 6

Imagined Pasts, Possible Futures: The Playful Mode of Cinematic Remembering

Witness testimony plays a crucial role in all cinematic modes of remembering. Yet, as we have seen, the way this device is used and the purpose it serves varies significantly: in the informative mode of remembering, testimony is treated as a transparent account of historical events with the goal of generating knowledge and understanding about the past; in the reflective mode, bearing witness is shown as a process, contingent upon and shaped by the concerns and priorities of the present; the diaristic mode similarly focuses on the operations of memory through testimonial accounts but, in this case, remembering is a profoundly personal experience, painful but necessary for uncovering family secrets, rebuilding shattered identities and working through trauma. The playful mode, to which I now turn, also concerns bearing witness, but it distinguishes itself by disrupting the ‘truth-telling’ status of testimony and focusing, instead, on the more imaginative and creative aspects of remembering. Films in the playful mode suggest that memory requires the investment of imagination, creation and even a degree of fiction. They focus on the subjective and fluid nature of memories, as do films in the reflective and diaristic modes, but whereas these latter two approach the past with solemnity and gravitas, the former is characterized by a ludic, sometimes irreverent attitude to the dictatorial past that invites us to remember more freely. Irreverence in this case does not necessarily imply disrespect © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_6

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or contempt, but rather a desire to openly challenge prevailing norms and expectations about how the past should be remembered. Sometimes, this entails forgoing historical fact altogether to imagine how the past might have been. For instance, in Bettina Perut’s and Iván Osnovikoff’s El astuto mono Pinochet contra La Moneda de los cerdos/The Clever Monkey Pinochet versus La Moneda’s Pigs (2004), the directors invited groups of children, teenagers and university students to reconstruct Chile’s military coup d’etat through a series of improvised performances. The discordant sketches that resulted from this experiment were considered so brutal and disturbing that the film was declined by the television station for which it had been commissioned, rejected for funding by FONDART, Chile’s National Fund for the Development of Culture and Arts, and delayed for release, which had been originally planned for the twentieth anniversary of the coup. As Perut has noted, the film turned out not so much as the ‘encounter with memory’ they expected, or as the commemorative piece of work planned by its funders, but as ‘a perverse game’ (Pinto 2007). The idea of reconstructing the past as a game or experiment was also central to Rodrigo Siqueira’s Orestes (2015), a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy ‘Oresteia’ to the Brazilian context. Siqueira convened two groups, survivors of state violence during the military regime and victims of police violence in the contemporary period, to highlight the historical continuities between then and now. Like ‘Oresteia’, the film comprises three parts: in ‘Betrayal’ participants recounted their stories through testimony; in ‘Revenge’ they re-enacted real or imagined confrontations with their perpetrators; in the final act, they participated in a fictional trial with other non-actors, including a criminal defence lawyer and a prosecutor, to dramatize the kind of justice proceedings Brazil has failed to produce. As in Perut’s and Osnovikoff’s experiment, in Orestes the boundaries between memory, fiction and imagination become indistinguishable and the group dramaturgy work produces cathartic and unexpected effects. Another example of how the playful mode fuses art and politics is El tío/The Uncle (Mateo Iribarren 2013), played and produced by Ignacio Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is the nephew of one of Chile’s most controversial figures, Jaime Guzmán (1946–1991), a former close adviser of Pinochet’s and the ideologist of the 1980 Constitution. In the film, Santa Cruz plays the role of ‘Ignacio’, a playwright and director whose sole ambition is to produce and star in a play about his notorious uncle. However, the feat proves impossible as the cast members’ opposing political views

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and sentiments about the past generate chaos and discord. One climactic sequence dramatizes Guzmán’s assassination by a leftist guerrilla group on 1 April 1991 in the exact location where it occurred. Through a playful combination of different media and genres (theatre, autofiction, bio-pic, docudrama) El tío constructs an allegory of the enduring divisiveness left by Pinochet’s dictatorship in contemporary Chile. The characterization of these films as playful may seem to clash with the seriousness of the topics they address, including state violence, institutionalized torture, transgenerational trauma, forced exile, political assassination and disappearance. However, as Alexandra Effe and Arnaud Schmitt (2022) have observed in relation to auto-fictional novels, the genre is often used in a productive and meaningful way to tackle serious issues and provoke emotional engagement.1 Moreover, as I will demonstrate, playfulness here refers not only to the film’s subject matter but to an approach that freely challenges the boundaries of what can be remembered and how we remember. My choice of the term was partly inspired by director Flávia Castro when I asked about her decision to make a second film focusing on her family history. She explained that after making Diário de uma busca/Diary of a Search (2010), she wanted to revisit her past ‘more freely and playfully’. Accordingly, whereas with Diário de uma busca she investigates and charts her family history, with Deslembro/ Unremember (2018) she playfully recreates it by layering fiction over autobiographical events. Moreover, in line with other films in the playful mode, Deslembro places greater value on nonnarrative and nonrepresentational forms of memory, such as sensations, emotion and affect.2 Lúcia Murat expressed similar views when I asked about her approaches to filmmaking; she argued that, when making a documentary, she tries to remain true to fact, but with fiction she has the freedom to invent, imagine and distort. As I will demonstrate below, with Ana. Sem Título/ Ana. Untitled (2020), she combines both approaches, freely mixing fact and invention. Finally, the term is also inspired by Jordanna Blejmar’s (2017) understanding of it. She describes a cultural trend whereby ‘young contemporary artists and writers, many children of disappeared and persecuted parents (…) use humour, popular genres, children’s games and visual techniques commonly taught at school to provocatively represent the dictatorship and toy with trauma’ (2017, 2). Through ‘playful memory’, the novels, blogs, testimonial artworks, plays, documentaries and photographs produced by members of Argentina’s post-dictatorship

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generation have ‘changed the whole panorama of mourning, remembering and representing trauma over the past decade or so by offering playful accounts of the past and of the self’ (2017, 2). Blejmar identifies some traits that particularly distinguish these works from previous accounts of Argentina’s authoritarian past: humour, a ludic aesthetics, and autofiction. As I seek to demonstrate in this chapter, these traits are present not only in Argentine post-dictatorship works but elsewhere in the Southern Cone, at least where cinema is concerned. Blejmar has linked the rise of ‘playful memory’ to the coming of age, in the early 2000s, of sons, daughters and relatives of victims of the dictatorship. She paraphrases Ernst van Alphen’s commentary on post-Holocaust art to argue that ‘with the arrival of the post-dictatorship generation, playing with the Argentine traumatic past is no longer unthinkable’ (2017, 2). One of her case studies is Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios /The Blondes (2003), which charts the director’s attempt to make a documentary about her parents, both Peronist militants disappeared by the Argentine military forces when she was 4 years old. Carri represents her traumatic past through ludic and self-reflexive strategies, for instance: she recreates her parents’ disappearance as a science-fiction tale of extraterrestrial abduction using Playmobil figures and stop-motion animation; she represents herself twice in the film, both through an actor playing the auto-fictional Albertina, daughter of the disappeared, and through her own self-inscription as Albertina, film director. In one scene, she reads and mocks a letter received from INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Visuales) informing her that her request for funding was rejected because the film does not meet its criteria for memory politics: ‘this project (…) demands to be revised with greater documentary rigor’. The final sequence shows Carri and her small crew in the countryside, wearing blond wigs and walking towards the horizon. The wigs could be read as a way of mocking the unreliability of testimony (one witness interviewed in the film remembered Carri’s family members as blond, when they were all in fact dark-haired); the walk towards sunny fields is suggestive of Carri’s desire to project herself onto the future, rather than be defined by her painful past. As Nouzeilles (2005, 275) has observed, the inclusion of her crew in this sequence points to the ‘promise of a new, flexible community, based on friendship and dialogue’. In a similar vein, Sosa (2011, 79) has interpreted the closing sequence as Carri’s enactment of ‘a dream that invents its own future’. As I will demonstrate, the view of memory as Janus-faced—facing backward and towards the future—is

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an underlying feature of the playful mode. Like Los rubios, other playful films suggest that it is less important to have precise and total knowledge about what has occurred than to understand the various conflicted meanings assigned to the past and how they shape our relation to the present and the future. Many critics have praised the pioneering role that Carri and other filmmakers of her generation have had in advancing new approaches to memory. Indeed, as we have seen in Chapter 5, the coming of age of the post-generation has resulted in the arrival of new voices on the political scene and a renewal of memory discourses. Nonetheless, I would argue that beyond the age and biological ancestry of filmmakers, other factors have encouraged filmmakers to develop a playful mode of remembering, namely, their artistic background and their aesthetic and political concerns. The temporal distance gained from the dictatorship is yet another determining factor that has encouraged filmmakers, regardless of blood links or age, to experiment with ludic approaches. For instance, Argentine multi-media artist Lola Arias, whose Teatro de guerra/Theatre of War (2018) focuses on ex-combatants of the Malvinas/Falklands war, has stated that this film, and the wider project from which it originated, is a product of its time and could not have been made any earlier due to the nature of the memories it addresses: ‘The time that has passed was necessary (…). Now [the veterans] are in the final stage of a cycle that enables them to see what the war did to them, the consequences of this event that marked their lives. From this perspective, I believe that the film is about this passing of time, and the time of this artistic process’ (Cruz 2018). The importance of temporal distance from events filmed has also been mentioned by Castro, who waited until her mid-forties to turn her camera onto the painful events that impacted her youth (interview with author). Wider political developments in the country were also decisive for the timing of her films. When Castro started filming Diário de uma busca, Brazil was undergoing an unprecedented process of reckoning with its dictatorial past, and by the time she conceptualized Deslembro the National Truth Commission was well under way. The extensive media coverage and public discussion that followed encouraged filmmakers like herself to feel less of a need to ‘document the truth’ and freer to experiment with memory and imagination, as she went on to do with Deslembro. This statement also applies to Lúcia Murat, herself an ex-revolutionary, whose film Ana.Sem Título openly challenges the ‘truth-status’ of witness testimony in a manner that would arguably not have been possible before

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the National Truth Commission. My contention here is that once the facts about a country’s violent past have been investigated, verified and elucidated, playing with historical memory becomes less of a risk because the difference between truth and falsehood (i.e., revisionist theories) has been established. In what follows, I examine these three films more closely to demonstrate the ways in which they invite us to approach the past freely, playfully and imaginatively.

Autofiction and Sensory Memory in Deslembro Deslembro centres on Joana, a teenager living in Paris with her Brazilian mother, Chilean stepfather and two half-brothers. The year is 1979 and the Brazilian government has just passed the Amnesty Law allowing political militants like her mother to return. Against Joana’s will, the family moves to Rio de Janeiro where she is forced to adapt to a reality she can barely remember. Gradually, however, certain places and situations trigger flashbacks of her father, a leftist militant disappeared by the military forces. Parallel to a coming-of-age tale centred on Joana’s adolescent world, the film charts her political awakening to Brazil’s dark past through her memories of her father. Such a recovery of the past is anything but straightforward. Joana’s memories are disjointed, confusing and elusive, an effect cinematically conveyed through techniques borrowed from experimental cinema, including montage, blurring, fade-ins, meshes and superimpositions.3 For instance, when Joana goes on a family hike in Rio’s Atlantic Forest, they get caught in a tropical storm. The action suddenly pauses, and the camera focuses on her eyes, nose and ears, a suggestion that her senses have captured something relevant. These shots are intercut with similarly extreme close-ups of rain drops, followed by blurry images. These same images reappear later in the film when Joana is decorating her new bedroom. She is fixing a sticker to the windowpane when, once again, the action pauses and the camera focuses our attention on her senses. The touch of glass on her fingers triggers a vision, depicted in flashback, of lashing rain on the windscreen of a car where she sits behind her mother. On the soundtrack a male voice states ‘Tiago has fallen’. The meaning of this flashback is only revealed later, when she bites a jaboticaba (a fruit native to Brazil). Like Proust’s madeleine, the taste triggers a wave of overwhelming sensations that slowly start to make sense to her. A close-up point-of-view shot of the round black berry meshes into another close-up

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point-of-view shot of Joana’s father’s round black pupil, at the centre of which she sees a tiny reflection of her younger self. In a soft, affectionate voice, her father says: ‘Joana, daddy’s name is now Tiago’. The way these scenes interrupt the narrative flow to represent sensation and affect emulates the way that sensory memory itself can intrude on the ‘here and now’ and make us seemingly relive a moment from the past. Indeed, one of Castro’s aims was to explore the nature of flashbacks and whether they are in fact memory, or something else (interview with author). Helped by her mother, Joana comes to realize that her flashbacks are a mixture of memory, fantasy and desire. Not unlike Habegger in El (im)possible olvido (see Chapter 5), the more she tries to remember her father, the more her memories become elusive and distorted. Hence Poglajen’s (2018) comment that Deslembro is ultimately ‘about memory, or the pieces of it that remain from a fragmented childhood, interwoven with imagination, which keeps playing tricks on the mind, falsely illuminating some images of the past and obscuring others, in addition to creating some of its own’. Such exploration of memory is emphasized in the film’s title, drawn from a poem by Fernando Pessoa that Joana reads aloud in two separate scenes: Deslembro incertamente. Meu passado. Não sei quem o viveu. Se eu mesmo fui, Está confusamente deslembrado (…). Não sei quem fui nem sou.

I remember uncertainly. My past. I don’t know who lived it. If it was me, It’s confusingly unremembered (…). I know neither who I am nor was.

The predicament here described is reproduced in the film: if the past is unremembered, how can we know who we are? Joana’s identity crisis, typical of adolescence, is further complicated by the disruption of memory caused by the trauma of her cultural displacement. Like Castro in real life, Joana moved from Brazil to Chile then France and back to Brazil. In the film, she continually switches from French to Portuguese and Spanish, sometimes in the same sentence. Her multilingualism brings to mind a scene in Diário de uma busca, an archival interview in which the director as a 14-year-old speaks to a Brazilian reporter in Paris. In her

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French-accented Portuguese peppered by Parisian mannerisms, teenage Castro offers eloquent opinions about life in exile and the recently passed Amnesty Law. When asked if she feels more French or Brazilian, she falters, a reaction that communicates her feelings of displacement more effectively than any of her words. Hence, through her fictional alter ego in Deslembro, Castro recreates the feeling of being torn between cultural identities. She also recreates the process whereby she eventually loosened her grip on her ‘Frenchness’ to become more Brazilian. In the film, Joana’s acculturation is facilitated through her boyfriend’s love for samba and bossa nova, her newly acquired and typically Brazilian habit of watching telenovelas (soap operas), and trips to the beach with her new friends. These picturesque shots of Rio, combined with extensive use of popular music and remediated extracts from telenovelas, generate a certain nostalgia for the early 1980s, especially for spectators for whom these cultural references feel familiar. But if nostalgia often means a sentimental yearning for an idealized past, Deslembro does the opposite: it re-imagines the past to confront aspects of it that remain painfully unresolved, specifically, the consequences of Brazil’s Amnesty Law.4 As we have seen, with Deslembro Castro aimed to revisit certain themes touched upon in Diário de uma busca. Of these, the contested meaning of amnesty is central. Her earlier film depicted her father’s spiralling into depression after he returned to Brazil from exile in 1979. The film contrasted his growing despair with the euphoric atmosphere in the country: for most Brazilians, including many leftist revolutionaries like himself, amnesty was perceived as a victorious step towards re-democratization. As Diário points out through voiceover readings of his letters and the director’s own observations, such a perspective largely ignored (or chose to forget) facts of which he remained acutely aware, namely, the end of all hopes for a more egalitarian society, the defeat of the Left and the military government’s use of amnesty as a tool to control the terms and conditions of democratic transition. With Deslembro, Castro revisits the post-amnesty period from the less politically informed, but equally emotional perspective of her auto-fictional teenage self. Joana sees Brazil as ‘a country that tortures and kills’, but where people nevertheless organize parties in airports to greet those returning from exile. The clash between such a festive mood and Joana’s feelings of displacement is reinforced in a scene when the family attends a party for ex-militants in a beautiful house set against the backdrop of the Corcovado hills. The scene effectively conveys the disparity between the teenager, seated quietly in a

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faraway spot, and the partygoers she observes from a distance, all of whom appear to enjoy the music and chatter, oblivious to her agony. Although Joana’s feelings are never voiced, the imagery and sounds invite us to understand, and perhaps reflect on, the loneliness and isolation experienced by those like her, for whom amnesty failed to wipe away painful losses. In a broader sense, the scene points to the paradox of an Amnesty Law that, in the name of social peace and the reconciliation of enemy citizens, effectively forced political dissidents, survivors and victims’ relatives to forget past atrocities and live as though nothing had occurred (see Chapter 2). Such ‘commanded forgetting’ through amnesty is, of course, not unique to Brazil, as Paul Ricœur has demonstrated with reference to many historical cases. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur characterized amnesty as one of the ‘abuses of forgetting’ located only a short step across the boundary from amnesia (2004, 452–453). As a type of imposed forgetting, it deprives public opinion of dissent and condemns competing memories to ‘an unhealthy underground existence’ (2004, 455), a description that illuminates Castro’s father’s deteriorating mental health when his political beliefs found no means of expression. In Deslembro, similar feelings of malaise and displacement are experienced by the teenager. Indeed, her compulsion to recollect her disappeared father could be interpreted in terms of Ricœur’s mémoire empêchée, the persistent memories that arise when ‘imposed forgetting’ forces one to live as though nothing had happened. Furthermore, as the film highlights her sense of alienation, it points to another more devious form of forgetting that occurs when authoritarian governments seek to control narratives of the past through intimidation, seduction or fear: ‘forgetting by avoidance’, a strategy of evasion ‘motivated by an obscure will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the harm done by the citizen’s environment, in short, by a wanting-not-to-know’ (2004, 449). Accordingly, Joana’s impulse to recollect continually clashes with a ‘wanting-not-toknow’ stance in her social circles, including her schoolteachers, friends and, in particular, her mother, for whom talking about the past is simply too painful. The timing of Deslembro is significant: it was released in Brazil weeks before Jair Bolsonaro became president and in a context of growing support for the political far right, including demonstrations in favour of the return of a military dictatorship. For many left-wing critics, Castro’s

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film was interpreted as a commentary on the country’s problematic relationship with memory. Arguably, the protagonist’s distress upon realizing that her need to remember is met with the blank ‘wanting-not-to-know’ of those around her seems to mirror the agony that many Brazilians have felt as they watched a self-proclaimed defender of the dictatorship gain support and become president. Hence why, despite focusing on the postAmnesty period, Deslembro was received first and foremost as a warning about the country’s political future. After all, to paraphrase Pessoa, if the past is unremembered, how can we understand who we are or indeed where we are headed?

Performing Trauma in Teatro de guerra An award-winning writer, playwright and film director, Lola Arias is renowned for her intermedial approach and a desire to combine documentary and fiction.5 She gained international acclaim with the plays Mi vida después (2009) and El año en que nací (2012) in which adults born under the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships compared their childhood memories and reconstructed their parents’ lives using photographs, video projections, puppetry, letters, audio recordings and family anecdotes. In relation to these plays, Blejmar (2017, 105) has observed that Arias’s work is characterized by the use of theatre as a medium to ‘recover lost or blocked memories’, with dynamic performances in which ‘life feeds theatre and theatre has concrete effects on the lives of the performers’. Such features are present also in her first feature-length film, Teatro de guerra, the culmination of a five-year project working with former combatants in the Malvinas/Falklands war (1982). The project originated in 2014 with an invitation for Arias to participate in the London-based LIFT Festival After a War. She contributed with the video installation Veteranos /Veterans, in which five Argentine veterans performed their memories of the conflict in the places where they currently work, using props and people from their present context. This was followed by the bilingual play Campo Minado/Minefield (2016), also published as a book, which retained the same concept. This time, however, Arias brought together veterans from both sides of the conflict and asked them to collaboratively re-enact their memories and experiences of the war. She auditioned over a hundred veterans before deciding on six: Royal Marines Lou Armour, David Jackson and Ghurka soldier Sukrim Rai, from Britain; conscripts Marcelo Vallejo, Rubén Otero and Gabriel

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Sagastume, from Argentina. The play premièred in London’s Royal Court Theatre before circulating in Argentina and eighteen other countries. Footage of the casting, rehearsals and production served as the basis for Teatro de guerra, which reworks aspects of the play while also introducing new scenes. The film consists of a series of auto-fictional sketches in which veterans re-enact their own memories with the collaboration of other members of the cast and crew. As this overview indicates, Teatro de guerra is marked by a strong degree of transnationalism. As well as featuring an international cast speaking three different languages (Spanish, English and Nepali), it was co-produced with European and Argentine funding and premiered simultaneously in Berlin and at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, after which it was screened around the world.6 In Veronica Perera’s (2019, n.p) words, Arias’s project ‘transnationalized’ the Malvinas/Falklands war by turning the veterans into ‘global performers’ who translated their memories into a meaningful experience for audiences of various nationalities. Yet, despite these transnational features, the embeddedness of the project in the specific Argentine context should also be considered. The Argentine government’s mismanagement of the South Atlantic conflict was a key contributing factor to the downfall of the dictatorship, as seen in Chapter 2. Once the country returned to democratic rule, human rights organizations and families of deceased soldiers identified continuities between the military dictatorship’s criminal tactics and its alleged ‘clean war’ on the islands, namely: the punishment and harsh discipline to which soldiers were subjected in military facilities that resembled clandestine detention camps; the lack of adequate training and resources, including food; systematic gross negligence leading to fatalities; censorship and repression by, for instance, prohibiting returning soldiers from forming associations or disclosing any information about what they had witnessed at war (Perera 2017). When ex-combatants started to organize themselves politically in the mid-1980s, they incorporated the human rights discourse that had gained traction after the publication of the Nunca Más report in 1984. Such humanitarian discourse helped the civilian population to gain awareness of certain aspects of the conflict that had been obscured by previous nationalist sentiments, but nonetheless repeated the same strategy whereby the ‘innocence’ of victims became the central point. The young age of combatants (the majority were aged

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between 16 and 18) further contributed to their characterization as ‘innocents’, as Federico Lorenz (2015, 276) has argued: ‘the Malvinas soldiers shared with their compatriots the leading role that the discourse of the transition began to assign, uncritically, to civilians: victims of dictatorial power, with the addition of being young’.7 Such exaltation of innocence and victimhood shut down the possibility for ex-combatants to publicly express aspects of their experience that did not fit with this view. Moreover, it reinforced the logic of warfare whereby the enemy—in this case, the British—is construed as less than human, or evil. A shift in the way the conflict was perceived by Argentines occurred between 2003 and 2015, when the successive administrations of President Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007) and President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner (2007–2015) reopened discussions on the question of the sovereignty of the Islands in the United Nations’ Committee for Decolonization, and in regional institutions such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Union of South American Nations. Perera (2017, 302–5, 2019) has referred to this period as ‘malvinización’, a growing interest in, and acknowledgement of, aspects of the conflict that had been downplayed or excluded from previous accounts. As part of this shift, she points to the creation of the Secretaría de Asuntos Relativos a Malvinas (Secretary of Topics Related to the Malvinas) and the inauguration, in 2014, of the Museum of Malvinas and South Atlantic Islands on the grounds of the former Escuela Mecánica de la Armada/ The Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA), a memory site that came to symbolize state terrorism and repression. The period also saw a veritable explosion of plays, films, novels and photography works about the Malvinas.8 Hence, when Arias started to work with former combatants, she was not alone in seeking to represent memories of the conflict, nor was she even the first to invite a veteran on stage to perform his own memories.9 Nonetheless, her project has remained unique for its ludic tone, its intermediality and the unprecedented decision to forge an onstage collaboration between former war enemies. The controversial nature of this decision led many institutional funders to reject the project, as she recalls: ‘The government had no problem with a work about Malvinas veterans (…). But they didn’t want to listen to the other side’ (Perera 2017, 304). It was only after securing funds from European sources that she persuaded INCAA and the Universidad General San Martín to offer

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their support. Some reticence was expressed by the performers themselves, who felt uneasy working with their former adversaries and feared how they might react (Cruz 2016). As Arias explained on this occasion and many others, however, she had no desire to produce a politically or historically informed account of the war: ‘I don’t want you to tell me the whole story of the war; I just want to you to tell me the memory that stays in your mind. The image you can’t get rid of. The ghost that is following you. The flashback that comes to your mind’ (Bither 2019). Hence, the question that informs Teatro de guerra, and indeed the trilogy as a whole, is not what happened in the war, but how veterans remember traumatic events and how their memories continue to shape their lives in the present. In what follows, I draw upon some of the sketches to examine how these questions are addressed in the film and how it contributes to a playful mode of remembering. Halfway through Teatro de guerra, the protagonists gather around a swimming pool accompanied by a female translator. Some of them do warm-up exercises, others rest with their feet in the water. The colours of their bathing suits, floats and the mise-en-scène evoke those of the British and Argentine flags, as if to remind us that the intimate stories performed in these sketches cannot be separated from the transnational conflict that gave rise to them. Marcelo walks to the centre of the frame and starts to tell us, in Spanish, about a road trip he made with other Argentine veterans in 2002. As he recalls, he had been taking medication for depression and insomnia, and when they set up camp by a reservoir, he mixed pills with alcohol and jumped into the water, knowing that he couldn’t swim. Marcelo then re-enacts his own suicide attempt by jumping into the pool. Lou and David immediately follow and, in the roles of the two friends who saved him, drag him out of the water. Marcelo sits on the edge of the pool and resumes his story: ‘After that trip, I came to this swimming pool and learned how to swim. I was forty years old’. He then stands up, puts on his googles and dives into the water, this time with the composure of a professional swimmer. Arias has frequently stated that her work is not about the past, but about the present and about how trauma survivors now work through what happened back then. As she has said, ‘the present is made up of pasts, and there is no such thing as drawing a line in the sand as if to say: “now we’re done with the past and it’s time to look for our future”’

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(Kan 2014). The idea of a ‘present made up of pasts’ is well captured in Marcelo’s sketch as it superimposes four moments in his life: his time at war, manifested through his reported insomnia and depression; his suicide attempt; his move towards recovery and the present, when his physical and psychological transformation is evidenced by his athletic body and graceful diving. The performative act emphasizes that Marcelo’s healthy, fifty-something year-old body carries the trauma he has experienced and worked through in the past. In other words, his present is indeed ‘made up of his pasts’. The idea of a time-travel machine, evoked by Arias elsewhere is also useful here. As the director has explained, ‘We see these men as they are now in their 50s and we also catch a glimpse of their younger selves, those young men in their late teens and early twenties who went to war’ (Gardner 2016). This quote invites us to consider an aspect of her trilogy that makes it so exceptional: the veterans not only co-authored and co-directed their own mnemonic sketches but, through their performances, embodied different temporalities of their ‘selves’. As Teichert (2020, 1113) has observed, their bodies stand as testimony to the past because ‘they constitute the very matter of the memories they enact’. This coincidence between the body of the performer and the subject of the performance points to a different way of bearing testimony through embodiment, remembering with the body. Many critics have praised the originality of this approach, but also raised ethical objections. Blejmar (2016) and Teichert (2020) have observed that asking trauma survivors to revisit their traumatic experiences may risk re-traumatization, while Maguire (2019) has drawn attention to the dangers of turning their suffering into a voyeuristic spectacle. As discussed in previous chapters, trauma is a response to an event or series of events so overwhelming that they cannot be processed in the normal way, remaining therefore ‘dislodged’ from narrative memory and returning to the individual in the form of symptoms. Arias’s metaphor of the time-travel machine to describe dramatic performances could equally be used to describe the way PTSD symptoms disrupt the survivor’s experience of time, making them experience emotions and sensations of the past as if they were occurring in the present. Hence, trauma and performance are both characterized by repetition, and both make themselves felt ‘affectively and viscerally in the present’ (Taylor 2003, 167). Such effects are highlighted in Teatro de guerra when one of the veterans auditioning for the film reads out his poem:

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I can’t go to bed. Because the things in my head. Make it hard to fall asleep. It’s like it happened today. And it won’t go away. Don’t ask me to try counting sheep.

In the same auditioning sequence, another British veteran displays a photograph of a pair of clouds that, according to him, look just like the Falklands. These and other sketches highlight the extent to which the war remains present in the minds of ex-combatants. The paradox of trauma, whereby events are simultaneously disconnected from memory and impossible to forget, is expressed in a range of other ways: scars and tattoos on their bodies; mementoes kept like treasure troves of the war; songs, anecdotes, drawings and paintings. These symbolic representations highlight the veterans’ unwillingness to draw a line and be done with the past, an idea complicated in the case of trauma because traumatic memories cannot ‘be done with’, even when one wishes it to be so. In the light of these considerations, is it reasonable to invite trauma survivors to revisit their most painful memories and re-enact atrocities for an audience? I have used the analogy of time-travel to highlight the similarities between PTSD symptoms and the film’s auto-fictional performances, but there are important differences. In the former, the survivor retains a sense of defencelessness as the time-travel is undesirable, involuntary and uncontrollable. In the latter, the encounter with the past is a choice, as veterans take ownership of their memories and control their own narratives. Significantly, their memories are ‘repeated without repetition’, that is, each time a traumatic event is narrated and performed, it is transformed and re-signified. As seen in Marcelo’s sketch, he twice jumps into the water, but a clear distinction is established between then and now as he transforms his suicidal jump of yesteryear into a slow, elegant dive in the present. Moreover, the sketches are performed with the support of other veterans who take turns role-playing each other’s memories. The term ‘supporting actors’ gains a double meaning here to imply not only participation in someone else’s story, but the way in which the performers empathetically listen and attend to one another’s experience. In her analysis of Campo Minado, Blejmar has concluded that the play mitigates its own ethical risks by forging empathy in two directions: the

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veterans establish an empathetic bond between themselves, and the audience empathizes with the experiences of the performers. In turn, Erika Teichert (2020) has pointed to the parallels between Arias’s work and dramatherapy, a type of group therapy in which clients re-enact personal problems with the participation of other members to foster empathy, understanding and validation. I find such a conceptualization particularly useful because it not only illuminates the potential benefits of re-enacting trauma but also underscores one of the key arguments in this chapter: the value of playfulness in remembering past atrocities. Dramatherapy is defined by the British Association of Dramatherapists on their website as ‘a method of working and playing that uses action methods to facilitate creativity, imagination, learning, insight and growth’. Pioneers of this practice recognized that theatre, like play, is a vital form of reflecting upon and reacting to reality while remaining apart from it. Just as children play out events that they have witnessed in order to master and come to terms with them, in dramatherapy ‘play is a part of the expressive range which can be drawn on in creating meaning, exploring difficulties and achieving therapeutic change’ (Jones 2007, 161). In the experimental space of dramatherapy then, participants temporarily step out of their daily lives and try on new ways of being, without irreversible consequences. They become co-creators and playmates engaging creatively for a particular purpose with whatever role they are cast into, or choose to play, a dynamic similar to Teatro de guerra. In highlighting the potentially healing and affective powers of collaborative performance, I am not suggesting that Arias’ project was conceived with therapeutic intentions, nor that the veterans’ participation in it helped in their recovery; indeed, Arias herself has stated that she does not make art to ‘cure’ people (Herrero 2021). Rather, my goal here is to draw attention to the reasons why playfulness can be a valuable strategy in addressing trauma: it allows for a more flexible and imaginative attitude towards events, consequences and held ideas. Some of the core processes of dramatherapy are deployed in the film, including roleplay, soliloquy and witnessing, as illustrated in the swimming pool sketch, as well as projection, dance, movement and humour, in other sketches. For instance, through projection, Gabriel uses toy soldiers and a miniature landscape to reconstruct his memory of a fatal explosion in a minefield which, he later discovered, had been set by the Argentines themselves. Sukrim expresses his feelings of isolation and homesickness through martial arts movements, while in a surreal and darkly humoured

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sequence set in a nightclub, veterans dance around David as he performs a tongue-in-cheek striptease under a mirror ball. Whether their experiences are expressed through dance, monologue, poetry or song, these theatrical performances foreground memory as an ongoing negotiation, open to change and susceptible to reframing. The dynamic aspect of remembering is perhaps best articulated through the sketches focusing on Lou Armour’s recollection of a dying Argentine soldier in Mount Harriet. His memory is repeated four times throughout the film, each time distinctively. In the first sketch, Lou reenacts his fatal encounter in a derelict building with the support of other veterans. He kneels over the soldier, played by an inert Rubén, takes him in his arms and addresses the camera as he narrates: ‘He was speaking in English. He had a belly wound. As I was trying to console him, he began telling me about a trip to England… something about Oxford. And then he died’. Lou releases Rubén and watches him die. Halfway into the film, the same memory is performed during what appears to have been Lou’s audition for Campo Minado. He narrates the same events, but this time in a casual, almost perfunctory manner. The third repetition comes after a sequence in which the six protagonists interact with schoolchildren in a classroom. A schoolboy asks them: ‘Have you ever killed or seen someone die?’. As if in response, the film cuts to a close-up of Lou dressed in his Royal Marines sweater. After a silence, he recounts: ‘We found an Argentine with a belly wound (…) I went over, and he started speaking to me in English. He was telling me that he didn’t know why he was fighting, why we were fighting, either’. Lou then pauses and his face remains still. His voice continues on the soundtrack, disconnected from the image. Another cut reveals that the source of his voice is in fact an older documentary, Falklands War: The Untold Story (1987), featuring Lou in his thirties. Apart from his visibly younger face, the two interviews are almost identical in framing, camerawork and mise-en-scène. Through close-up, another difference becomes apparent: the emotions on younger Lou’s face are rawer, his eyes filled with tears. Too shaken to continue, he asks the reporter to stop. A cut takes us back to the present-day interview, where Lou’s emotions are more contained. He reflects on what it meant to have featured in that documentary thirty years ago: ‘I was a Royal Marine. For over thirty years, I felt guilty for grieving for a dead Argentine, instead of one of our own’. After further reflection, he concludes, somewhat coldly: ‘I could tell the story again about the dead Argentine, and it wouldn’t necessarily make me cry’. His calm and composed statement contrasts

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with the older footage in which he is visibly moved. Through repetition, then, and by inviting us to observe what changes and what remains the same in Lou’s performative recall, the film draws attention to his evolving relationship to his own experiences over time, or what Teichert (2020, 1138) has called ‘the shifting affective relationship between the body and its memories’. The fourth and final re-enactment of Lou’s memory serves as an epilogue for the film, introduced after a sequence in which six actors in their late teens and early twenties prepare to act as doubles for the protagonists. The young men dress in replica uniforms, get lookalike haircuts and interview their older counterparts. The epilogue itself starts as the two groups, veterans and young actors, walk into an open field where they set up an improvised stage. The younger men sit in a row and the veterans walk over a grassed bank where they start the re-enactment. A few seconds into the performance, the veterans stop and motion freeze. One by one, their younger counterparts walk to the stage and, with a gentle tap on the shoulder, give their respective veteran the cue to leave. The veterans do so and, in turn, sit in row to watch the younger men perform their memories of war. This epilogue contrasts two dramatherapy processes, embodiment and displacement. Embodiment, as we have seen, involves the act of experiencing the past in the present through movement, sensation and feeling. Displacement (or distancing, in Brechtian terms) is more orientated towards abstract thought, logic and reflection. As the veterans become observers of their own experience, they arguably gain new understanding and convert their memories into collective and national narratives, as Blejmar (2016) has written in relation to the play. Displacement could also be understood here as an act of handing over the responsibility to remember to the younger generations. The presence of young actors and children in the film is significant, for they represent Argentines born after the dictatorship, who are nonetheless responsible for ensuring that the Nunca Más retains some significance in the future. As Diana Taylor (2003, 21) has argued, performances are acts of transmission: they transfer communal memories, histories and values from one group or generation to the next. This epilogue, in particular, highlights the need to hand over the weight of traumatic memories, not only because the act is necessary for the psychological health of veterans, but because it is essential for the well-being of society as a whole.

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Arias’s audacious act of bringing together former war adversaries has granted her the label ‘the artist of the impossible’ from Spanish newspaper La Razón (2016), and ‘the most radical face of a war’ from La Nación (Cruz 2018). Commenting on these labels and based on her own experience as assistant to Arias on the project, Teichert (2020, 1142) has written that the five-year collaboration between the veterans has changed their identities in relation to war. Such change is hardly surprising and, in my view, relates to the kind of ‘transcultural memory’ discussed in Chapter 1. I have concurred with Törnquist-Plewa’s (2018, 302) suggestion that the concept of transcultural memory be reserved for ‘the hybridization of memories that not only occurs in the crossing of cultural borders but at the same time enables the imagining of new communities and new types of belonging’. Accordingly, one of the most prominent features in Teatro de guerra is the rise of a transcultural community based on the veterans’ shared memories of war and on the affective bond they developed by working together on the project. Such a bond is prominent even in sequences aimed at underscoring their differences. For instance, one humorous sketch simulates a language class in which the men try to communicate despite their limited vocabulary. After a friendly introduction, Marcelo and Lou enact the following exchange: Marcelo: Lou:

‘I am a soldier. Veterano de la guerra de Malvinas’. ‘Ah. Malvinas. Mi veterano del guerra de Falklands’.

They laugh in recognition of the political difference betrayed by their chosen terminology before proceeding with their clumsy attempts at bilingual conversation. Later in the film, the sense of a shared experience despite their adversarial position is foregrounded in sketches where veterans simulate acts of caring and helping one another’s psychological recovery by role-playing as psychiatrists and patients. Sentiments of identification, solidarity and belonging are further underscored through a punk-rock garage band performance. Written by the veterans themselves, the song expresses their shared feelings of anger and powerlessness in an aggressive, almost accusatory tone. Have you ever been to war? Have you ever killed anybody? Have you seen people die? Have you? Have you ever felt ignored by the people you fought for? Have any of your friends committed suicide? Have you spoken to a dying man? (…) Have you ever been to war? Have you?

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As the song continues on the soundtrack, images of their performance give way to archive footage of the festivities that celebrated the return of the British troops to England in 1982. The footage shows a cheerful crowd waving Union Jacks to welcome the soldiers, a patriotic hysteria that contrasts with the song’s angry outburst. This dissonance invites us to think of the unease those soldiers must have felt upon arrival, psychologically wounded and traumatized but with no space in which to express this experience. One critic from The Independent disliked this sketch and argued that the song felt confrontational, ‘with a divisiveness that feels false to the show’s spirit’ (Taylor 2016, in the context of the play). In my view, this is precisely the point of the sketch: to create a sense of communality among veterans to the exclusion of the audience, after all, the song articulates memories of extreme violence to which no civilian could relate. The transcultural identification that arises from the song is well captured in Teichert’s (2020, 1143) observation that ‘(t)he true difference does not lie between [the veterans] themselves, but between them and the general audience: unlike them, most of us have not been to war’. The song therefore underlines the veterans’ reframing of their relationship in terms of Chantal Mouffe’s (1999, 755) understanding of the ‘political’: ‘the “other” is no longer seen as an enemy to be eradicated, but as an “adversary”, i.e., somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question’. Arias’ work highlights the absurdity of war. By foregrounding the productive, joyful collaborations that arise between former adversaries, it destabilizes both the logic of the Malvinas/Falklands conflict and the patriotic discourses that shaped its remembrance. As we will see, the use of play and humour to address the senselessness of violence and its long-lasting repercussions is also present in Murat’s Ana. Sem Título, to which I now turn.

Playing the Witness in Ana. Sem ti´tulo Lúcia Murat is one of Brazil’s best-known film directors, with an extensive career that spans over three decades and a list of award-winning films. As I’ve written elsewhere, many of her films can be read as survivor narratives that respond, in some way or other, to her experience as a former leftist revolutionary and the violence to which she was subjected in prison (Heise 2015). Indeed, Murat has repeatedly addressed the atrocities of the Brazilian military regime onscreen, and with Ana. Sem título she

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revisits them again, but this time widening the scope to encompass the aftermath of dictatorship across Latin America more broadly. Like most of her work, Ana. Sem título was produced by Murat’s own company, Taigá Filmes, and screened in prestigious festivals across the world. The film is based on two interrelated threads: an investigation into Ana, a black Brazilian artist whose short but prolific career ended when she became a victim of forced disappearance in Pinochet’s Chile, and an examination of the region’s violent past. Accompanied by a two-person crew, Murat and actress Stella Rabello travel across five countries where they interview eyewitnesses and ‘experts’ (art critics, curators and historians) who describe Ana and other women who, like her, used art and often their own bodies to address dimensions of female existence and themes such as racism, homophobia and political violence. As suggested in this synopsis, the film’s subject matter is strongly transnational, as is its production. It was shot on location with the support of local crews in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. It is spoken in Portuguese and Spanish, with a soundtrack that combines local music including Cuban bolero, Argentinean tango and Chilean folk songs. The mode of narration is also transnational, with two cinematic genres recognizable by audiences worldwide: the road movie (albeit by air) and the ‘mockumentary’. Ana. Sem título cosplays as a documentary but is, in fact, mostly fictional. The eponymous protagonist is fictitious, and so is, to some degree, Stella, the actress who leads the investigation. Murat features as a fictionalized version of herself, a former leftist revolutionary turned cineaste who decides to film Stella’s journey as a way to ‘encounter her own generation’, as she explains. The film thereby plays upon Murat’s credibility as a director in its bid for legitimacy, in a way that brings to mind Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), or The Incident of Loch Ness (2004), with Werner Werzog. Like these two mockumentaries, and indeed like Carris’s Los rubios, Ana. Sem título plays with the idea of a ‘film-within-a-film’, with contributors featuring on both sides of the camera in their roles as director, actress and crew members. Yet, unlike most films of the genre, Ana. Sem título does not ‘mock’ documentary conventions for the sake of comedy, nor does it confront the conventions of post-dictatorship film in the same way that Los rubios does. Rather, Ana. Sem Título poses the following question: given what we already know about the atrocities of dictatorship, do we need more facts, or might we gain new understanding if we allowed memory to mix freely with imagination?10

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The film’s prologue takes us to the realm of imagination opened up by the exhibition ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985’, hosted by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2018. There we find Stella and Murat reacting to several artworks produced by established artists such as Brazilian Lygia Pape and Chilean Cecilia Vicuña Cecília, alongside lesser-known ones such as Mexican Maria Eugenia Chellet and Colombian Feliza Bursztyn.11 The pair are particularly struck by an installation titled ‘Donde están?’, a seemingly endless roll of portraits of detenidos desaparecidos that hangs from the wall and folds over itself multiple times as it reaches the ground. ‘Infinite’, Murat comments. ‘A never-ending list’, Stella concurs. As if to reinforce this point, the film cuts to a photographic montage of dozens of women who disappeared during the Brazilian dictatorship. Murat’s voiceover tells us: ‘In Brazil there are over 430 dead and disappeared during the dictatorship, many of them women. But in contrast to Chile, the perpetrators have never been prosecuted’. Murat then recollects an impoverished and frail-looking woman whom she met in the 1970s, whose daughter had disappeared. She tells us that the woman spent many years following the false trails provided by military officials, refusing to acknowledge that her daughter was, in all likelihood, dead. This sequence illustrates one of the film’s central propositions, that art can serve as a powerful means of knowing, and perhaps feeling, the past. Bennettt’s (2005) considerations about the ‘affective’ quality of art are helpful here. In the museum scene, Stella and Murat are visibility moved by the photographic installation. However, the artwork itself does not dictate how they should think or feel, it is their visceral response to it that activates their desire to remember and reflect, much in the manner that Jill Bennett (2005, 7) has described in relation to art-related trauma more generally. Like the installation ‘Donde están?’, many other artworks, performances and anecdotes in Ana. Sem Título does not seek so much to represent the past in a didactic manner, as to convey affect and encourage reflection on a tumultuous period. Such an invitation is made more explicit when, in conversation with a group of fellow actors, Stella expresses her excitement upon discovering that the artists from the ‘Radical Women’ exhibition exchanged letters during the period, some of which mention the Brazilian artist, Ana. Stella then reads a liberal translation from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and concludes: ‘É provável que a ficção contenha aqui mais verdade que os fatos’ (‘It is likely that fiction here contains more truth than the facts’).12 The misquote

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serves as an invitation for us to accept that although some of the film may be fantasy (like the letters she mentions), it can nonetheless communicate meaningful truths. The first leg of their journey is in La Habana. While Murat recollects her past as a leftist guerrilla, Stella enjoys the idiosyncrasies of the city to the sound of local music and the voiceover reading of a letter allegedly written by painter Antonia Eiriz in 1968, with clues about Ana’s time there. Similar travelogue sequences accompanied by the voiceover reading of letters mark the arrival of the crew in each of their subsequent destinations: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile and a small town in southern Brazil. These sequences generate a sense of cultural ‘locatedness’ (Radstone 2011) as they draw attention to the unique histories, architecture and sounds of each city, while also alluding to the wider, transnational experience of institutionalized violence and persecution. The letters serve both as a thread connecting these various locations, and as a roadmap that takes Stella to the experts and witnesses she interviews. These interviews are shot in a conventional talking-heads style, except that no information is provided about the interviewees’ names or occupation, as we might expect in a documentary. It soon becomes apparent that while some witnesses are indeed the persons they claim to be, others are actors performing a role. However, the film provides no apparent distinction between real and fictionalized testimonies and, to confuse matters further, some witnesses blend fact and fiction within the same testimony. In this way, Ana.Sem título becomes a charade of sorts, in which we either accept the play between fantasy and fact, or fruitlessly try to discriminate between the two. As we have seen so far, the indisputable authenticity of witness testimony has constituted the central pillar of post-dictatorship memory politics. At the core of every testimony is an implicit appeal for us to believe that the witness is telling the truth, every utterance prefaced by a silent ‘Believe me’ (Plant 2007, 44–46). Ana. Sem título defies this precept and turns it into a game, but it is not concerned with the epistemological and ethical problems surrounding testimony as a ‘truth-telling’ form, nor is it asking us to embark on the kind of doubt and cynicism that can lead to negacionismo, revisionist history. What the film suggests instead is that while some of its testimonies may not be factual or authentic, they point in the direction of certain truths, or realms of possibility, that can only be expressed through fiction.

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As an example of this strategy, in Buenos Aires Stella learns that Ana had befriended and collaborated with film director Maria Luisa Bemberg (1922–95). This information leads her to a woman who appears to have been Bemberg’s former producer and close friend. The woman is indeed film producer and director Lisa Stantic, but most viewers won’t know this unless they investigate beyond the film. Stantic’s reflections on Bemberg are illustrated with remediated archive images and footage from their short film El mundo de la mujer (1972) a satire of female objectification set in a hairstyling contest. The footage shows white, docile women quietly seated as stern-looking men manipulate their hair into ridiculous shapes. Cut back to the interview, Stantic confirms Ana’s collaboration with Bemberg with a barely discernible cheeky grin: ‘I heard a lot about Ana. I know she stopped working with film and ventured into the arts’. This information is corroborated with extracts from Ana’s and Bemberg’s alleged Super-8 films, including a sequel to El mundo de la mujer. The film is also set among hairdressers, but in contrast to the original, this time a woman is in charge: it is Ana who instructs the stylist, a black woman like herself, to shape her hair in the way that she decides: a bold Afro, as worn by the likes of Black Panther leaders at the time. Ana animatedly talks, smokes and laughs at the camera, clearly in control of her body and enjoying the experience. If Bemberg’s film pointed to the absurd manifestation of patriarchy in the world of hairdressing, this alleged sequel asks us to imagine how different the past might have been if only women had had more power. Through its seamless blend of documentary and fiction then, the film invites us to imagine several ‘what ifs’. What if 1970s feminist art had been less white? What if black women had been able to express their thoughts and ideas through their own art, or work collaboratively with their white counterparts? Following the Super-8 extract, Stella asks us to imagine a black version of ‘Mon Fils’ (‘My Son’), the controversial performance staged by Polish-Argentine artist Lea Lublin at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1968.13 In a graphic representation of this possibility, we see Ana play with a baby in his crib in a museum, the sight of which provokes an expression of disapproval in a white visitor. Stella concludes that the performance would not have been possible because, even if a black artist had been invited to perform in the museum, visitors ‘would have assumed she was the nanny, not the artist’. The centuries-old association between black female bodies and subservient roles is critiqued in another piece, the photographic installation that provides the film’s title. The series of

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auto-portraits ‘Ana. Untitled, 1986’ depicts Ana’s emancipation from the norms of a racist, class-based, patriarchal society. In the first portraits she wears a maid’s uniform and straightened hair, a suggestion of her compliance with expectations that black women should minimize their African features to look more ‘acceptable’ in the job market (Pinho 2007). In the portraits that follow, her uniform is replaced by casual clothing and her hair becomes progressively looser and kinkier. In the last portrait her emancipation is complete, as signalled by her striped turtleneck and full Afro à la 1970s ‘Black is Beautiful’. In this and other scenes, Ana emerges as a synthesis of all other female artists referred to in the film. These women were ‘fighters, audacious and strong (…) they imposed themselves and refused to submit to prevailing norms… but suffered with machismo’, as described by a witness. Ana is also the embodiment of the values and ideals of the 1960s’ leftist generation, as recalled by another witness: ‘Ana had a utopian vision of the world and she acted accordingly. These are the people who suffer the most’. Indeed, Ana’s art frequently alludes to the high cost that artists and activists like herself paid for defying the norms of authoritarian and misogynistic societies. For instance, in one such performance she displays in graphic detail a relatively fresh swastika-shaped scar on her thigh. This is intercut with a witness testimony according to which Ana was kidnapped and tortured by a militia in Argentina where, as another witness explains, ‘a black woman would become the target of violence very quickly’. This is then juxtaposed with remediated press clippings and Murat’s voiceover narration of the story of Soledad Barret, a young Paraguayan woman murdered by the Brazilian authorities. As we learn via the press items and narration, when Soledad was seventeen, she was captured by neofascists in Montevideo who used knives to carve swastika-shaped incisions on her thighs. The sequence concludes by taking us back to Ana’s video art: in her performance, a redress or homage to Soledad, she uses a brush and paint to slowly transform the wound into a beautiful tattoo, thereby reclaiming her body. The sequence exemplifies an extreme case of remediation: every element in it is remediated, or allegedly remediated: the video performance which, we are led to believe, was found by Stella; the archival material about Soledad Barret, retrieved by Murat; and even the swastika wound itself, reworked by Ana to evoke beauty and resistance in the artist’s own flesh. Like this performance, many others in the film allude to the female body as a site of oppression and subordination, and to the body of

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the artist as a site where agency can be reclaimed. Some performances convey black histories, including the trafficking of Africans to the continent as slaves, and the ongoing hostility against Afro-descendants in the contemporary period. In one such piece, Ana ritualistically covers her naked body with blood-red paint before placing an African crown on her head. In another, she wears a lucha libre mask of the kind used by Mexican artist Lourdes Grobet in her photographs of Mexican women. She then takes a large pair of scissors and cuts off the mask, only to reveal another mask underneath: the punitive iron muzzle worn by Anastasia, the legendary Brazilian slave tortured by her masters for trying to escape. Once the muzzle is removed, Ana opens her mouth to show her secret weapon: another pair of scissors, tiny but sharp, tied to her tongue. In this way, her art juxtaposes the violence against her body to the violence inflicted on hundreds of thousands, millions of black bodies before her, thereby highlighting the continuities between dictatorship, slavery and colonialism. Similar to the works displayed in the ‘Radical Women’ exhibition, Ana’s art is noteworthy not so much because of meanings they convey but because of their capacity to move Stella, and by extension, us. My description of these performances is insufficient because, like any verbal account, it cannot capture the sensations and affect provoked by them. Such reactions are deeply personal; we may experience wonder, curiosity, surprise, disturbance, recoil and a range of other feelings. As Bennett (2005) has argued, contemporary art dealing with trauma is nonnarrative and nonrepresentational: it does not seek to communicate an experience of violence and loss in the way that, for example, a testimony might do. Such art engages directly with sense memory, the lived, embodied experience. For Bennett, because art speaks directly to our senses, it can provoke a more effective empathic response and turn our attention away from trauma as a private matter, located in an individual’s psyche, to trauma as a widespread matter, present within a culture. She contrasts the operations of art and narrative film to explain that the former rarely configures traumatic experience in terms of characters with whom we can identify, nor does it offer an individual account of the artists’ experience. Hence her argument that the affective responses engendered by art are not born out of identification or sympathy, but from a direct engagement with sensation (Bennett 2005: 7). It is this affective quality, she argues, that contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and

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to a broader form of empathy that connects us to people whose experiences differ radically from our own. It can be argued that, through the insertion of artistic performances in a narrative, Ana. Sem título performs both operations. As a film that employs the standard conventions of plot, characters and setting in a verisimilitudinous manner, it invites viewers to attend to the traumatic experience of a character with whom we identify. At the same time, the linear narrative flow is continuously interrupted by the artistic performances, which invite a different quality of engagement from us, more affective and contemplative. However, although there are certain mechanisms in the film that enable our identification with the characters, mainly Ana and Stella, there are also self-reflexive strategies that encourage distanciation. For example, Stella frequently breaks the illusion of realism by addressing the camera directly and posing questions for the spectator in a Godardian manner that prevents us from becoming emotionally absorbed. We are reminded of film’s artifice each time a nameless witness is introduced, inviting us to question whether their testimony is factual or fictionalized. Finally, while we may experience sympathy for Ana, her construction as a collage of many women and the lack of sufficient biographical information may prevent us from achieving the levels of recognition and alignment required for us to establish an effective moral engagement with her of the kind theorized by Smith (1995). Through her art, Ana’s subjectivity is politicized, and her body becomes the site where the traumas of an entire culture seem to unfold. In this way the film turns our focus away from trauma as a private phenomenon and invites to see it as a political matter, pervasive in Latin America. The choice of a black protagonist is significant, particularly in the context of Brazil, where blacks have been notoriously underrepresented in the media in general, and in post-dictatorship cinema in particular. As we have seen, Ana’s blackness serves to highlight the continuities between institutionalized forms of torture under dictatorship and the violence of slavery. Indeed, as many scholars have argued, for the black population the dictatorship represented more continuity than rupture, and this point is brought up to date by the film’s only black crewmember, sound technician Andressa Neves.14 In an improvised scene when Murat and crew reflect on their personal memories of the dictatorship, Andressa states: ‘For us, the dictatorship never ended’. Her perspective is reinforced in a later scene when she reveals that she was the only passenger stopped

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and searched at the São Paulo airport, where she was then subjected to a four-hour interrogation by a group of policemen. As this example suggests, the film draws connections between the atrocities of dictatorship and the violence of other periods, including the present. These connections through time and space, and the juxtaposition of artworks and material sourced from various Latin American cultures, can be conceptualized in terms of Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ (2009). Rothberg coined the term to suggest that, rather than understand memory discourses in competition with one another as if in a hierarchy of importance, we focus instead on the ways in which these discourses can enable and illuminate one another. Indeed, as Murat herself has observed, memories of Latin American dictatorships are often placed in competition, as if the extent of state crimes in one nation could somehow diminish or undermine the crimes committed elsewhere (interview with author). This logic is aptly illustrated by the expression ‘ditabranda’, according to which the Brazilian dictatorship was ‘bland’ because it did not produce as many victims as Chile or Argentina. With Ana. Sem título, Murat refutes this fallacy and reminds us that these dictatorships are not easily distinguishable and that they emerged transnationally, cross-referencing and in dialogue with one another. Furthermore, the film highlights that these various dictatorships were, from the start, inflected by the legacy of slavery and colonialism, in the manner that Rothberg (2014, 176) has proposed we think about events from the twentieth century. For instance, in Mexico Stella visits a photographic exhibition focusing on the Tlatelolco massacre that killed many unarmed civilians, mostly students, who were protesting the upcoming 1968 Olympics. In voiceover, Murat connects the massacre with the police repression of student protests in Rio a few days before the city hosted the 2016 Olympics. ‘The history of Latin America repeats itself’, she observes. Further connections are formed in Argentina, where the pair join a demonstration by the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo whose participants range from young children to elderly citizens. Through their chanting, the protestors claim that the old anti-dictatorship motto ‘Memory, truth and justice’, printed on their banners, remains relevant today: ‘Alerta, alerta, alerta que estan vivos! Todos los ideales de los desaparecidos!’ (‘Alert, alert, alert because they are alive! All the ideals of the dissapeared!’). The film visually reinforces the connection between past and present by editing together images of banners alluding to yesteryear (‘30.000 dead and disappeared!’) and denunciations of political violence

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today, including a poster claiming justice for Marielle Franco, a black councilwoman murdered in Brazil in 2018, and the unlawful detention of a Peruvian Tupac Amaru activist, Graciela Lopez, in Argentina the same year. The film’s closing sequence, an epilogue in which Ana is transported to present-day São Paulo, is a final illustration of Rothberg’s idea that multidirectional memory has ‘the potential to generate new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice’ (Rothberg 2009, 5). Ana joins six other women in a circle outside the Pinacoteca Museum in São Paulo and together they perform a SLAM adaption of Peruvian Victoria Santa Cruz’s poem ‘Me Gritaron Negra’, which in fact echoes many of the sentiments and experiences expressed by the artists of the ‘Radical Women’ exhibition within the Pinacoteca building. They clap and chant the riff ‘Se eu pudesse voltar eu voltava… NEGRA!’ (If I could return, I’d return… a BLACK WOMAN). Ana looks at each woman in turn as she rhythmically recites the following verses, all of which evoke the experiences of real-life women, including Dora (Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcellos, whose story features in Anita Leandro’s 2014 film Retratos de identificação/Portraits of identification, discussed in Chapter 4) and Marielle Franco, mentioned above. The last verse, a direct reference to Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–22), positions us firmly in the contemporary period of the film’s making: If I could return, I’d return and remove you from that parrot’s perch, Dora. I wouldn’t let them drag you across the asphalt, Claudia. And no cowardly policeman would beat you up, Luana. And in your head, Marielle, those four bullets would not have entered. And I swear that never again would a man pay homage to another man who tortures. Never again, to our faces, would a man pay homage to another man who tortures.

The SLAM reinforces the film’s proposition that patterns of violence and authoritarianism all the way from Cuba down to Chile have been countered by the determination of Latin American women to resist and fight in the most creative ways. The film thus leaves us with the feeling that this determination to resist, combined with creativity and visions of a better future, is what constitutes something of a Latin American identity, despite the memories of violence that have criss-crossed the region from its origins until this day.

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Concluding Remarks The films studied in this chapter serve as an invitation for us to appreciate the value of playfulness and imagination to processes of remembering. As Emily Keighley and Michael Pickering (2012) have suggested, imagining is vital in making sense of the past and connecting it to the present and future, but it is often treated with suspicion, as if ‘imagination’ were equivalent to delusion or falsification. However, as demonstrated here, the possibilities opened up through fiction, autofiction and experimentation do not necessarily lead to forgery but to a broadening of perspectives and a new understanding of the historical world. Such an approach has an important political dimension since, after all, any desire for change ‘implies a conceptualisation of the status quo and conscious envisioning and imagination of a desired state of being’ (Flynn and Tinius 2015, 6). In a sense, these films emulate a kind of utopian quality that characterized third cinema in 1960s and 1970s Latin America. As Mike Wayne (2001, 11) has written, a crucial component of the films and manifestos produced by the likes of Glauber Rocha, Fernando Birri and Fernando Solanas in that period was the capacity to ‘expand our political and cultural horizons, to imagine alternatives to what is and refuse to accept what is as coterminous with what can be’. Although the revolutionary thrust of those filmmakers has all but gone and the capitalist imperialism that motivated their cause has taken entirely new forms, there is a trace of third cinema’s hopeful vision for the future in the films studied in this chapter; specifically, an invitation for us to expand the horizon of possibility by imagining different worlds that simultaneously mirror our own, and alter it through ‘what if’ scenarios. For instance, what if war enemies could regroup and re-enact their traumatic memories before an audience? How might our understanding of war be transformed by this experience? What if a revolutionary’s daughter could travel in time and observe the past through the perspective of her teenage self, enhanced by the knowledge accumulated over her adult life? How might Latin America be different today if women’s acts of political resistance had found resonance in the public sphere? What if artists like Ana had been valued and gained their due visibility, had their voices heard, their ideas disseminated, their vision still impacting us today? Alongside these specific questions, films in the playful mode invite a broader interrogation about the meanings of memory itself. They build upon the momentum initiated by the reflective and diaristic modes to ask, for instance, is memory only what we have lived, or is

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it what we imagine the past to have been? Is memory something we never knew to remember? These playful inquiries about memory are less concerned with representing the past as it happened, than in imagining what the present and the future could be. As we have seen in Chapter 2, conservative groups in South America have often defended the need to forget past atrocities through claims that too much focus on remembering hinders us from moving forward. Indeed, the framework of oblivion embraced by these groups is based on a view of memory as inherently backward facing, like a rear-view mirror that fixes our sight on what has already gone. I have argued here that the kind of memory constructed in playful films does the opposite: it invites us to reconsider imagined pasts so that we can better comprehend what lies ahead. Through improvised re-enactments of a military coup by children, dramatized tribunal proceedings, theatrical collaborations and the recreation of 1960s art, among other strategies, these films suggest that the ways in which the past is remembered can have profound effects on how we experience the present and envision the yet-to-come. In so doing, they invite a change of perspective that Yifat Gutman, Adam Brown and Amy Sodaro (2010, 2) regard as more pressing than ever, from ‘pastoriented memories’ towards a new politics of memory focusing on the challenges of the future.

Notes 1. The term ‘autofiction’ can be broadly defined as an interplay between imaginative reinventions of the past and the fictionalization of the self. It was developed by writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 to describe his own playful experimentation with the boundaries of autobiography and fiction. As Elizabeth Jones (2007, 96) has argued with reference to Doubrovsky, ‘Rather than professing to tell the truth as sincerely as possible, an autofiction acknowledges the fallibility of memory and the impossibility of truthfully recounting a life story’. Whereas classic autobiography has generally aimed to give the impression of a whole, unflawed memory corroborated by fact, autofiction draws attention to the difficulties of remembering and overtly signals its fictional nature through the use of generic conventions. Régine Robin (1997) has associated the rise of autofiction with the difficulties posed to language by traumatic experiences of the twentieth century, including the Shoah.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

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Such perspective is echoed by Blejmar’s view that autofiction is ‘based on the premise that to bear witness to past events (especially traumatic ones) we need the obliqueness of fiction’ (Blejmar 2017, 6). Autofiction’s deconstruction of the biographical illusion and the possibility to imagine different versions of the past are indeed key elements of the playful mode. Affect is broadly defined here as an individual’s internal state, encompassing emotion, feeling and mood. See Margaret Wetherell (2012) for an in-depth discussion. As we have seen in Chapter 5, similar techniques were used in Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil to evoke the elusive and unstable nature of remembering, but Deslembro uses them to represent the act of remembering with the body. Svletana Boym’s (2001) study of the concept offers some guidance in this regard. She stresses the centrality of space to nostalgia, the etymology of which, as she reminds us, is the longing (algia) for a home (nostos ) that no longer exists, or never existed. She distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: restorative, which ‘proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’, and reflective, which ‘dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’ (2001, 41). If the former manifests itself in reconstructions of monuments from the past, the latter lingers on its ruins and produces an ethics of resistance to totalizing memory discourses. It is the latter that concerns us here. For Arias, there is no difference between fiction and documentary. She has stated that all her work is based on the art of storytelling, where fiction and reality mix and contaminate one another (Arias and Kan, 13). Campo Minado was staged for the first time at the Brighton Theatre Festival and London’s Royal Court (2016) before travelling to various locations in Argentina and beyond. The book was published in the United Kingdom with Oberon Books and the documentary premiered simultaneously at the Berlin Festival and BAFICI (Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente) before featuring in a range of festivals around the world. As a telling illustration of this tendency to infantilize the experience of combatants, after the publication of Daniel Kon’s (1982) compilation of interviews with returning soldiers, the expression

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‘chicos de la guerra’ (kids from the war), borrowed from its title, became common usage in Argentina. The number of cultural representations about the Malvinas/ Falklands war has been extensive, particularly from the Argentine side. Produced in collaboration with the Comisión de Familiares de Caídos en Malvinas e Islas del Atlántico Sur, the documentaries Locos de la bandera (Julio Cardoso 2005) and Malvinas, viajes del bicentenario (2010) follow the families of deceased soldiers to portray their experiences of mourning and loss. In the docudrama Fuckland (2000), a magician and stand-up comedian uses a hidden camera to document a week-long trip to the islands. In Desobediencia debida (2010) director Victoria Reale documents the story of a British pilot who captured by the Argentine forces. The conflict has also been the focus of numerous plays, for instance Piedras dentro de la piedra (Mariana Mazover 2014) photography works including Paruelo’s 2006 exhibition ‘Malvinas, imágenes de un naufragio’ and Travnik’s 2011 book Malvinas: Retratos y paisajes de una guerra. From the British side, cultural production has been scarcer; a noteworthy case is the TV documentary Falklands War:The Untold Story (1987). For a complete list, María Lara Segade (2014). Federico Leon’s play Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio (1998) is based on the first-person testimony of a veteran, performed by the veteran himself. The ‘already known’ is important here. As we have seen, evidence about state crimes and human rights violations was established through the country’s National Truth Commission (2011–2014). The 2018 exhibition ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960– 1985’ featured the work of 120 women artists from fifteen countries. It was one of the main sources of inspiration for Ana.Sem Título. See https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women. The original quote reads: ‘Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact’ (Woolf 2020 [1929], 3), translated to Portuguese as ‘É provável que a ficção contenha aqui mais veracidade que fatos’ (Woolf 1990, 9). In her liberal translation of the quote, Stella’s inclusion of a definite article before ‘fatos’ alters the original meaning. For a discussion of Lublin’s original piece, see Catherine Spencer (2017).

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14. As reported by the National Truth Commission, the dictatorship reinforced racial inequalities and injustices that stayed in place long after the abolition of slavery and, to this date, the black population continues to suffer the impact of further discriminatory practices and structures introduced under 1960s military rule.

References Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bither, Philip. 2019. We Are All Writing the Novels of Our Lives: Lola Arias on War, Memory, and Documentary Theater. Walker Magazine. https://walker art.org/magazine/lola-arias-minefield-documentary-theater. Accessed 29 May 2023. Blejmar, Jordana. 2016. Autofictions of Postwar: Fostering Empathy in Lola Arias’ Minefield/Campo Minado. Latin American Theatre Review 50 (2): 102–123. Blejmar, Jordana. 2017. Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Postdictatorship Argentina. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Origins of Nostalgia: Memories and Reflections. London: Bloomsbury. Comissão da Verdade do Estado de São Paulo, Relatório Tomo I, Parte II, Perseguição à População e ao Movimento Negro. www.verdadeaberta.org Accessed 29 May 2023. Cruz, Alejandro. 2016. El Campo Minado, la vida después de dos soldados enemigos en las islas Malvinas. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/esp ectaculos/teatro/la-vida-despues-de-dos-soldados-enemigos-en-las-islas-mal vinas-nid1956844/. Accessed 29 May 2023. Cruz, Alejandro. 2018. Lola Arias y la cara más radical de la guerra. La Nación. https://www.pressreader.com/argentina/la-nacion/20180905/282 200831802557 Accessed 29 May 2023. Effe, Alexandra, and Arnaud Schmitt. 2022. Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour: A Playfully Serious Affective Mode. Life Writing 19 (1): 1–11. Flynn, Alex, and Tinius Jonas. 2015. Reflecting on Political Performance: Introducing Critical Perspectives. In Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of performance, ed. Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius, 1–29. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner, Lyn. 2016. Minefield: The Falklands Drama Taking Veterans Back to the Battle. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/ 26/minefield-falklands-theatre-veterans-battle Accessed 29 May 2023.

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Gutman, Yifat, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodaro. 2010. Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heise, Tatiana. 2015. The Weight of the Past: Trauma and Testimony in Que Bom te ver viva. New Cinemas 13 (2): 107–112. Herrero, Julián. 2021. ‘Lola Arias: “No hago arte para curar a la gente”’. La Razón. 2021. https://www.larazon.es/cultura/20201029/lkjhxux25fgk bpigmcdknqx75e.html Accessed 29 May 2023. Jones, Elizabeth. 2007. Spaces of Belonging: Home, Culture and Identity in 20th Century French Autobiography. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jones, Phil April. 2007. Drama as Therapy: Theory, Practice and Research. London: Routledge. Kan, Elianna. 2014. Lola Arias by Elianna Kan. BOMB 128: 58–64. Keighley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. 2012. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kon, Daniel. 1982. Los Chicos de la Guerra: hablan los soldados que estuvieron en Malvinas. Buenos Aires: Galerna. La Razon. 2016. La artista de lo imposible. https://noticias.unsam.edu.ar/ 2016/11/17/entrevista-a-lola-arias-en-la-razon/ Accessed 29 May 2023. Lorenz, Federico. 2015. «Ungidos Por El Infortunio». Los Soldados De Malvinas En La Post Dictadura: Entre El Relato Heroico Y La Victimización. Cuadernos de Historia 13 (14): 265–287 Maguire, Geoffrey. 2019. Screening the Past: Reflexivity, Repetition and the Spectator in Lola Arias’ Minefield/Campo minado (2016). Bulletin of Latin American Research 38: 471–486. Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? Social Research 66 (3): 745–758. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. 2005. Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14 (3): 263–278. Perera, Verónica. 2017. Testimonios vivos, dramaturgia abierta: La guerra de Malvinas en Campo Minado de Lola Arias. Anagnórisis Revista De Invéstigación Teatral 16: 293–323. Perera, Verónica. 2019. Teatros de guerra: entre los derechos humanos y el arte de Lola Arias. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. https://journals.openedition. org/nuevomundo/78102. Accessed 29 May 2023. Pinho, Patricia. 2007. Afroaesthetics in Brazil. In Beautiful/Ugly African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall, 266–288. London: Duke University Press. Pinto Veas, I. 2007. Entrevista con Bettina Perut e Iván Osnovikoff. laFuga 4. http://2016.lafuga.cl/entrevista-con-bettina-perut-e-ivan-osnovikoff/340. Accessed 29 May 2023. Plant, Bob. 2007. On Testimony, Sincerity and Truth. Paragraph 30 (1): 30–50.

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Poglajen, Tina. 2018. Review: Unremember. Cineuropa. https://cineuropa.org/ en/newsdetail/359741/. Accessed 29 May 2023. Radstone, Susannah. 2011. What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies. Parallax 17: 109–123. Ricœur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Robin, Regine. 1997. Le Golem de l’ecriture : de l’autofiction au cybersoi. Montréal: XYZ. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2014. Multidirectional Memory. Témoigner 119: 176. Segade, María Lara. 2014. La guerra en cuestión: relatos de Malvinas en la cultura argentina (1982–2012). Unpublished doctoral thesis, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sosa, Cecilia. 2011. Queering Acts of Mourning. In The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone : Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, ed. Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer, Catherine. 2017. Acts of Displacement: Lea Lublin’s Mon fils, May ’68, and Feminist Psychosocial Revolt. Oxford Art Journal 40 (1): 65–83. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Taylor, Paul. 2016. Minefield, Royal Court London, Theatre Review: Unforgettably Potent. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent ertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/minefield-royal-court-london-theatre-rev iew-unforgettably-potent-a7067196.html Accessed 22 Apr 2023. Teichert, Erika. (2020). Lola Arias’ Campo minado/ Minefield (2016): Exploring Dramatherapy in Documentary Theatre. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 97 (10): 1031–1046. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2018. The Transnational Dynamics of Local Remembrance: The Jewish Past in a Former Shtetl in Poland. Memory Studies 11: 301–314. Travnik, Juan. 2011. Malvinas. Retratos y paisajes de guerra. Buenos Aires: Zagier & Urruty. Wayne, Mike. 2001. Political Film: the Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Los Angeles: Sage. Woolf, Virgina. 1990. Um teto todo seu. Translated by Vera Ribeiro. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro. Woolf, Virgina. 2020 [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. London: Arcturus.

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Filmography Ana. Sem Título/ Ana. Untitled. 2020. Lúcia Murat. Brazil Deslembro/ Unremember. 2018. Flávia Castro. Brazil, France. Desobediencia debida. 2010. Victoria Reale. Argentina. Diário de uma busca/ Diary of a Search. 2010. Flávia Castro. Brazil. El astuto mono Pinochet contra La Moneda de los cerdos/ The Clever Monkey Pinochet versus La Moneda’s Pigs. 2004. Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff. Chile. El mundo de la mujer/ Woman’s World. 1972. Maria Luisa Bemberg. Argentina. El tío/ The Uncle. 2013. Mateo Iribarren. Chile. Falklands War: The Untold Story .1987. Peter Kominsky. United Kingdom. Fuckland. 2000. José Luis Marquès. Argentina. Locos de la bandera/ Flag Freaks. 2005. Julio Cardoso. Argentina. Los rubios / The Blondes. 2003. Albertina Carri. Argentina. Malvinas, viajes del bicentenario/ Malvinas, journeys of the bicentennial. 2010. Julio Cardoso. Argentina. Orestes. 2015. Rodrigo Siqueira. Brazil. Sweet and Lowdown.1999. Woody Allen. United States. Teatro de guerra/ Theatre of War. 2018. Lola Arias. Argentina, United Kingdom. The Incident of Loch Ness. 2004. Zak Penn. United Kingdom.

Plays Campo Minado/Minefield. 2016. Lola Arias. El año en que nací. 2012. Lola Arias. Mi vida después. 2009. Lola Arias. Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio.1998. Federico Leon. Piedras dentro de la piedra. 2014. Mariana Mazover.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

(…) Even now it is perfectly clear that neither the future nor the past are in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there are three times – past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say: ‘There are three times – a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.’ For these do exist in the mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time of things past is memory; the present time of things present is direct experience; the present time of things future is expectation. St. Augustin. (Confessions, Book 11, Chapter XX) What you discover is how far the past and present co-exist in all our lives and how much what once happened to us has an influence on who and what we are now. Lola Arias. (The Guardian 2016)

In an early scene in Nae Pasaran (Felipe Bustos Sierra 2018), four elderly Scotsmen meet in a pub in East Kilbride, south of Glasgow, to reminisce about their former time as workers in the nearby Rolls Royce factory. They are soon joined by a much younger, dark-haired man who introduces himself as Felipe Bustos Sierra, the son of a Chilean journalist exiled in Belgium. Sierra recounts that when he was a kid, he and his father used to go to solidarity meetings where they listened to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1_7

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stories of anti-Pinochet protests rising all over the world. This is how he heard about the factory workers in Scotland who refused to repair the Hawker Hunter jets that had been used to bomb the presidential palace in Chile on 11 September 1973. ‘The idea that somebody could defeat those planes seemed incredible to me. I want to know what’s true’, he tells us. The anti-Pinochet heroes who blacked those engines were, of course, none other than the Scots themselves. Unbeknown to the men, their boycott became the longest single act of solidarity with the Chilean people, but they would only come to realize the impact they had through the making of Sierra’s documentary. Determined to learn more about the story that had fascinated him as a child, Sierra interviewed several Chilean eyewitnesses, ex-prisoners, human rights workers and government officials from both sides of the Atlantic. In the film’s climactic sequence, he accompanies the four Scots at an official ceremony in which they are awarded the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins medal by the Chilean government, the highest order received by non-Chilean citizens. The transnational act of solidarity is thus fully acknowledged. Nae Pasaran premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2018 where it produced a passionate response from the audience, manifested in loud applause and enthusiastic conversations in the Q&A session and postscreening party with Sierra and the four protagonists. I was moved by this response and, as I walked out of the theatre, I wondered if members of this predominantly Scottish audience would go home with newly formed memories of Chile. I had met Sierra five years prior, when a shorter version of his film was shown to students at the University of Glasgow and received an equally warm reception. That screening became one of the reasons I decided to write this book, hence my pleasure to find that, not only had Nae Pasaran been successfully developed into a full-length feature through crowdfunding, it had also been selected to close one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious film festivals. The documentary condenses many questions, concepts and ideas that I have explored here. How does cinema contribute to constructing memories of Latin America’s conflicted pasts? As an inherently transnational medium of expression, how does it encourage us to expand our focus from national to transnational forms of remembering? When does transnational memory become transcultural and what are the differences between the two? What kinds of strategies do filmmakers use to make the past meaningful to audiences in the present?

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Cinema, like any labour of memory, is a realm wherein multiple versions of the past vie for relevance. It could be said that all postdictatorship films enact memory politics by bearing testimony to a violent past, but they do so in distinctive ways and for different purposes. Through attention to the specific properties of the medium and the sociohistorical context in which films have been made, I have examined four modes of cinematic remembering that emerged in dialectical relationship with the wider memory frameworks in South America. I have thereby argued that documentary filmmaking (in the broadest sense of the term) is, like memory itself, an inherently dynamic practice, strongly attuned to the values and priorities of the present. As Kate Nash et al. (2014) have argued, documentarians are constantly seeking new avenues, new ways of approaching the socio-historical reality and new ways of connecting with audiences, and this is certainly the case with all the directors I interviewed and mentioned in this book. To a great extent, they have all challenged the ‘salvation and demons’ framework according to which military regimes were a necessary evil to restore order in the nation. They have also been informed by the desire to remind audiences of the catastrophic consequences of dictatorship, thereby opposing the ‘oblivion’ framework advanced by conservative forces wishing to turn the page on the recent past. Nonetheless, the relationship that these films establish between the act of remembering and forgetting, victim and perpetrator, memory and counter-memory is a nuanced one. Although they thoroughly engage with the leftist agenda proposed by human rights organizations and grassroots groups since the 1970s, they have pushed the boundaries of the ‘humanitarian’ framework, pointed to its shortcomings and continuously advanced in the direction of ‘unsatisfied memory’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, an informative mode of remembering through film prevailed in the early stages of democratic transition when the central concern was to establish and disseminate the truth about past atrocities. Filmmakers embraced documentary as a platform for the testimonial recounting of first-hand memories and took the role of historians and journalists. At the same time as they reinforced a humanitarian appeal, they counteracted the silence and stigma around leftist militancy and helped to reclaim the political identities and ideologies of former revolutionaries, thereby expanding the framework of who remembers and what is remembered. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the overreliance of informative films on the possibility of ‘recuperating’ the past through film often resulted in commemorative discourses in which eyewitness memories were

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equated with historical fact and the past was depicted as complete and concluded. This was particularly the case in Brazil and Argentina, where the stigma around leftist warfare prevented public debate on the topic. The new ‘willingness to listen’ in the mid- to late 1990s encouraged ex-militants to replace silence with commemorative discourses about the armed struggle. In Chile, a more nuanced and questioning approach to memory was adopted due, in great part, to the country’s more ambiguous path to reckoning with past atrocities. Former militants and politically engaged directors approached the past from a reflective and personal lens that drew attention to the continuities between past and present. They were followed in the early 2000s by their counterparts in Brazil and Argentina, who went on to develop new approaches and perspectives more attuned to global tendencies in documentary. At the same time, the arrival of a new generation on the political scene, namely the descendants of victims of the dictatorship, helped to inject new creativity into post-dictatorship cinema and begin a cross-generational dialogue that would lead to a range of innovative approaches seen in the reflective, diaristic and playful modes. Since then, there has been a progressive and constant move away from the imperative to present a clear picture of what had happened or why, and towards new questions raised by the ‘unsatisfied memory’ framework. Rather than approach the memory of witnesses as a reliable gateway to the past, filmmakers have increasingly questioned the workings of memory and focused on the continued traces of the past in the present. The temporal focus shifted from the ‘there and then’ to the ‘here and now’ and with it, a growing interest in embodied aspects of lived experience, including trauma. All of these elements— an interest in memory as process; an emphasis on subjective experience, including non-verbal bodily expressions; and an understanding of trauma as the presence of the past in the present—are manifested in the reflective, diaristic and playful modes, but to different degrees and with different emphases. In the reflective mode, documentarians operate as essayists or facilitators for the stories of others, while making their presence known to us via more or less subtle means, including the voiceover. They still rely on the talking-witness formula that characterized earlier films, but they innovate it through the use of in situ testimonies, photo elicitation and fluid camera work, among many other strategies, and by turning the archive into the focus of discussion, rather than using it as mere illustration or evidence. In the diaristic mode, directors become protagonists of their own story to tell us about the dictatorship from a deeply

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personal perspective. Their inner conflicts, sentiments and thoughts are expressed in voiceover in a manner that resembles a monologue with the self, even when they are addressed to another. Some of these films unsettle the premises at the heart of testimonial narratives, namely, the reliability of the witness, the stability of personal memory and the possibility of fully apprehending the past. Hence, rather than produce conclusive and reliable accounts of the past, diaristic films chronicle incomplete and frustrated efforts to remember that, as they emphasize, are still better than not attempting to remember at all. Finally, a playful mode emerged fully in the mid-2010s, a context when, in all three countries, the need to establish the facts about the dictatorial past had been largely fulfilled through national truth commissions and other state-led institutional mechanisms. Free from the imperative to document the past, filmmakers combined memory and imagination to understand certain aspects of the dictatorship that history alone could not explain, including hypotheses about the impact of past atrocities on future generations. Elianna Kan (2014) has written that in any ‘society recovering from a dictatorship that has actively lied to and silenced its people, new languages have to be invented to speak about the traumas of the past or, perhaps, to speak freely at all’. Indeed, each in their own way, the cinematic modes of remembering have defied familiar arguments according to which trauma is ‘unrepresentable’, as theorized by Caruth (1995, 1996). While it is true that trauma provokes memory lapses and breakdown in communication, and while psychological phenomena does indeed pose practical and ethical challenges to filmic representation, these challenges are not unsurmountable. As we have seen, directors of post-dictatorship cinema have addressed them by expanding their creative repertoire and their own roles to become protagonists, ‘visual therapists’, empathic listeners, advocates and dramatherapists, all the while recognizing that absolute knowledge of another person’s subjective experience of trauma is never fully possible. When verbal testimony has proven insufficient, filmmakers have drawn attention to silences, gaps and bodily expressions as an inherent part of communicating trauma. When remembering became too elusive or impossible, the frustrated pursuit of absent memories itself became the thematic focus of the films, accompanied by an interest in the relations between memory, amnesia and identity. Finally, we have seen various other creative strategies for transmitting something of the experience of trauma, including the insertion of fiction film tropes (horror, avant-garde, thriller), music, autofiction, theatrical performance and performative arts.

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Seliprandy (2020) has argued that if we take the difficulties of representing trauma as a given and relegate the past to the sphere of the unspeakable, we may find ourselves dangerously close to revisionist discourses of denial that memory advocates have struggled so hard to combat. He reminds us of Jacques Rancière’s (2007) famous statement in relation to the Holocaust that nothing is unrepresentable as a property of an event, and that the choice always exists whether or not to document and historicize an event. The quote brings to mind Didi-Huberman’s (2008) argument, also in the context of the Holocaust, that although images can never lead to absolute knowledge of an event, it is erroneous to conclude that no knowledge is ever possible. The French philosopher invites us to replace such ‘all or nothing’ logic with a non-totalizing ‘malgré tout’ (‘in spite of all’) approach that allows an interpretation of the past by also considering what is not there, that is, all elements of knowledge ‘susceptible of being assembled by historical imagination – written documents, contemporary testimonies and other visual sources’ (2008, 114). Didi-Huberman’s concept of ‘historical imagination’ relates to the use of cognitive processes such as rational thought, creativity and association, in the service of knowledge. As I have argued, a closer attention to the affective qualities of remembering, or embodied remembering, does not imply a relation of superiority to narrative memory and cognitive processes. These forms of knowing—through reason and emotion, intellect and affect—do not stand in opposition to one another, rather, they operate dialectically. Hence my argument, in relation to the playful mode, that there is a place for fiction and fantasy in memory work that does not imply historical denial or revisionism. In the work of contemporary filmmakers, dramaturgy and play become further creative strategies for expanding the possibilities of understanding. These strategies build upon the ones developed prior, without necessarily replacing or superseding them. In brief, if new languages must be invented to speak of catastrophic socio-political events, South American filmmakers have made an undeniable contribution over the last thirty years. Finally, I have proposed that, for memory to be effectively political, it must not be seen as ‘a thing of the past’, frozen and static, but something projected onto the future, subject to renewal and re-actualization with each act of remembrance. Accordingly, each post-dictatorship film is a new encounter with the past, a new route of exploration into how

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the historical events of yesteryear have brought us to where we are today. And while individual films pose certain limitations as to what can be remembered and how, each film carries with it the potential to inspire new perspectives and new ways of constructing and thinking about memory. Andreas Huyssen (2003) has argued that the early twenty-first century was marked by ‘hypertrophy’ of memory in the Western world, an avalanche of memory discourses that left in its wake an exhaustion with the topic. His diagnosis for the time was, simply: ‘Memory fatigue has set in’ (2003, 3). Despite warning against the risks of melancholic fixation with the past and the ‘problematic privileging of the traumatic dimension of life with no exit in sight’, he has nonetheless emphasized that memory discourses are ‘absolutely essential’ for helping us to retain a strong temporal and spatial grounding on current life and imagine alternatives to the status quo. ‘We need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world’ (2003, 6). I agree. In my perspective, by turning our eyes onto the past, post-dictatorship cinema invites us to remember both what has already been and what an alternative future might look like, in contrast to the remembered wreckage of yesteryear and its ongoing legacy in the present.

References Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in spite of all: Four photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford: Standford University Press. Kan, Elianna. 2014. Interview: Lola Arias by Elianna Kan’ Bomb 128: 58–64. Nash Kate, Craig Hight Craig, and Catherine Summerhayes. 2014. Introduction: New Documentary Ecologies. Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. In New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, ed. Kate Nash, Craig Hight Craig, and Catherine Summerhayes, 1–9. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, Jacques 2007. The Future of the Image. London: Verso.

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Seliprandy, Fernando. 2020. Aporias e apostas do representável: vazios e vestígios da memória em ‘Os dias com ele’ (Maria Clara Escobar, 2013). Fotocinema: Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía 20: 137–164. The Guardian. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/26/min efield-falklands-theatre-veterans-battle. Accessed 29 May 2023.

Filmography Pasaran, Nae. 2018. Felipe Bustos Sierra. Chile: Scotland.

Index

A Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, 35 Abuses of memory, 92 Acculturation, 174 Adaptation, 168 Aesthetic, 124 Affect/affective, 81, 121, 129 Affect theory, 121 Allegory, 104 ALN (Aliança Nacional Libertadora), 68 Amnesia, 83 Amnesty, 44 Amnesty Commission, 47 Amnesty International, 155 Amnesty Law, 83 Andes, 105 APDH (Asemblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos), 35 Archive footage, 18, 71 Archive images, 84 Archive material, 19 Archivos del Terror, 33

Argentina, 16 Armed forces, 36 Armed struggle, 82 Asociación de Fotógrafos Independentes (AFI), 106 Atacama Desert, 104 Auteur film, 17 Authoritarian rule, 56 Autobiographical portraiture, 138 Autobiography, 99, 100, 102 Autofiction, 102, 197 Avant-garde, 209

B Bearing witness, 119 Berlin, 116 Biopolitical, 126 Biopolitics, 52 Biopower, 52 Black histories, 192 Bolivia, 33 Boom of memory, 99

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. S. Heise, Transnational Memories and Post-Dicatorship Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47069-1

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INDEX

Brasil Nunca Mais , 35 Brazil, 16 Brussels, 148 Bystanders, 17

C Carta a los chilenos , 53 Caso Degollados, 128 Catholic Church, 30 Censorship, 67 Chile, 16 China, 51 Cinema-verité, 100 Civil groups, 54 Civil resistance, 108 Civil rights, 46 Clamor, 35 Close-up, 113 CNI (Central Nacional de Informaciones), 44 CNV (Comissão Nacional da Verdade), 48 Cold War, 3 Collective memory, 5 Colonial, 30 Colonization, 30 Comissão Especial sobre Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos, 47 Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos da Organização dos Estados Americanos (CIDH of OEA), 47 Commemoration, 11, 92 Communist, 51 Communities, 14 CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de las Personas), 37 CONAR (Comité Nacional de Ayuda a los Refugiados), 34 Concertación, 40

Connective turn, 12 Constitution, 46 Continuity editing, 78 Cordobazo, 76 Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos (CIDH), 47 Cosmopolitan, 12 Counter-practice, 19 Coup within the coup, 45 Crisis of representation, 121 Cross-cultural, 4 Cuba, 187 Cuban Revolution, 31, 59 Cultural memory, 2 D Denial, 160 Desaparecidos-detenidos , 54 Diaristic mode, 22 DI-GB (Dissidência da Guanabara), 69 Digital, 12 DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional), 44 Diretas Já, 46 Dirty war, 70 Displacement, 173, 184 Distanciation, 193 Ditabranda, 46 Dónde están, 108 Dramatherapy, 182 Dramaturgy, 168 E Emblematic, 50 Embodiment, 180 Emotion, 81 Emplot, 9 Emplotment, 9 ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), 75

INDEX

Escraches, 56 Escuela de las Americas, 51 Esculachos , 48 ESMA (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada), 39 Essay film, 102 Estado Novo dictatorship, 124 Ethical, 17 Europe, 35 Evidentiary editing, 78 Exile, 4, 17, 136 Experimentation, 196 F FAR (Frente Anarquista Revolucionario), 75 Feminist(s), 46, 100 Fiction, 17, 198 Filmic transnationality, 14 First-person, 135 First-person testimonies, 101 Flashbacks, 173 FONDART (Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes), 58 Forced disappearance, 29 Forgetting, 105 Furnas, 56 G Glasgow Film Festival, 206 Global, 12 Globalization, 12 Globital, 12 Grassroots, 46 Guerres de memoire, 50 Guerrillas, 33 Guerrilla warfare, 83 H Hegemonic/counterhegemonic, 19

215

H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio), 55 Holocaust, 31 Homo sacer, 125 Humanitarian, 15 Human rights, 2 Human rights movement, 34 Hybridization, 13, 185 Hypermediacy, 103

I Identity politics, 100 Imagination, 196 Immediacy, 80 Impunity, 36 INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales), 58 Indexical, 108 Indigenous, 46 Inequalities, 45 Informational, 70 Informative mode, 21, 67 In-situ testimonies, 106 Interactive, 69 Intergenerational, 147 Intermediality, 178

J Journal entry film, 138

L La Moneda, 103 Law of the Disappeared, 47 Lei de Acesso à Informação, 114 Liuex de memóire, 109 Locatedness, 29 Lonquén, 108

216

INDEX

M Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 35 Malvinas/Falklands war, 36, 171 Malvinización, 178 Marcas da Memória, 58 Marxist, 31 MEDH (Movimiento Ecuménico de Derechos Humanos), 35 Media specificity, 16 Mediated memory, 5 Mémoire empêchée, 175 Memoirs, 68 Memorial da Resistência, 48 Memórias Reveladas, 158 Memory-narratives, 2 Memory politics, 39, 158 Memory sites, 106 Memory studies, 11 Memory, truth and justice, 54 Memory wars, 50 Mendonza, 145 Methodological nationalism, 3 Mexico, 34 Mexico City, 143 Militants, 17 Military coup, 30 Military juntas, 37 Military regime, 2 Mise-en-scène, 81 Mockumentary, 187 Montoneros, 74 Mourning, 18, 127 MR-8 (Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro), 68 Multidirectional memories, 12 Muro de la Memoria, 112 Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos, 153 Music, 209 Mystic writing pad, 6

N Narratives, 3 Narrativization, 10 National, 4 National memory, 11 National Security Doctrine (NSD), 51 National truth commissions, 39 Nation-centred, 15 Nazi, 52 Negacionismo, 189 Negotiated transition, 40 Neoliberalism, 55 Non-representability, 121 Non-verbal communication, 120 Nostalgia, 105 Nuevo cine latinoamericano, 2 Nunca Más , 37 O Obediencia Debida, 37 Oblivion, 15 Operação Limpeza, 51 Operation Condor, 33 P Panopticon, 123 Paraguay, 33 Para-linguistic, 120 Participatory, 69 Performance, 180 Performative, 69, 87 Peronist, 76 Peronist Youth, 77 Perpetrators, 160 Peru, 34 Photographs, 19 Photography, 11, 102 Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 188 Pinochet, Augusto, 38 Plano Nacional de Direitos Humanos (PNDH), 47

INDEX

Playful mode, 22 Playfulness, 169 Plays, 68 Plaza de Mayo, 75 Política de los acuerdos , 40 Popular memory, 50 Post-dictatorship culture, 3 Postmemory, 12, 139 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 180 Prisoner mugshots, 115 Propaganda, 70 Prosthetic memory, 12 Punctum, 109 Punto Final, 37 R Radical Women, 192 Reconciliation, 36 Red Cross, 46 Reflective mode, 22, 99 Reflexivity, 84 Refugee, 32 Remediation, 19 Remembering cinematic modes of, 16 frameworks for, 15 modes of, 5 through film, modes of, 16 Remembrance, 4 Repression, 84 Rettig commission, 41 Revisionist, 189 Rio de Janeiro, 143 S Salvation and demons, 15 Santiago, 116 São Paulo, 105 Schemata, 8 Self-aware memory, 102

Sensory memory, 172 Silence, 121 SLAM, 195 Slavery, 30 Social framework, 6 Social injustices, 56 Solidarities, 14 Soviet Union, 51 Stalinist, 52 State terror, 4 State violence, 46 Stockholm, 154 Storage, 115 Storehouse model, 5 Student movement, 46 Subaltern truths, 50 Subjective turn, 99 Subjectivity, 100, 113 Surveillance images, 123

T Talking-witness, 80 Television, 68 Teoría de los dos demonios , 53 Teotihuacan, 146 Terror, 32 Testimonial accounts, 67 Testimonials, 19 Testimonies, 18 Thanatopolitics, 125 Theatrical performance, 102 Therapy, 157 Third cinema, 196 Thriller, 69 Tomas , 71 Trade unions, 30 Transcultural, 4, 12, 185 Transcultural memory, 5 Transition, 29 Transitional justice, 31, 49 Transnational, 3

217

218

INDEX

Transnationality, 15 Transnational memory, 5 Transnational turn, 15 Trauma, 120 Trauma studies, 17 Travelling memories, 12 Trelew, 76 Trial, 118 Trilogy, 105 Triple A, 76 Tupac Amaru, 195 Two demons theory, 53 U UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), 114 Unidad Popular, 33 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 34 Universidad General San Martín, 178 University of Buenos Aires, 142 University of Glasgow, 206 Unrepresentable, 121 Unsatisfied memory, 15

Uruguay, 33 V Valech truth commission, 43 VAR-Palmares (Vanguarda Revolucionária Palmares), 74 Venezuela, 34, 140 Vicaría de la Solidaridad, 105 Victims, 17 Video art, 102 Video performance, 191 Vila Grimaldi, 42 Visual therapist, 157 Voice-over, 105 VPR (Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária), 115 W War, 185 Witness, 67 Witness testimony, 22 World Council of Churches (WCC), 34