Diary of a documentary in the making: filming the local imaginaries of post-dictatorship Argentina* Diario del making of de un documental: imaginarios locales de la posdictadura argentina (original) (raw)
Related papers
From Recording to Intervention: History and Documentary Filmmaking in Argentina
Latin American Perspectives, 2012
The study of Argentine social and political documentaries from 1956 to 1974 allows one to trace the crisis and discrediting of democracy that began in 1930 and intensified after 1955 with the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón. The documentaries show the decline of legitimacy of the opposing political forces, the radicalization of the political actors involved, and the configuration and affirmation of antagonistic social subjects. Toward the end of the 1960s, this process led to an imaginary of revolution and violence that energized documentary practices and forms.
2020
Over 453 films have been made focusing on the topic of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), otherwise known worldwide as the Dirty War. This time period is characterized by the vile human rights abuses committed by the military junta against those who opposed the government, leading to the disappearances of 30.000 people, many of whom left children behind. These children were often forced to grow up, giving up their childhood, due to their parents' militancy. In the national story of the dictatorship, these children's stories and experiences have often been forgotten. This thesis will investigate the portrayal of the last Argentine dictatorship through cinema, from the perspective of children who grew up during the dictatorship, often children of the disappeared. These films often focus on the recreation of identity, their disappeared parents, and the loss of childhood innocence. Through fiction and documentary film, these filmmakers are able to use a self-reflexive process to recreate their identity and self-represent their own stories, rather than fitting into the narratives forced upon them.
"Cinema and Recent Past in Argentina"
In Argentina, the last military dictatorship ruled between 1976 and 1983. Since the return of democracy in December of 1983, a variety of means have—to a large extent—made it possible to unravel and represent the horror endured during the years of the so-called “National Reorganization Process.” The aim of this presentation is to address the different discourse strategies used in motion pictures representing the kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance of persons during the last military dictatorship. To this end, I have selected Argentine films that, having been produced in different decades, allow me to trace an historical evolution in the treatment of this topic. These films portray the adaptation to life in illegal detention centers in different ways. From an analytical perspective, my starting point in each chapter is a “memory cycle” (Da Silva Catela 2006), a concept I shall often resort to, since it defines the different socio-historical periods in post-dictatorship Argentina.
Young Argentine Filmmakers: Remembering the Past in Times of Crisis
Latin American Studies: Critiques of Contemporary Cinema, Literatures, Politics and Revolution (David Gallagher ed.) , 2011
In this essay, I reflect on how young filmmakers intervene in the formation of collective memory about the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), contributing to the renewed societal interest on the subject. The two films I analyze share a concern with creating a more instructive and inclusive collective memory by encouraging different groups to learn from the past to inform decisions in the present. In an experimental documentary, Diario argentino/Argentine Diary (2007), Lupe Pérez García focuses on the so-called “bystanders”—those who were neither activists nor represores. She challenges their typical image as passive spectators in a war between “two demons” and highlights their role as political actors in the past and the present. Secondly, in the feature film Cordero de Dios/Lamb of God (2008), Lucía Cedrón, herself daughter of a “disappeared” activist, proposes a way of taking the past as a guide for acting in present situations of hate and violence. The 2001 crisis plays an important role in these two films and in the directors' lives. The uncertainty impels them to understand their choices in relation to their interpretation of the past and to own the decisions they make and their (political/human) implications. Keywords: Cordero de Dios, Diario Argentino, Lucía Cedrón, Lupe Pérez García, Memory and intergenerational transmission, Memory and economic crisis."""
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2023
While much has been written about Argentine political documentary during the 1960s and 1970s, less has been said about post-dictatorship political documentaries. This article will consider the films Cuarentena: Exilio y regreso (1983) and Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (1987) by Carlos Echeverría, an independent filmmaker who focuses on the return to democracy and reflections on the recent past. Cuarentena: Exilio y regreso is about Osvaldo Bayer's experiences and fervent desire to return to his homeland. Osvaldo Bayer is an Argentine writer who was exiled in Germany during the dictatorship. Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido is one of the most important Argentine films of the last thirty years, as it is among the first documentaries to address the subject of the forced disappearance of people during the last military dictatorship. The film contains interviews with military officers who held high positions during the period, asking them about the roles they played in political disappearances.
Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham _ Supervisor Dr. Adam Sharman, 2000
This thesis analyzes a series of films that, in different ways, seek to represent the last Argentine dictatorship. The possibility of interpreting the thematic and formal recurrences of the films as a defining characteristic of a specific genre is posed as a first hypothesis. The second hypothesis postulates the possibility of relating certain aesthetic and rhetorical changes of the series to certain socio-political processes. After presenting a general overview of some of the various forms in which the relationship between cinema and society has been theorized before, the work proposes the instance of enunciation as a principle of articulation between textual and social systems, analysing the subjects involved in each of these levels and the relationship that can be established between them. The apparatus of enunciation (between textual figures), which can be related to the reading contract (between social subjects) can also be associated with the notion of genre. In this context, the thesis explores the possibility of a redefinition of cinematographic genres from the perspective of the Semiotics of Passions. Having established in the previous chapters the theoretical and methodological basis, the second part of the work consists of the analysis of the enunciation in the films of the corpus, in order to establish the main characteristics of the reading contract proposed to the spectator. The analysis starts with the consideration of the genre known in television as "docudrama", paying particular attention to the relationship between what is filmed and the "real", that this genre seeks to establish. This is followed by the partial conclusions of the analysis of the totality of films included in the corpus. A first systematisation of the general characteristics of the films considered allows for a definition of a new genre which we termed "documelodrama".
Anarchism and Counterinformation in Documentaries: From Civil War Spain to Post-2001 Argentina
Latin American Perspectives, 2012
The work of anarchist collectives in the film industry during the Spanish Civil War and the video documentaries of Grupo Alavío in post-2001 Argentina, as represented in two documentaries that attest to historical moments of worker self-management, shows historical and aesthetic intersections. Both were devoted to disseminating information counter to the official line of the mass media, and in neither was there a desire to take over the state; instead, the movements they represented denied the very legitimacy of the state. In the tradition of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, both crafted meanings out of sequences of images of all kinds, and both paid homage to the masses awakening to social emancipation. Similarly to the Soviet film vanguard of the 1920s, both can be understood as organic parts of the transformations that they portrayed. La obra de colectivos anarquistas en la industria del cine durante la Guerra Civil Española y los video-documentales del Grupo Alavío en la Argentina del pos 2001, representadas en dos documentales que atestiguan los momentos históricos de autogestión laboral, demuestran una intersección histórica y estética. Ambas se dedicaban a la difusión de información contraria a la línea oficial de los medios de comunicación, y ninguna deseaba apoderarse del estado; en lugar de ello los movimientos que representaban negaban la propia legitimidad del estado. En la tradición del cineasta soviético Dziga Vertov, ambos elaboraban significados de secuencias de imágenes de todo tipo, y ambos prestaron homenaje al despertar de las masas y la emancipación social. Igual a la vanguardia del cine soviético de los años mil novecientos veinte, ambos pueden entenderse como piezas orgánicas de la transformación que retrataban.
Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Post-Dictatorship Argentina: Beyond Memory Fatigue:
Indiana University Press, 2019
This book's primary goal is to critically examine traditional approaches to testimonial cinema (trauma theory and subaltern studies), to propose an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics and theories of affect, and to re-read Argentine films produced between 1983 and 2016 from this latter standpoint. I expect that this renewed analysis will contribute to understanding the specific place of first-person narratives in contemporary Argentine culture and to overcoming the existing fatigue surrounding the topic (“el temita,” as Mariana Eva Perez, also known as “la princesa montonera,” has brilliantly called the fossilized discourse on the dictatorship). Although I focus on Argentina, my readings also apply to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to hegemonic, iconic accounts: Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian post-dictatorship narratives; accounts of apartheid South Africa; and Holocaust testimonies, to name but a few. I see Argentina as a case study for rethinking testimonial cinema in a larger context, one that goes beyond trauma and subaltern theories. I also believe that an approach combining semiotics and affect theories could be helpful in pursuing a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.
Iconic Fictions: Narrating Recent Argentine History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Films
This article examines a recent trend in Argentine post-dictatorial cinema that has not received sufficient critical attention: post-2000 fictional films by second-generation film-makers that go back to a child's or a teenager's perspective, and to an 'archaic' pre-1990s format. By focusing on a political thriller that I find paradigmatic of this recent trend, Gastón Biraben's Cautiva/Captive , I argue that these films (which I call 'iconic fictions') should not be read as additional examples of contemporary second-generation narratives. Instead, I propose that their formal exception attests to an intragenerational tension regarding the representation of recent history (in particular, regarding the representation of 1970s political activism). In these films, the use of fiction (and of a child's or a teenager's perspective) allows for a predominance of iconicity over indexicality -a predominance that entails crucial ideological connotations for contemporary Argentina and that demands a re-examination of the efficacy of representing history through a child's or a teenager's lens.