Memoria, posmemoria y re-enactment en el cine documental argentino

Abstract

In contemporary Argentine cinema the confrontation with the memory of the state terrorism practiced during the last military dictatorship is articulated both in fictions and documentaries whose reconstructions of the past appear to be closely related to the experience of the present. The filmic articulations of social memory are frequently associated with the concept of ‘postmemory’ which is not only defined by the posteriority of remembrance and its highly reflexive status but is also caracterized by various practices of re-embodiment or of the re-enactment of the traumatic past. The present article investigates the cinematographic techniques as well as the socio-cultural implications which mark the documentary representations of ‘postmemory’ in three films directed by children of desaparecidos: Papá Iván (María Inés Roqué, 2000), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), M (Nicolás Prividera, 2007). It focuses in particular on the continual oscillation between the opposed techniques of reflexive distancing and affective re-enactment which alter the relation between past and present and threaten to blur the very boundaries separating victims and perpetrators.