Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina

Beyond Memory Fatigue

Verónica Garibotto

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253038531
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue, " a backlash against the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina, Verónica Garibotto looks at the causes for this reticence and argues that, rather than discarding memory texts for their repetitive excess, it is necessary to acknowledge them and their exhaustion as discourses of the present.

By critically examining how trauma theory and subaltern studies have previously been applied to testimonial cinema, Garibotto rereads Argentinian films produced since 1983 and calls for an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics, theories of affect, scholarship on hegemony, and the ideological uses of documentary and fiction. She argues that recurrent concepts—such as trauma, mourning, memory, and subalternity—miss how testimonial films have changed over time, shifting from subaltern narratives to official, hegemonic, and iconic accounts. Her work highlights the urgent need to continue to study these types of narratives, particularly at a time when military dictatorships have become entrenched in Latin America and memory narratives proliferate worldwide. Although Argentina is Garibotto's focus, her theory can be adapted to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to official, hegemonic accounts—such as in Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, South African, and Holocaust testimonies. Garibotto's study of testimonial cinema moves us to pursue a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.

1 Knowledge and Feeling

Testimonial Documentary and Fiction in the 1980s

ON DECEMBER 10, 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín took office, surrounded by an ecstatic crowd of Argentines from all social classes and political backgrounds. He was the first democratically elected president of Argentina after seven long years of dictatorial rule. Alfonsín’s primary goals had been clear since the beginning of the electoral campaign: to promote democracy and to rebuild a public sphere that had been broken by a near decade of forced exile, torture, death, censorship, and economic depression.¹ Departing from a national history of impunity, his first measure was to prosecute state-sponsored human rights violations. Thus, after repealing a military self-amnesty law, he appointed an independent organization, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP, its acronym in Spanish), to collect information on people who had gone missing during the dictatorship. Nunca más, CONADEP’s final report compiling testimonies of survivors and relatives, sold out in forty-eight hours and has remained Argentina’s top bestseller ever since. Thousands of witnesses exposed the existence of clandestine detention centers and gave detailed accounts of how military officers had tortured, raped, and killed political prisoners—in many cases also stealing babies born in captivity. As Hugo Vezzetti suggests, Nunca más marked a turning point in Argentine history (Pasado 107): The book’s testimonies laid the groundwork for a new discourse on memory and ushered in an irreversible condemnation of state terrorism.

Such revelations paved the way, too, for a unique legal procedure. Between April and December 1985, the nine chief military officers who had ruled Argentina during the dictatorship were brought before a civilian court for an oral and public trial, best known as the juicio a las juntas (trial of the juntas). Eight hundred thirty witnesses, mostly camp survivors and relatives of missing people, testified before an audience that included judges, lawyers, journalists, members of human rights organizations, and ordinary people interested in the legal process. As a result, two officers were sentenced to life imprisonment, three were sentenced to several years behind bars, and the remaining four were absolved.² Both Nunca más and the juicio a las juntas were major steps toward achieving the new administration’s goal of reconstructing the broken public sphere; they fostered democratic values, encouraged trust in government institutions, and filled gaps in historical knowledge that had been left by the military’s intentional destruction of documents.

In this context of political turmoil and hope, the film industry became a key pillar of the incipient democracy. While maintaining Law No. 17,741, through which the Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía (then INC, now INCAA) controlled exhibition and production, Alfonsín sanctioned Law No. 23,052, abolishing censorship. Manuel Antín, the INC’s new director, actively sought to reconcile entertainment with political commitment, in large part because a portion of the institute’s funding came from a 10 percent sales tax. The 1960s-era movement Third Cinema—which, as stated in its foundational manifesto, was “independent in production, militant in politics, and experimental in language” (Stam 253)—was no longer an option. Its anticommercial stance did not suit the new scenario. Furthermore, following the defeat of the left-leaning armed struggle, overtly political, activism-encouraging narratives seemed archaic.³ As opposed to Third Cinema productions, Argentine films of the 1980s combined political and market demands, denouncing, especially through fiction, what had transpired during the dictatorship.⁴ Usually combining two popular genres, thriller and melodrama, these fiction films led viewers through a labyrinth of clues and feelings until they reached a final revelation that uncovered previously hidden aspects of the recent past. Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1985, was paradigmatic in this respect. The story of Alicia, a high school teacher who had unknowingly adopted a daughter born to disappeared parents and gradually discovered the secret truth, met audience expectations by way of a generic fiction that successfully fused melodrama, thriller, and politics.⁵

It is precisely for this combination of genre and politics that 1980s fictional cinema has often been criticized. According to most scholars, the thriller format provides a sanitized version of the recent past that fails to challenge the audience. Innocent protagonists, like Alicia in La historia oficial, enable the Argentine people to unveil the darkest facets of the previous years without truly confronting their own responsibility (Aprea, Cine 55; Burucúa 72; España 30; Podalsky 6). Based on transparent, linear narratives poor in aesthetic value, these simplistic stories go from the revolutionary to the revelatory. Rather than exploring the past, they merely aim for a visceral denunciation, creating an abstract consensus around democracy (Aprea, Cine 52; Andermann, New Argentine 4). Moreover, melodramatic conventions elicit empathy and unleash sensations, turning the cinematic act into a self-purging experience. Instead of appealing to the viewers’ critical judgment, these fictional melodramas prompt catharsis while precluding active thought and historical examination (Amado 23; Andermann, New Argentine 3). They engulf the audience and make “no attempt to question the language of representation” (King 96).⁶

This reading has also polarized the appraisal of 1980s testimonial cinema, as evidenced by the opposing reactions to Héctor Olivera’s canonical La noche de los lápices (1986) and Carlos Echeverría’s Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (1987). La noche de los lápices is a fictional reconfiguration of camp survivor Pablo Díaz’s testimony in the juicio a las juntas. Based on Díaz’s experience, the film tells a love story while recreating the inhuman conditions of the detention centers. Although directed by Olivera, Díaz acts both as the speaking subject and the subject of speech. The film is grounded in his juridical testimony, the script is organized according to his advice, and the narrative is structured from his point of view—the first-person perspective of a fictional character who serves as Díaz’s “I.” In other words, Díaz holds primary agency both on the level of enunciation and on the level of fiction. Meanwhile, Echeverría’s film—which initially seems very different—is a documentary investigating the fate of Juan Marcos Herman, the only person who disappeared from the touristic city of Bariloche during the military regime. The filmic narrative mainly comprises first-person accounts by Juan’s friends, relatives, and possible murderers—all real protagonists of the events described. In line with the common appraisal of 1980s cinema, the two films have prompted opposing critical reactions. While Olivera’s popular fiction has been dismissed as a naïve, self-purging, and emotional narrative, Juan has been praised as an anomaly—an exception within the early democracy, a highly reflexive documentary far removed from the unsophisticated, sentimental generic fictions typical of its time (Amado 23; Aprea, Cine 39, 59; Andermann, New Argentine 108–109; Margulis, De la formación 206, “Documentaries” 326; Piedras, “La regla y la excepción: figuraciones de la subjetividad autoral en documentales argentines de los ochenta y noventa” 44, El cine documental en primera persona 52).

I would like to suggest that this appraisal is somewhat anachronistic. Seen from a temporal vantage point, generic fictions certainly seem naïve, in both formal and historical terms, while reflective documentaries look more complex and sophisticated. Such an assessment, however, mainly results from a displaced, belated reception. Moreover, the negative view is based on certain dichotomies (reason/emotion, feeling/cognition, passion/knowledge) that, as affect theories show, are not as rigid as usually perceived. These dichotomies result in another static binary (testimonial fiction versus testimonial documentary) that obliterates a general, more comprehensive understanding of testimonial cinema. An analysis of specific 1980s films that resists these rigid binaries, focusing instead on the films’ present of enunciation, helps us better understand how testimonial cinema accompanied official discourses of democratization.⁷ Testimonial films—whether documentary or fictional—materialized and contributed to the creation of narratives that fostered democratic participation, shaped new affective configurations, and influenced a different version of history. This analysis also encourages us to rethink the reason/affect dichotomy and sheds light on its implications in the early democracy.

In order to develop these ideas, chapter 1 will primarily focus on Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido. I am interested in how the film’s indexical and symbolic components help us elucidate the role of testimonial cinema in the early democracy. At first glance, this may seem like a strange choice; after all, the film has usually been interpreted as an anomaly. Nonetheless, I specifically chose Juan both because it embodies the most relevant aspects of the incipient democracy and because its perceived exceptional status is a starting point for rethinking the way 1980s cinema has been read. Although I agree that Juan’s formal techniques are quite advanced and that its content alludes to waning democratic optimism—the documentary ends with President Alfonsín’s announcements of the leyes de punto final and obediencia debida—I contend that what are usually seen as anomalies are actually traces of the early democracy.⁸ Thus, once I have clarified, via Juan, the place of testimonial cinema at this historical moment, I briefly reread Olivera’s La noche de los lápices to revise the role of fictional testimony and to reexamine the reason/affect binary.⁹

Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido: Democracy as Work in Progress

Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido stands out as one of the most fascinating and complex testimonial films of the postdictatorship period. Some of its intricacy is due to its collaborative origin. Echeverría, a native of Bariloche himself, created and directed the film as his university thesis project while studying in Munich. Horacio Herman, Juan’s brother, was in charge of photography, lighting, and investigation. Journalist Esteban Buch appears on-screen as he interviews Juan’s relatives, friends, former military officers, and public figures presumably involved in the man’s kidnapping. And Osvaldo Bayer, a famous Argentine writer who was living in exile in Germany and had been the protagonist of Echeverría’s previous film Cuarentena, wrote texts for the voiceover in which Buch analyzes the testimonies, acting as a “juxtadiegetic” narrator (i.e., a narrator whose voice runs alongside the plot) (Metz, Impersonal 39). In this sense, the film is a typical product of a phase in Argentine documentary history that Margulis has called “formacional” (formational), because it saw the emergence both of documentary filmmakers who had been professionally trained (formados) in the genre and of different forms of collaboration (formaciones) that made these films possible (De la formación xxiii).

Furthermore, the film is complex not only in terms of authorship and enunciation but also stylistically and formally. Far from being a straightforward staging of the results of a three-year investigation, the narrative is structured as a messy collage that leaves us with several loose ends. Ex-military officers reluctantly answer Buch’s questions, often contradicting one another. Juan’s friends and relatives, sometimes unidentified, confront the viewer with their own feelings and memories. Contemporary images of Bariloche and Buenos Aires are juxtaposed with older photographs and TV footage, combining different temporalities. Moreover, the documentary openly reflects on the shooting process, showing the crew as they edit filmic material and acknowledging the existence of two different cameras: the video camera that Buch uses to conduct the interviews and a hidden sixteen-millimeter camera capturing these moments. In this sense, the film becomes doubly reflective, as it exposes the apparatus that allows for an exposure of the apparatus—“a filmic operation, ‘to expose the apparatus’, that only rarely shows THE apparatus, that is, its own apparatus, but is usually content to display AN apparatus that belongs to some other film” (Metz, Impersonal 65, emphasis in the original).

It is because of this complexity that Juan has been read as an anomaly. Aside from interpretations grounded in trauma theory (Bekerman 159–178; Grinberg Plá 1–21), which I will revisit in the next chapter, Juan has usually been defined as an exception. The reflective use of filmic language has been considered an early example of post-1990s cinema. Ana Amado observes that this reflective language appeals to the spectator’s critical judgment, breaking with typical 1980s affective films that work to elicit empathy (23). In the same vein, Gustavo Aprea claims that Juan evidences the end of 1980s cinema, as it exhibits the exhaustion of its two most popular genres: revelatory melodrama and political thriller. Unlike simplistic stories imbued with the new democracy’s optimistic spirit, Echeverría’s film aims to redefine realism and to question celebratory discourse (Cine 39). Paola Margulis, Pablo Piedras, and Carmen Guarini argue that features like the inclusion of a journalist who represents the director, a first-person voiceover narrating the investigation, and the crew at work, ultimately link the film to the documentaries of the post-1990s (Margulis, “Documentaries” 326, De la formación 206–210; Piedras, “La regla” 44; Guarini 355). Jens Andermann, meanwhile, goes so far as to connect its narrative procedures to the post-2000 second generation. As in M or Los rubios, the polyphonic nature of the testimonies, instead of providing a truthful representation of the past, reinforces the absences it contains—the impossibility, in other words, of a single, totalizing truthful representation (New Argentine 108–109). On initial review, then, Juan seems to be the opposite of typical 1980s cinema. Whereas generic fictions erase every trace of reflexivity in order to establish a smooth connection with the audience, the exhibition of the filmic process lies at the core of Echeverría’s documentary. In the former, viewers are engulfed into the plot; in the latter, they are starkly aware of its fabrication.

Although I certainly agree with the prominence of Juan’s reflective language, I would suggest that, rather than setting it apart from the 1980s, it actually embodies what is happening in that decade. Reflexivity materializes social discourses of the early democracy, offering traces of the present and helping us better understand it almost three decades later. A closer look at what makes the film reflective illuminates this temporal connection. If we focus on Juan’s traditional readings, we could say that reflexivity is mainly caused by the emphasis on the film as a documentary. As we watch, we witness firsthand how Buch immerses himself in the real world in search of referents. We see him walking through the streets, taking a bus, knocking on doors, and entering military facilities. We become aware that the filmic image emerges through the shooting of real objects and people—an awareness that usually escapes us in conventional fiction, in which “the cinematic signifier . . . is employed entirely to remove the traces of its own steps, to open immediately to the transparency of a signified, of a story, which is in reality manufactured by it but which it pretends merely to ‘illustrate,’ to transmit to us after the event, as if it had existed previously” (Metz, The Imaginary Signifier 40).

Several scholars have already specified the difficulty of establishing definitive boundaries betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Redefining Testimonial Cinema
• 1. Knowledge and Feeling: Testimonial Documentary and Fiction in the 1980s
• 2. Indexicality and Counterhegemony: Testimonial Documentary in the 1990s
• 3. Distortion and History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Performative Documentaries
• 4. Emotion and History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Iconic Fictions
• Afterword: From Counterhegemony to Hegemony
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author