Remembering the other, repositioning oneself: the right to a biography and autocommunication in perpetrator and collaborator descendant documentaries*

ABSTRACT

Can the perpetrator or the collaborator “speak”? How, and for whom? Do they have a “right to a biography” and, if so, what are the terms of this right? Who can speak for them? In short, what does it mean to work through their lives and the crimes they committed for those who decide to tell their stories? The main goal of this paper is to answer these questions using a particular kind of documentary directed by those who, in a certain moment of their lives, have discovered that a member of their families was a perpetrator or a collaborator relating to a dictatorship. Using Lotman’s theory of culture and memory, we discuss the positionalities of those who “wrote” these documentaries, located constantly between the individual and the collective semiosphere. Taking into account two case studies – El pacto de Adriana directed by Lissette Orozco (Chile, 2017) and L’occhio di vetro directed by Duccio Charini (Italy, 2020) – we look at the mechanisms of investigation and recollection that they use and “show,” in order to elucidate family secrets within the broader contexts of the collective traumas of Chile’s and Italy’s post-conflict societies.

KEYWORDS:

• The right to a biography
• autocommunication
• documentaries
• perpetrators and collaborators
• Juri M. Lotman

Acknowledgements

The two authors thank Dom Holdaway for the attentive proof-reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article, whenever we use the adjective “difficult” to characterise the pasts of post-conflict societies, we do so with reference to often competing national memories in that society, which are often not easily manageable, and which trigger a conflictual politics of memory and identity. As in our case, this politics regards not only the victims, but also the legacy of the perpetrators. See Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002) and Macdonald (2009) for the first scholarship to have interrogated the concept of “difficult” pasts and “difficult” heritage.

2 Given the extensiveness of these discourses, there is little need – nor space – to retrace these debates here; suffice it to recall the close if not entirely indexical relationship between the modern (and postmodern) technologies of representation – photography, cinema, sound recording – and the imagined object, as well as their potential to toy with the viewer/listener’s perception of time, space, representation (Doane 2002, see also Kilbourn 2010).

3 First published in 1984. On this occasion, we refer to the Italian translation, reproduced in La semiosfera (1985).

4 One further example is the novel Stirpe e Vergogna (“Ancestry and Shame”) by Michela Marzano (2021).