Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the past in Albertina Carri's Los Rubios

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Notes

 1 Idelber Avelar, Alberto Moreiras and Nelly Richard have made important and insightful contributions to the exploration of memory in dialogue with such approaches. For a critical reading of the limitations of the Holocaust model, see Casullo (2004) and Vezzetti (2002).

 2 Besides Los rubios, Carri has directed No quiero volver a casa (2000), Barbie también puede estar triste (2001), and Géminis (2005).

 3 Historias cotidianas (2000) by Andrés Habegger and Papá Iván (2000) by María Inés Roqué are two documentaries by young directors whose parents are also missing. One could also include in this group the fiction short film In absentia (2003), by Lucía Cedrón, daughter of film director Jorge Cedrón, assassinated in 1980.

 4 Textual examples of Montonero memory are El presidente que no fue (1997) and Diario de un clandestino (2000) by Miguel Bonasso, and the three volumes of La voluntad (1997, 1998) by Eduardo Anguita and Martín Caparrós. Jelin and Kaufman (2000) offer a detailed analysis of how memory is produced and reconstructed in Argentina 20 years after the end of the dictatorship.

 5 A long article by writer and cultural critic Martín Kohan, entitled ‘La apariencia celeda’, appeared in the Argentine journal Punto de Vista in 2003. The article praised the formal sophistication of Carri's documentary but had many harsh words for the young director, whom Kohan accuses of narcissistic excess, of disrespect toward her parents and of holding a post-political, superficial view of Argentina's social and political past (and present). The journal published a response by Cecilia Macón, who criticizes Kohan's prescriptive reading of the movie, and praises Carri for underscoring the conflictive nature of memory. Although, to my knowledge, this is the only published evidence of unease elicited by the documentary, it was not an isolated case. In the interview she gave to the electronic site devoted to film La Pochoclera, Carri herself acknowledges other disapproving reactions to her film.

 6 About the different modes of the documentary genre, see Nichols (2001: 32–75).

 7 In fact, the openness endorsed by the movie has its limits. Although there is at least one interview in which a working-class woman echoes the official discourse of the dictatorship against 1970s leftist militants, the selection of views does not include a direct presentation of the perspective of the regime's supporters – an option that for many is unacceptable, and even obscene.

 8 For an interesting analysis of performative films, see Bruzzi (2000), especially Chap. 6.

 9 On the distinction between time-images and movement-images, see Deleuze (1989).

10 The resort to narrative patterns coming from mass culture in order to make sense of the disappearance of their parents seems to have been a common response among the children of the disappeared, when they were kids. The testimonies included in Habegger's movie make reference to this phenomenon.

11 The testament letter appears in many productions by children of disappeared parents. See, for example, the film Papá Iván by Ana María Roqué, and the testimony by Ana, included in Juan Gelman (1997: 47).

12 According to Ana Amado, genealogical and mimetic interpellation between parents and children are central to the visual and cinematographic production by the children of the disappeared. On the daughter's challenge to the militant father's political interpellation in the visual productions of Carri, Quieto and Roqué, see Amado's two outstanding critical pieces (Amado, 2004, Amado and Dominguez, 2004).

13 The DNA performance draws from two heuristic systems, the biological and the performative, and is based on forms of transmission that refuse surrogation (see Taylor, 2003: 173, 175).

14 For a list of the common features in Latin American political cinema, between 1967 and 1977, see Getino and Vellegia (2002: 18). Bernini (2004) provides a cultural historical analysis of Argentine political cinema.

15 Christian Gunerman (2004) sees a similar intertextual dialogue between Alejandro Agresti's Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), and the political cinema of the 1960s.

16 The opposition between lower and middle class is inherent to the politics of memory of the HIJOS, whose members belong almost entirely to the middle class. Silvia, a member of the association, suggests that in industrial cities like Córdoba militant workers are the unacknowledged disappeared, whose children do not know much about their fathers' activism and who have not organized themselves like the relatives of the students and militants of political organizations did (see Gelman, 1997: 136–7).

17 The Institute later awarded a grant to the project, which is acknowledged in the film.

18 On Benjamin's concept of pantomime as the index of mourning, see Butler (2003: 467). Diana Taylor also calls attention to HIJOS's joyful rituals of mourning and the carnivalesque nature of their performative escraches (2003: 181–2).