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Abstract
The present article concentrates on the analysis of the film De l’Argentine/De la Argentina/For example Argentina (Werner Schroeter, France/Argentina, 1983–1985) as a way of access to a number of specific problems concerning the process of Argentinean democratic consolidation. It is a film that was only screened in Argentina for the first time in 2013, after a copy was found at the French Cinémathèque. Like other films produced in the context of dictatorship and democratic transition, Schroeter’s film has tended to think Argentina ‘from the outside’, that is, with a view marked by strangeness. These are documentaries which reflect upon physical and temporal distances, but, not the least, through cultural and ideological remoteness. On the basis of an analysis framed within Documentary Theory and the Sociology of Culture, this article seeks to make a contribution by way of an original perspective on a political film which, as far as we know, has not been addressed yet by Film Studies.
Notes
1. We understand democratic transition to be a complex process that extends in time well beyond democratic elections. According to the criteria offered by Juan Carlos Portantiero (Citation1987, 262–264), the process of democratic transition consists of three stages: first, an ‘authoritarian crisis’, second, the ‘establishing of democracy’, and lastly, the ‘consolidation of a democratic system’. The success of this last stage can be reached only when a stable regulation of democratic and political forms and the explicit presence of interests of state are in place.
2. Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is a civil organization created during the military dictatorship whose aim was to recover alive detainees and the disappeared, and then ascertain responsibilities for the crimes against humanity, promoting both judgement and punishment.
3. Cinema studies tended to focus on the decades of the 1960s and 1990s, as can be noted in the periodizations of edited works by Marrone and Moyano Walker (Citation2011) and Peña (Citation2003). The said tendency privileged political cinema of the 1960s, and the documentary of memory that emerged in Argentina during the mid 1990s, setting aside the approach to cinema of the 1980s, which coincided with democratic transition. This was due to the dispersion and in many cases also the lack of knowledge of this production made outside Argentina. For this reason, it is always possible that with the passing of the years more films could be found, as is the case precisely of the recent recovery of the film De l’Argentine, the object of this analysis.
4. I thank the Goethe Institut of Buenos Aires for granting access to the film.
5. Along with the three pillars just mentioned, Waldo Ansaldi (Citation2006, 24) also characterizes democracy in terms of other variables, such as freedom of association, the proper functioning of political parties, the separation of branches of government and the organization of free elections.
6. The irony rests on a joint mention by the same title of both tango and Argentinean reality in and around 1983. Tango alludes to a certain melancholic perspective, proper to its poetics, which could be read in line with the events of the convoluted Argentinean reality of the first half of the 1980s (which involves violence, the disappearance of people and, in general, the violations of human rights).
7. The retrospective ‘Werner Schroeter. Superar la insoportable realidad’ (Werner Schroeter. To overcome the unbearable reality) took place in the auditorium ‘Leopoldo Lugones’ of the San Martín Theater between August 17 and September 1, 2013.
8. While publicly sharing her testimony, the woman stated: ‘We wish that in Europe, the place where this [film] will be released, they gain conscience about the situation in Latin America’.
9. As an example, we can refer to the way in which Schroeter himself appears in the scene of actor and director Norman Briski’s testimony. Schroeter is located next to a sign with the silhouette of a soldier pointing with his long-range rifle in the direction of his head, next to a sign that says ‘Stop!’.
10. The ‘siluetazo’ practice consisted in drawing on large pieces of paper silhouettes of human bodies on a natural scale, which were then posted in different points of the city. These actions were an attempt to render visible the ‘present absence’ of the disappeared during the last military dictatorship.
11. In other cases, the faces of the interviewees remain in silence, accompanying the voice-over of the narrator.
12. Even though Gonzalo Aguilar refers specifically to ‘memory cinema’ quite typical of 1990s Argentina, we believe that some of his observations are indeed applicable to Argentinean cinema ‘from the outside’.
13. Estimates of the number of attendants were taken from Pucciarelli (Citation2006, 116).
14. The English translation of the poem ‘The Enemies’ was taken from https://www.proz.com/forum/literature_poetry/62348-nerudas_los_enemigos_and_my_translation.html (access date October 12, 2015).
15. The speech of then President Raúl Alfonsín was delivered in Spanish and translated into English by me.
16. The ‘Full stop law’ (N° 23.492) established the expiration of legal action against material authors of crimes surrounding the forced disappearance of people during the military dictatorship that, for whatever reason, had not been called to declare within sixty consecutive days from the date the law was passed.
17. The act of ‘Due obedience’ (N° 23.521) established a presumption (which did not admit counter-evidence) that the crimes committed by members of the Armed Forces (whose rank was inferior to Colonel) during ‘State terrorism’ and the military dictatorship were not punishable on account of ‘due obedience’.
18. Estimates suggest around 30,000 disappeared in Argentina as a consequence of ‘State terrorism’.
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Notes on contributors
Paola Margulis
Paola Margulis holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. She is a researcher with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). She teaches an undergraduate Seminar about documentary film at the University of Buenos Aires, where she also co-directs the Department of Communication and Documentary Film Studies. She is the author of the book, De la formación a la institución: El documental audiovisual argentino en la transición democrática (1982-1990) (From Formation to Institution: The Argentinean Audiovisual Documentary in the Transition to Democracy (1982-1990)).