Redirected utopias: the politics of self-reflexive autobiographical documentary in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios and Ufuk Emiroglu’s Mon père, la révolution, et moi

ABSTRACT

Twenty-first century documentary production from around the world has used self-reflexivity to challenge assumptions about subjectivity and social positioning in ways that explicitly challenge the politics of filmmaking. Released in 2003 and 2013 respectively, Argentine director Albertina Carri’s Los rubios and Turkish filmmaker Ufuk Emiroglu’s Mon père, la révolution et moi incorporate fictions and fantasies into their autobiographical stories, telling their life stories through alternative narrative forms that deviate from existing social and aesthetic precepts. The two filmmakers seek to understand – and scrutinize – the utopian ideals of the revolutionary movements to which their fathers belonged in 1970s Argentina and Turkey, respectively. The directors use non-realist, non-linear approaches to telling their own life stories as a way of challenging what audiences think they know about their nations’ recent history. Situating these two films within their respective national film industries and within documentary practices around the globe, I show that their shared metonymic structures question the utopic aspects of their respective fathers’ revolutionary politics and the non-place of memory. As I argue in my comparative discussion, these films are ‘redirecting’ utopic autobiographical storytelling to challenge notions of cohesion in both the self and political pursuits.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiography
• animation
• memory
• politics

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 By ‘politically inflected filmmaking,’ I am referring to filmmaking that explicitly recounts or engages with political events – in both of these cases, revolutionary political movements and dictatorship.

2 In this regard, the films exemplify Michael Chanan’s characterization (2007) of twenty-first-century documentary: ‘documentary has shifted its ground and become more personal. There are still film-makers who practice rather strict forms of observational filmming or third-person narrative – Être et avoir and En construcción are both examples – but many new-wave documentarists are given to flouting the traditional documentary stance of impersonality, and frequently insert themselves into their own films in a variety of ways’ (6). For his part, Michael Renov has noted, ‘current documentary self-inscription enacts identities – fluid, multiple, even contradictory – while remaining fully embroiled within public discourses’ (2007: 178).

3 Ayfer Genç Yilmaz’ article (2014) focuses on the inspiration that Turkey’s Saturday Mothers drew from Argentina’s Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.

4 Suner discusses the nostalgia for home and the loss of childhood innocence as integral themes to such films as Çagan Irmak’s Babam ve Oglum (2005), also centered on the country’s 1980 coup, as is Emiroglu’s film. In a sense, Mon père, la révolution, et moi inverts Irmak’s nostalgic portrayal of the main character’s involvement in the insurgency against the wishes of his traditional father. Irmak’s fictional film is characterized by its melodramatic approach to the topic of family strife within the context of political insurgency.

5 Carri’s oeuvre has included such feminist and queer-affirming films as Barbie también puede estar triste (2003), a stop-motion film that depicts Barbie dolls in same-sex encounters and her most recent film, Daughters of Fire (2018), has been categorized as ‘political pornography.’ Carri also founded and began the Asterisco LGBTQIA film festival in Buenos Aires in 2014.

6 See Forcinito 2013.

7 Hirsch (2012) submits: ‘in the particular case of postmemory and ‘heteropathic recollection,’ where the subject is not just split between past and present, adult and child, but also between self and other, the layers of recollection and the subjective topography are even more complicated’ (166)

8 Testimonial language in documentary film has been explored in the context of the Foucauldian notion of the ‘regime of truth.’ (‘Exposing Mechanisms of Memory’)

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Stephanie Pridgeon

Stephanie Pridgeon is assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Bates College and the author of Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film (University of Toronto Press) as well as several articles on Latin American film, literature, and cultural studies.