Filming Loss

(Post-)Memory, Subjectivity, and the Performance of Failure in Recent Argentine Documentary Films

Bibliographic Data

ID4501173
AuthorsMichael J Lazzara (Latin American literature and culture at the University of California, Davis, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume36
Issue5
Pages147-157
Publication date2009-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x09341978
OpenAlexW2129596419
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited1

Two Argentine filmmakers of the postdictatorship generation have used the documentary as a space in which to question constructions of history, memory, and identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. Both projects foreground the idea of loss and the difficulties of writing a "truthful" version of the past when confronted by politically motivated "official histories," temporal shift, ideological change, lost referents, and missed experience. Andrés Di Tella's La televisión y yo (2003) questions the intersections among history, identity, and the media. In it the filmmaker's identity, fragile and tenuous, is shown to be based upon memories of the television programs of his youth that he missed because of his family's self-imposed exile during the Onganía regime. The film is a clear critique of globalization's effects on subjectivity. Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003) highlights the tenuousness of her identity by exploring the gaps and silences of memory. It raises key questions about "postmemory" and generational shifts and, more particularly, about how those at a generational remove from the traumas of dictatorship can comprehend these traumatic historical events and their own relationships to them

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dictatorship · Epistemology · Film director · Identity (music) · Ideology · Key (lock) · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Memory, violence, and history · Philosophy · Spanish Culture and Identity

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