Transnational Memories and Post-Dictatorship Cinema: Brazil, Chile and Argentina, Tatiana Signorelli Heise, 2024, Palgrave Macmillan
The darkest period in South American history was undoubtedly that of the military dictatorships between the 1960s and 80s.
The Southern Cone nations of Brazil, Chile and Argentina found themselves in the gripof brutal authoritarian regimes pursuing developmental agendas agreed by—and to a large extent pursued on behalf of—the sentinels of international capital.
Brazil’s military dictatorship was imposed through a coup in 1964 and endured until 1985; in Chile the appalling regime of Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973 and remained in control until 1990; and in Argentina a military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 unleashed the most bloody state terrorism against its own population of the era.
Memories of the victims of these murderous regimes—which benefited from the support of Washington as well as local elites in a climate of Cold War anti-communism—are understandably raw and the trauma they inflicted was, inevitably, enduring.
Subsequent democratisation faced the socio-cultural problems of how to reconcile wounded societies while protecting them against a recurrence of military coups which, in countries such as Brazil, disturbingly continue to find adherents among the far-right.
Cinema has played a role mediating this dilemma, since the 1990s creating a repertoire of “memory-narratives” about the dictatorships and their legacy in Latin America that have made the period known to audiences both too young to have experienced its depredations and those beyond national borders.
As Tatiana Signorelli Heise notes, cinema in these societies is of particular interest to the study of cultural memory because they have undergone a unique post-transitional experience since then, marked by unprecedented debates about human rights violations, accountability for state crimes, the silencing of victims, and the broader importance of remembering.
She writes: “Politically committed filmmakers … are moved by the desire to render visible what has remained hidden, to make reappear what has disappeared and to reinterpret historical actors and events from a present-day perspective.”
But what exactly is memory, the author starts by asking, and how can the production and content of films—in this case documentaries—help us to understand this concept more broadly and advance growing scholarship about it?
Signorelli Heise’s book is not only valuable for exploring this dimension of the South American experience of recent decades, but also for providing a fascinating introduction to the study of memory over time that is well worth reading for those new to this subject.
Our understanding of memory, she points out, has evolved significantly since antiquity, which established the foundation of a model that was archival—a storehouse of past experiences and information inscribed in the human mind and independent of social context.
In the 20th century and beginning with Freud, this philosophical understanding was consistently challenged by writers, philosophers and scholars concerned with the potential for a social dimension to recollection, and hence the specific construction of memory.
Maurice Halbwachs noted famously that: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.”
In short, remembering occurs within a social framework by which conventions, beliefs, concerns, moral codes, worldviews and preferences help us to assign meaning and value to our personal experiences.
As a result, culture looms large in any nuanced understanding of memory, and as scholars such as British psychologist Frederick Bartlett have argued, this in turn situates the act of remembering within our existing and dynamic frames of reference and narrative patterns.
Signorelli Heise likens this as a process akin to creating and telling stories, and hence one of the basic functions of memory—our ability to position ourselves in time and history itself—is grounded in the creation of narratives.
Such ideas have profound implications for the understanding both of memory and history, with the shift of much post-dictatorship and post-trauma research to oral history open to the challenge that interviews, in fact, do not provide direct access to past experiences, merely a way of ordering them within a contemporary sociocultural context. Moreover, where do such ideas leave the notion of “cultural memory”?
Media such as film are important in this respect, providing a powerful mechanism by which the personal memories of an individual or group can gain relevance and meaning in the sociocultural realm, and then disseminating these—implicitly, in the case of media such as film, beyond a specific national community.
As Signorelli Heise points, more recent scholarship in the field of memory studies is characterised by transnational approaches including those that conceptualise memory as global, cosmopolitan, digital and transcultural.
Concentrating on the Southern Cone dictatorships and their aftermath, the author applies these ideas to the study of film and the specific attributes this medium offers in the articulation of memory narratives and the codes it adopts in doing so.
She argues that memories are not simply represented or articulated in a film—they are constituted through it in a particular cinematic mode of remembering through the use of certain aesthetic forms and narrative structures that construct different versions of the past.
As an audio-visual medium, film has a capacity to convey experiences of trauma not only through the verbal accounts of eyewitnesses but also through the sensory and embodied types of memory they articulate through gestures, facial expressions, movements and voice tones.
Applying an eclectic theoretical and methodological toolbox, Signorelli Heise bases her findings on a corpus of about 200 auteur documentary films produced since the mid-1990s that chart the rise and aftermath of the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.
She pays close attention to their thematic concerns, representational modes, stylistic tropes and conventions, to identify four “modes” of remembering through film as determined by factors such as genre, temporal structure, editing, mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, performance, and setting etc: informative, reflective, diaristic and playful.
The informative mode of documentary filmmaking is a foundational style aiming to transmit knowledge about the past through an orderly, coherent narrative that seeks to disclose information about historical events through witness testimony, persuade audiences about the atrocities carried out by the dictatorship, and generate collective memories about the past.
The author examines this through two examples of identifiably “national” cinema: Cazadores de utopías (David Blaustein 1996) that provided a platform for former Argentine militants hitherto denied a voice; and Hércules 56 (Silvio Da-Rin 2006), a similar Brazilian “history lesson” offering social and political analyses of the emergence of the armed Left.
Both films construct alternative memories of the dictatorship by highlighting the heroic contribution of leftwing guerrilla groups in the struggle for democracy and fostering a positive self-image, argues Signorelli Heise. In doing so, she says, they establish a monolithic “counter-memory” that can be likened to a form of “commemoration” intolerant of dissenting positions.
Subsequent modes of remembering through film since the early 2000s reflect filmmakers’ shift in attention from memory as content to memory as process, and engage in a more critical reassessment of testimony by asking “what constitutes memory, how we remember, who is entitled to remember and what compels us to forget”.
Signorelli Heise explores the reflective mode—inviting viewers to take a contemplative and self-aware approach to memory—in terms of Sebastián Moreno’s La ciudad de los fotógrafos (2006) and Anita Leandro’s Retratos de identificação (2014).
She analyses the diaristic mode—first-person, autobiographical narrative in which the filmmaker overtly acknowledges his or her subjective position—through El (im)possible olvido (Andrés Habegger 2016), El color del camaleón (Andrés Lübbert 2017) and Fico te devendo uma carta sobre o Brasil (Carol Benjamin 2019).
Finally, Signorelli Heise assesses the playful mode of remembering through film—injecting imagination, creativity and even a degree of fiction to focus on the subjective nature of memories—through Deslembro (Flávia Castro 2018), Teatro de Guerra (Lola Arias 2018) and Ana. Sem Título (Lúcia Murat 2020).
Transnational Memories and Post-Dictatorship Cinema is a highly original interdisciplinary study that charts a novel, informed and rewarding course into the exploration of how memories of a traumatic period in South America’s past are recreated through film.
Eloquent, intriguing and fascinating, it offers an important point of departure for subsequent research.
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Categories: Argentina, Brazil, South America