Cinema, Memory and Human Rights in Argentina
Start Date
12-1-2012 1:30 PM
End Date
12-1-2012 3:00 PM
Description
Since the return to democracy in 1983, Argentine cinema has produced a great number of feature films and documentaries that return many times over to the years of the so called “Dirty War”. Starting with Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Oscar winning film The Official Story , filmmakers have used cinema in order to remember and reconstruct the historical period that expands from 1976 to 1983 where more than 30,000 people “Disappeared” from Argentine daily life to never again be seen. As Jaques Aumont in his book Amnesies: Fictions du cinema d’apres Jean-Luc Godard states: “Cinema has given us another memory. Cinema remembers everything … it has changed our way of remembering by changing the contents of our memory, by changing our own memory.” My paper analyzes the particular contributions made by post-dictatorship films to the preservation of memory as exemplified by a selected number of feature films and documentaries that emerged in Argentina after the country’s return to democracy. My presentation more specifically examines the ways in which films reflexivity and subversion of cinematic conventions become essential to the reworking of the themes of memory as well as national and personal identity. Some of the films to be used in the analysis are La historia oficial (Luis Puenzo, 1985), Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, 1999), Kamchatka (Marcelo Piñero, 2002) and Botín de Guerra (David Blaustein, 2000). In order to illustrate many of the arguments made in my presentation, I will use selected clips taken from the above mentioned films.
Cinema, Memory and Human Rights in Argentina
Since the return to democracy in 1983, Argentine cinema has produced a great number of feature films and documentaries that return many times over to the years of the so called “Dirty War”. Starting with Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Oscar winning film The Official Story , filmmakers have used cinema in order to remember and reconstruct the historical period that expands from 1976 to 1983 where more than 30,000 people “Disappeared” from Argentine daily life to never again be seen. As Jaques Aumont in his book Amnesies: Fictions du cinema d’apres Jean-Luc Godard states: “Cinema has given us another memory. Cinema remembers everything … it has changed our way of remembering by changing the contents of our memory, by changing our own memory.” My paper analyzes the particular contributions made by post-dictatorship films to the preservation of memory as exemplified by a selected number of feature films and documentaries that emerged in Argentina after the country’s return to democracy. My presentation more specifically examines the ways in which films reflexivity and subversion of cinematic conventions become essential to the reworking of the themes of memory as well as national and personal identity. Some of the films to be used in the analysis are La historia oficial (Luis Puenzo, 1985), Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, 1999), Kamchatka (Marcelo Piñero, 2002) and Botín de Guerra (David Blaustein, 2000). In order to illustrate many of the arguments made in my presentation, I will use selected clips taken from the above mentioned films.