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Dictatorship memories: Working through trauma in Chilean post-dictatorship documentary

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10304310903444037

1469-3666

Antonio Traverso,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

Abstract This essay discusses the representation of traumatic memory in Chilean post-dictatorship documentary. It argues that Chilean political memory documentaries of the post-dictatorship period, beyond their necessary depiction of the traumas and suffering of victims and survivors, consistently reveal productive attributes of life under dictatorship, such as the people's creative capacities of agency, resilience and imagination. In order to illustrate this proposition the essay offers an encompassing critical review of post-dictatorship documentaries directed by Chileans both in Chile and abroad between 1990 and 2007, focusing in particular on the films' representation of strategies of working through that counterbalance the acting out of suffering and damage that is characteristic of trauma cinema. Notes 1. On the history of the film school of Universidad de Chile, see Salinas and Stange (Citation2008); and on the history of the film institute of Universidad Católica, see the fourth chapter in Cavallo and Díaz (Citation2007). 2. In 2009 the audiovisual section of Fondart allocated funds to the tune of one thousand million pesos (approximately, US$2.5 million) to eleven feature film projects, five of which are documentaries; see Fondart's website (Spanish): www.consejodelacultura.cl/fondosdecultura/ 3. Ley del Fomento del Cine y el Audiovisual (No. 19.981, November 2004); see full text of the law (Spanish) at: www.leychile.cl/Navegar?idNorma = 232277 4. Cineteca Nacional: www.cinetecanacional.cl; www.ccplm.cl 5. See online a recent economic and demographic report on Chile's cultural industries, Cultural Industries Profile – Chile, prepared for the Department of Canadian Heritage by Rafael Otano and Patricia Hidalgo at: Chile_culturl_industries_jan_2007-eng[1].pdf 6. For a succinct summary (Spanish) of the essential historiographic studies of Chilean cinema, see Vásquez (Citation2000). 7. Besides the titles by Mouesca (Citation2005) and Vega (Citation2006), see the following Spanish sources on Chilean documentary: Ruffinelli (Citation2001, Citation2008), Corro et al. (Citation2007) and Donoso (Citation2007). 8. For sources in English see Pino-Ojeda and Ortega (Citation2009), Traverso (Citation2009), Chanan (Citation1976, Citation2007), Rodriguez (Citation2007), Cisneros (Citation2006), Wayne (Citation2001), Pick (Citation1987) and Coad (Citation1980). 9. I am using the expression coined by CitationJanet Walker in her influential 2005 book. 10. Unless otherwise indicated, in the remainder of the essay 'documentary' is used to denote 'Chilean post-dictatorship political memory documentary', that is, political documentary films and videos made in 1990 and after, that thematize the experience of the military period. 11. On acting out and working through see the conclusion in LaCapra (Citation1994); the introduction in Kaplan and Wang (Citation2004); Walker (2005); and Hirsch's essay in Kaplan and Wang (Citation2004). 12. Several scholars have disagreed with LaCapra's critique of Shoah (see, for example, Hirsch's essay in Kaplan and Wang Citation2004). The counter-argument can be broadly summarized thus: even though the film clearly engages in prompting traumatic acting out, its broader cultural and historical function is one of encouraging a process of working through the trauma of the Holocaust, which until then had been misrepresented, silenced, or denied. LaCapra's essay, however, anticipates such criticism by acknowledging the crucial significance of the film, both historical and aesthetic, and explaining in detail the rationale of his criticism. 13. Aor. CitationKonrad Brendler defines working through as 'the gradual assimilation of overwhelming conflicttype [sic] experiences which the psychic organism initially rejects and in the long run suppresses if there is no adequate psychic basis and support for processing the impressions' (1995, 250). 14. Also see Traverso (Citation2008), where I propose a similar argument in relation to two Chilean narrative films. 15. The material for this and my two previously cited essays is drawn from an in-progress monograph provisionally entitled 'Dictatorship screens: Chilean cinema, politics, and traumatic memory', where I analyse both documentary and narrative films that thematize Chile's military dictatorship period. 16. While the main events are fairly well known, here is a summary for the uninitiated: socialist president Salvador Allende was ousted by a US-backed military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Allende and many of his supporters died on the day of the coup and for the next 16 years of dictatorship an estimated 3000 political opponents died, while hundreds of thousands suffered state-sponsored exile, imprisonment, violence, and torture. Pinochet's regime ended in 1990, with the beginning of the current period of parliamentary democracy; see Dorfman (Citation2003) and Constable and Valenzuela (Citation1991). 17. Among the most prolific media collectives of the 1980s were: Ictus, Proceso, Eco, Canelo de Nos, Más Media, and Nueva Imagen. While most groups disappeared soon after the end of the military regime in 1990, among the successful survivors are: Ictus, one of Chile's principal theatre companies originally founded in 1955 (http://www.teatroictus.cl/); and Nueva Imagen, founded towards the end of the dictatorship in 1989, which has become one of Chile's most important independent film and television production houses (http://www.nuevaimagen.cl/). Also see the U-Matic Project website (http://www.umatic.cl/index.html), which contains a comprehensive list of independent video productions made in Chile from the 1970s to 1990s, including a selection of clips. 18. The phrase caravana de la muerte was coined in Chile to refer to a group of military officers led by General Sergio Arellano who travelled by helicopter after the coup, visiting concentration camps, summarily executing prisoners whose names appeared on a death list, and then hiding or destroying their remains. 19. This is a well-known organization of mothers and widows of the desaparecidos, similar to Argentina's Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who as a way of drawing public attention to the issue of missing political detainees in Chile danced the cueca, the Chilean national dance (traditionally danced by a couple), without a partner. The British pop singer Sting famously dedicated the song 'They Dance Alone' to them. 20. See my in-depth analysis of Reinalda del Carmen in Traverso (Citation2009), from which this paragraph is adapted. 21. Memoria desierta was produced as part of a cultural memory project called The Chacabuco Project (www.chacabuco.org). Another documentary, Citation La sombra de don Roberto (2007), also looks at the memory of the Chacabuco camp through a slow-paced conversation amidst the camp's ruins with one of the survivors, Roberto Zaldívar.