Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Infancia clandestina or the will of faith

2013; Berghahn Books; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3828/jrs.13.3.17

1752-2331

Gonzalo Aguilar, Glyn Fry,

Cinema History and Criticism

This article argues that Benjamin Avila’s Infancia clandestina (2012) marks a turning point in the cinematic representation of the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina. On the one hand, this film distances itself from works of fiction such as Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial, regulated by the archive and by testimonial and documentary evidence available to the viewer beyond the film. Conversely, Avila’s film not only includes a figure absent in films on the period made immediately after the dictatorship, namely the guerrillero, but it also shifts its discourse away from the referential verification demanded by testimony and from the autobiographical experience of the first person, to one that expresses–with the immanent articulation of its own fictional narrative units–a tale of community identity over the historical past. While the same could be said about more recent subjective documentary films centred on a point of view (that of the children of the disappeared who have grown up with an invented biogra...