Archaeology of the Apocalypse (Cinema and Authoritarian regimes in Argentina)

OUBIÑA, DAVID

Amsterdam

Congreso; XXIX International Congress of the History of Art: "Memory & Oblivion"; 1996

Comité International d´Histoire de l´Art (CIHA)

Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina was a country destroyed by a terrible dictatorship that -paradoxically-called itself National Reorganization Process. The reestablishing of democratic institutions (that began at the end of 1983 and tried rebuild a ruined society) has pretended, very often, to conceal the past as if it only was a bad dream. However, the history of a nation cannot be constructed upon amnesia. The diferent artistic expressions refused to renounce to the past. Lots of films after 1983 tried to build a map of that memory that the military regime wanted to supress by means of torture, missing persons, exile and censorship. These films know that horror can´t be exorcised by any image, but they also know that the only justification for art is to shape the memory of the people. My work focuses on the different forms in which films made during democracy represent the problems of exile and of missing persons. That is how authoritarian regimes exerts their power: amputation of an individual from his belonging place or physically abrogation by vanishing. That is to say: by supressing memory. In that dialectics of outside/inside that defines the meaning of belonging, the concept of exile always produces a spatiotemporal alteration; or, better to say, spatial alteration is experimented as temporal alteration. For those outcast, the native land is always past. So, it is not hazardous that the aesthetic answer of cinema consists in building that land as a mythical place. The perverted act in the concept of missing person is the absence of a dead body. A missing person is a dead person who cannot return from the limbo of oblivion. Then, he is more (and worse) than a dead person because he cannot even accede to remembrance. He is a spectral presence, a soul in pain. He is a black hole in our memory. So, it is not hazardous that the aesthetic answer of cinema consists in affirming a kind of Habeas corpus. The exiled person is an individual that authoritarian regimes supress by tearing him apart from the land where he belongs; the missing person is a macabre exacerbation of an exiled person: a missing person is an absolute absence. But the aim is the same in both cases: these individuals never existed. Absence, here, means oblivion. Films strategy preserves memory as an instance of resistance against a policy of exclusion as oblivion.