(Mis)trasting Argentine Images of the Latest National Dictatorship: Silent Majorities, Desires or Repression and Vacillations

MAURO GRECO

Maynooth

Simposio; Symposium on Visual Culture in Argentina; 2019

In this presentation I would like to come back to a couple of hypotheses I worked on for a recentarticle proposal, in the frame of the project ?Navigating they Grey Zone: Addressing Complicityin Human Right´s Violations? at the University of Edinburgh. In that paper, I analysed tworecent films from Argentine cinema about our last dictatorship: The long night of FranciscoSanctis (released in 2016), directed by Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez, and Red (2018),of Benjamin Naishtat. The three filmmakers are very young, having been born either in the lastyears of the dictatorship or, as in Testa´s and Naishtat´s cases, during the so-called ?democraticrecovery?. Both films tackle the situation of the ?ordinary men/women? under a radicalsituation, even when, in Red, this exceptionality is re-located to the context immediately beforethe dictatorship, namely, the rightwing Peronist interventions in the ?rebels? provinces underPeronist leftist governments, democratically elected two years before.