The Bustle of the "Silent Majority" in Argentinean post-dictatorship cinema

MAURO GRECO

Workshop; Compromised Identities: Reflections and complicity under Nazism; 2018

The presentation re-examines the problem of collective responsibility for state-sponsored violence, taking the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) as a case study, a country that has elaborated a proper theoretical frame to research the subject. Here I propose to think about the issue of society's implication in past violence in terms of the categories of desires of repression and micro-fascism, rather than the classical, Enlightened and heroic concepts of responsibility and resistance. To that end, the article analyses two very recent films of the Argentine cinema: The long night of Francisco Sanctis and Red. Both films address the situation of the ordinary people under systemic violence, exemplifying how societal desires and micro-fascist attitudes work to stabilise a repressive regime. The films? focus on the desires of repression and micro-fascisms, I argue, draws attention to the small fears, anxieties, resentments, and jealousies that constitute a society and represent the violent regimes? conditions of possibility. I suggest the films were read less as films about the abuses of the past and more as productions that illuminate the elements of the past that made possible the resurgence of repressive discourses and neoliberal ideologies in the present.