FLAGSTAFF — “Politics and Postmemory in Southern Cone Documentary,” 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 12 in LA 204. Part of the Literary and Textual Analysis Research Colloquium Series Spring 2018.
Abstract:
The military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina and Chile can be seen to mark a clear rupture in filmmaking activity, and a gulf on either side of which are the militant films of the New Latin American Cinema of the 60s and 70s, and the postdictatorship films I will consider in this talk. If, as I will argue, these later films (more backward-looking as attempts to work through the trauma of the dictatorships) are political, then their politics is nevertheless clearly of a different kind than that of the New Latin American Cinema. In this talk I will sketch out some of the different forms of politics that can be identified in postdictatorial documentary production, which vary with the different demands of different generations. My talk will examine three postdictatorship documentaries from Argentina and Chile, and will read them in relation to the politics of the New Latin American Cinema as well as for the ways in which they challenge commonplace conventions of realism.