Post-Dictatorship Argentinian Cinema as a Renarration of Collective Memory: The Spectrum of Absence

Although Film Studies is an area with important epistemological advances, in recent decades most of the analyses related to the Southern Hemisphere present an approach to this region’s cinema that places importance on its historical-political descriptive capacity without paying attention to its symbolic power as a performative actor in the processes of social change. This book focuses on this epistemological gap by highlighting the discursive relationships between the ethical-aesthetic modes of production of Argentinian cinema in the first post-dictatorial decade and the competing discourses that were negotiating a narrative of the truth of the dictatorial past. The Spectrum of Absence covers the hyperreal dynamics through which this cinema stands as a cognitive map able to promote critical interpretations of the post-dictatorial world, represent a theoretical model about how society is structured, and guide the individual’s sense of place at that moment of intersubjective forgetting. The book starts with an analysis of Luis Puenzo’s film The Official Story (1985) presenting it as a pattern of reinterpretation, representation and reconstruction of the historical narrative that generates a new syntagmatic chain – a new syntax of memory – capable of promoting the social elaborative work of memory that confronts the symptoms of postmodern and post-dictatorial schizophrenia. For this reason, this syntactic organisation serves as a “cognitive map” for the examination of two other later films: A Wall of Silence (Lita Stantic, 1993) and Buenos Aires Vice versa (Alejandro Agresti, 1996), so that the three, together in one intertextual dynamic, are integrated into a post-dictatorial poetics that renarrates collective memory.