Gabriela Nouzeilles

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE

OF THE PAST IN ALBERTINA CARRI’S

LOS RUBIOS

‘Historical memory today is not what it used to be’, states cultural critic AndreasHuyssen in the opening paragraph of his recent book on historical trauma and thepolitics of memory. The title of the book, Present Pasts (2003), underlines theparticularity of a time increasingly out of joint, in which the past has becomeconfounded with the present. Echoing widespread unease among progressiveintellectuals, Huyssen is positive and yet anxious about the political and ethicalconsequences of such postmodern temporal disruptions. While history, once apowerful vehicle to create a lasting link between community and nation through themonumentalization of a common past, keeps losing credibility and political weight, weare witnessing an unprecedented explosion of historical fictions fed by a museum-machine that turns everything into signs of an omnivorous past. The vociferouscondemnation of history is thus paradoxically accompanied by the irresistible seductionof the archive and its endless supply of stories of human achievement and suffering,ceaselessly recycled and exploited by the market and the media (Huyssen, 2003: 5).Out of the ruins of conventional history emerge, multiple and contradictory, thefractured discourses of memory. Particularly noticeable among them are thoseaccounts dealing with personal and traumatic experiences, available to the publicthrough countless autobiographies, diaries and all sorts of testimonial accounts.Literature, art, film, as well as photography have all provided their own renderings ofthe traumatic and the confessional. The globalization of the experience of theHolocaust as the dominant hermeneutical model with which to explain differenthistorical experiences of exceptional violence is another defining feature of the newcultures of remembrance.

The questions raised by a present out of joint are both multifaceted and politicallypressing. What kind of politics of memory is possible today? How can one maintain anethical stand and a claim for justice when historical truth is being questioned as such?What kind of political responses are possible in societies in which spectacular images ofpain and violence have become part of a mass media-driven circus? And, moreover,how can the future be imagined in a culture transfixed by fetishized versions of the pastand numbed by the unlimited promises of consumption? These and other relatedquestions are being asked in many regions across the world, and are particularlyrelevant in those countries where the arrival of late capitalism and global culture waspreceded by periods of exceptional violence and oppressive political regimes.

In the Southern Cone, the discrediting of history and the mediatic explosionof memory coincided with the end of bloody military dictatorships and the beginning

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 263-278

ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13569320500382500

of uneven democratic transitions, when the state and civil society were forced,reluctantly, to face the aftermath of state terrorism and its thousands of victims.The Holocaust and the Freudian concepts of mourning and melancholia offered ahermeneutic and ethical model through which critics and intellectuals from the lefttried to make sense of post-dictatorship and the politics of memory that developed afterthe return to democracy.1 In ways reminiscent of the Nazi genocide, the extreme actsof violence against dissidents carried out by the dictatorial regimes seemed to defy allattempts at rational explanation; the wounds they inflicted were beyondrepresentation. One result of this horrific collective experience was the proliferationof accounts that tended to be unstable, inarticulate, suspended between memory andforgetting, representation and nonsense. Among these dislocated expressions of adeeply fractured social memory, the testimony of those who survived the state’scriminal violence had and still has a privileged status as a form of narrative that, beingthe bare remainder of catastrophe, resists all simplifications. The healing of thecommunity, argues Nelly Richard (Richard and Moreiras, 2001), requires thecompletion of the work of memory and mourning, but on the condition thatthe ‘tremor of expression’, implicit in all testimonial accounts of traumaticexperiences, be preserved. Only by working through the hesitations and contradictionsof memory will it be possible to imagine future narratives for the social collective(2001: 14). In order to do so, it is necessary to avoid the reductionist characteristic oftwo powerful discursive systems in the present of the post-political. First, the judicialdiscourse, because it tends to reduce the incommensurability of the testimony so that itcan fit into the letter of the legal codes, what Shoshana Felman describes as ‘the limitsof the law in its encounter with the phenomenon of trauma’(2002: 145); and second,the postmodern spectacularization of the traumatic, with its pornographic exploitationof violated bodies, which Martin Jay relates to a neo-Nazi ideal of hypervisibility.

In addition to these two discourses, there is a third obstacle to a critical approachto the past, arising in part from the mechanical translation to the Southern Conecontext of the Holocaust paradigm and the figure of the abstract victim that alsocharacterizes the discourse of human rights advocates. The abstract reading of stateviolence according to these paradigms may prevent a long-needed critical examinationof the historical forces at play in the 1960s and ’70s, and the nature of the radicalpolitical movements that the military regimes sought to crush. In his book Pensar entreepocas. Memorias, sujetos y crıtica cultural (2004), Nicolas Casullo calls attention to thepersistence, after 20 years of democracy, of a public secret encrypted in the politics ofmemory regarding the forced disappearance of people by the Argentine dictatorship,between 1976 and 1983. Such a secret has to do with the systematic omission, by tacitagreement, of almost all references to the radical politics of most of those that themilitary regime renamed ‘the disappeared’. The reduction of the call for memory tothe space of the family as well as the definition of the state’s crimes in terms of theinternational discourse on human rights, Casullo argues, has hindered the restoringwork of memory, taking it out of its historical points of reference and de-politicizingthe meaning of the death of those who suffered the systematic violence of themilitarized state. From this perspective, the widespread acceptance of the term‘disappeared’, coined by the military juntas, represents a second form of death, asymbolic one, for the victims of the dictatorship’s mass killings (2004: 105–10). Whatis at stake in revising the representation of the victims as abject and in openly debating

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the revolutionary projects of the left in the 1960es and ’70s is, once again, the future ofthe community.

The problem of transmitting past experiences to younger generations, andtherefore the question of the meaning of memory, is central to understanding morerecent manifestations of remembrance in post-dictatorial Argentina. I am referringhere to the symbolic laboring of postmemory, understanding by this not a ‘post’ of themnemonic – although it could also mean that – but rather the novel setting and actingout of a secondary, post-generational memory that differs from traumatic memorybecause of its generational distance, and from history because of its strong personal andemotional connection with the past. According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory is‘a very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object orsource is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment andcreation’ (1997: 22). The most visible manifestations of postmemory in Argentina arethe performative and visual practices of the group HIJOS, acronym for Hijos por laIdentidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identityand Justice Against Forgetting and Silence). This association, formed by sons anddaughters of the disappeared, has defined itself through the realization of escraches,perfomative street events whose goal is to reveal the scandal of yet another publicsecret, by denouncing the criminal behaviour of those who collaborated with themilitary regime (physicians, torturers, military officers, etc.) and who continue to liveamong regular citizens unaffected by the consequences of their criminal actions.Overall, HIJOS’s political agenda echoes the goals put forward by the Mothers andGrandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, that is, a claim for justice based on biological identityand family ties, for the conservation of memory, and against the silencing and coveringup of a criminal past.

It is in the context of postmemory and its predicaments that I would like to offer areading of the remarkable and puzzling documentary Los rubios (2003) by the talenteddirector Albertina Carri,2 daughter of Peronist radical militants who disappeared in1977. Carri’s film represents a new stage within a progression of cinematicinterventions on behalf of the victims of state violence, while making a quantum leap inthe area of film production that has turned local independent cinema into one the mostinnovative and creative sources of intellectual and artistic thinking today. Whether asinnocent victims or as involuntary witnesses and heirs to their parents’ tragic fate, thechildren of the disappeared were from the beginning essential figures in the fictionalnarratives with which Argentine cinema has contributed to the work of memory. FromLa Historia oficial (1985) by Mario Puenzo and El exilio de Gardel (1986) by Pino Solanasto Muro de silencio (1993) by Lila Stantic, Kamchatka (2002) by Marcelo Pineiro, andI Figli (2003) by Marco Becchis, we see a progression through which the children havegradually moved from being a significant but secondary element of the story to beingthe main focus of the cinematic gaze. In the last five years there has been anotherimportant development, as some of the children of the disappeared have begun to maketheir own movies about their disturbing memories and the complex sense of identitythat they carried with them as a result of the foundational absence that defines theirlives. Carri’s documentary belongs to this latter group of films.3

What makes Los rubios remarkable is not so much the director’s family background,although it is certainly relevant, but rather that Carri has dared to significantly modifythe ways in which it is possible to talk about the past and its futures in postdictatorial

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Argentina. Los rubios signifies a form of intervention that is both highly sophisticatedin its formal approach and, to a large extent, at odds with the ways in which the workof memory had been carried out previously. And in that sense it can be read as avaluable shift in terms of Casullo’s call for a more critical approach to the past, beyondthe condemnation of human rights violations. Without rejecting them altogether, themovie alters the roles sanctified by the prevalent discourses of memory, taking aparttheir commonplaces and questioning the identity principle that feeds them. To beginwith, Los rubios targets the two discourses on collective memory that have definedrepresentations of the disappeared for more than 20 years. On the one hand, there isthe discourse of memory represented by the official report of the CONADEP, Nuncamas (1986), and supported by the relatives of the disappeared, which relies on thegathering of evidence in order to demand justice before the law. The representation ofthe missing persona as an absolute victim and a call for total memory against forgettingare two defining features of this approach. On the other hand, there is a more openlypolitical type of memory that cultural historian Hugo Vezzetti calls ‘Montoneromemory’, understanding by it a melancholic discourse that celebrates the figure ofthe militant and the radical agenda advanced by the Montonero youth movement(2002: 19).4 Carri positions herself in opposition to these two discourses by replacingthe call for total memory with an exploration of the unavoidable gaps andcontradictions of memory – the ‘tremor’ of uncertainty that Nelly Richard considersessential to critical thinking – and by playing down the epic exaltation of her parents’Montonero history.

An even more controversial aspect of Los Rubios comes from its irreverentinterrogation of the secondary logic of postmemory, as well as of the heavy demands onthe children of the disappeared imposed by the combination of biological, judicial andpolitical legacies. To many sons and daughters of the disappeared, inheritance meansassuming a mimetic, derived identity, to the extent that they may see themselvesprimarily as embodiments of the traumatic loss of disappearance. At times, they maybehave as political literalizations of what Slavoj Zizek has provocatively called the livingdead, the ghosts of a historical past that return to the present as the symptom of anunresolved, terrible crime (1991: 23). Similarly, in so far as they make some of therevolutionary ideals of the 1970s their own, they run the risk of becominganachronistic reflections of a project frozen in time. Against the compulsory demand ofgenealogical inscription, Carri suggests the desirability of other kinds of communities,beyond the politics of blood and party; that is, flexible, open communities, capable ofimagining still undefined, alternative political projects, helping the members of awounded society to accomplish what Alberto Moreiras has called el duelo del duelo, themourning of mourning (2001: 318).

The confrontational nature of Carri’s documentary, its many angles and fronts,explains the uneasiness, which occasionally turns into disapproval, that the film haselicited in some circles. The discomfort arises primarily from three sources of anxiety:some aspects of Carri’s avant-garde aesthetics, her questioning of the revolutionaryideals of the 1960s and ’70s and, finally, the pantomimic destabilization of Carri’spublic persona as ‘daughter of the disappeared’.5 Even though I find most of theobjections that have been made against the film to be unjustified, I want to make clearthat my reading does not carry with it a prescriptive endorsement of a ‘correct’ way ofremembering that the movie somehow would illustrate. Rather, what I would like to

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do in the following pages is to explore the film’s alleged political incorrectness, whatMartın Kohan contemptuously identifies with Carri’s shameful display of a ‘regimen dela descortesıa’(2004: 28), as perhaps the film’s most powerful contribution to criticalthinking.

I. Looking for Los rubios

The quest, whether or not it is related to an actual journey, is a pervasivedocumentary impulse. (Bruzzi, 2000)

The meaning of Los rubios and its aesthetic and political project depend, to a largeextent, on the realist conventions of referentiality and its association with historicaltruth, conventions that the internal logic of the film both confirms and negates.

Schematically, the movie is a documentary about Albertina Carri and her crewmaking a documentary about her parents Roberto Carri and Ana Maria Caruso, theequivocal ‘rubios’ of the title, who were kidnapped in 1976 and presumably executed ayear later. The Carris were intellectuals and radical Montonero militants who gave uptheir middle-class lives to pursue their political ideals. Roberto Carri was a sociologistand a journalist. His publications include Isidro Velazquez: Formas prerrevolucionarias de laviolencia (1968), a study of non-urban forms of popular rebellion, recently re-editedwith an introduction by Horacio Gonzalez. At the time the Carris were taken away,they were in hiding, living with their three daughters, Paula, 13, Andrea, 12, andAlbertina, 4, in a proletarian neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. After ayear of captivity in an illegal detention centre, during which time they stayed in contactwith their daughters through letters, Roberto and Ana Marıa Carri disappearedforever. Their names and stories are included in the official report Nunca mas.Their bodies have never been recovered.

As a documentary about the Carris, Los rubios is not an investigation about whathappened to them – an aspect of their story that can regrettably be inferred from thesickening accounts by many survivors of the detention camps, and from thepredictability of the terror apparatus. Nor is it about locating their bodies – a task thatthe movie clearly delegates to the state institutions and the teams of forensicanthropologists working on the identification of human remains from mass graves.Deceptively, the goal seems more modest. What Los rubios attempts to find out is whothe Carris really were. Since any piece of information may hold the key to what isforever lost, all angles may be relevant. What were they like? What political ideals didthey hold? How did they behave? Did they cheat when playing sports? How did theycope with the dire consequences of their political choices? Were they handsome?Was she fat? Did she have a shrieking voice? Were they blonde? Nothing is left out.From the political to the cultural, from the social to the personal, the film keepscollecting and presenting data that may or may not prove useful in reconstructing theauthentic Carris, whose behaviour and choices, at least from today’s perspective, mayseem puzzling, even bizarre.

In order to solve the enigma, the director and her crew take advantage of many ofthe resources offered by the documentary as an investigative genre driven by the desireto know, and based on an ideal of transparency in opposition to fiction film. A sense of

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unmediated access to the world, the impression of objectivity, a unified and coherentview of events, and the use of more or less structured interviews are some of theformal features that characterize the most conventional modes of the documentarygenre.6 Correspondingly, in Los rubios we have interviews with relatives, friends andpolitical comrades, and the indirect testimony of other witnesses of the Carris’ past,including Albertina. In a move reminiscent of the cinema verite, a more radical form ofrealism in which spontaneity and interventionist tactics are valued over editing and thedictates of the script, there are also spontaneous interviews with two working-classwomen from the proletarian neighbourhood where the Carris were last seen.

The lingering of the camera’s eye over material evidence such as photographs,letters, and publications from the 1970s is another way of reinforcing the realityeffect of the documentary, its epistemological potential. The photographs of theCarris when they were children or posing with their daughters function asparticularly powerful markers of reality, as they may pass for incontrovertible proofof the actuality of the past. Since they are literally an emanation of the referent, inphotographs ‘the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation’, saysBarthes (1981: 88–9). Photographs may distort the real, but there is alwaysa presumption that something was out there, that resembled what is still inthe picture.

The inspection of the locations of past events is another important dimension ofreconstruction. Since searching is the main force behind the film’s narrativedynamics, we frequently see the director and her film crew going places, tracking thetraces left behind by the Carris. They walk and drive for long distances; they takehighways and look for streets that are hard to find. In addition to the proletarianneighbourhood where they last lived, they visit the Police Unit where the illegalcentre in which the Carris were held used to function, and drive to the countrysidewhere Albertina and her sisters went to live after they lost contact with their parents.The mapping of the past and its geographies comes across as both comprehensiveand thorough.

And yet, notwithstanding the efforts of the film crew, the search for the real andthe authentic is always imperfect, unsatisfactory. The larger the amount of data, themore distant the object of their quest appears, continuously receding behind the veilsof representation. Instead of clarifying the blurred images of the past, the interviewskeep bringing up partial or contradictory information. For the family, the Carris areexceptional beings, funny, loving, beautiful, intelligent. For their political comrades,they were soldiers for a lost cause and the tragic heroes of popular struggle. There iseven disagreement about their physical features. One of the proletarian women ispositive that all the members of the Carri family were blonde, or looked blonde – astatement that the photographs, Albertina’s own appearance, and the testimony of anaunt immediately put into question. At the same time, one could argue that, in thecontext of the proletarian neighbourhood the Carris were seen as ‘blonde’, that is,whiter, more educated, and from a different class. Consequently, it is fair to say thatboth statements, ‘The Carris were blonde’ and ‘The Carris were not blonde’ arepotentially true. The title of the movie, ‘Los rubios’, ironically highlights thefundamental inconclusiveness of memory and identity. The puzzle contains manypieces, some of which are missing, while others do not match, or could be

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assembled in more than one way. What is left is a profuse collage of fragments andloose ends.

Rather than one compact memory, the movie records the existence of a collectionof memories that will never fit into a coherent whole. It is not so much the threat offorgetting as the surfeit of memory and its irreducible imprecision that is the problemaddressed by Carri’s work. Excess does not mean fullness. When meaning explodes, italways leaves, scattered all over the surface of our recollections, the gaps of the failureto remember, or the baffling certainties of remembering otherwise. And yet, Carri’sacknowledgement of memory’s multiplicity does not translate into a superficialcelebration of a liberal pluralism of memory according to which any form ofrecollection has exactly the same value as any other form of recollection.7 In Los rubios,we learn the inherently controversial nature of memory, even in the case of those whoseem to be in complete agreement on their irrevocable condemnation of a violent past.

In acknowledging the impossibility of knowing for sure who the Carris were, thedocumentary undoes its original project by displaying its own making and unmaking.What we end up with is a self-referential documentary about a ‘failed’ documentary, inwhich the trace of the real corresponds to the process of making and assembling thefilm. Because of the mirror effect created by the arrangement of the movie within themovie, looking for ‘los rubios’, the equivocal parents, turns outs to be indistinguishablefrom looking for ‘Los rubios’, the elusive movie.

In its self-referential mode, Carri’s documentary rejects the realism of thetraditional versions of the genre, revealing the naivety of its criteria for truth,incorporating instead strategies that come from more experimental articulations ofdocumentary filmmaking. These are documentaries in which not only the object beinginvestigated but the very concept of representation is seen as problematic. In thesefilms, the poetic and reflexive predominate over the expository and the observational(Nichols, 2001: 99–138). Among them, performative documentaries in particularhave many traits in common with Los rubios. Like them, Carri’s film is based on the ideaof disavowal that simultaneously signals a desire to make a conventional documentary,and hence to provide an accurate account of a series of factual events, while alsoindicating the infeasibility of the documentary’s cognitive ambitions.8 Against thenotion of transparency, it encourages a performative exchange between subjects,filmmakers and spectators. One of the immediate effects of this stylistic option is thesplitting of the director into different personae, typically the (actual) director and thedirector-actor in the film. Los rubios takes this splitting even further. There are at leastthree ‘Albertina Carri’: Albertina, the author behind the frame; Albertina, the auteurinside the film, who appears holding the camera, giving instructions and discussing themovie with the crew; and Albertina, the daughter in a state of memory, who standsbefore the camera delivering a rehearsed testimony. The latter is played by the actressAnalıa Couceiro who early in the movie identifies herself as an actress who will play thepart of Albertina Carri. The passage between the fictional and non-fictional Albertinascorresponds in the movie to the alternation of the use of colour and a movie camera forthe fictional one, and the use of black and white and a video camera for the ‘real’ one –a distinction that, given the frequent slipping of one level into the other, soon becomeshazy. Far from being the exaggerated symptom of narcissistic self-absorption, themultiplication of Albertinas seeks to throw into disarray previously held notions offixity of meaning and documentary truth. It also shows that, in the case of the children

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of the disappeared, the reconstruction of the past always entails the assembling of theirown subjectivity, since their fragile identity has been shaped around the black hole leftby the absence of their parents. Thus, a documentary about Albertina Carri’s parentsby Albertina Carri cannot but be also a movie about her selves.

As a postmemory artefact, countering the call for total recollection that underliesthe politics of memory held by the organizations of the relatives of the disappeared, Losrubios is the chronicle of the impossibility of reconstructing the past and of offering acomplete and reliable version of it. It also implies the impossibility of giving a final,organic narrative structure to the movie we are watching. The film exhibits thisimpasse in different ways. The journeys realized by the film crew around the city ofBuenos Aires or to the countryside – metaphorical references to the director’semotional journey – ultimately generate an anarchic narrative structure that cannotadvance. At one point the film crew gets lost; in another, their car gets stuck in themuddy tracks of a country road. The highways and roads they take to reach theirdestinations could go anywhere or nowhere. Although they move and get to places,their journeys are for the most part illustrations of static movement, in which thosewho travel keep returning to their point of departure. The frustration of movementleads to the predominance of time-images, in which time is out of joint, overmovement-images that ordinarily help a story move forward.9 The film’s interruptionof narrative linearity is evident in a memorable scene in the pampas when, as the resultof smooth editing, we see the image of Albertina/Couceiro recur multiple times,standing next to a fence as the eye of the camera moves steadily along the fence and aline of trees. The disarray in which we see the old photographs of the Carri familypoints in the same direction. Photographs may be markers of reality, but in order tomake sense they must be inserted into a narrative. When such a narrative has been lost,or brutally interrupted, in its place we have blank spaces (the missing faces of theparents, covered by other pictures), or temporal leaps (picture of the father as a boynext to the pictures of his young daughters).

The past, argues Carri in Los rubios, is beyond representation, and therefore cannever be fully understood. When dealing with a traumatic past, representation is notonly difficult to accomplish but can also be objectionable or undesirable. Testimonies ofsurvivors repeatedly expose this dilemma. Talking publicly can help to achieve justiceand reparation but it is also a way of making oneself vulnerable again by exposingoneself to the look and judgement of others. In this sense, it is interesting to note thatthe two ‘authentic’ testimonies, that of the survivor who shared a cell with the Carrisand the testimony of Albertina herself, are both delivered indirectly by an actress,Couceiro. Carri, nevertheless, includes alternative forms of mimesis that can be usedto access the most painful areas of the past. There are only two instances in the moviein which the unrepresentable is represented. Representation is in both cases displacedand metaphorical, a variety of mimetic approximation (Huyssen, 2003: 132), not ofthe events themselves but of particular recollections of them. They are the result ofcreative memory, and yet somehow ‘true’ to the past. The first is the photographs of aslaughterhouse taken by a survivor of a detention camp in which Albertina’s sisterrecognizes what is not literally there: the horror of torture and mass killing. The secondinstance of mimetic approximation is the animation scenes made with Playmobil toys inwhich Carri gives shape to the confusing memories of her childhood and her attempts atmaking sense of the disappearance of her parents as a case of extraterrestrial

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abduction.10 Again, the animated renderings of the past are not historically accuratebut they do reveal the degree of the family trauma and the insufficiency of all rationalexplanations.

Against expectations, the realization that the past can only be recoveredimperfectly, or through metaphorical displacement, does not make of Los rubios amelancholic project. On the contrary, the movie suggests that the process of puttingtogether, in cinematic language, the pieces of an unworkable puzzle constitutes initself a way of dealing with loss. The film’s therapeutic potential – liberation fromthe rituals of mourning and guilt – has a twofold beneficiary: Albertina, on the onehand, who is both the protagonist of the quest and the director of the film; and herfriends and assistants, on the other, who help her realize the documentary and who,given their degree of participation, could be easily considered its co-authors.It is as a collective project that Los rubios argues for a future based on a new politicsof memory and a different type of community, beyond the family and thepolitical cell.

II. The Future of the Past

And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics ofmemory, of inheritance, of generations. (Derrida, 1994)

¿Adonde van las almas de los muertos? (Albertina Carri played by Analıa Couceiro.Los rubios)

Los rubios is not only a movie about the fragility of memory, and the gaps and holes thatpermeate all representations of the past. It is also an exploration of the haunting of thepresent by the spectre(s) of a traumatic past and its legacies. The spectre is the return assymptom of a traumatic event, the trace of a horrible crime that remains unresolved.The trauma created by the dictatorship and its killing machine is an exemplary case ofthe return of the dead. The shadows of its victims continue to haunt the present asliving dead until they receive decent burial, and/or the trauma of their death issomehow integrated into historical memory. The presence of the symptom, like thepresence of the ghost, is a sign that the trauma is still active, still has power to woundand disrupt.

In Los rubios, the spectre is as much a symptom of past wounds as it is a speakingemissary. It keeps coming back in order to ask for justice but also to deliver a politicalmessage, that of a generation of revolutionary militants who wanted to radicallytransform what they saw as a profoundly unjust society. Thus, the spectre in Los rubiosrefers both to Carri’s disappeared parents and to the beaten radical left represented bythe Montonero movement of which the Carris were a part.

The film itself is framed by Carri’s explicit invocation of the spectre ofrevolutionary thought when Analıa Couceiro, as Albertina Carri, reads aloud aquotation from her father’s most important work, Isidro Velazquez: Formasprerrevolucionarias de la violencia. Her father is not the author of the passage but thisis irrelevant. It stands for a political position and a political view Roberto Carri fullyendorsed. The text belongs to Juan Dıaz del Moral, a historian, who in 1923 wrote

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a book about peasant rebellions in Catalonia. It is worth quoting the passage inits entirety:

La poblacion es la masa, el banco de peces, el monton gregario, indiferente a losocial, sumiso a todos los poderes, inactivo ante el mal, resignado con su dolor.Pero, aun en ese estado habitual de dispersion, subyace en el espıritu de la multitudel sentimiento profundo de su unidad originaria; el agravio y la injusticia vanacumulando rencores y elevando el tono en su vida afectiva, y un dıa, ante elchoque sentimental que actua de fulminante, explota ardorosa la pasion, lamuchedumbre se hace pueblo, el rebano se transforma en ser colectivo: elegoısmo, el interes privado, la preocupacion personal desaparecen, las voluntadesindividuales se funden y se sumergen en la voluntad general; y la nuevapersonalidad, electrizada, vibrante, se dirige recta a su objetivo, como la flecha alblanco, y el torrente arrasa cuanto se le opone.

What we have here is a theory of the spontaneous political awakening of a popularcollective subject, capable of setting off overwhelming destruction and radicaltransformation. This is the subject of revolution, and as such it is unstoppable. RobertoCarri uses del Moral’s interpretation of peasant insurrections as a theoretical model toread the political meaning of rural crime in northern Argentina in the 1960s. His casestudy is the criminal life of Isidro Velazquez, a rural bandit in the province of Chaco,who was killed by the police in 1967. Rejecting the distinction between civil andpolitical society, Carri advances the hypothesis that criminals are the authentic agents ofsocial revolution (2001: 93–4). What is the meaning of such an inflammatory passagein the daughter’s documentary? Is it a mere relic, the dead letter of the past that liesnext to the silent images of the family pictures? Is it the spectre’s mandate that thechildren of the disappeared, and other members of their generation, are expected tofollow?

It is my contention that the father’s text has the same role in Carri’s documentaryas the letters that many radical militants addressed to their children, usually afterdeciding to go underground, either by choice or because of imminent danger. Theseletters function as political testaments in which the militant parents state a politicaltruth and, frequently, encourage their sons and daughters to follow their path.Paradigmatic among them is the letter from Ernesto Che Guevara to his four children,written in 1965, in which he tells them: ‘Remember that the revolution is the onlyimportant thing and that each of us, separately, means nothing’ (1997: 349).11

The primacy of the political over everything else, including the subjective and theemotional, is a defining trait of this legacy.

Confronted with the spectre’s call, Albertina Carri challenges his genealogicalinterpellation and mimetic desire, and asserts instead the necessary hetero-geneity of inheritance, ‘the difference without opposition that has to mark it’(Derrida, 1994: 16).12 In doing so, she distinctly departs from the position adopted byother children of the disappeared, who, incapable or unwilling to question theirparents’ righteousness, tend to define themselves as ghostly re-enactments of theirpolitical choices. Such is the case of Mariano I, for example, for whom part of theprocess of coming to terms with the death of his parents is to vindicate their politicaldreams (‘We assume their essence, the utopia. . .. The point is that we are proud of our

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parents, because of the position they adopted vis-a-vis life, for trying to change theworld for everybody and for us’ [in Gelman, 1997: 215]). Even though Carri rejectsthe mimetic dynamics of filial desire, she also refuses to dispose of her parents’ legacyaltogether in the name of the presumed sacredness of the nuclear family. What we havein Los rubios is the display of a scrupulous but irreverent reading of inheritance. Carrifilters, sifts, questions and finally chooses those areas of the past that seem for her moreproductive. Part of this negotiation with the legacies handed down to her by fate is toavoid staying frozen in her role of daughter-heir.

In terms of the predicaments of inheritance, in Los rubios the future of the pastdepends on a series of heretic displacements within political, cultural and socialgenealogies, and their systems of truth. There is a pendular movement betweenrejection and re-inscription that the movie openly addresses in both its formal choicesand its use of materials, as well as in some of the film crew’s discussions on camera.There are two main areas of negotiation. First, we have the tradition of Argentinepolitical cinema, especially documentary films, from the 1960s and ’70s, and its politicsof representation of the dispossessed. And second, the discourse of identity andgenealogical interpellation that Diana Taylor characterizes as ‘DNA performance’, andthat constitutes the dominant mode of self-definition in the association HIJOS.13

With regard to the tradition of political cinema, Carri’s strategy is one ofagreement and opposition. On the one hand, her rejection of realism, her emphasison the process of filmmaking, her support of collective film production, as well asher adoption of the essay form coincide with many of the guiding principles ofrevolutionary cinema.14 On the other hand, Los rubios casts doubt on, and ultimatelyrejects, two fundamental assumptions of the same school: the identification of thepopular as the primary theme and motive of filmmaking, and the political allianceamong artists, intellectuals and popular classes that it entails.15 The spontaneousinterviews with two old women from the proletarian neighbourhood where the Carrislived not only point to the futility of Albertina’s parents’ sacrifices, but also to thepossibility, at least in one case, that members of the popular classes facilitated thecapture of the Carris by the dictatorship’s repressive forces. Albertina’s recurrentdream about a shantytown girl with a giant louse perched on her head furtherunderscores the apprehension aroused in her by the poor. Comparing its position withthat of the Carris almost 30 years ago, the film crew sees itself as a group of foreignersvisiting a devastated country mainly inhabited by women and children. The maleworkers who witnessed the 1970s appear in the background, or are altogether absent(like the father of Margarita who was fired from a factory). And yet, notwithstandingthis gloomy social landscape, the journey to the proletarian world provides afundamental key to the film project. Carri discovers in the alienated perspective of aproletarian housewife the ‘truth’ of her project. It is this woman who provides the titleof the movie, Los rubios, when she describes the Carris, who were not blonde, as‘blonde’. This ‘false’ recollection reveals a truth: the fragility of memory and theirreconcilable social differences that undermined any alliance with the popular classes,who in many cases did not understand and were even hostile toward militantinterpellation.16 For reasons that are not clear, Carri and her crew choose to excludealmost all references to militant workers, tacitly denying the populist message in thespectre’s revolutionary text. There is no trace of the revolutionary subject in Los rubios.This silence is particularly puzzling in the context of contemporary Argentina, where

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the economic crisis of 2001 set in motion many social movements, especially amongthe lower classes, which many have identified with the awakening of a radicalmultitude. Kohan sees in Carri’s omission of popular mobilization the mark of thepost-political as the celebration of postmodern hollowness. Without denying that this isone of the murkiest areas of meaning in Carri’s documentary, in Carri’s faultyexploration of the popular I also perceive a critical statement. By defiantly putting ondisplay the predicaments of the political today, and interrogating the role ofintellectuals and artists in the struggle for social transformation, the film calls attentionto a crisis of representation that needs to be addressed.

Carri’s ambiguous and fairly dismissive use of interviews with ex-Montoneromilitants underscores the distrust and profound reticence of Carri and her crew towardthe revolutionary discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. The interviews are not only denieda central place in the documentary (at times they are shown on the screen of a TVmonitor to which Albertina/Couceiro pays passing attention), but they are also madesecondary in the film’s reconstruction of the past, serving just as one source amongmany others. The tense dialogue with Montonero memory, and its committedaesthetics, is finally brought out into the open when Carri and her crew discussand harshly condemn, in front of the camera, a letter from the INCAA(Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Visuales) that rejects their request for financialsupport, alleging that the documentary does not do justice to the Carris’ militantheroism.17 For her parents’ ex-comrades, the only relevant hi/story was the Carris’tragic fate and not their daughter’s exploration of the labyrinths of memory and theconstruction of her own identity. By opposing Montonero memory, the heir affirmsher right to read the text of the past from a different perspective.

Finally, and more importantly, Carri defies the logic of representation, in its twomeanings as mimics and as mimetic approach, behind HIJOS’ identity politics. Herquestioning, in any case, does not – and this is fundamental – carry with it anabandonment of the claim for justice or of the unfaltering condemnation of state terror.Los rubios instead takes apart the performative scene of biological, cultural and politicalinscription through which HIJOS constitutes itself as a political collective subject.Carri’s revisionist approach challenges two areas: the juridical uniqueness of thechildren of the disappeared as the rightful and only legitimate witnesses of theirparents, and the indisputable authenticity of their memories. By dividing herself intotwo, the Albertina who makes the movie and the Albertina daughter of thedisappeared, played by Analıa Couceiro, Carri avoids the burden of representation thatcomes with being the daughter of the Carris and its accompanying expectations,thereby denying the priority of her position over that of others who were not directlyaffected by violence. The authenticity of her perspective is further undermined by thepresentation of multiple memories, all of them imperfect and partial: the Playmobilfantasies, the second-hand memories handed down to her by her sisters, and her ownmemories of the countryside after her parents had already disappeared. The disavowalof her role as compulsory witness of the past coincides with a desacralization oftestimony and its indexical power. This is the function of the scenes in which we seeAlbertina, the film director, giving instructions to Albertina/Couceiro about how togive testimony. If they can be rehearsed and corrected according to certain conventionsof credibility, it becomes clear that testimonies are constructions and not literaltranslations of real experiences. The introduction of an actress playing the testimonial

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self also helps separate the word from the image of the body, and especially of the face,as a site of family resemblance. The result is a Brechtian interruption of spontaneoussympathy so that the viewer feels compelled to contemplate the nature of memoryand identity. Carri herself explains the utility of such interruption: ‘I began to thinkabout memory, absence, and emptiness in fiction, because those terrible eventshappened to me. If I don’t say this, I am not being honest. I felt it was my duty to tellmy story, but at the same time I did not want the telling of my story to prevent theviewer from thinking. I thought that telling them directly “well, look, they killed myparents when I was 4 years old” was like blowing away the public’s ability to think’(see Mango, n.d.). Since emotional identification can be easily manipulated, the use ofBrechtian estrangement also helps to distinguish the documentary from the media’ssuperficial treatment of pain and suffering, and its exploitation of testimony.

The defiance with which Los rubios reworks the prevalent poetics of collectivememory connects it with other irreverent productions of postmemory, also realized bythe children of victims of extreme and systematic violence, and which also eliciteduneasiness in the public. One paradigmatic example is Maus by the Jewish-Americancartoonist Art Spiegelman, who chooses to represent the protagonists of the Holocaustas rodents and domestic animals, and who makes of irreverence and the incongruitiesbetween a monumentalized past and the banality of everyday life the triggers for criticalreflection. Another case is the documentary Don’t touch my Holocaust (1994) by Israelifilm director Asher Tlatim, who questions the official memories of the Holocaust byendorsing an inclusive definition of victimhood beyond identity politics. As in thesecases, in Los rubios the challenge of the spectre’s interpellation does not involve a totalrejection of the witness’s duty, but rather the opportunity to imagine a more complexsystem of representation. From this perspective, the end of Los rubios constitutes alesson on the mimetic negotiation of inheritance. When the camera shows all themembers of the film crew, including the director, walking away into the liberatingopen spaces of a clear, sunny plain, all of them wearing blonde wigs, their identities arefused into a pantomimic performance of displaced identities. They come to embody atime out of joint in which the past is finally projected into the future as creativememory. They are the promise of a new, flexible community, based on friendship anddialogue, that seeks to overcome the trauma of the past while incorporating a trace ofits legacies in their blonde wigs, vindicating the Carris’ decision to act against theexpectations of conformity, what we may call their out-of-placeness. It is in theperformative potential of this pantomime, and in the irreverent humour that permeatesLos rubios, that we can imagine, with Benjamin, the repairing rituals of mourning as sitesof joy.18

Notes

1 Idelber Avelar, Alberto Moreiras and Nelly Richard have made important andinsightful contributions to the exploration of memory in dialogue with suchapproaches. For a critical reading of the limitations of the Holocaust model, seeCasullo (2004) and Vezzetti (2002).

2 Besides Los rubios, Carri has directed No quiero volver a casa (2000), Barbie tambien puedeestar triste (2001), and Geminis (2005).

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3 Historias cotidianas (2000) by Andres Habegger and Papa Ivan (2000) by Marıa InesRoque are two documentaries by young directors whose parents are also missing. Onecould also include in this group the fiction short film In absentia (2003), by LucıaCedron, daughter of film director Jorge Cedron, assassinated in 1980.

4 Textual examples of Montonero memory are El presidente que no fue (1997) and Diariode un clandestino (2000) by Miguel Bonasso, and the three volumes of La voluntad(1997, 1998) by Eduardo Anguita and Martın Caparros. Jelin and Kaufman (2000)offer a detailed analysis of how memory is produced and reconstructed in Argentina20 years after the end of the dictatorship.

5 A long article by writer and cultural critic Martın Kohan, entitled ‘La aparienciaceleda’, appeared in the Argentine journal Punto de Vista in 2003. The article praisedthe formal sophistication of Carri’s documentary but had many harsh words for theyoung director, whom Kohan accuses of narcissistic excess, of disrespect toward herparents and of holding a post-political, superficial view of Argentina’s social andpolitical past (and present). The journal published a response by Cecilia Macon, whocriticizes Kohan’s prescriptive reading of the movie, and praises Carri forunderscoring the conflictive nature of memory. Although, to my knowledge, this isthe only published evidence of unease elicited by the documentary, it was not anisolated case. In the interview she gave to the electronic site devoted to film LaPochoclera, Carri herself acknowledges other disapproving reactions to her film.

6 About the different modes of the documentary genre, see Nichols (2001: 32–75).7 In fact, the openness endorsed by the movie has its limits. Although there is at least

one interview in which a working-class woman echoes the official discourse of thedictatorship against 1970s leftist militants, the selection of views does not include adirect presentation of the perspective of the regime’s supporters – an option that formany is unacceptable, and even obscene.

8 For an interesting analysis of performative films, see Bruzzi (2000), especially Chap. 6.9 On the distinction between time-images and movement-images, see Deleuze (1989).

10 The resort to narrative patterns coming from mass culture in order to make sense ofthe disappearance of their parents seems to have been a common response among thechildren of the disappeared, when they were kids. The testimonies included inHabegger’s movie make reference to this phenomenon.

11 The testament letter appears in many productions by children of disappeared parents.See, for example, the film Papa Ivan by Ana Marıa Roque, and the testimony by Ana,included in Juan Gelman (1997: 47).

12 According to Ana Amado, genealogical and mimetic interpellation between parentsand children are central to the visual and cinematographic production by the childrenof the disappeared. On the daughter’s challenge to the militant father’s politicalinterpellation in the visual productions of Carri, Quieto and Roque, see Amado’s twooutstanding critical pieces (Amado, 2004, Amado and Dominguez, 2004).

13 The DNA performance draws from two heuristic systems, the biological and theperformative, and is based on forms of transmission that refuse surrogation(see Taylor, 2003: 173, 175).

14 For a list of the common features in Latin American political cinema, between 1967and 1977, see Getino and Vellegia (2002: 18). Bernini (2004) provides a culturalhistorical analysis of Argentine political cinema.

15 Christian Gunerman (2004) sees a similar intertextual dialogue between AlejandroAgresti’s Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), and the political cinema of the 1960s.

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16 The opposition between lower and middle class is inherent to the politics of memory ofthe HIJOS, whose members belong almost entirely to the middle class. Silvia, amember of the association, suggests that in industrial cities like Cordoba militantworkers are the unacknowledged disappeared, whose children do not know muchabout their fathers’ activism and who have not organized themselves like the relatives ofthe students and militants of political organizations did (see Gelman, 1997: 136–7).

17 The Institute later awarded a grant to the project, which is acknowledged in thefilm.

18 On Benjamin’s concept of pantomime as the index of mourning, see Butler(2003: 467). Diana Taylor also calls attention to HIJOS’s joyful rituals of mourningand the carnivalesque nature of their performative escraches (2003: 181–2).

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Gabriela Nouzeilles teaches at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Ficciones

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