The Making of Images: trauma and borrowed memory in documentary cinema

Abstract

The 20th century is home to a large production of documentary film works framed by the different dictatorships developed in the Southern Cone. It is possible to perceive the logics of a collective gaze in the production and reception of the works through which the documentary is constructed as an attentive witness that can confirm what happened, thus fixing in the retina pieces such as La batalla de Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1971). At the beginning of the 21st century, a series of aesthetic and discursive transformations took place that led both cinematographic and photographic images to explore new uses beyond their documentary value. Themes related to trauma, memory and identity occupy mainly these spaces of creation and a change in the production processes with respect to the models of the political and social documentary cinema of the 60s and 70s can be observed. The purpose of approaching the work of images in contemporary Latin American artistic and cinematographic practice is to identify the strategies of configuration of a borrowed memory crossed by trauma. “The image of” corroborates the presence of an absence that permeates the construction of the self. Sons and daughters of the disappeared, tortured or murdered during the dictatorship in both Argentina and Chile use artistic and audiovisual practice as a tool to reconfigure the self, distancing themselves from the dynamics of the past 20th century. The visual works by Lucila Quieto (Arqueología de la memoria, 1999-2001) and Verónica Maggi (El Rescate, 2007) as well as the documentary piece by Lissette Orozco (El pacto de Adriana, 2017) allow us to analyze and delve into how to work image and memory in new political and social contexts. The documentary Desaparecer (Isadora Guardia, 2022) is proposed as an exploration in itself of the image in the construction of the family album as a producer of political image.