Post-authoritarian Chilean Documentary

In the wake of the Chilean dictatorship, artists found their perspectives and subjectivities affected by the aftermath of terror, detention, torture, and trauma. Not only was their authority as privileged interpreters and mediators of others’ experiences and pain diminished, the idea of representation itself had met its limits, and become a problem. In this talk I identify at least four stages or modalities in the Chilean documentaries of the post-authoritarian era: first, documentaries of “forensic memory” that trace surviving witnesses or biological remains of the disappeared. A second group comprising of films about subjects that acted as perpetrators of atrocities during the dictatorship. Guzman’s latest films have display another tendency, with an autobiographical voice enacted in the first person and chronicling the generation comprising the children of victims. Lastly, established documentarian Ignacio Agüero has introduced a further dimension to this autobiographical positioning in The Other Day (2012), returning to the social thematics that were suspended under authoritarianism. Picking up on the concept of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “singular plural” recuperated by Alisa Lebow, I name this voice “the collective I” to emphasize the distinctive trajectory taken by Chilean documentary filmmaking in this tendency. These four modalities in Chilean documentary constitute more than simply a subjective turn. I propose what is taking place here is an ontological-epistemological turn. Facing an altered and fractured individuality that is aware of being a part and result of a socio-political whole, the autobiographical subject that emerges is actually responding to a “collective I”.

Associate Professor Walescka Pino-Ojeda received her PhD in Critical Theory and Latin American Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. Since 2007 she has been the director o the New Zealand Centre for Latin American Studies at The University of Auckland. She has published on Latin American women and gay literature, photography, civic activism, film, and popular music. Her books, Sobre Castas y Puentes: Conversaciones con Elena Poniatowska, Rosario Ferre y Eltit (2000) and Noche y Niebla: Neoliberalismo, Memoria y Trauma en el Chile post-authoritario Chile (2011) were published in Chile by Editorial Cuarto Propio. She is presently completing a volume that analyses the role that the arts, culture and civic activism have been playing in overcoming the traumas of the past in order to consolidate ongoing processes of re-democratization in post-authoritarian Chile.