Between carceral family album and world memory

Abstract

Susana de Sousa Dias’s cinematic reframing of mugshots from the archive of Portugal’s former political police, the PIDE, represented a unique intermedial contribution to the country’s memory boom of the 2000s and 2010s. In her 2017 documentary, Luz Obscura, three surviving children of Octávio Pato (1925–1999), an emblematic leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, narrate their traumatic memories of a clandestine childhood overshadowed by surveillance, ruptured family ties and imprisonment. The pathos of the narrators’ recollections is enhanced by the intercutting of repressive archival portraits and fragmented images of detained parents and children, which, as an ensemble, evokes a disturbing ‘family album’. In this article, I consider the extent to which Sousa Dias’s film encourages the viewer to empathize with the individualized pain of each narrator while simultaneously framing the ‘carceral’ family album as a trope for a recuperated anti-fascist memory and, ultimately, as a contribution to a Deleuzian ‘world memory’ of political resistance.