Excavating La Moneda: cinematic memory and post-dictatorship documentary in Chile

Abstract

ABSTRACTNearly three decades after the end of the civic-military dictatorship led by General Pinochet, the documentary cinema of Chile has systematically embraced this country’s public memory project, exposing state-sponsored atrocities and their perpetrators, recovering survivors’ memories of loss, suffering and resilience, while continuing to challenge the collective conscience of Chileans. Post-dictatorship documentary in Chile has featured changing approaches, aesthetics, and themes, while persistently interrogating the relationship between the nation and its collective memory in the afterlife of the dictatorship through a filmic formal strategy of cinematic memory. Cinematic memory is defined here as a film’s deliberate use of style to articulate a distinctively filmic procedure of remembering experiences subjected to a politics of erasure. Thus, Chilean post-dictatorship documentaries seek an encounter with cultural memory via a filmic approach that can be described in terms of the Benjaminian metaphor of excavation. These post-dictatorship documentaries unearth tenuous material traces of the past through cinematic memory by focusing on the embodied return of survivors and other witnesses of atrocity to La Moneda, this nation’s government house, one of Chile’s most significant sites of memory.