Pitfalls of Trauma: Revisiting Postdictatorship Cinema from a Semiotic Standpoint

Verónica Garibotto

doi:10.25222/larr.56

Abstract

This article examines two approaches to postdictatorship cinema: trauma theory, which has been especially popular in reading this corpus, and semiotics, which has regained popularity in film analysis in general but is not often employed when analyzing postdictatorship films. The article claims that, though highly productive in the 1990s, trauma theory has become less fruitful after decades of continuous scholarship and after the emergence of administrations that have made the representation of the dictatorship the center of their public policies, such askirchnerismoin Argentina (2003–2015). While trauma theory yields ahistorical analyses, a semiotic approach that takes into account how indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs merge in the cinematic field allows for historical interpretations that are more adequate for reading postdictatorship films, especially after 2003. The article first outlines the main tenets of the two approaches (trauma theory and semiotics), then assesses their suitability for historical interpretation via a brief analysis ofAndrés no quiere dormir la siesta, a 2009 Argentine film on the country’s last dictatorship.

Highlights

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992, xiii) pose questions that are often raised by scholars working on Latin American culture: “What is the relation between the act of witnessing and testifying, and the acts of writing and of reading? What is . . . the relation between narrative and history, between art and memory, between speech and survival?” Felman and Laub’s answer is well known and is a landmark in global academic discourse
In the 1990s—marked by Walter Benjamin’s writings, impacted by recent shifts in cultural criticism, and attuned to the discipline’s historical influence in the region—foundational scholars like Nelly Richard, Alberto Moreiras, and Idelber Avelar unveiled the complex relationship between narrative and history appealing to psychoanalysis
Symptom, memory, and mourning proved useful concepts for understanding how cultural production reacted to what Richard (2004, 33) famously called the neoliberal “techniques of forgetting”: the strategies of oblivion encouraged by the neoliberal regimes of the 1990s.2. It is probably because of this popularity of psychoanalysis that trauma theory has been prominent in postdictatorship studies, mainly since the early 2000s

Summary

Verónica Garibotto

This article examines two approaches to postdictatorship cinema: trauma theory, which has been especially popular in reading this corpus, and semiotics, which has regained popularity in film analysis in general but is not often employed when analyzing postdictatorship films. While trauma theory yields ahistorical analyses, a semiotic approach that takes into account how indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs merge in the cinematic field allows for historical interpretations that are more adequate for reading postdictatorship films, especially after 2003. It is probably because of this popularity of psychoanalysis that trauma theory has been prominent in postdictatorship studies, mainly since the early 2000s Recent books such as Nora Strejilevich’s El arte de no olvidar (2006) and Edurne Portela’s Displaced Memories (2009) base their analyses on the premise that clinical discourse is suitable for reading the representation of history in catastrophic narratives. Trauma theory relies on the premise that films are means of historical transmission, analyses embedded in invariable concepts rooted in the subjective experience end up blocking access to history.. I argue, that it could be beneficial for interpreting this corpus historically, especially—as I analyze —given the iconic status of several representations of the dictatorship after 2003.13

Vintage Representations of Argentine History during Kirchnerismo

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