Post-Dictatorship Documentary in Chile: Conversations with Three Second-Generation Film Directors

Antonio Traverso

doi:10.3390/h7010008

Abstract

No other medium has rejected the restorative narrative of Chile’s democratic state’s memory discourse as vigorously as documentary cinema. After the several democratic governments that succeeded the civic-military dictatorial alliance that ruled this nation uninterruptedly between 1973 and 1990, documentary films have resisted monumental versions of historical memory by confronting the ambivalent nuances of the traumatic legacy of the dictatorship. Chilean documentarians have investigated, uncovered, and depicted the dictatorial state’s crimes, while offering testimonial space to survivors, and have also interrogated the perspectives of the dictatorship’s supporters, collaborators, and perpetrators while wrestling with an open dialectic of confrontational and reconciliatory gestures. More recently, this interest has intensified and combined with what is often described as a “boom” in second-generation personal-narration memory films. The present article includes the author’s conversations with the directors of three recent Chilean second-generation documentaries that explore the perspectives of former secret service collaborators: Adrian Goycoolea’s ¡Viva Chile Mierda! [Long Live Chile, Damn It!] (2014), Andrés Lübbert’s El color del camaleón [The Color of the Chameleon] (2017), and Lissette Orozco’s El pacto de Adriana [Adriana’s Pact] (2017).

Highlights

Chile’s process of transitional justice after General Pinochet’s alliance with the Chilean economic civilian elite that ruled this country through an uninterrupted dictatorial regime between 1973 and 1990 has been entrapped within a prescriptive, state-sponsored restorative notion of national reconciliation, highly reliant on perpetrators’ impunity and vigorously rejected by survivors and their supporters.Critics of the official reconciliation discourse in this nation have instead directed their attention toChile’s highly productive grass-roots memory culture—which includes independent journalism, social research, memory sites, literature, performance, music, and visual and screen arts—giving preference to agonistic concepts of social reconciliation
While the majority of the documentaries made in Chile after the end of the dictatorship naturally sought to denounce crimes against humanity, centering their attention on historical narration, forensic and legal investigation, depiction of evidence, and survivor testimony, two landmark films were the first to open up to the exploration of the perspective of former secret service collaborators: La Flaca Alejandra [Skinny Alexandra] (1994), directed by Carmen Castillo and Guy
[The Young Butler] (2011), directed by Marcela Said and Jean de Certau (Said and de Certau 2011), which centers on the testimony of a man who as a teenager was employed as an errand boy at one of the dictatorship’s torture houses

Summary

Introduction

Chile’s process of transitional justice after General Pinochet’s alliance with the Chilean economic civilian elite that ruled this country through an uninterrupted dictatorial regime between 1973 and 1990 has been entrapped within a prescriptive, state-sponsored restorative notion of national reconciliation, highly reliant on perpetrators’ impunity and vigorously rejected by survivors and their supporters. I decided to use Super-8 in this scene to present a different aesthetic of memory: the home movie, which is coded both as nostalgia and as a source of documentary evidence for a familial narrative This sequence directly precedes the semi-final scene of the film, which shows actual home video footage of my aunt and uncle visiting their old haunts in Papudo, Chile, several years ago. These two sequences highlight the way in which the aggregation of family memories proceeds to form cultural and historical narratives that we retell in order to create a coherent sense of self, both as individuals and as nations. Some of the pictures of my family, in particular the “photograph” of Valenzuela with his arm around my Uncle Sergio, are fabrications that create images of events for which there is no photographic record

Andrés Lübbert’s El color del camaleón

Director

Lissette

Conclusions