Rethinking Victimhood: Violence and Female Agency in Contemporary Argentine Memory Cinema

Abstract

Rethinking Victimhood: Violence and Female Agency in Contemporary Argentine Memory Cinema Ana Marina Gamba In the opening images of the 2011 film Infancia clandestina a young child asks his parents to quickly open the door of the house as he needs to go to the bathroom. What appears to be a rather ordinary event abruptly becomes a scene from an action film. Gunshots are fired from a moving vehicle towards the family, in response to which the parents draw their own guns. Using an aesthetic that distinctly evokes a superhero comic book, the film shows the famous actress and pop singer Natalia Oreiro firing back at the unknown aggressors. In spite of the considerable number of Argentine movies depicting the events that took place in that country in the 1970s, the scene described above appeared as quite novel. As pointed out by Gonzalo Aguilar, this film was the first one to give a fictional portrayal of the activities of the revolutionary groups from that period (17)—more specifically in this context, of the political organization called Montoneros.1 This article addresses a yet unstudied aspect of this wider phenomenon: the specific transformation that the figure of the female activist suffered in this strain of “memory cinema.”2 It argues that there is a fracture in contemporary cinema concerning previous cinematic representations of female revolutionary activists. The main aim of this essay is to comprehend the relationship between narratives portraying women as mere “innocent victims,” on the one hand, and figurations more centered on the political agency of female characters, on the other. The former narratives appeared in the immediate aftermath of the return to democracy, while the latter emerged in the second decade of the 21st century, exploring the duality of the female characters as both victims and perpetrators of violence. The present analysis is inspired by the theoretical framework of memory studies which holds that any discourse about the past should also be considered an expression of the present where it emerges. In this case, the unprecedented growth of feminist movements in Argentina in recent years3 will provide an essential background to our analysis. From this perspective, the shift in the way female victimhood is portrayed should be analyzed as twofold: as a new perspective on the social understanding of events that occurred during the last dictatorship (1976–1983), and as a transformation in the relationship between women and politics that characterizes contemporary culture and politics in Argentina. [End Page 17] 1. Innocent victims The production of films—both fictional and documentary—has been of great significance in the construction of social memory throughout history, as the case of the Holocaust has clearly demonstrated (Lewis, 7). Argentina is by no means an exception. In the years following the end of the dictatorship in 1983, audiovisual productions constructed a narrative about that period that compensated for the absence of historic visual records—the clandestine character of the repression meant that there were no traces of the action of the army (Feld and Stites Mor, 20). The cruelty and cynicism of the atrocities committed by the military were so disturbing and inconceivable that the Argentine society resorted to visual representations to comprehend what had happened during those years. Therefore, artistic discourses—notably cinema—were granted a very important role in the collective production of memory, and, since the return of democracy, numerous films problematizing the 1970s have been released.4 Regarding this cinematic repertoire, Ana Amado distinguishes different cycles in post-dictatorship memory (13). The years immediately following the return of democracy in Argentina, identified as the first cycle, were characterized by a heated public debate on the events that took place in the country during the military government. Central issues were the responsibility of the different parties involved and the most viable alternatives to overcome the tremendous suffering as a society. The new government, backed by human rights associations, instructed a commission5 to investigate the crimes perpetrated by the military. The purpose of such investigations was to pursue legal action on the basis of the information gathered. The version about the past supported by these social actors tried to decouple the victims of the State repression from their...