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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Archive/Missing. No(Body’s) Images? Reflections on Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983) and on Its Visual Recollection
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2011-10-01
2022-12-10
2011-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Valentina Cucca
2011/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
2036-461X
16-17
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Archive/Missing. No(Body’s) Images? Reflections on Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983) and on Its Visual Recollection
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19366/17237
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ARCHIVE/MISSING. NO(BODY’S) IMAGES?
REFLECTIONS ON ARGENTINIAN DICTATORSHIP (1976-1983)
AND ON ITS VISUAL RECOLLECTION
Valentina Cucca, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano




   On 24 March 1976, General Videla assumes the presidency of Argentina with a coup that was
supported by a military junta formed by General Orlando Ramon Agosti and Admiral Emilio
Eduardo Massera – who served as Supreme Court and Attorney General, respectively. The dicta-
torship called “Process of National Reorganization,” lasted almost eight years, until 30 October
1983, the date of the elections won by the Union Civica Radical headed by Raul Afonsìn.
   From the very beginning, the military dictatorship started out by practicing systematic repres-
sions of every political and social dissent, in particular that of left-wing militants. Repression had
already been planned since 1975, a year before the coup (1976). The preparation had been metic-
ulous. This mechanism, developed in order to eliminate any kind of opposition (real or alleged),
worked through 364 clandestine concentration camps, where the detainees were first tortured to
extort information and then, literally “made to disappear” primarily through bureaucracy: once
seized, it was impossible to get information about them, they did not appear even on police or mil-
itary registers anymore. This was the first step. Subsequently, the prisoners were made to disap-
pear physically with the so-called death flights: they were thrown, still alive, into the sea, the Rio
de la Plata. Between 1977 and 1983, the Argentine military dictatorship disposed of more than
thirty thousand alleged “opponents”. While the Nazis had followed an ethnic-religious policy of
selection (all Jews had to be eliminated without exception), the Argentinean dictatorship followed
an ideological criterion: to eliminate all young dissenters because, as far as the dictatorship was
concerned, it was not possible to erase ideology from their heads.
   The escalation of repression led to a clampdown not only on political activists and dissidents but
also on those who had simply, even indirectly, sympathized with any social, humanitarian or stu-
dent association. Therefore, to “disappear” were also, and in great part (!), people who had, actual-
ly, in no way been involved in activities against the regime. In fact, 94% of detainees were civilians
and only 6% guerrilleros, most of them between 15 and 30 years old. A whole generation gone.
   Unlike what had occurred in Chile, where the 1973 coup had provided the press and therefore
the world’s public opinion with images of aerial bombardment of the Palacio de La Moneda,
Argentina’s military dictatorship undertook its repressive activities with secrecy (also in view of
the Soccer World Cup that were to take place in Argentina two years later). Therefore, the kid-
napping of suspects and their transport to the clandestine detention centers usually occurred by

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VALENTINA CUCCA

night. After the kidnapping, the missing people’s relatives were not informed of their fate: they
simply didn’t figure on any record and just “disappeared.” There were no traces left and therefore
no archives.
   Another peculiarity of the Argentine case relates to the places of detention and torture. These
were in fact not built ad hoc; instead they were situated inside of the civic buildings themselves:
city garages, military schools, shooting ranges, police stations etc… most of them were located
in the city center undergrounds. Therefore, in a sense, the tragedy was carried out in broad day-
light, so to speak, under the eyes of everyone, while remaining, at the same time, invisible.
   At one point (30 April 1977), the mothers and relatives of the missing persons, by now con-
vinced of the military’s responsibility of the disappearances, began a silent protest: it consisted of
a march, the largest and best known of which took place every Thursday in Plaza de Mayo in
Buenos Aires, with the image and the name of the missing relatives on a sign and a white hand-
kerchief on their heads. This is the only image we have of the events (fig. 1). The victims of this




                              Fig. 1 – Madres de Plaza de Mayo (1983).

wave of death were recognized only in 1983 after the declaration of their presumed death,
obtained by the Madres and Abulas (grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo, with the support of human
rights movements. Two years later, this step gave rise to criminal proceedings against the mem-
bers of the military junta.
  There are at least three reasons that compel us to re-propose these historical events, in order to
understand the complex relationship between visual archive and social memory when the first
one is missing.
  The first reason is political and concerns impunity. Unlike in Chile and Paraguay, in Argentina
the governments that have succeeded the dictatorship have never willfully and unequivocally rec-
ognized and thus condemned the crimes committed. In 1986, after the report Nunca Más (Never
again), 2,000 trials were held against the military that were involved in tortures and human rights
violations; even if only for reasons of “national reconciliation” with the Ley de Punto Final,1 the
judges were allowed a small margin to initiate the process, after which all charges would have
fallen in prescription. In 1988, under the Ley de Obediencia Debida (Law of Due Obedience), all
of the soldiers who had tortured or killed prisoners by executing an order were declared innocent
by the Pardon. The tangible proof of the precise will and determination of the Argentinean post-
dictatorial governments’ to visually censor as much as possible the tragedy, is also evidenced by
the modes of recording the only visual document of military dictatorsʼ process in 1985, which
were very different from those used in Eichmannʼs trial: it is in fact composed of still images
from a camera placed at the bottom of the courtroom in which all defendants are taken from
behind, and one never sees their faces. There were no condemnations and no public recognitions

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of what had happened. There were no archives, no museums, no places of memory until the most
recent Kirchner government brought about a decisive change in Argentinean history. Firstly, by
declaring the Laws on Pardon unconstitutional and, secondly, by reopening all trials on 14 June
2005.
   The second reason is social: during the period when thousands of opponents disappeared, there
were, under the military, waiting lists to have a baby from imprisoned women who had given
birth in the camps. Those children (about 500) would eventually grow up as true sons of the
nation. Those children are now in their thirties and do not know their true identity. The fact is a
serious issue both in terms of identity and in social ones implying somewhat suspect in the inter-
stices of the social construction itself.
   The third reason pertains to the symbolic and relates specifically to the reworking of the trauma
and its possibilities of representation. That is specifically what I am going to undertake in this paper.
   Desaparecidos have no images, not even one. No traces. No pictures. No archives.


The archive as visual evidence

   The importance and value assigned to images in the exercise of memory is certainly not a recent
discovery, and the idea that images can play a decisive role in the making of personal and collec-
tive memories is nowadays widely shared. Unlike what happened in Europe at the end of World War
II, when journalists and filmmakers filmed and photographed concentration camps to document the
event and places of Nazi tortures, the murder of more than 30,000 Argentinean dissidents left
absolutely no visual cue, no footprint, no visual archive, and no place of memory: desaparecidos.
   The archive is above all “the law of what can be said”2 and, as I have argued, it is secrecy that
characterizes the Argentine case from the very beginning.
   In the words of Ruth Klüger, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, “where there isnʼt a
grave, mourning does not cease.” How, then, did post-dictatorial Argentina visually rework the
trauma?
   In Derrida’s formulation, the unyielding etymological ambiguity of the archive (from the greek
arché: beginning, but also authority) indicates both beginning and injunction.3 Therefore, the
archive seems to be both site of the original and jussive-memorial deposit, place/site where the
document is kept in its authority and together certification of his authoriality. Before the archive
as historical memory, Derrida intends the archive as an essentially political institution. It arises
first as memory of power, the power claimed by documental heritages and historical sources:
there is no political power without the control of the archive, if not that of memory.4 Therefore,
to control the archives means to govern memory. “The archive has the eminent value of potential
memory or, better, it is the material condition of a subsequent cultural memory.”5
   Ricœur’s reflections uphold this position.6 According to the philosopher, archives pertain not
only to the management of the past, but also (and in great part) to the planning of the future: doc-
umentary traces are instruments that keep the dialogue going between past and present, at least in
two respects:
   1. The archive is a physical place that preserves documental traces, allowing the work of his-
       toriographical reconstruction;

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VALENTINA CUCCA

  2. But, it is also a social site that stores and protects a futura memoria social memory, which
      stored and archived documents help to preserve.
  Therefore, archives arise as social institutions. Their nature is an eminently social one, as physi-
cal places where primary sources are kept, and as sites of potential preservation of social memory.
  Given that nowadays both history and social memory no longer pass through only traditional
and institutional channels, and that in our contemporary cultural paradigm there are more often
images and their different forms of mediation that seem to establish a privileged relationship in
the formation and sustenance of personal, collective and historical memories;7 and if, as antici-
pated, in our contemporary culture, this task seems to be increasingly delegated to images, in face
of the absence of a record due to a mere non-existence, or because of censorship, how can cul-
tural productions resulting from the symbolic processings of the survivorsʼ testimonies of
Argentina’s tragedy respond figuratively to the absence of a visual archive? In the case of
Argentina, the problem has been (and is) that of putting back on screen documental images of
events that have never had an image of their own, in order to visually support social memory
through symbolic elaborations able to act as “surrogate archives.”
  What is the image’s responsibility in the face of this problem? Obviously the question is both
social and political; therefore, it immediately raises at least two ethical issues:
  1. Primarily, given the absence of an original archive, cinema candidates itself to act, to play
      the role of a figurative archive – albeit a surrogate one. Given these circumstances, the first
      question is that of a “rightness” of a voluntary act of figurative memory production without
      any visual evidence.
  2. Secondly, what is the responsibility of the image in the event of the lack of an original?
      Indeed even of a virtual one: survivors themselves have no visual memory because of the
      tabiquamento8...
  Furthermore, how does one shoot violence? There is no objectivity in violence.
  Given that (a) the contemporary canon of historical filmic reconstructions seems to be mainly
that of the re-semantization of archival records (either in the form of found footage, and that of
the cast); and that (b) we are usually used to trust in archival documents (confidence and trust
which coexist with the idea that its handling, its hypertextual re-contextualization, is going to pre-
serve its original sense, already dense of all ethical connotations of “History’s Judgment”); mind-
ful of the absence of a figurative canon resulting from the absence, the disappearance or the cen-
sorship of a visual archive, how is it possible to produce a figurative memory of the event and
through which linguistic strategies?



Argentinian trauma on screen
  From the sampling and analysis of Argentina’s post-dictatorial film productions that have tried
to symbolically rework the trauma (only a few films, indeed) different narrative and topic modes
emerge. Upon general analysis, both in the more recent productions and in those immediately fol-
lowing the fall of the dictatorship, we can observe the coexistence of more realistic genres both
in their declination of drama (Jacobo Timerman, Linda Yellen, 1983) and that of an explicit
thematization of trauma (Garage Olimpo, Marco Bechis, 1999; Hijos, Marco Bechis, 2002; Das
Lied in mir, Florian Micoud Cossen, 2010), or an indirect one (through the detective story in El

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secreto de sus ojos, Juan José Campanella, 2009); with fantastic genres in their heterogeneous
declinations like that of the surreal (Moebius, Gustavo Mosquera, 1998; Imaging Argentina,
Christopher Hampton, 2003), or even the horror (Aparecidos, Paco Cabezas, 2007). By virtue of
their ability to lead to displacement and disorientation produced from the intrusion of the surreal
and the supernatural in everyday life, these genres are thus able to manage a metaphorical and
symbolical processing of the trauma in terms of disbelief in front of disappearance.
   1. At a first glance, a kind of cinema obsessed with reality that it is able to recreate only
      through a hallucinatory form seems to emerge.
   2. In fact, in terms of style, the common fil rouge that runs through the mood of many texts
      seems to be dreamlike in differing degrees, narratively transposed through the admixture
      and hybridization of reality and imagination (synthesized in figures of dreams, clairvoy-
      ance, zombies, story within the story, etc.), able to recreate the surreal dimension typical of
      incredulity and disbelief in front of disappearance’s absurdity.
   3. With regard to screenplays, given the lack of archives, they are in most cases adaptations
      of novels (The Honorary Consul, John Mackenzie, 1983, La noche de los lápices, Hector
      Olivera, 1988, etc.), or texts based on testimonies on which I am going to pursue later.
   4. A further issue that pertains to the aesthetical level and that all productions have in com-
      mon, is encountered in the use of chromatic codes. Whereas the canon used by contempo-
      rary mainstream cinema to establish the historicization and indirectly the “archivation” of
      historical events seems to follow more and more often the standard of black and white (even
      to facilitate the overlapping/juxtaposition of images in the editing of footage with ex novo
      images), it is a chromatic option absent in all the filmic texts for at least two reasons: (a)
      there is no visual document nor archival footage available to strengthen the documentary
      status of the filmic text; (b) nor does it seem that the event has been in someway archived
      into the common social conscience, into the present. Instead, the question remains more
      open than ever because of identity issues raised by the hijos (the sons) of desaparecidos.
   5. In terms of representation per se, given that there are no images of the disappeared, the only
      available figurative materials – which may in some way constitute an iconographic archive
      of the tragedy – are the images of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the few remaining pho-
      tographs of the disappeared. Nothing but a few wrecks are left of the Argentinean tragedy.
   They are, however, tracks, traces, ghostly imprints that stay “in place” of an original absent,9
disappeared, again. Only a text, the most recent, re-enters these traces linking them to the pro
filmic narrative: for example, in El secreto de sus ojos, the photograph on the bedside table
strongly resembles the mosaics of the missing we already know (fig. 2).




                     Fig. 2 – El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009).

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VALENTINA CUCCA

   Reconstructing the tragedy on screen is a political issue, and as Godard used to say “you donʼt
have to shoot political films, but to shoot films politically.” Therefore, if the archive is missing,
what kind of images can reprocess violence and trauma?
   Marco Bechisʼ autobiographical writing in Garage Olimpo, and his biographical writing in
Hijos seem emblematic because of the way they develop, starting from the research and possibil-
ity of reshooting the archive. Let us take, for example, Garage Olimpo. Firstly, under a purely
technical aspect the film was shot entirely in Buenos Aires, and in continuity. On the aesthetical
level, the underground scenes are always shot with the camera on the operator’s shoulder, and
with intradiegetic lights, nothing is artificial (unlike the city that is shot as fiction). Secondly, the
construction of a realistic and almost documentary figurativeness is obtained through images built
on sound and words. They are built up through the words and sounds evoked by the witness –
given that even survivors have no images of the event – and are recalled by survivors both on and
off the set. Thirdly, the effort to build the profilmic with the witnesses and through their evidence
– among them objects and dresses belonging to the desaparecidos – is what largely establishes an
affinity between the fiction and the archive understood as rest, as a significant trace of the past
that can engage in a dialogue with the present.10 On the other hand, both Ricœur11 and Assmann12
emphasize the importance of testimony for historical reconstruction and its ability to become
archive. In the case of Bechis’ movies, testimony plays a key role for at least two reasons. Garage
Olimpo is not only built through the survivors’ evidences (from 1991 on, he gathers more than
70) and through their concrete presence on the set as active participation in the creation of the
filmic text; but, even the director himself in some way certificates the text through its own biog-
raphical experience. Fourthly: shooting violence. It is always the hint, the allusion of the gesture
that prevails on the unseen and on the un-shown, in this way always avoiding the risk of abjec-
tion, as described by Serge Daney on Kapòʼs final traveling.13 Finally, Bechis’ movies are not to
be considered only as ethical images, but as distressing images that literally leave an impression
on the audience when they leave space to time. Editing solves a key role in this sense because
rather than as conceptual device it is deployed as a strategy able to unlock image’s whole poten-
tial, thus conferring ethical and moral resonances to the filmic text. Bechis’ images never show
violence, on the contrary they imagine the violent gesture, in this way becoming stronger than
mere representations, or than possible footages. They never give, rather they suggest (fig. 3).




                             Fig. 3 – Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, 1999).




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Conclusions

   The archive is thus not just a place of storage and preservation of an archivable past content, it
goes further. The archive concurs to some extent to produce, to bring into existence into the past,
recording them, the archivable events, determining the content of (future) knowledge itself.
Archiving means not only preserving, but somehow capitalizing the possibility of a future testi-
mony. What archives imply is the ethical imperative of preserving the memory of what has gone
(and therefore they contain the potential, the opening to a future).
   Therefore, how is it possible to have knowledge without archive? What type of imagery
reprocesses trauma? Based on what if the archive is missing? As we have seen, in this case the
only solution seems to be that of the living archive14 and the memories, the recollections and the
social discourses that constitute what has been defined by Aleida Assmann15 as memory-archive,
it is a memory of the memories that includes everything that has already lost a vital relationship
with the present. In this kind of memory as many testimonies as cultural productions that rework
and sustain themselves through them are included, turning them again into functional memory
through the establishment of that dialogue between past and present released by the recirculation
of witness in its various forms.
   The works of Bechis – through the effort of telling the guerra sucia (dirty war) through ethical
images drawn from a symbolic density built on the evocation of an alternative archive, it is that
of the traces and the wrecks, and evoked entirely through the reiteration of the un-shown and
unseen and through the soundtrack that imposes itself on the images – seem at first sight to estab-
lish themselves as master works in social discourses. Indeed, Garage - Olimpo and Hijos have
both received an archival form intended as physical place (as described at the beginning by
Ricœur16) from the Cineteca Vida in Buenos Aires. This is clearly a form of institutionalization,
a futura memoria through the recognition of their national interest. Furthermore, both have in
some ways received an institutionalization as social site: UGC on Argentinean desaparecidos
use, in most cases, scenes taken from Garage Olimpo as source material and therefore they play
a big part in the visual reworking process by re-entering fictional images onto the audience under-
stood as a subject-archive (fig. 4).17 Moreover Hijos has been able to virtually generate a meeting




              Fig. 4 – Homage to desaparecidos by the amateur videomaker Leon Gieco,
                                 who cites Bechis’ Garage Olimpo.

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VALENTINA CUCCA

place for the sons of the disappeared (http://www.garageolimpo.it); that by itself does not say
much about its ability to become an archive, but certainly it says much on its co-option as figu-
rativeness able to establish itself as a document.
   Finally, the question at stake here is that the image as discourse broadens the archive as a set
of discursive forms that enable the emergence of future discourses, a prerequisite both for a proac-
tive action by the audience and for the fulfillment of the role of constitution, preservation and
maintenance of social and collective memory, which had already been identified from the outset
as a primary function of the archive.18


Filmography

Jacobo Timerman: Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (Linda Yellen, USA 1983)
Las madres de Plaza de Mayo (Susana Blaustein Muñoz, Argentina 1985)
Missing (Costa Gavras, USA 1982).
The Honorary Consul (John Mackenzie, UK 1983)
Sur (Fernando E. Solanas, Argentina/France 1988)
La noche de los lápices (Hector Olivera, Argentina 1988)
Moebius (Gustavo Mosquera, Argentina 1998)
Garage Olimpo (Marco Bechis, Argentina/Italy 1999)
Vidas privadas (Fito Páez, Spain/Argentina 2001)
Hijos (Marco Bechis, Italy 2002)
Imaging Argentina (Christopher Hampton, Spain/UK/USA 2003)
Aparecidos (Paco Cabezas, Argentina 2007)
Salamandra (Pablo Agüero, France/Argentina/Germany 2008)
Desaparecido (Peter Sanders, Argentina 2008)
El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, Argentina 2009)
La mirada invisible (Diego Lerman, Argentina/France/Spain 2010)
Das Lied in mir (Florian Micoud Cossen, Germany/Argentina 2010)




1    The Ley de Punto Final (law 23.492, Extinción de la acción penal) is a law passed by the Argentinian
     National Congress on 24 December 1986, during the presidentiship of Raul Alfonsin within the process
     of democratization of the country after the end of the military dictatorship of the Proceso de
     Reorganización Nacional (1976-1983). The law dictates the end of investigations and prosecutions
     against people accused of political violence during the dictatorship, up to the restoration of the demo-
     cratic rule on 10 December 1983. Literally: “Are to be extincted prosecutions brought against all people
     who have committed crimes tied to the establishment of violent forms of political action until 10
     December 1983.” The law, by decreeing the impunity of the military for the disappearance and torture
     of at least 9,000 people, was extremely controversial in its time and afterwards. This law had a comple-
     ment in the Ley de Obediencia Debida (Law of Due Obedience), which exempted subordinates from any
     accusation when they were carrying out orders. Both laws were considered null and void by the National
     Congress in 2003 and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Justice on 14 June 2005, under
     Néstor Kirchner’s presidentship. In this way allowing the re-opening of cases that involved crimes

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     against humanity. The first of such cases, which involved the former Buenos Aires Provincial Police sec-
     ond-in-command Miguel Etchecolatz, ended in September 2006 and laid down precedent by acknowl-
     edging that the dictatorship’s state terrorism was a form of genocide.
2    Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, Paris 1969 (ed. it. L’archeologia del sapere,
     Rizzoli, Milano 1971).
3    Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne, Galilée, Paris 1995 (ed. it. Mal d’archivio.
     Un’impressione freudiana, Filema, Napoli 1996).
4    Ibidem.
5    Aleida Assman, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, C.H.
     Beckʼsche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Oscar Beck), München 1999 (ed. it. Ricordare, Il Mulino, Bologna
     2002, p. 383).
6    Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, lʼhistoire, lʼoublie, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2000 (ed. it. La memoria, la sto-
     ria, lʼoblio, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2003).
7    Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins
     University, Baltimore 1973.
8    The tabiquados were prisoners whose eyes were blindfolded so that they could not recognize any peo-
     ple or places.
9    Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archivio, cit.
10   Georges Didi-Hubermann, Images malgré tous, Éditions de Minuit, Paris 2004 (ed. it. Immagini mal-
     grado tutto, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2005).
11   Paul Ricœur, La memoria, la storia, lʼoblio, cit.
12   Aleida Assmann, Ricordare, cit.
13   Serge Daney, “Le Travelling de Kapò,” in Trafic, no. 4, Autumn 1992.
14   Daniele Dottorini, “Nachleben: l’archivio dei gesti,” in Fata Morgana, no. 2, October 2007.
15   Aleida Assmann, Ricordare, cit.
16   Paul Ricœur, La memoria, la storia, lʼoblio, cit.
17   Ruggero Eugeni, “Lo spettatore-archivio: Cinema – Memoria – Modernità,” in Fata Morgana, no. 2,
     October 2007.
18   Further bibliographical references: Orlando Baroncelli, Su la testa, Argentina! Desaparecidos e recu-
     pero della memoria storica, Libriliberi, Firenze 2008; Marco Bechis, Argentina 1976-2001 filmare la
     violenza sotterranea, Ubulibri, Milano 2001; Michel De Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, Éditions
     Gallimard, Paris 1975 (ed. it. La scrittura della storia, Jaka Book, Milano 2006); Maurizio Ferraris, La
     documentalità, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2009; Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce: vero, falso, finto,
     Feltrinelli, Milano 2006; Carlo Ginzburg, Rapporti di forza, Storia, retorica, prova, Feltrinelli, Milano
     2000; Roberto De Gaetano, “L’inarchiviabile”, in Fata Morgana, no. 2, October 2007; Hayden White,
     The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Johns Hopkins University
     Press, Baltimore-Maryland 1987.




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