Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the past in

Albertina Carri's Los Rubios
Gabriela Nouzeilles
To cite this article: Gabriela Nouzeilles (2005) Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the past
in Albertina Carri's Los Rubios , Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 14:3, 263-278, DOI:
10.1080/13569320500382500
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569320500382500

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

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Gabriela Nouzeilles
POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE
OF THE PAST IN ALBERTINA CARRIS
LOS RUBIOS
Historical memory today is not what it used to be, states cultural critic Andreas
Huyssen in the opening paragraph of his recent book on historical trauma and the
politics of memory. The title of the book, Present Pasts (2003), underlines the
particularity of a time increasingly out of joint, in which the past has become
confounded with the present. Echoing widespread unease among progressive
intellectuals, Huyssen is positive and yet anxious about the political and ethical
consequences of such postmodern temporal disruptions. While history, once a
powerful vehicle to create a lasting link between community and nation through the
monumentalization of a common past, keeps losing credibility and political weight, we
are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of historical fictions fed by a museummachine that turns everything into signs of an omnivorous past. The vociferous
condemnation of history is thus paradoxically accompanied by the irresistible seduction
of the archive and its endless supply of stories of human achievement and suffering,
ceaselessly recycled and exploited by the market and the media (Huyssen, 2003: 5).
Out of the ruins of conventional history emerge, multiple and contradictory, the
fractured discourses of memory. Particularly noticeable among them are those
accounts dealing with personal and traumatic experiences, available to the public
through countless autobiographies, diaries and all sorts of testimonial accounts.
Literature, art, film, as well as photography have all provided their own renderings of
the traumatic and the confessional. The globalization of the experience of the
Holocaust as the dominant hermeneutical model with which to explain different
historical experiences of exceptional violence is another defining feature of the new
cultures of remembrance.
The questions raised by a present out of joint are both multifaceted and politically
pressing. What kind of politics of memory is possible today? How can one maintain an
ethical stand and a claim for justice when historical truth is being questioned as such?
What kind of political responses are possible in societies in which spectacular images of
pain and violence have become part of a mass media-driven circus? And, moreover,
how can the future be imagined in a culture transfixed by fetishized versions of the past
and numbed by the unlimited promises of consumption? These and other related
questions are being asked in many regions across the world, and are particularly
relevant in those countries where the arrival of late capitalism and global culture was
preceded by periods of exceptional violence and oppressive political regimes.
In the Southern Cone, the discrediting of history and the mediatic explosion
of memory coincided with the end of bloody military dictatorships and the beginning
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 263-278
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320500382500

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of uneven democratic transitions, when the state and civil society were forced,
reluctantly, to face the aftermath of state terrorism and its thousands of victims.
The Holocaust and the Freudian concepts of mourning and melancholia offered a
hermeneutic and ethical model through which critics and intellectuals from the left
tried to make sense of post-dictatorship and the politics of memory that developed after
the return to democracy.1 In ways reminiscent of the Nazi genocide, the extreme acts
of violence against dissidents carried out by the dictatorial regimes seemed to defy all
attempts at rational explanation; the wounds they inflicted were beyond
representation. One result of this horrific collective experience was the proliferation
of accounts that tended to be unstable, inarticulate, suspended between memory and
forgetting, representation and nonsense. Among these dislocated expressions of a
deeply fractured social memory, the testimony of those who survived the states
criminal violence had and still has a privileged status as a form of narrative that, being
the bare remainder of catastrophe, resists all simplifications. The healing of the
community, argues Nelly Richard (Richard and Moreiras, 2001), requires the
completion of the work of memory and mourning, but on the condition that
the tremor of expression, implicit in all testimonial accounts of traumatic
experiences, be preserved. Only by working through the hesitations and contradictions
of memory will it be possible to imagine future narratives for the social collective
(2001: 14). In order to do so, it is necessary to avoid the reductionist characteristic of
two powerful discursive systems in the present of the post-political. First, the judicial
discourse, because it tends to reduce the incommensurability of the testimony so that it
can fit into the letter of the legal codes, what Shoshana Felman describes as the limits
of the law in its encounter with the phenomenon of trauma(2002: 145); and second,
the postmodern spectacularization of the traumatic, with its pornographic exploitation
of violated bodies, which Martin Jay relates to a neo-Nazi ideal of hypervisibility.
In addition to these two discourses, there is a third obstacle to a critical approach
to the past, arising in part from the mechanical translation to the Southern Cone
context of the Holocaust paradigm and the figure of the abstract victim that also
characterizes the discourse of human rights advocates. The abstract reading of state
violence according to these paradigms may prevent a long-needed critical examination
of the historical forces at play in the 1960s and 70s, and the nature of the radical
political movements that the military regimes sought to crush. In his book Pensar entre
epocas. Memorias, sujetos y crtica cultural (2004), Nicolas Casullo calls attention to the
persistence, after 20 years of democracy, of a public secret encrypted in the politics of
memory regarding the forced disappearance of people by the Argentine dictatorship,
between 1976 and 1983. Such a secret has to do with the systematic omission, by tacit
agreement, of almost all references to the radical politics of most of those that the
military regime renamed the disappeared. The reduction of the call for memory to
the space of the family as well as the definition of the states crimes in terms of the
international discourse on human rights, Casullo argues, has hindered the restoring
work of memory, taking it out of its historical points of reference and de-politicizing
the meaning of the death of those who suffered the systematic violence of the
militarized state. From this perspective, the widespread acceptance of the term
disappeared, coined by the military juntas, represents a second form of death, a
symbolic one, for the victims of the dictatorships mass killings (2004: 105 10). What
is at stake in revising the representation of the victims as abject and in openly debating

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

the revolutionary projects of the left in the 1960es and 70s is, once again, the future of
the community.
The problem of transmitting past experiences to younger generations, and
therefore the question of the meaning of memory, is central to understanding more
recent manifestations of remembrance in post-dictatorial Argentina. I am referring
here to the symbolic laboring of postmemory, understanding by this not a post of the
mnemonic although it could also mean that but rather the novel setting and acting
out of a secondary, post-generational memory that differs from traumatic memory
because of its generational distance, and from history because of its strong personal and
emotional connection with the past. According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory is
a very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or
source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and
creation (1997: 22). The most visible manifestations of postmemory in Argentina are
the performative and visual practices of the group HIJOS, acronym for Hijos por la
Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity
and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence). This association, formed by sons and
daughters of the disappeared, has defined itself through the realization of escraches,
perfomative street events whose goal is to reveal the scandal of yet another public
secret, by denouncing the criminal behaviour of those who collaborated with the
military regime (physicians, torturers, military officers, etc.) and who continue to live
among regular citizens unaffected by the consequences of their criminal actions.
Overall, HIJOSs political agenda echoes the goals put forward by the Mothers and
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, that is, a claim for justice based on biological identity
and family ties, for the conservation of memory, and against the silencing and covering
up of a criminal past.
It is in the context of postmemory and its predicaments that I would like to offer a
reading of the remarkable and puzzling documentary Los rubios (2003) by the talented
director Albertina Carri,2 daughter of Peronist radical militants who disappeared in
1977. Carris film represents a new stage within a progression of cinematic
interventions on behalf of the victims of state violence, while making a quantum leap in
the area of film production that has turned local independent cinema into one the most
innovative and creative sources of intellectual and artistic thinking today. Whether as
innocent victims or as involuntary witnesses and heirs to their parents tragic fate, the
children of the disappeared were from the beginning essential figures in the fictional
narratives with which Argentine cinema has contributed to the work of memory. From
La Historia oficial (1985) by Mario Puenzo and El exilio de Gardel (1986) by Pino Solanas
to Muro de silencio (1993) by Lila Stantic, Kamchatka (2002) by Marcelo Pineiro, and
I Figli (2003) by Marco Becchis, we see a progression through which the children have
gradually moved from being a significant but secondary element of the story to being
the main focus of the cinematic gaze. In the last five years there has been another
important development, as some of the children of the disappeared have begun to make
their own movies about their disturbing memories and the complex sense of identity
that they carried with them as a result of the foundational absence that defines their
lives. Carris documentary belongs to this latter group of films.3
What makes Los rubios remarkable is not so much the directors family background,
although it is certainly relevant, but rather that Carri has dared to significantly modify
the ways in which it is possible to talk about the past and its futures in postdictatorial

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Argentina. Los rubios signifies a form of intervention that is both highly sophisticated
in its formal approach and, to a large extent, at odds with the ways in which the work
of memory had been carried out previously. And in that sense it can be read as a
valuable shift in terms of Casullos call for a more critical approach to the past, beyond
the condemnation of human rights violations. Without rejecting them altogether, the
movie alters the roles sanctified by the prevalent discourses of memory, taking apart
their commonplaces and questioning the identity principle that feeds them. To begin
with, Los rubios targets the two discourses on collective memory that have defined
representations of the disappeared for more than 20 years. On the one hand, there is
the discourse of memory represented by the official report of the CONADEP, Nunca
mas (1986), and supported by the relatives of the disappeared, which relies on the
gathering of evidence in order to demand justice before the law. The representation of
the missing persona as an absolute victim and a call for total memory against forgetting
are two defining features of this approach. On the other hand, there is a more openly
political type of memory that cultural historian Hugo Vezzetti calls Montonero
memory, understanding by it a melancholic discourse that celebrates the figure of
the militant and the radical agenda advanced by the Montonero youth movement
(2002: 19).4 Carri positions herself in opposition to these two discourses by replacing
the call for total memory with an exploration of the unavoidable gaps and
contradictions of memory the tremor of uncertainty that Nelly Richard considers
essential to critical thinking and by playing down the epic exaltation of her parents
Montonero history.
An even more controversial aspect of Los Rubios comes from its irreverent
interrogation of the secondary logic of postmemory, as well as of the heavy demands on
the children of the disappeared imposed by the combination of biological, judicial and
political legacies. To many sons and daughters of the disappeared, inheritance means
assuming a mimetic, derived identity, to the extent that they may see themselves
primarily as embodiments of the traumatic loss of disappearance. At times, they may
behave as political literalizations of what Slavoj Zizek has provocatively called the living
dead, the ghosts of a historical past that return to the present as the symptom of an
unresolved, terrible crime (1991: 23). Similarly, in so far as they make some of the
revolutionary ideals of the 1970s their own, they run the risk of becoming
anachronistic reflections of a project frozen in time. Against the compulsory demand of
genealogical inscription, Carri suggests the desirability of other kinds of communities,
beyond the politics of blood and party; that is, flexible, open communities, capable of
imagining still undefined, alternative political projects, helping the members of a
wounded society to accomplish what Alberto Moreiras has called el duelo del duelo, the
mourning of mourning (2001: 318).
The confrontational nature of Carris documentary, its many angles and fronts,
explains the uneasiness, which occasionally turns into disapproval, that the film has
elicited in some circles. The discomfort arises primarily from three sources of anxiety:
some aspects of Carris avant-garde aesthetics, her questioning of the revolutionary
ideals of the 1960s and 70s and, finally, the pantomimic destabilization of Carris
public persona as daughter of the disappeared.5 Even though I find most of the
objections that have been made against the film to be unjustified, I want to make clear
that my reading does not carry with it a prescriptive endorsement of a correct way of
remembering that the movie somehow would illustrate. Rather, what I would like to

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

do in the following pages is to explore the films alleged political incorrectness, what
Martn Kohan contemptuously identifies with Carris shameful display of a regimen de
la descortesa(2004: 28), as perhaps the films most powerful contribution to critical
thinking.

I. Looking for Los rubios

The quest, whether or not it is related to an actual journey, is a pervasive
documentary impulse. (Bruzzi, 2000)
The meaning of Los rubios and its aesthetic and political project depend, to a large
extent, on the realist conventions of referentiality and its association with historical
truth, conventions that the internal logic of the film both confirms and negates.
Schematically, the movie is a documentary about Albertina Carri and her crew
making a documentary about her parents Roberto Carri and Ana Maria Caruso, the
equivocal rubios of the title, who were kidnapped in 1976 and presumably executed a
year later. The Carris were intellectuals and radical Montonero militants who gave up
their middle-class lives to pursue their political ideals. Roberto Carri was a sociologist
and a journalist. His publications include Isidro Velazquez: Formas prerrevolucionarias de la
violencia (1968), a study of non-urban forms of popular rebellion, recently re-edited
with an introduction by Horacio Gonzalez. At the time the Carris were taken away,
they were in hiding, living with their three daughters, Paula, 13, Andrea, 12, and
Albertina, 4, in a proletarian neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. After a
year of captivity in an illegal detention centre, during which time they stayed in contact
with their daughters through letters, Roberto and Ana Mara Carri disappeared
forever. Their names and stories are included in the official report Nunca mas.
Their bodies have never been recovered.
As a documentary about the Carris, Los rubios is not an investigation about what
happened to them an aspect of their story that can regrettably be inferred from the
sickening accounts by many survivors of the detention camps, and from the
predictability of the terror apparatus. Nor is it about locating their bodies a task that
the movie clearly delegates to the state institutions and the teams of forensic
anthropologists working on the identification of human remains from mass graves.
Deceptively, the goal seems more modest. What Los rubios attempts to find out is who
the Carris really were. Since any piece of information may hold the key to what is
forever lost, all angles may be relevant. What were they like? What political ideals did
they hold? How did they behave? Did they cheat when playing sports? How did they
cope with the dire consequences of their political choices? Were they handsome?
Was she fat? Did she have a shrieking voice? Were they blonde? Nothing is left out.
From the political to the cultural, from the social to the personal, the film keeps
collecting and presenting data that may or may not prove useful in reconstructing the
authentic Carris, whose behaviour and choices, at least from todays perspective, may
seem puzzling, even bizarre.
In order to solve the enigma, the director and her crew take advantage of many of
the resources offered by the documentary as an investigative genre driven by the desire
to know, and based on an ideal of transparency in opposition to fiction film. A sense of

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unmediated access to the world, the impression of objectivity, a unified and coherent
view of events, and the use of more or less structured interviews are some of the
formal features that characterize the most conventional modes of the documentary
genre.6 Correspondingly, in Los rubios we have interviews with relatives, friends and
political comrades, and the indirect testimony of other witnesses of the Carris past,
including Albertina. In a move reminiscent of the cinema verite, a more radical form of
realism in which spontaneity and interventionist tactics are valued over editing and the
dictates of the script, there are also spontaneous interviews with two working-class
women from the proletarian neighbourhood where the Carris were last seen.
The lingering of the cameras eye over material evidence such as photographs,
letters, and publications from the 1970s is another way of reinforcing the reality
effect of the documentary, its epistemological potential. The photographs of the
Carris when they were children or posing with their daughters function as
particularly powerful markers of reality, as they may pass for incontrovertible proof
of the actuality of the past. Since they are literally an emanation of the referent, in
photographs the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation, says
Barthes (1981: 88 9). Photographs may distort the real, but there is always
a presumption that something was out there, that resembled what is still in
the picture.
The inspection of the locations of past events is another important dimension of
reconstruction. Since searching is the main force behind the films narrative
dynamics, we frequently see the director and her film crew going places, tracking the
traces left behind by the Carris. They walk and drive for long distances; they take
highways and look for streets that are hard to find. In addition to the proletarian
neighbourhood where they last lived, they visit the Police Unit where the illegal
centre in which the Carris were held used to function, and drive to the countryside
where Albertina and her sisters went to live after they lost contact with their parents.
The mapping of the past and its geographies comes across as both comprehensive
and thorough.
And yet, notwithstanding the efforts of the film crew, the search for the real and
the authentic is always imperfect, unsatisfactory. The larger the amount of data, the
more distant the object of their quest appears, continuously receding behind the veils
of representation. Instead of clarifying the blurred images of the past, the interviews
keep bringing up partial or contradictory information. For the family, the Carris are
exceptional beings, funny, loving, beautiful, intelligent. For their political comrades,
they were soldiers for a lost cause and the tragic heroes of popular struggle. There is
even disagreement about their physical features. One of the proletarian women is
positive that all the members of the Carri family were blonde, or looked blonde a
statement that the photographs, Albertinas own appearance, and the testimony of an
aunt immediately put into question. At the same time, one could argue that, in the
context of the proletarian neighbourhood the Carris were seen as blonde, that is,
whiter, more educated, and from a different class. Consequently, it is fair to say that
both statements, The Carris were blonde and The Carris were not blonde are
potentially true. The title of the movie, Los rubios, ironically highlights the
fundamental inconclusiveness of memory and identity. The puzzle contains many
pieces, some of which are missing, while others do not match, or could be

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

assembled in more than one way. What is left is a profuse collage of fragments and
loose ends.
Rather than one compact memory, the movie records the existence of a collection
of memories that will never fit into a coherent whole. It is not so much the threat of
forgetting as the surfeit of memory and its irreducible imprecision that is the problem
addressed by Carris work. Excess does not mean fullness. When meaning explodes, it
always leaves, scattered all over the surface of our recollections, the gaps of the failure
to remember, or the baffling certainties of remembering otherwise. And yet, Carris
acknowledgement of memorys multiplicity does not translate into a superficial
celebration of a liberal pluralism of memory according to which any form of
recollection has exactly the same value as any other form of recollection.7 In Los rubios,
we learn the inherently controversial nature of memory, even in the case of those who
seem to be in complete agreement on their irrevocable condemnation of a violent past.
In acknowledging the impossibility of knowing for sure who the Carris were, the
documentary undoes its original project by displaying its own making and unmaking.
What we end up with is a self-referential documentary about a failed documentary, in
which the trace of the real corresponds to the process of making and assembling the
film. Because of the mirror effect created by the arrangement of the movie within the
movie, looking for los rubios, the equivocal parents, turns outs to be indistinguishable
from looking for Los rubios, the elusive movie.
In its self-referential mode, Carris documentary rejects the realism of the
traditional versions of the genre, revealing the naivety of its criteria for truth,
incorporating instead strategies that come from more experimental articulations of
documentary filmmaking. These are documentaries in which not only the object being
investigated but the very concept of representation is seen as problematic. In these
films, the poetic and reflexive predominate over the expository and the observational
(Nichols, 2001: 99 138). Among them, performative documentaries in particular
have many traits in common with Los rubios. Like them, Carris film is based on the idea
of disavowal that simultaneously signals a desire to make a conventional documentary,
and hence to provide an accurate account of a series of factual events, while also
indicating the infeasibility of the documentarys cognitive ambitions.8 Against the
notion of transparency, it encourages a performative exchange between subjects,
filmmakers and spectators. One of the immediate effects of this stylistic option is the
splitting of the director into different personae, typically the (actual) director and the
director-actor in the film. Los rubios takes this splitting even further. There are at least
three Albertina Carri: Albertina, the author behind the frame; Albertina, the auteur
inside the film, who appears holding the camera, giving instructions and discussing the
movie with the crew; and Albertina, the daughter in a state of memory, who stands
before the camera delivering a rehearsed testimony. The latter is played by the actress
Anala Couceiro who early in the movie identifies herself as an actress who will play the
part of Albertina Carri. The passage between the fictional and non-fictional Albertinas
corresponds in the movie to the alternation of the use of colour and a movie camera for
the fictional one, and the use of black and white and a video camera for the real one
a distinction that, given the frequent slipping of one level into the other, soon becomes
hazy. Far from being the exaggerated symptom of narcissistic self-absorption, the
multiplication of Albertinas seeks to throw into disarray previously held notions of
fixity of meaning and documentary truth. It also shows that, in the case of the children

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of the disappeared, the reconstruction of the past always entails the assembling of their
own subjectivity, since their fragile identity has been shaped around the black hole left
by the absence of their parents. Thus, a documentary about Albertina Carris parents
by Albertina Carri cannot but be also a movie about her selves.
As a postmemory artefact, countering the call for total recollection that underlies
the politics of memory held by the organizations of the relatives of the disappeared, Los
rubios is the chronicle of the impossibility of reconstructing the past and of offering a
complete and reliable version of it. It also implies the impossibility of giving a final,
organic narrative structure to the movie we are watching. The film exhibits this
impasse in different ways. The journeys realized by the film crew around the city of
Buenos Aires or to the countryside metaphorical references to the directors
emotional journey ultimately generate an anarchic narrative structure that cannot
advance. At one point the film crew gets lost; in another, their car gets stuck in the
muddy tracks of a country road. The highways and roads they take to reach their
destinations could go anywhere or nowhere. Although they move and get to places,
their journeys are for the most part illustrations of static movement, in which those
who travel keep returning to their point of departure. The frustration of movement
leads to the predominance of time-images, in which time is out of joint, over
movement-images that ordinarily help a story move forward.9 The films interruption
of narrative linearity is evident in a memorable scene in the pampas when, as the result
of smooth editing, we see the image of Albertina/Couceiro recur multiple times,
standing next to a fence as the eye of the camera moves steadily along the fence and a
line of trees. The disarray in which we see the old photographs of the Carri family
points in the same direction. Photographs may be markers of reality, but in order to
make sense they must be inserted into a narrative. When such a narrative has been lost,
or brutally interrupted, in its place we have blank spaces (the missing faces of the
parents, covered by other pictures), or temporal leaps (picture of the father as a boy
next to the pictures of his young daughters).
The past, argues Carri in Los rubios, is beyond representation, and therefore can
never be fully understood. When dealing with a traumatic past, representation is not
only difficult to accomplish but can also be objectionable or undesirable. Testimonies of
survivors repeatedly expose this dilemma. Talking publicly can help to achieve justice
and reparation but it is also a way of making oneself vulnerable again by exposing
oneself to the look and judgement of others. In this sense, it is interesting to note that
the two authentic testimonies, that of the survivor who shared a cell with the Carris
and the testimony of Albertina herself, are both delivered indirectly by an actress,
Couceiro. Carri, nevertheless, includes alternative forms of mimesis that can be used
to access the most painful areas of the past. There are only two instances in the movie
in which the unrepresentable is represented. Representation is in both cases displaced
and metaphorical, a variety of mimetic approximation (Huyssen, 2003: 132), not of
the events themselves but of particular recollections of them. They are the result of
creative memory, and yet somehow true to the past. The first is the photographs of a
slaughterhouse taken by a survivor of a detention camp in which Albertinas sister
recognizes what is not literally there: the horror of torture and mass killing. The second
instance of mimetic approximation is the animation scenes made with Playmobil toys in
which Carri gives shape to the confusing memories of her childhood and her attempts at
making sense of the disappearance of her parents as a case of extraterrestrial

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

abduction.10 Again, the animated renderings of the past are not historically accurate
but they do reveal the degree of the family trauma and the insufficiency of all rational
explanations.
Against expectations, the realization that the past can only be recovered
imperfectly, or through metaphorical displacement, does not make of Los rubios a
melancholic project. On the contrary, the movie suggests that the process of putting
together, in cinematic language, the pieces of an unworkable puzzle constitutes in
itself a way of dealing with loss. The films therapeutic potential liberation from
the rituals of mourning and guilt has a twofold beneficiary: Albertina, on the one
hand, who is both the protagonist of the quest and the director of the film; and her
friends and assistants, on the other, who help her realize the documentary and who,
given their degree of participation, could be easily considered its co-authors.
It is as a collective project that Los rubios argues for a future based on a new politics
of memory and a different type of community, beyond the family and the
political cell.

II. The Future of the Past

And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of
memory, of inheritance, of generations. (Derrida, 1994)
Adonde van las almas de los muertos? (Albertina Carri played by Anala Couceiro.
Los rubios)
Los rubios is not only a movie about the fragility of memory, and the gaps and holes that
permeate all representations of the past. It is also an exploration of the haunting of the
present by the spectre(s) of a traumatic past and its legacies. The spectre is the return as
symptom of a traumatic event, the trace of a horrible crime that remains unresolved.
The trauma created by the dictatorship and its killing machine is an exemplary case of
the return of the dead. The shadows of its victims continue to haunt the present as
living dead until they receive decent burial, and/or the trauma of their death is
somehow integrated into historical memory. The presence of the symptom, like the
presence of the ghost, is a sign that the trauma is still active, still has power to wound
and disrupt.
In Los rubios, the spectre is as much a symptom of past wounds as it is a speaking
emissary. It keeps coming back in order to ask for justice but also to deliver a political
message, that of a generation of revolutionary militants who wanted to radically
transform what they saw as a profoundly unjust society. Thus, the spectre in Los rubios
refers both to Carris disappeared parents and to the beaten radical left represented by
the Montonero movement of which the Carris were a part.
The film itself is framed by Carris explicit invocation of the spectre of
revolutionary thought when Anala Couceiro, as Albertina Carri, reads aloud a
quotation from her fathers most important work, Isidro Velazquez: Formas
prerrevolucionarias de la violencia. Her father is not the author of the passage but this
is irrelevant. It stands for a political position and a political view Roberto Carri fully
endorsed. The text belongs to Juan Daz del Moral, a historian, who in 1923 wrote

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a book about peasant rebellions in Catalonia. It is worth quoting the passage in

its entirety:
La poblacion es la masa, el banco de peces, el monton gregario, indiferente a lo
social, sumiso a todos los poderes, inactivo ante el mal, resignado con su dolor.
Pero, aun en ese estado habitual de dispersion, subyace en el espritu de la multitud
el sentimiento profundo de su unidad originaria; el agravio y la injusticia van
acumulando rencores y elevando el tono en su vida afectiva, y un da, ante el
choque sentimental que actua de fulminante, explota ardorosa la pasion, la
muchedumbre se hace pueblo, el rebano se transforma en ser colectivo: el
egosmo, el interes privado, la preocupacion personal desaparecen, las voluntades
individuales se funden y se sumergen en la voluntad general; y la nueva
personalidad, electrizada, vibrante, se dirige recta a su objetivo, como la flecha al
blanco, y el torrente arrasa cuanto se le opone.
What we have here is a theory of the spontaneous political awakening of a popular
collective subject, capable of setting off overwhelming destruction and radical
transformation. This is the subject of revolution, and as such it is unstoppable. Roberto
Carri uses del Morals interpretation of peasant insurrections as a theoretical model to
read the political meaning of rural crime in northern Argentina in the 1960s. His case
study is the criminal life of Isidro Velazquez, a rural bandit in the province of Chaco,
who was killed by the police in 1967. Rejecting the distinction between civil and
political society, Carri advances the hypothesis that criminals are the authentic agents of
social revolution (2001: 93 4). What is the meaning of such an inflammatory passage
in the daughters documentary? Is it a mere relic, the dead letter of the past that lies
next to the silent images of the family pictures? Is it the spectres mandate that the
children of the disappeared, and other members of their generation, are expected to
follow?
It is my contention that the fathers text has the same role in Carris documentary
as the letters that many radical militants addressed to their children, usually after
deciding to go underground, either by choice or because of imminent danger. These
letters function as political testaments in which the militant parents state a political
truth and, frequently, encourage their sons and daughters to follow their path.
Paradigmatic among them is the letter from Ernesto Che Guevara to his four children,
written in 1965, in which he tells them: Remember that the revolution is the only
important thing and that each of us, separately, means nothing (1997: 349).11
The primacy of the political over everything else, including the subjective and the
emotional, is a defining trait of this legacy.
Confronted with the spectres call, Albertina Carri challenges his genealogical
interpellation and mimetic desire, and asserts instead the necessary heterogeneity of inheritance, the difference without opposition that has to mark it
(Derrida, 1994: 16).12 In doing so, she distinctly departs from the position adopted by
other children of the disappeared, who, incapable or unwilling to question their
parents righteousness, tend to define themselves as ghostly re-enactments of their
political choices. Such is the case of Mariano I, for example, for whom part of the
process of coming to terms with the death of his parents is to vindicate their political
dreams (We assume their essence, the utopia. . .. The point is that we are proud of our

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

parents, because of the position they adopted vis-a`-vis life, for trying to change the
world for everybody and for us [in Gelman, 1997: 215]). Even though Carri rejects
the mimetic dynamics of filial desire, she also refuses to dispose of her parents legacy
altogether in the name of the presumed sacredness of the nuclear family. What we have
in Los rubios is the display of a scrupulous but irreverent reading of inheritance. Carri
filters, sifts, questions and finally chooses those areas of the past that seem for her more
productive. Part of this negotiation with the legacies handed down to her by fate is to
avoid staying frozen in her role of daughter-heir.
In terms of the predicaments of inheritance, in Los rubios the future of the past
depends on a series of heretic displacements within political, cultural and social
genealogies, and their systems of truth. There is a pendular movement between
rejection and re-inscription that the movie openly addresses in both its formal choices
and its use of materials, as well as in some of the film crews discussions on camera.
There are two main areas of negotiation. First, we have the tradition of Argentine
political cinema, especially documentary films, from the 1960s and 70s, and its politics
of representation of the dispossessed. And second, the discourse of identity and
genealogical interpellation that Diana Taylor characterizes as DNA performance, and
that constitutes the dominant mode of self-definition in the association HIJOS.13
With regard to the tradition of political cinema, Carris strategy is one of
agreement and opposition. On the one hand, her rejection of realism, her emphasis
on the process of filmmaking, her support of collective film production, as well as
her adoption of the essay form coincide with many of the guiding principles of
revolutionary cinema.14 On the other hand, Los rubios casts doubt on, and ultimately
rejects, two fundamental assumptions of the same school: the identification of the
popular as the primary theme and motive of filmmaking, and the political alliance
among artists, intellectuals and popular classes that it entails.15 The spontaneous
interviews with two old women from the proletarian neighbourhood where the Carris
lived not only point to the futility of Albertinas parents sacrifices, but also to the
possibility, at least in one case, that members of the popular classes facilitated the
capture of the Carris by the dictatorships repressive forces. Albertinas recurrent
dream about a shantytown girl with a giant louse perched on her head further
underscores the apprehension aroused in her by the poor. Comparing its position with
that of the Carris almost 30 years ago, the film crew sees itself as a group of foreigners
visiting a devastated country mainly inhabited by women and children. The male
workers who witnessed the 1970s appear in the background, or are altogether absent
(like the father of Margarita who was fired from a factory). And yet, notwithstanding
this gloomy social landscape, the journey to the proletarian world provides a
fundamental key to the film project. Carri discovers in the alienated perspective of a
proletarian housewife the truth of her project. It is this woman who provides the title
of the movie, Los rubios, when she describes the Carris, who were not blonde, as
blonde. This false recollection reveals a truth: the fragility of memory and the
irreconcilable social differences that undermined any alliance with the popular classes,
who in many cases did not understand and were even hostile toward militant
interpellation.16 For reasons that are not clear, Carri and her crew choose to exclude
almost all references to militant workers, tacitly denying the populist message in the
spectres revolutionary text. There is no trace of the revolutionary subject in Los rubios.
This silence is particularly puzzling in the context of contemporary Argentina, where

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the economic crisis of 2001 set in motion many social movements, especially among
the lower classes, which many have identified with the awakening of a radical
multitude. Kohan sees in Carris omission of popular mobilization the mark of the
post-political as the celebration of postmodern hollowness. Without denying that this is
one of the murkiest areas of meaning in Carris documentary, in Carris faulty
exploration of the popular I also perceive a critical statement. By defiantly putting on
display the predicaments of the political today, and interrogating the role of
intellectuals and artists in the struggle for social transformation, the film calls attention
to a crisis of representation that needs to be addressed.
Carris ambiguous and fairly dismissive use of interviews with ex-Montonero
militants underscores the distrust and profound reticence of Carri and her crew toward
the revolutionary discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. The interviews are not only denied
a central place in the documentary (at times they are shown on the screen of a TV
monitor to which Albertina/Couceiro pays passing attention), but they are also made
secondary in the films reconstruction of the past, serving just as one source among
many others. The tense dialogue with Montonero memory, and its committed
aesthetics, is finally brought out into the open when Carri and her crew discuss
and harshly condemn, in front of the camera, a letter from the INCAA
(Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Visuales) that rejects their request for financial
support, alleging that the documentary does not do justice to the Carris militant
heroism.17 For her parents ex-comrades, the only relevant hi/story was the Carris
tragic fate and not their daughters exploration of the labyrinths of memory and the
construction of her own identity. By opposing Montonero memory, the heir affirms
her right to read the text of the past from a different perspective.
Finally, and more importantly, Carri defies the logic of representation, in its two
meanings as mimics and as mimetic approach, behind HIJOS identity politics. Her
questioning, in any case, does not and this is fundamental carry with it an
abandonment of the claim for justice or of the unfaltering condemnation of state terror.
Los rubios instead takes apart the performative scene of biological, cultural and political
inscription through which HIJOS constitutes itself as a political collective subject.
Carris revisionist approach challenges two areas: the juridical uniqueness of the
children of the disappeared as the rightful and only legitimate witnesses of their
parents, and the indisputable authenticity of their memories. By dividing herself into
two, the Albertina who makes the movie and the Albertina daughter of the
disappeared, played by Anala Couceiro, Carri avoids the burden of representation that
comes with being the daughter of the Carris and its accompanying expectations,
thereby denying the priority of her position over that of others who were not directly
affected by violence. The authenticity of her perspective is further undermined by the
presentation of multiple memories, all of them imperfect and partial: the Playmobil
fantasies, the second-hand memories handed down to her by her sisters, and her own
memories of the countryside after her parents had already disappeared. The disavowal
of her role as compulsory witness of the past coincides with a desacralization of
testimony and its indexical power. This is the function of the scenes in which we see
Albertina, the film director, giving instructions to Albertina/Couceiro about how to
give testimony. If they can be rehearsed and corrected according to certain conventions
of credibility, it becomes clear that testimonies are constructions and not literal
translations of real experiences. The introduction of an actress playing the testimonial

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

self also helps separate the word from the image of the body, and especially of the face,
as a site of family resemblance. The result is a Brechtian interruption of spontaneous
sympathy so that the viewer feels compelled to contemplate the nature of memory
and identity. Carri herself explains the utility of such interruption: I began to think
about memory, absence, and emptiness in fiction, because those terrible events
happened to me. If I dont say this, I am not being honest. I felt it was my duty to tell
my story, but at the same time I did not want the telling of my story to prevent the
viewer from thinking. I thought that telling them directly well, look, they killed my
parents when I was 4 years old was like blowing away the publics ability to think
(see Mango, n.d.). Since emotional identification can be easily manipulated, the use of
Brechtian estrangement also helps to distinguish the documentary from the medias
superficial treatment of pain and suffering, and its exploitation of testimony.
The defiance with which Los rubios reworks the prevalent poetics of collective
memory connects it with other irreverent productions of postmemory, also realized by
the children of victims of extreme and systematic violence, and which also elicited
uneasiness in the public. One paradigmatic example is Maus by the Jewish-American
cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who chooses to represent the protagonists of the Holocaust
as rodents and domestic animals, and who makes of irreverence and the incongruities
between a monumentalized past and the banality of everyday life the triggers for critical
reflection. Another case is the documentary Dont touch my Holocaust (1994) by Israeli
film director Asher Tlatim, who questions the official memories of the Holocaust by
endorsing an inclusive definition of victimhood beyond identity politics. As in these
cases, in Los rubios the challenge of the spectres interpellation does not involve a total
rejection of the witnesss duty, but rather the opportunity to imagine a more complex
system of representation. From this perspective, the end of Los rubios constitutes a
lesson on the mimetic negotiation of inheritance. When the camera shows all the
members of the film crew, including the director, walking away into the liberating
open spaces of a clear, sunny plain, all of them wearing blonde wigs, their identities are
fused into a pantomimic performance of displaced identities. They come to embody a
time out of joint in which the past is finally projected into the future as creative
memory. They are the promise of a new, flexible community, based on friendship and
dialogue, that seeks to overcome the trauma of the past while incorporating a trace of
its legacies in their blonde wigs, vindicating the Carris decision to act against the
expectations of conformity, what we may call their out-of-placeness. It is in the
performative potential of this pantomime, and in the irreverent humour that permeates
Los rubios, that we can imagine, with Benjamin, the repairing rituals of mourning as sites
of joy.18

Notes
1 Idelber Avelar, Alberto Moreiras and Nelly Richard have made important and
insightful contributions to the exploration of memory in dialogue with such
approaches. For a critical reading of the limitations of the Holocaust model, see
Casullo (2004) and Vezzetti (2002).
2 Besides Los rubios, Carri has directed No quiero volver a casa (2000), Barbie tambien puede
estar triste (2001), and Geminis (2005).

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3 Historias cotidianas (2000) by Andres Habegger and Papa Ivan (2000) by Mara Ines
Roque are two documentaries by young directors whose parents are also missing. One
could also include in this group the fiction short film In absentia (2003), by Luca
Cedron, daughter of film director Jorge Cedron, assassinated in 1980.
4 Textual examples of Montonero memory are El presidente que no fue (1997) and Diario
de un clandestino (2000) by Miguel Bonasso, and the three volumes of La voluntad
(1997, 1998) by Eduardo Anguita and Martn Caparros. Jelin and Kaufman (2000)
offer a detailed analysis of how memory is produced and reconstructed in Argentina
20 years after the end of the dictatorship.
5 A long article by writer and cultural critic Martn Kohan, entitled La apariencia
celeda, appeared in the Argentine journal Punto de Vista in 2003. The article praised
the formal sophistication of Carris documentary but had many harsh words for the
young director, whom Kohan accuses of narcissistic excess, of disrespect toward her
parents and of holding a post-political, superficial view of Argentinas social and
political past (and present). The journal published a response by Cecilia Macon, who
criticizes Kohans prescriptive reading of the movie, and praises Carri for
underscoring the conflictive nature of memory. Although, to my knowledge, this is
the only published evidence of unease elicited by the documentary, it was not an
isolated case. In the interview she gave to the electronic site devoted to film La
Pochoclera, Carri herself acknowledges other disapproving reactions to her film.
6 About the different modes of the documentary genre, see Nichols (2001: 32 75).
7 In fact, the openness endorsed by the movie has its limits. Although there is at least
one interview in which a working-class woman echoes the official discourse of the
dictatorship against 1970s leftist militants, the selection of views does not include a
direct presentation of the perspective of the regimes supporters an option that for
many is unacceptable, and even obscene.
8 For an interesting analysis of performative films, see Bruzzi (2000), especially Chap. 6.
9 On the distinction between time-images and movement-images, see Deleuze (1989).
10 The resort to narrative patterns coming from mass culture in order to make sense of
the disappearance of their parents seems to have been a common response among the
children of the disappeared, when they were kids. The testimonies included in
Habeggers movie make reference to this phenomenon.
11 The testament letter appears in many productions by children of disappeared parents.
See, for example, the film Papa Ivan by Ana Mara Roque, and the testimony by Ana,
included in Juan Gelman (1997: 47).
12 According to Ana Amado, genealogical and mimetic interpellation between parents
and children are central to the visual and cinematographic production by the children
of the disappeared. On the daughters challenge to the militant fathers political
interpellation in the visual productions of Carri, Quieto and Roque, see Amados two
outstanding critical pieces (Amado, 2004, Amado and Dominguez, 2004).
13 The DNA performance draws from two heuristic systems, the biological and the
performative, and is based on forms of transmission that refuse surrogation
(see Taylor, 2003: 173, 175).
14 For a list of the common features in Latin American political cinema, between 1967
and 1977, see Getino and Vellegia (2002: 18). Bernini (2004) provides a cultural
historical analysis of Argentine political cinema.
15 Christian Gunerman (2004) sees a similar intertextual dialogue between Alejandro
Agrestis Buenos Aires viceversa (1996), and the political cinema of the 1960s.

POSTMEMORY CINEMA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

16 The opposition between lower and middle class is inherent to the politics of memory of
the HIJOS, whose members belong almost entirely to the middle class. Silvia, a
member of the association, suggests that in industrial cities like Cordoba militant
workers are the unacknowledged disappeared, whose children do not know much
about their fathers activism and who have not organized themselves like the relatives of
the students and militants of political organizations did (see Gelman, 1997: 136 7).
17 The Institute later awarded a grant to the project, which is acknowledged in the
film.
18 On Benjamins concept of pantomime as the index of mourning, see Butler
(2003: 467). Diana Taylor also calls attention to HIJOSs joyful rituals of mourning
and the carnivalesque nature of their performative escraches (2003: 181 2).

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Gabriela Nouzeilles teaches at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Ficciones
somaticas: naturaleza y poltica medica.