For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime
in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a
privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public
intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue," a backlash against
the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial
films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In
Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina,
Veronica Garibotto looks at the causes for this reticence and
argues that, rather than discarding memory texts for their
repetitive excess, it is necessary to acknowledge them and their
exhaustion as discourses of the present. By critically examining
how trauma theory and subaltern studies have previously been
applied to testimonial cinema, Garibotto rereads Argentinian films
produced since 1983 and calls for an alternate interpretive
framework at the intersection of semiotics, theories of affect,
scholarship on hegemony, and the ideological uses of documentary
and fiction. She argues that recurrent concepts-such as trauma,
mourning, memory, and subalternity-miss how testimonial films have
changed over time, shifting from subaltern narratives to official,
hegemonic, and iconic accounts. Her work highlights the urgent need
to continue to study these types of narratives, particularly at a
time when military dictatorships have become entrenched in Latin
America and memory narratives proliferate worldwide. Although
Argentina is Garibotto's focus, her theory can be adapted to other
contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have
shifted from alternative versions of history to official, hegemonic
accounts-such as in Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, South
African, and Holocaust testimonies. Garibotto's study of
testimonial cinema moves us to pursue a broader ideological
analysis of the links between film and historical representation.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!