Cinema of the Dark Side Book Subtitle: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship Book Author(S): Shohini Chaudhuri Published By: Edinburgh University Press

Chapter Title: The Art of Disappearance: Remembering Political Violence in Argentina and Chile Book Title: Cinema of the Dark Side Book Subtitle: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship Book Author(s): Shohini Chaudhuri Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2014) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt14brxd1.8 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema of the Dark Side This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms chapter 3 The Art of Disappearance: Remembering Political Violence in Argentina and Chile ut of an aeroplane hatch, paper cutout people tumble into the sky and Ocrash to the ground. During their fall, their names, ages and dates of disappearance appear in titles. This scene is from the documentary short Abuelas (2011), which blends animation with real-life testimonies in its tale about family life during the 1976–83 military dictatorship in Argentina, when an estimated 30,000 people disappeared into secret detention centres, many of them tortured and finally killed, their bodies buried in unmarked graves, or secretly dispatched, drugged but still alive, from planes out at sea. At a panel discussion, its Iranian-born director, Afarin Eghbal, and British screenwriter Francesca Gardiner explained that that their reason for making the film was that these atrocities had taken place in their lifetime and, yet, like many of their generation or younger, they had previously known nothing about them (Eghbal and Gardiner 2011). This chapter focuses on the art of imagining and remembering the disappearances in Chile and Argentina in films made by filmmakers from those countries and from abroad. Each of these films responds to the political ‘art’ of disappearance with a particular kind of cinematic experience, ranging from thrillers (Imagining Argentina and Chronicle of an Escape), through poetic, performative and animated documentaries (Nostalgia for the Light, The Blonds and Abuelas), to surreal narrative (Post Mortem). Critics who have written about these (or similar) films in the context of national cinema studies have noted that they are concerned with memory (Page 2009; Sorensen 2009). But, as these films are made at least in part for transnational audiences, how do they encourage those audiences to identify with memories they have never had? A frequent criticism of films aimed at global markets is that they ‘minimize specific referential markers’ and ‘gloss over’ the complexities of the past so as not to alienate audiences from ‘elsewhere’ (Podalsky 2011: 60). In this chapter, I argue that these films about the disappearances construct ‘memory-worlds’ This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CHAUDHURI 9780748642632 PRINT.indd 84 01/10/2014 12:09 the art of disappearance 85 and ‘dream-worlds’, containing both general and specific referents, that act as mnemonic triggers, capable of interfering with, and disturbing, our own per- sonal and cultural memories. Moreover, I argue that their endeavour to reach beyond the limits of national communities enriches, rather than weakens, their ethical and political potential by fostering what Michael Rothberg has called ‘multidirectional memory’, capable of evoking and articulating other histories of the disappeared.1 Used by repressive regimes to crush their political opponents, enforced disappearance is a widespread historical phenomenon that has given the verb ‘to disappear’ a chilling transitive meaning. A disturbing addition to the history of modern atrocity, yet with roots in previous colonial practices, enforced disappearance was officially adopted as a state policy by the Nazis in their ‘Night and Fog’ campaigns; it was also used in Franco’s Spain and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. During the Cold War, it was practised by Latin American militaries and deployed against the militant left inspired by the Cuban Revolution (1959). Trained at the US Army School of the Americas as part of US foreign policy, those militaries themselves had a longer history of involvement in brutal practices that goes back to colonialism. The Argentine military described their opponents’ guerrilla tactics as a ‘dirty war’, though the phrase equally applies to their own and other regimes’ operations during the 1960s–80s, when ‘dirty wars’, using enforced disappearance and torture as instruments of repression, proliferated across much of Latin America.2 The military juntas gave moral justification to their tactics as a necessary defence against subversive elements. Enforced disappearance remains a technique of state terror in many parts of the world. And in the ‘War on Terror’, waged by the USA with the complicity of many other countries (including the UK), using ‘extraordinary rendition’ and targeted killings, we have witnessed its return on a global scale. As defined in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, enforced disappearance is carried out by states, or with their acquiescence, and conceals the whereabouts of arrested or abducted individuals in order to place them ‘outside the protection of the law’, at risk of torture and murder (UN 2006).3 As a political crime, it may be understood as the art of making people disappear imperceptibly and effacing the evidence. Diana Taylor suggests that it is a trick or spectacle that manipulates appearances to promote the illusion of normality, while striking terror into the population, especially relatives of the disappeared, who are left paralysed with uncertainty regarding their loved ones’ fate. She deploys the term ‘percepticide’ to describe the ‘self-blinding of the general population’ in Argentina: People had to deny what they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them. They knew people were ‘disappearing.’ Men in This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CHAUDHURI 9780748642632 PRINT.indd 85 01/10/2014 12:09 86 cinema of the dark side military attire, trucks, and helicopters surrounded the area, closed in on the hunted individuals and ‘sucked’ them off the street, out of a movie theater, from a classroom or workplace. And those in the vicinity were forced to notice, however much they pretended not to. (Taylor 1997: 123) Although denial, as Stanley Cohen (2001) has pointed out, is a common feature of responses to atrocity, it is intrinsic to the strategy of disappearance, which entails the collusion of the national and also often the international community. While the US role in the 1973 Chilean military coup to overthrow Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government is well known (the first film to reveal this was Missing, discussed below), British authorities also colluded with Augusto Pinochet’s regime. They were fully aware of the atrocities soon after they began, yet determined to maintain good relations with Chile because of economic or strategic advantages. A Foreign Office brief from the time stated: ‘We have a major interest in Chile regaining stability, regardless of politics.’ As Mark Curtis glosses, for the latter read ‘regardless of the people of Chile’ (2004: 271). In addition, Britain supplied the aircraft (Hawker Hunters) used to bomb Allende’s presidential palace on 11 September 1973, and continued to supply arms thereafter. During the Falklands War with Argentina (1982), Britain sought cooperation from Chile for military intel- ligence in exchange for undermining UN investigations into human rights abuses (ibid.: 275). And Britain’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was a stalwart defender of Pinochet. On the regimes’ part, denials range from claims that there are no kidnap- pings, no secret detention facilities, and no torture and murder of political opponents, to deliberate hoaxes staged for the international media and community of human rights monitors. This is what happened when Argentina hosted the 1978 World Cup: the basement of the Navy Mechanics School (known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA), which served as a notorious exter- mination centre and a departure point for death flights over the sea, was turned into a players’ relaxation area (Feitlowitz 1998: 172). Concealment of dead bodies in secret mass graves or other unmarked deposition sites also forms an act of denial, contrasting with the ways in which death is usually publicly acknowledged. Disappearance is an interdiction of thought. It is calculated to stop us think- ing about it, to relegate these uncomfortable thoughts to the edges of our aware- ness. Over time, such a strategy is compounded by amnesia or, rather, selective memory and unconscious forgetting. When the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile ended, truth commissions were set up. In Argentina, the National Commission on Disappeared People (CONADEP) published its report Nunca más (‘Never Again’) in 1984, leading to the trials of military juntas in 1985, in This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CHAUDHURI 9780748642632 PRINT.indd 86 01/10/2014 12:09 the art of disappearance 87 which army commanders were convicted of their crimes against humanity. In Chile, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, focusing on victims of disappearances and killings, made its findings public in the Retting Report (1991).

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