UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Placing Memory: Postdictatorial Documentaries in the Southern Cone A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies by David Winks Gray Committee in charge: Professor Janet Walker, Chair Professor Cristina Venegas Professor Charles Wolfe Professor Catherine Benamou, University of California Irvine June 2015 The dissertation of David Winks Gray is approved. ____________________________________________ Catherine Benamou ____________________________________________ Cristina Venegas ____________________________________________ Charles Wolfe ____________________________________________ Janet Walker, Committee Chair June 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to many people for their support and friendship during the writing of this dissertation, too many to all be mentioned here. Antonio Traverso was kind enough to share a number of his contacts in Chile with me, and pave the way with introductions. For their hospitality, their patience with my Spanish, and their generosity with their time I thank Macarena Aguiló and Lorena Giachino Torréns, Enrique Azúa at Chile’s National Institute for Human Rights, Eduardo Machuca at the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Chile, Evangelina Sanchez and the rest of the staff at Memoria Abierta in Argentina, and Maria Teresa Viera-Gallo at the Museo de la memoria in Chile. I am also indebted to all the tour guides, and memory workers who met with me and answered my questions at ESMA, El Olimpo, Londres 38, the Museo de la memoria in Rosario, the Museo de la memoria in Santiago, the Parque de la memoria in Buenos Aires, and Villa Grimaldi. Francisco Lomelí shared his temporary home in Santiago with me, and let me use office space at the University of California Education Abroad office. I thank him also for the conversations, the food, the tour guiding, and for watching baseball and the presidential debates with me. I have been incredibly lucky to complete my graduate studies in an environment as collegial and intellectually stimulating as that of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Among the graduate students, I particularly thank Hannah Goodwin, Carlos Jimenez, Rahul Mukherjee, and Ethan Tussey for their friendship. Maria Corrigan and Jade Petermon are two of the best iii friends I could ever hope to have. I can’t wait to see what lies in store in the lives and careers of my fantastic fellow grads. My dissertation committee was an inspiration and my discussions with them individually and as a large group were immeasurably productive. Catherine Benamou at UC Irvine was generous enough to join the committee from afar, and gave me terrific feedback and suggestions. Charles Wolfe was often able to see my arguments more clearly than I was, and helped shape the project during its inception in the prospectus class. Before this project existed, Cristina Venegas kindly conducted an Independent Study with me on Latin American documentary, and her enthusiasm and critical feedback has been invaluable throughout the development of the dissertation. Finally, Janet Walker has been an inspiring mentor, and a constant champion of my work. I feel fortunate to have had her in my corner, and I aspire to someday be half the scholar and mentor that she is. I think my friends and family most of all, for all their love and support, especially John Gray, Elizabeth Allen, Samuel Gray, and Miranda Gray. This dissertation is dedicated to Anna Geer and Felix Gray, without whom I could do nothing. I offer it with love, and look forward to our next adventures. iv VITA OF DAVID WINKS GRAY June 2015 EDUCATION Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film & TV Production, New York University, May 2002 Master of Arts in Cinema Studies, San Francisco State University, May 2009 Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2015 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2008: Teaching Assistant, Cinema Department, San Francisco State University Summer 2010: Research Assistant, Media Industries Project, University of California, Santa Barbara 2010-2014: Teaching Assistant, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 2014-2015: Teaching Assistant, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara PUBLICATIONS “Representing the Unrepresentable: The Cinema of Rithy Panh,” Unpublished thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in Cinema Studies, San Francisco State University, 2009. 38 pp. With Ido Haar, Jade Petermon, and Janet Walker, “Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon.” Media Fields Journal no. 3, 2011 http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/mapping-documentary/ With Jade Petermon, “Introduction: Media, Space, and Memory.” Media Fields Journal, no. 5, 2012 http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/introduction-memory-space-and/ AWARDS Post Script Graduate Student Essay Award in Film Studies, Southwest Texas PCA/ACA, Albuquerque, NM, 2009 University of California Regent’s Special Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009-2010 & 2012-2013 Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant for research in Argentina, University of California, Santa Barbara, Graduate Division, 2013 v ABSTRACT Placing Memory: Postdictatorial Documentaries in the Southern Cone by David Winks Gray My dissertation, Placing Memory: Postdictatorial Documentaries in the Southern Cone, examines recent films from Argentina and Chile that take up the dictatorships of the 1970s and ‘80s in each country. I argue that these documentaries provide a new vantage point from which to consider how spaces in the postdictatorial landscape are mediated, shaped, and reshaped in memory over time, remolded to the demands of each successive generation. I begin by considering the politics of these recent documentaries in relation with the more militant films of the New Latin American Cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s. This chapter also includes consideration of the different relationships to memory of those who experienced the dictatorship as adults, and the postmemory generation, or those who were children during, or were born after the dictatorship. In the two chapters that follow, I consider films that employ sites with memorial significance: first, official memorial sites, with wide recognition and significance, and second, sites that resonate within individual or smaller-scale memories, whether that of the filmmaker or their subjects. I read these sites through the films and through my own site visits in order to elucidate the vi ways in which the films alter the experience of the sites, or function as memorials in their own right. Finally, I examine the networks of distribution and sites of exhibition for these films, including museums that exhibit documentary clips, screenings at memory sites and at schools, and documentary representations of the space of exhibition in a memorial context. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Postmemory and Politics Across the Rupture 31 Chapter Two: “What to Do Starting From this Place”: Documentary Production and Official Memorialization 70 Chapter Three: Unofficial and Individual Memory Sites 111 Chapter Four: Exhibition Site as Memorial Space 141 Conclusion 172 References 175 Film/Videography 194 Appendix: Acronyms Used in Dissertation 198 viii Introduction Both Argentina and Chile were marked in the 1970s and 1980s by violent dictatorships that carried out systematic and clandestine campaigns of detention, torture, killing and disappearance. In Chile, the government of Augusto Pinochet, who led the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, ruled from 1973 to 1990, at which point a transition to democracy took place although Pinochet remained the commander-in-chief of the army until 1998. Argentina’s Dirty War is associated with the military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983, with the worst human rights violations having taken place under the rule of Jorge Rafael Videla.1 However, the government had engaged in repression in the years prior to the military coup of 1976, so that the coup produced an intensification, but also represented a continuation of military violence directed towards those on the left. Both dictatorships were pieces in a continent-wide upheaval that included murderous dictatorships in countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Uruguay, often with the implicit or explicit support of the United States intelligence apparatus and State Department. The application of state terror in Latin America was transnational, through the repressive structure of Operation Condor, under which regimes in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia all collaborated, together with the support of the CIA. In the post-dictatorship period, both Argentina and Chile have gone through tumultuous 1 Videla ruled until 1981, when he was replaced in quick succession by Roberto Viola and Leopaldo Galtieri. The occupation of the Falkland Islands, and defeat of the Argentine Army in the Falklands War was one of the key contributing events leading to the demise of the military government and the return to democracy with the election of Raúl Alfonsin in 1983. 1 periods of contestation and struggle over whether and how to memorialize the suffering that marked the events of the