Militancy and Make-Believe: Cinematic Memory and the Adolescent Gaze in Infancia clandestina (2011)

• In Event: The Child/Adolescent Image in Latin American Millennium Cinemas: Memory and Utopia

Abstract

Benjamín Ávila’s film Infancia clandestina (Argentina, 2011) offers an original and powerful portrayal of 1970’s left-wing militancy, narrated from the perspective of a twelve-year-old son of high-ranking Montonero militants. As the natural divisions between the teenager’s public and private spheres are transgressed, and as politics and violence become swiftly embedded within the familial environment, Infancia clandestina functions not only as a powerful insight into the historical era in question, but also as a means of interrogating and diversifying homogenized notions of Argentina’s recent political past. This paper contends that, through a manipulation of the inherent visuality of the adolescent experience and from his present adult position as a child of the disappeared, Ávila foregrounds an alternative view of Argentine history that both undermines hegemonic cultural narratives of the period and, more specifically, diversifies contemporary perspectives towards ideas of left-wing militancy and the disappeared.

Author

• Geoffrey W Maguire, University of Cambridge