Playing the Game of Fort and Da: The Disappeared in Recent Argentine Cinema

• In Event: Specters of the Vanguard

Abstract

This presentation will explore ethics of representation in three contemporary films on the Argentine Dirty War: Marcelo Piñeyro’s Kamchatka (2002), Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios (2003), and Christopher Hampton’s Imagining Argentina (2003). The distinguishing characteristic of state violence conducted against political dissidents in the period was, as is well known, the determination to leave no trace of the murdered bodies, forcefully reducing them to what Diana Taylor calls “iconic afterlives.” The disappeared pose a distinctive problem for aesthetic representation: the very attempt to re-present and make them visible might obscure the reality of their ordeal. Films focusing on the period contest the state’s regime of invisibility by rendering the disappearances and the ones responsible for them visible. This politically motivated “will to visibility,” however, may preclude access to the very truth of the crimes it seeks to elucidate. The challenge then becomes “representing” the disappeared without negating their spectral, non-present presence—what Derrida would call their “paradoxical phenomenality.” Through the French philosopher’s articulation of the Freudian game of fort-da to the Latin American disappeared in his seminar on death penalty, this paper will examine absence/presence dialectics in recent cinematic production on the Argentine Dirty War. Whereas Piñeyro and Carri prefer to approach the theme obliquely through recourse to children’s games and genres of popular culture, Hampton’s unbridled desire to make the disappeared present seems to make him prey to ethical pitfalls.

Author

• Ali Kulez, University of Southern California