Disappearance and archive fevers in film: the rewriting of history and practical uses of the past

Abstract

In Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Hayden White argues that the theory of historical writing must attend to what the author characterizes as modernist events. He is thinking about the World Wars, genocides, the overwhelming growth of world population, the widespread poverty in most of the global population and famines on an unimaginable scale, among other factors linked to nuclear explosions and the ecological disaster. These events imply a revision of the very concept of event and new categories and conventions for attributing meaning to them. Similarly, Walter Benjamin draw attention to historical thinking in this mutation of the structure of modern experience. It is only necessary to remember the distinction that the author establishes between a kind of “true” experience (Erfahrung) and a devalue experience (Erlebnis) in a classic 1933 text, “Experience and poverty”. There is an irreducible distance between the communicable experience, collected from tradition and transmitted from generation to generation, and the modern depreciated experience, that is reactive to linguistic formulation. Considering the so-called archival turn in theory and art since the end of the 1990s, Latin American archival art posits complex archaeologies about the relationship between the present and the past in post-dictatorship societies, and new challenges to historiography and art history. It is by collecting these traditions that we could explore some artistic devices that defy history-writing conventions and archival considerations. To do so, this paper explores two films considered as archival works of art focusing on some relationships between Benjamin’s and White’s reflections on history that have not been thoroughly analyzed.