Between The Long Sixties And The Short Eighties: An Analysis of Jorge Denti’s Film Malvinas, Historia De Traiciones

Abstract

This article surveys early documentaries about the Malvinas War, through an analysis of Jorge Denti’s Malvinas, historia de traiciones (1983), the first such film about the 1982 war by an Argentine filmmaker. Forty years after this conflict, this article recuperates this frequently overlooked film in order to analyse how its narrative dialogues with different imaginaries and identities of the sixties and eighties–influenced, of course, by the experience of state terrorism in the seventies. Paying special attention to Denti’s political and cinematographic trajectory, this article focuses on the film’s use of testimony and its construction of an epic around the idea of popular organisation that underscores the tensions between different epochal perspectives.