Post-Dictatorship Argentinian Cinema as a Renarration of Collective Memory: The Spectrum of Absence

Abstract

This book identifies discursive relationships existing between the aesthetic modes of production of first-decade post-dictatorship Argentinean cinema and the negotiations for the instauration of a socially accepted narrative over the truth when looking at the recent historical past signed by the State terrorism responsibility for human rights violations. Considering this scenario, The Spectrum of absence reviews the hyperreal dynamics in which 1985 to 1996 Argentinean cinema gets involved to act, within these negotiations, as a “cognitive map” (Jameson, 1981) signaling an alternative route of memory to the viewers situated among official narratives of intersubjective oblivion. The book proposed that such cognitive mapping reinterprets, represents, and reconstructs a different historical narrative generating a new syntax of memory capable of encouraging new processes of social memorialization facing that particular moment signed by social melancholy.