Archipelago of Memories: Affective Travelogue and Mourning in La forma exacta de las islas

Abstract

Rather than an historical documentary or a war film, The Exact Shape of the Islands is a "mourning film". Fragments of travel memoirs, autobiographical discourses, photographs, historical meditations, fiction and literary criticism all merge to reveal the permanence of the marks of pain through history. The overlapping of travels of exploration and return to a fictional and geographic space is crucial in this documentary that follows the structure of a postmodern travelogue to give an account, through a fragmented and self-reflective mode, of the intimate connection between collective wound and personal drama. In this sense, as I suggest in this article, the use of the structure of travel diary and other forms of personal expression in documentary film are indicative of an "affective turn" characterized by an emphasis on the texture of the individual experience rather than historical events, and the privilege of the repairing function of narrative, rather than the need to establish the "truth" of historical representations. Part mourning documentary, part affective travelogue, The Exact Shape of the Islands eludes the nationalist prerogatives and the idea of the ´just cause´ that permeates political discourses, testimonies or historical films and manages, instead, to pose complex responses to the questions of the war's aftermath. As a modern cartography, the film is capable of mapping not only the shape of the territory, but the temporal experiences inscribed there. As an evocation of the temporal shifts characterizing the aftermath of a war, The Exact Shape of the Islands thinks memory through space. Mapping experience of grief and consolation through narratives of self and space, the film makes of the islands a place of both personal and collective trauma. Julieta's itinerary through ghostly sites of inarticulate and half understood longing is an act of mapping of haunted spaces that, during the travelogue, will be filled with new stories. The archipelago becomes a site of memory because the film presents this remote region as an intensive, affective, even heterotopic space that changes both the characters´ and the viewers connection to the land and to personal and collective wounds. The film also explores how a particular space is involved in consolation. If the Falkland became a "consolation-scape" is because the geography of the islands metaphorically extends itself toward the insular condition of those who inhabit in that terrain, making it possible to think a parallel between the scenery and the subjectivity of the inhabitant. The audiovisual mapping of the islands guides us within the insular territory of the subjective experience. Living in one of the most remote islands in the world implies to expose oneself to a permanent state of vulnerability, precariousness, and resilience. Yearning and wandering through monuments, memorial sites or erased spaces and places inhabited by memories of past violence and tragedy, Julieta exposes herself to those precarious conditions that will distinguish also her very own affective process as she negotiates the fall out of acute grief. In the intersection of travelogue and mourning, psycho-geography comes to function as a memorial site, a collection of places of reclamation and self discovery, allowing the film to stage a form of mourning that emerges as a mode of becoming other. In this vein, tracing the protagonist emotional journey in the aftermath of loss, The Exact Shape of the Islands functions as an affective geography that configures new forms of community through its creative transformation of voices and places ignored by hegemonic narratives.