The Silent Majority in Cinema about the Argentinian (Post)Dictatorship: Collective Responsibility, Desires of Repression and Micro-fascisms

Abstract

The article re-examines the problem of collective responsibility for state-sponsored violence, taking the latest Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) as a case study, a country that has also elaborated a proper theoretical frame to research the subject. Here I propose to think the issue of society’s implication in past violence in terms of the categories of desires of repression and micro-fascism, rather than the classical, Enlighted and heroic concepts of responsibility and resistance. To that end, the article analyses two very recent films of the Argentine cinema: The long night of Francisco Sanctis1 and Red.2 Both films address the situation of the ordinary people under systemic violence, exemplifying how societal desires and micro-fascist attitudes work to stabilise a repressive regime. The films’ focus on the desires of repression and micro-fascisms, I argue, draws attention the small fears, anxieties, resentments, and jealousies that constitute a society and represent the violent regimes’ conditions of possibility. I suggest the films were read less as films about the abuses of the past and more as productions that illuminate the elements of the past that made possible the resurgence of repressive discourses and neoliberal ideologies in the present.