The Child in Post-dictatorship Southern Cone Film

Abstract

This chapter deals with the Southern Cone, where narratives of historical memory have come to occupy an important place since the end of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. Those who experienced military rule as children have now reached adulthood, leading to a wave of films which focalise the period through the eyes of a child. Middle-class children function as witnesses to the historical events unfolding around them in the Argentine Kamchatka (Piñeyro, 2001), Cautiva (Biraben, 2005) and Andrés no quiere dormir la siesta (Bustamante, 2009), the Chilean Machuca (Wood, 2004), and the Uruguayan Paisito (Díez, 2008), amongst other films. The chapter gives a broad overview of the phenomenon, which, alongside the street child, is the most common representational use of children in Latin American film. It argues that the child’s limited agency and understanding of the world encapsulates the crisis of adult subjectivity in the face of the bewildering historical realities these films depict (Kelleher 1998; Miller 2003) and traces significant meanings of the child-figure, and of play, in the films La historia oficial (Puenzo, 1985), Machuca and Los rubios (Carri, 2003). The chapter then turns its attention to Lucía Cedrón’s Cordero de Dios (2008), examining questions of (post)memory, intergenerational memory and mediation in that film, and the way the film constructs a poetics of postmemory through the extra-visual senses, as well as analysing the depiction of play and toys therein. The chapter shows how the narrative oscillation in Cordero de Dios between the viewpoint of the child and her adult counterpart allows for a sustained reflection on memory’s mediation.