Ana Amado é Professora de Análise Filmica e Teoria na ...

told. Today, the revolutionary actions of the parents are reconstructed through anaesthetic act on the part of their children, who portray them as heroic subjects seenthrough their own narration. Nevertheless, they are resistant to the type of relativelyidyllic representation that characterized documentaries from the earlier generation.In the late 90s and the first years of this century, a series of testimonial documentariesregister a critical or self-critical stance by former political militants and guerrillas, whorevisit their actions in the 70s with the more structured language of politics as aninstitution. A similar tendency can be found in testimonial literature. In contrast, thevoices in the documentaries by the children recreate the childhood memories filled withthe violence of kidnappings, absences, death and images in which the daily perceptionof threats seems to be associated precisely with the language of politics.Each film offers direct or indirect ways of revisiting the actions and political discourseof the previous generation. The filmmakers can elect to remain at the margin of thepolitical arguments that led their parents to sacrifice their lives in order to concentrateon the failed circuits of their own wounded memories with the help of a familyintegrated by their generational and vocational peers. The polemical film Los rubios(2003) by Albertina Carri is one example of this type of film. Other films such as M,by Nicolás Prividera (2007) or Encontrando a Víctor by Natalia Bruchstein (2005),among others, voice quite merciless criticism. Distancing themselves from inheriteddiscourses, each film tries to invent a way of supporting its arguments about what isreasonable or irrational, what is sensible or resolutely subversive in the review of thehistory of the period of the dictatorships. And in this review and invention of pastscenes that are imagined in various forms, the children frame the idea of generations asa narrative and temporal construct (as well as a biological one) of genealogy, as a formof resistance to their legacies and, finally, as a formal operation of timelessness.The various films are about the absent father or mother, although in the process ofremembering, the direct or deflected complaint about the parent’s priorities inevitablyappears. The question becomes why the parent followed the path of desire—that of therevolutionary cause, even though death was one of the possible consequences—insteadof guaranteeing his or her presence to the children. The viewer thus catches a glimpse ofan ambivalent image hovering between an epic profile of parents who are protagonistsin a collective historical endeavor and at the same time deserters in the sphere of privateemotions.At the same time, the very existence of the orphans (or bereaved familiars)is preciselythe proof that we could call unique, that is, symptomatic, of the traumatic way in whichpolitics intertwines with the language of intimacy and of experience. Au unquestionableexample is Rodolfo Walsh’s "Carta a mis amigos," a mix of accusation and personaltestimony in which Walsh describes how and why his daughter Victoria, whom he calls“Vicky,” was assassinated by the Army in 1977, as he illuminates the "official"version of the events--a sketchy soldier’s report--from the perspective of the intimacy ofthe father-daughter relationship. "I have witnessed the scene with her eyes,” writesWalsh soon after his daughter’s death, exchanging time and place with Vicky, withinthe logic of political discourse brought to maximum tension through the intimacy ofdeath.María Inés Roqué’s Papá Iván and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios are two filmsconstructed around the quarrel with a father’s ghost. Their formal operations ofdisassociation and fragmentation give the films a certain aesthetic modernity, although,