¿Qué dicen los juguetes de los niños? Breve recorrido por cinco películas alegóricas argentinas de la época postdictatorial
(2014) Cine y ... : revista de estudios interdisciplinarios sobre cine en espanol — Vol. 4, n° 2, p. 18-36 (2014)
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- (en) This article compares the narrative and symbolic functions of toys in five post-dictatorship Argentine films: The Official Story (Puenzo, 1985), A Red Bear (Caetano, 2003) and Lamb of God (Cedrón, 2008) on the one hand, and on the other The Blonds (Carri, 2003) and Los muertos (Alonso, 2004). In the first three films, the “innocent” appearance of the toys, which are given by adults to little girls, both conceals and reveals a fault committed by the former toward the latter. It is assumed that the function of these objects is a key allowing us to understand the allegorical and reflexive role of the child character in various post-dictatorship Argentine cinematic fictions (beyond the above-mentioned films). The article therefore examines to what extent the doll, the stuffed lamb toy and the teddy bear appear as symbols of the little girl’s ambiguous status in the first films under study: from the emblematic toy which represents her, she could be interpreted both as an object of the film’s allegorical discourse and as a subject moving beyond such a discursive framework. The article then contrasts these allegorical toys with the animated Playmobil figurines in The Blonds and with the football player figure in the last shot of Los muertos. These objects do not represent any more a present child but refer to a lost past. By applying the modern definition of allegory, as theorized by Benjamin, I will analyse these toys as “allegorical remnants” of a childhood that tends to disappear from memory.
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Dufays, S. (2014). ¿Qué dicen los juguetes de los niños? Breve recorrido por cinco películas alegóricas argentinas de la época postdictatorial. Cine y ... : revista de estudios interdisciplinarios sobre cine en espanol, 4(2), 18-36. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/34078 (Original work published 2014)