Relatos de infancia en el cine argentino de la postdictadura : lecturas alegóricas de la historia entre nostalgia y melancolía
(2012)
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- (en) This thesis aims to interpret the role and the symbolic status of the child character in Argentinian fiction cinema of the post-dictatorship era, on the basis of a corpus of thirteen films directed between 1983 and 2008. From the double premise of, first, the historical, cultural and artistic impact of disappeared children under the dictatorship and of, second, the recurrence of an allegorical interpretative paradigm in the reception of post-dictatorship Argentinian cinema, the present study discerns two main modes of allegorisation of a socio-historical mourning in the shaping of the child character. The thesis is structured in three chapters preceded by theoretical prolegomena. The two allegorical modes of childhood representation, confronted with the films analyses throughout the two last chapters, involve a distinction between the a priori synonymous notions of nostalgia and melancholia. This distinction is first given a theoretical formulation based on the concepts of allegory and mourning and on semio-narratological and psychoanalytic approaches (in the prolegomena entitled “Allegory, between nostalgic figuration and melancholic defiguration”). Chapter I (“Looking back. Three cinematographic and literary traditions around the child character”) establishes the genealogy of three child figures present in three Latin American and/or Argentinian narrative traditions in which my corpus of films could be situated. Moreover, as it provides a historiographical dimension to my thesis, this genealogy allows to clarify some literary and cinematographic functions and effects of the child character. The second chapter (“National allegories and nostalgic tales of filial transmission”) studies the allegorical strategies used in ten films (1983-2008) which situate the child in a historical context. From these analyses, this chapter draws a nostalgic pattern of allegorisation, characterised by the thematic absence (death or disappearance) of the father figure, by a narrative scheme founded on memory acquisition and by an aesthetic preponderance of verbal language. The third and last chapter (“Repetition and melancholy in La ciénaga and La Rabia”) offers a detailed analysis of two films released in the 2000s by two important directors of “New Argentine Cinema”, namely Lucrecia Martel and Albertina Carri. It demonstrates that these films correspond to another kind of allegorisation, based on the melancholic and/or tragic principle of repetition. From a thematic point of view, this second pattern is characterised by a negative influence of the maternal figure on the child. From an aesthetic point of view, it is defined by an audiovisual work in which verbal language is reduced to mere noise and loses its symbolic value as a social and family bound. In both films, the child appears as the bearer of a collective trauma, as the secret place of a phantom which condemns him/her to fall and either to die (in La ciénaga) or to kill his father (in La Rabia). The three chapters of this thesis thus examine how the child character tends to be represented as the victim of an allegorical loss that exceeds his individuality. By showing how this loss becomes conscious for the child as a figure of education and learning, most of the films under consideration attempt to present themselves as ritual acts of social mourning. On the contrary, the more original and more critically acclaimed works insist on the consequences of the unconscious nature of loss, affecting both the character’s destiny and the cinematographic narration and realism.
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Dufays, S. (2012). Relatos de infancia en el cine argentino de la postdictadura : lecturas alegóricas de la historia entre nostalgia y melancolía. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/88596