Introduction

In the previous chapters I have examined how the last military dictatorship and its excesses have been represented in the Argentine cinema of the redemocratization years through the conventions of two exemplary genres, the political thriller and the melodrama or, in a wider sense, the women’s film. While the former has been characterised as a ‘transitional genre’ in which historical discourses are accompanied and tinged by the portrayal of male anxieties, the analysis of the latter showed how the deepening of women's historical consciousness was taken to the big screen. In this final chapter I will concentrate on the study of metaphorical texts or historical allegories, following the definition of these rhetorical figures. A metaphor is ‘a comparison made by referring to one thing as another’ and the allegory is ‘a sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse’ (Burton, 1996, 2003).

The focus on this type of narrative also stems from what Idelber Avelar identifies as the primacy of allegory in Latin American post-dictatorship fictions. According to the Chilean scholar, the recurrence of allegory is closely related to the linguistic crisis that generates the transmissibility of traumatic experiences such as torture (2001, 254). Thus, the relevance of the films under scrutiny here, Darse Cuenta (Becoming Aware) (Alejandro Doria, 1984), Sur / The South (Fernando Solanas, 1988) and El acto en cuestión / The Act in Question (Alejandro Agresti, 1993), arises primarily from the interpretation of history they deliver by way of the metaphors they construct and the representational strategies they use to mourn a largely unresolved traumatic past. Yet, these films can also be thought of as auteur films, since they all translate their directors’ personal standing vis-à-vis the recent past.

As regards Darse Cuenta and Sur, I have decided to study them due to their popularity among national audiences and their positive international reception. My choice of El acto en cuestión, a film that was never commercially released in Argentina, is based on the belief that it signals a completely innovative approach to the issues studied in this book at a time when Argentine cinema had practically abandoned its attempts to understand and represent our recent past.