3 - Trauma and Cultural Memory in the Aftermath of the AMIA Bombing

Summary

On 18 July 1994, at 9:53 a.m., the building of the AMIA, the most important Jewish community centre in Argentina, situated at 633 Pasteur Street in the historic Jewish neighbourhood of Once, Buenos Aires, was the target of the deadliest bombing ever in the country. The attack left eighty-five people dead and three hundred injured. As I write these lines, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack has just been marked, but the perpetrators have not been caught and the case remains unsolved.

The AMIA bombing spawned numerous cultural expressions. Among these are two Argentine feature films which are the focus of this chapter: 18-J and Anita. 18-J, a collection of ten ten-minute shorts directed by ten Jewish and non-Jewish directors and released on the tenth anniversary of the attack, is a tribute to the victims of the bombing. Anita, a feature-length film directed by non-Jewish director Marcos Carnevale, revisits the AMIA bombing from the point of view of one of the victims, a young woman who exhibits child-like qualities. Both films reveal a common characteristic: they are victim-centred accounts depicting trauma and, in doing so, they perpetuate and construct cultural memory. Given the centrality of trauma and cultural memory in this chapter, it is pertinent to explain these terms here.

The concept of trauma stems from nineteenth-century psychology and was employed by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot to refer to a group of women's emotional response to violent events in their lives. Since the First World War, trauma theory has also been used to understand catastrophe and war survivors’ response to large-scale violent events. Jeffrey Alexander, who refers to this type of trauma as cultural trauma, provides an excellent description of what it entails. ‘Cultural trauma’, he argues, ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.’ Considering the far-reaching effects that the legacy of horrendous events has on society, cultural representations of trauma should not be overlooked. As a way of coping with trauma, or at least giving voice to the victims of horrendous events, films have an important role to play. The function of cinema finds its justification in that trauma or, rather, the traumatic experience requires interpretation and is therefore always mediated.