3 - Undoing the Cult of the Victim: Los Rubios, M and La mujer sin cabeza

Summary

In the context of a restored democracy, a substantial number of film directors began to respond to Argentina's violent past. This new cinematic repertoire corresponded to an incipient democratic culture in need of forging a new pedagogical conscience. In this context, these typically testimonial pieces have mostly monumentalised the past while adhering to the cult of the victim. However, a new genre emerged in the 1990s when the descendants of those who went missing introduced their own narratives to re-engage with the past. Still, the unwritten rule of the early post-dictatorship period stipulated that relatives and survivors must honour the name of the vanished through forceful comments on truth and justice. Although the descendants' testimonial effervescence remained mostly attached to the legitimacy of the ‘wounded family’, there are two films that have contested the dominant tradition in remarkable ways: Los Rubios (‘The Blondes’, 2003), the provocative film directed by Albertina Carri, and M (2007), an extended documentary by the debut filmmaker Nicolás Prividera. As Jens Andermann suggests, both films could be thought of as remarkable examples of a series of ‘post-memory documentaries’, in which the descendants stage their own family albums, ‘autobiographical or “autofictional” docu-essays about orphaned selves inquiring about their own identities and those of their abducted parents and relatives’.