Narratives
Sources
In contradistinction to the master narratives of official history, micro-narratives favour subjective knowledge and experience. Story-telling gives a meaningful structure to the events in people’s lived experience and helps shape their shared social bonds. It builds situated knowledges with social and political implications, which contribute to the spheres of public, collective representation and action.Genealogies of practice
- Chile, la memoria obstinada (“Chile: Obstinate Memory”) (Chile) Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 58 min., 1997
From all the films depicting the revolutionary climate in Chile in the 1970s, Patricio Guzmán’s Batalla de Chile was probably the most straightforward in narrative terms, and it ended up becoming a classic of worldly renown. In 1997 Guzmán went back to Santiago with a small film crew and revisited some of the people and places he had filmed twenty-five years earlier.
- Los Rubios ("The Blondes") (Argentina) Dir. Albertina Carri, 89 min., 2003
Exploring different memory states counterpoised within the narrative, this film documents the search of director Albertina Carri as she investigates what happened to her family during Argentina's "Dirty War”. In this emblematic work on the (im)possibility of memory, cinematic enunciation bifurcates as director Carri appears on film as herself in some scenes, but also uses an actor- accompanied by a film crew- to portray herself in other scenes, in a self-reflexive exercise that turns the film into not so much a documentary, but a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary. With a highly fragmented visual style combining different narrative techniques, Los Rubios depicts how the past infiltrates a present fractured by memory and silence.
Resources
