Europe, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

FILM-ARGENTINA: Recuperating the Collective Memory

Stefania Milan

LONDON, Dec 7 2004 (IPS) - "People cannot live without their memory. Memory is about culture, and culture is identity," said Argentine filmmaker Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas, presenting his latest documentary ‘A Social Genocide’, in London.

Salvaging the collective memory through the lens of a movie camera has caught on in Argentina, especially since the late December 2001 financial collapse and popular uprising.

‘A Social Genocide’, whose original title is ‘Memoria del saqueo’ (literally, Memory of the Plunder), narrates the history of the financial crisis that Argentina is just beginning to pull out of.

The film starts with the fall of the seven-year military dictatorship in 1983, continues on through the structural reforms and privatisations that turned Argentina into a short-lived "success story" for the neo-liberal model pushed by the international lending institutions, with huge social consequences, and ends with the late 2001 political and economic meltdown.

The film culminates with the massive ‘cacerolazos’ – spontaneous protests of people clanging on pots and pans – of Dec. 19 and 20, 2001, which, along with looting and rioting, forced the powerful minister of the economy Domingo Cavallo and then-president Fernando de La Rua to resign.

The screening took place in the Discovering Latin America film festival, which brought to London 46 films from that region, almost half of which were from Argentina.

The Nov. 25-Dec. 5 festival, organised by a non-profit organisation that supports social development projects in Latin America, was intended to "open up spaces for discussion. We invited the directors to talk about the economic, political and social issues facing their countries," the Venezuelan organiser, Libia Villazana, told IPS.

"My film is a contribution to the discussion of the rebuilding of Argentina," Solanas said. ‘A Social Genocide’ has been declared a work of "cultural interest," and is being shown in schools throughout the country.

A number of other documentaries were screened in the film festival as well – like ‘Cardboard Days’ by Veronica Souto, on the life of the thousands of people scavenging cardboard and other trash on the streets of Buenos Aires, whose number has ballooned since the 2001 debacle.

But not only the recent past appears in the films. ‘Rebellion’ by Federico Urioste, shot in 2003, goes back to the ‘Cordobazo,’ the name given to the worker and student uprising in the Argentine city of Córdoba which led to the end of the dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1969.

Urioste also presented ‘Sink the Belgrano’, a documentary on the Falkland/Malvinas islands war fought in 1982 by Britain and Argentina over the possession of the south Atlantic islands, which are small but rich in oil. The film was commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4 but never screened on television.

"When someone does not have his own memory, others will write his history," Urioste told IPS. "Colonised countries do not realise that the most subtle consequence is cultural colonisation. I made a film on the Malvinas war from the Argentine point of view."

"Filming is a witnessing of a moment in history, which then becomes part of the collective memory," Solanas told IPS.

But not only renowned professional filmmakers like Solanas are engaged in telling the story of Argentina. Video has become a form of social activism, along with street demonstrations, and is now a contribution by activists to the people’s memory, and their reply to the misrepresentation of people’s identities by the media.

Several groups are bringing video cameras to the streets and making documentaries about what is going on in Argentina. Names like Cine Insurgente and Grupo Alavío are becoming increasingly well-known in Argentina, and even outside the country.

These organisations are reviving the militant filmmaking of the 1970s, which was brutally interrupted by the military dictatorship in 1976 – Raymundo Gleyzer’s Grupo de Cine de la Base and Solanas’ Cine Liberación are two examples from that period.

A classic from that era is Solanas’ ‘The Hour of the Furnaces’ (La hora de los hornos), filmed in 1968 and screened at the Discovering Latin America festival to celebrate its director, who won the Honorary Golden Bear award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

"They marked out a path which we need to set out on again," Lorena Riposati from Cine Insurgente told IPS.

Cine Insurgente (Insurgent Cinema) is a grassroots group of 10 people "who have organised ourselves to put our skills as audio-visual producers at the service of the social struggle," Riposati said.

One of their latest videos is ‘Guernica, lo que no se ve’ (Guernica, What You Cannot See). It shows a group of ‘piqueteros’ – the name given in Argentina to the unemployed whose organisations protest by throwing up roadblocks (known as piquetes).

These organisations have mushroomed as a result of the economic crisis in Argentina, when unemployment soared above 20 percent and the poverty rate climbed to more than 50 percent.

When the documentary was shown, some of the protagonists themselves shared their experiences with the audience.

"The mass media reproduce stereotypes. The ‘piqueteros’ are represented as violent, as people who do not want to work. We decided to put the cameras on the side of those waging the struggle. The filmed image has become the system’s most powerful weapon. But we turn it into a weapon of resistance," said Riposati.

In 2001, Cine Insurgente organised ‘Cine Piquetero’ to give the unemployed a chance to show their point of view about their struggle. ‘Memoria, vacuna contra la muerte’ (Memory, a Vaccine Against Death) is the title of one of their documentaries.

Grupo Alavío has been producing documentaries for ten years, representing the identity of Argentine workers. ‘El rostro de la dignidad. Memoria del MTD de Solano’ (The Face of Dignity: the Memory of the Movements of Unemployed Workers in Solano) shows the experience of organisations of the unemployed in Quilmes, a working-class district in the greater Buenos Aires.

"We are not impartial. We always take sides, because we form part of the struggle," Fabian Petrucci from Grupo Alavío said in an interview with IPS in Buenos Aires last August.

"We are six filmmakers, but we always integrate with the groups we are working with, teaching people how to work with video. When, for instance, we work with a group of ‘piqueteros’, collecting their memories, we become 100," Petrucci said.