Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina

1. This book is a theoretical study that provides a means for working through the memory fatigue that has surrounded the study of testimonial narratives in post-dictatorship Argentina since the early 2000s. The author's conclusions and methods are broadly applicable to studies of narrative forms beyond film and beyond Argentina to similar situations such as Holocaust narratives, post-Apartheid South African testimonies, and other post-dictatorship South American contexts.

2. The author is an established scholar in Argentinian studies in general and Argentinian film specifically.

3. This work dialogues with our established lists in trauma and subaltern studies and builds on the growing audience IUP has among global and international studies researchers.

For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue," a backlash against the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina, Verónica Garibotto looks at the causes for this reticence and argues that, rather than discarding memory texts for their repetitive excess, it is necessary to acknowledge them and their exhaustion as discourses of the present.

By critically examining how trauma theory and subaltern studies have previously been applied to testimonial cinema, Garibotto rereads Argentinian films produced since 1983 and calls for an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics, theories of affect, scholarship on hegemony, and the ideological uses of documentary and fiction. She argues that recurrent concepts—such as trauma, mourning, memory, and subalternity—miss how testimonial films have changed over time, shifting from subaltern narratives to official, hegemonic, and iconic accounts. Her work highlights the urgent need to continue to study these types of narratives, particularly at a time when military dictatorships have become entrenched in Latin America and memory narratives proliferate worldwide. Although Argentina is Garibotto's focus, her theory can be adapted to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to official, hegemonic accounts—such as in Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, South African, and Holocaust testimonies. Garibotto's study of testimonial cinema moves us to pursue a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Redefining Testimonial Cinema

1. Knowledge and Feeling: Testimonial Documentary and Fiction in the 1980s

2. Indexicality and Counter-Hegemony: Testimonial Documentary in the 1990s

3. Distortion and History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Performative Documentaries

4. Emotion and History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Iconic Fictions

Afterword: From Counter-Hegemony to Hegemony

Works Cited

Index