Humanities (Jan 2018)
Post-Dictatorship Documentary in Chile: Conversations with Three Second-Generation Film Directors
Abstract
No other medium has rejected the restorative narrative of Chile’s democratic state’s memory discourse as vigorously as documentary cinema. After the several democratic governments that succeeded the civic-military dictatorial alliance that ruled this nation uninterruptedly between 1973 and 1990, documentary films have resisted monumental versions of historical memory by confronting the ambivalent nuances of the traumatic legacy of the dictatorship. Chilean documentarians have investigated, uncovered, and depicted the dictatorial state’s crimes, while offering testimonial space to survivors, and have also interrogated the perspectives of the dictatorship’s supporters, collaborators, and perpetrators while wrestling with an open dialectic of confrontational and reconciliatory gestures. More recently, this interest has intensified and combined with what is often described as a “boom” in second-generation personal-narration memory films. The present article includes the author’s conversations with the directors of three recent Chilean second-generation documentaries that explore the perspectives of former secret service collaborators: Adrian Goycoolea’s ¡Viva Chile Mierda! [Long Live Chile, Damn It!] (2014), Andrés Lübbert’s El color del camaleón [The Color of the Chameleon] (2017), and Lissette Orozco’s El pacto de Adriana [Adriana’s Pact] (2017).
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