Both scholar and analyst help to break silence and to enact the liberation of the testimony from the bondage of the secret.
The role of the cultural scholar thus resembles that of the analyst. Their discourse testifies to trauma, inscribing past historical truths that we might not yet know. Like clinical testimony, literature, cinema, and graphic art are precocious modes of accessing history. In an era that has survived unthinkable historical catastrophes, texts-much like patients undergoing treatment-bear witness to this crisis. There is a close relationship between trauma and history, between clinical work and the act of reading, between analyst and cultural scholar. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub ( Reference Felman and Laub1992, xiii) pose questions that are often raised by scholars working on Latin American culture: “What is the relation between the act of witnessing and testifying, and the acts of writing and of reading? What is … the relation between narrative and history, between art and memory, between speech and survival?” Felman and Laub’s answer is well known and is a landmark in global academic discourse.
Luego de delinear estas dos aproximaciones, el artículo las reevalúa mediante un breve análisis de una película argentina reciente sobre la dictadura militar, Andrés no quiere dormir la siesta. Mientras que la teoría del trauma resulta insuficiente para leer históricamente el cine postdictatorial, una lectura semiótica de cómo los componentes indiciales, icónicos y simbólicos se combinan en la imagen cinematográfica resulta más apropiada para llevar a cabo una interpretación histórica, especialmente después del 2003. El artículo argumenta que la teoría del trauma, aunque productiva en los años noventa, se ha vuelto menos fructífera después de varias décadas de producción académica constante y de la emergencia de gobiernos que, como el kirchnerismo en Argentina (2003–2015), han puesto la representación de la dictadura en el centro de sus políticas públicas. The article first outlines the main tenets of the two approaches (trauma theory and semiotics), then assesses their suitability for historical interpretation via a brief analysis of Andrés no quiere dormir la siesta, a 2009 Argentine film on the country’s last dictatorship.Įste artículo se propone examinar dos aproximaciones al cine postdictatorial: la teoría del trauma, que ha sido especialmente popular para leer este corpus, y la semiótica, un acercamiento que ha vuelto a ganar popularidad en el análisis fílmico en general pero que no es frecuentemente utilizado en la interpretación de este tipo de películas. While trauma theory yields ahistorical analyses, a semiotic approach that takes into account how indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs merge in the cinematic field allows for historical interpretations that are more adequate for reading postdictatorship films, especially after 2003. The article claims that, though highly productive in the 1990s, trauma theory has become less fruitful after decades of continuous scholarship and after the emergence of administrations that have made the representation of the dictatorship the center of their public policies, such as kirchnerismo in Argentina (2003–2015). This article examines two approaches to postdictatorship cinema: trauma theory, which has been especially popular in reading this corpus, and semiotics, which has regained popularity in film analysis in general but is not often employed when analyzing postdictatorship films.
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