The Split-Person Narrative

Direct Testimony and Postmodern Panic

In the struggle for human rights and justice in the wake of the political genocides that took place in Argentina and other Latin American countries under Plan Condor, the direct testimony of victims (testimonio) in conjunction with forensic science has proven to be one of the most consistent tools for achieving social justice in the courtroom. ² Postdictatorship political documentaries in Latin America show not only the importance of archiving memories that would otherwise disappear but also the power of direct testimony in the court of law. ³ In spite of its links with judicial cases connected to the Dirty Wars in Latin America, testimony has taken on a particularly controversial edge in academic circles today. Beverley, for example, sees it as an indicator of a pervasive neoconservative cultural backlash. While he may understand the functional value of testimony in the service of solidarity, human rights, and social movements, Beatriz Sarlo (2005), David Stoll (1999), and others view it as nothing more than a naive rhetoric of victimhood, corrupted by an identity politics that undermines facts and disciplinary authority and is subsumed, somewhere along the line, by the leviathan of postmodernism. ⁴

At its worst, Beverley suggests, this neoconservative trend unveils an attempt by the middle- and upper-middle-class educated, largely white criollo-ladino elite to recapture the authority it lost during the 1990s. He cautions us to resist being fooled by the “disciplinary modesty” of these largely literary modes of criticism: “The wider implications involve an appeal to fractions of the bourgeoisie and professional classes for a new form of cultural hegemony, understood in Gramsci’s sense as ‘the moral intellectual leadership of the nation’” (2008: 79–80). Similarly, Owens proposes that the loss mourned by those who position themselves against postmodernism masquerades as a cultural loss of facts and disciplinary authority. The real issue at stake, according to Owens, is an economic, technical, and political loss, “for what, if not the emergence of Third World nations, the ‘revolt of nature’ and the women’s movement—that is, the voices of the conquered—has challenged the West’s desire for ever-greater domination and control?” (1985: 67).

Los Rubios and The Seduction of Memory

Los rubios, a film that is both historical fact and fiction, made great waves on the independent film circuit, garnering overnight auteur status for the young filmmaker Albertina Carri. While the film stands on its own as an example of Argentine independent cinema at its most avant-garde, it also represents an important step both in the ever-evolving process of recovery from the trauma of political genocide and in the dialogue about social justice that followed in its wake. Carri’s background plays a crucial role in this film, which relies on an autobiographical narrative structure. She is the daughter of Montoneros who disappeared in 1977, when she was four years old. ⁵ Her father, a sociologist and journalist, was the author of a book about popular rebellion called Isidro Velásquez: Pre-revolutionary Forms of Violence. Carri’s parents’ story is recounted in the official report Nunca Más (Never Again), and their bodies have never been recovered (Nouzeilles, 2005: 5). Thus, Carri’s background carries the mandate that, like other sons and daughters of the disappeared, she should never forget the violence her parents suffered in the name of revolutionary change. As such, the film can be understood in the context of the HIJOS movement that began in 1995 in Argentina.

“HIJOS” stands for Hijos para Identidad y Justicia contra Olvido y Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence). The movement extends the work done by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their ongoing efforts to uncover corruption and injustice. In contrast to that work, however, the work of its members is permeated by unique identity complexities and influenced by an additional generation of distance from the original trauma. HIJOS members are organized around the vindication of the memory of their parents and their parents’ colleagues. In particular, they advocate “common prison for all of the perpetrators of genocide, as well as their accomplices, instigators, and beneficiaries, under the last military dictatorship.” ⁶ The generational difference between HIJOS members and the mothers of the disappeared is reflected in the different waves of dictatorship cinema in Argentina.

The first wave of dictatorship films, which began to come out in the mid-1980s, tended to address society’s confrontation with the military secrets, pain, and shame of the dictatorship. This wave is exemplified by the Oscar-winning Argentine film The Official Story (1983), directed by Luis Puenzo, in which an upper-middle-class housewife discovers the horrors that make up the fabric of her life (her illegally adopted daughter was, in fact, stolen from a couple who disappeared). The second wave of films, which began to appear in the 1990s, is concerned with the victims of the dictatorship (such as torture survivors and their families). The third wave, from the late 1990s to the present, reflects the bio-documentary perspective of the children of the disappeared (Noriega, 2009: 9–15).

On the surface, Los rubios can be described as a “third-wave” dictatorship documentary about one daughter’s search for her identity through the remnants and fragments of her parents’ papers, writings, photos, surviving acquaintances, and forensic science. The simplicity of the story concept stops there. From the opening scene of the film, audiences know that any expectations of a conventional treatment of the subject of dictatorship will be thwarted. As the opening credits roll, we hear peaceful pastoral sounds over a consistent but ominous low hum. Birds chirp, cows moo, and playful voices communicate about how to approach a horse. These sounds are intertwined with Albertina Carri’s voice directing her crew members as the camera moves slowly, voyeuristically, past a toy house. The house is uncannily lit from the inside; the doors and windows are open, and it is empty. On the outside of the house, the lighting suggests that it is nighttime. The lighting changes to daytime and we see Playmobil figures moving (via stop-motion animation) around what appears to be a farmhouse. From the opening scene through the final scene of the film (in which the entire production team walks away from the camera wearing blond wigs), viewers are confronted with a barrage of disjunctions—paths that seem to lead nowhere and yet keep the narrative moving. The simplest question of the film, as referenced in the title Los rubios, is never answered: were Carri’s parents really blond?

In a nod to Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Carri films the entire process of making her film. Thus, there are at least two cameras filming at all times, creating a film within a film and confusing the subjects and objects of the film. In keeping with Amos Vogel’s (1974: 43, citing Michelsen) assessment of Vertov’s use of the film within a film, Carri’s approach to the avant-garde technique results in “an attack on the illusion of art and a constant recall of the spectator to himself so as to disturb his equilibrium and to subvert him on deeper levels.” The use of color film stock mixed with black-and-white video adds to a kaleidoscopic feeling of hyperreality that subverts the direction of the narrative at every turn. To make matters more complicated, although Carri’s background as a child of disappeared revolutionary parents qualifies her beyond a doubt to be a member of the HIJOS artistic political movement, she rejects the movement’s strategies as too limiting: “Whenever the HIJOS appear, I’m not at all interested. . . . I’m not interested in a reaffirming perspective, and the name made me anxious. I don’t want to be a daughter [of the disappeared] all my life. I want to be other things, and among those things, I am also a daughter” (Noriega, 2009: 23).

Academic neoconservatives such as Sarlo and Stoll might embrace this documentary/docudrama for its resistance to what they consider to be identity-inspired politics and for its obvious formal intellectual qualities, which recall the European tradition of auteur, avant-garde cinema (Godard’s film-within-the-film metacommentary on the process of filmmaking in Contempt [1963] comes to mind). ⁶ But Los rubios invites a more pointedly feminist and postmodernist reading, one that might be understood in dialogue with Baudrillard’s notion that only seduction has the capacity to challenge established order.

In Seduction, Baudrillard refers to femininity as “a principle of uncertainty. Because it is uncertain, it causes the binary sex poles of male/female to waver—it abolishes the differential opposition” (12). There is nothing biologically female about the realm of femininity. Both femininity and transvestism seduce via signs, parody, simulation, and make-believe. As if taking a page from Baudrillard’s book, Carri both appears in the film and casts an actress (Analia Couceyro) in the role of herself. Just after the opening scene with the Playmobil farm we see a close-up of Couceyro, in the role of Carri, reading from Carri’s father’s book. This scene is immediately followed by a shot of Carri (camcorder in hand) and a crew member walking down the sidewalk of a provincial town. Such oscillations between “real” and actress versions of Carri are common. At times we see the actual director working on her life story. At other times, we see the taller, slightly more glamorous actress in the role of Carri. By replacing herself as the central subject of the documentary with a dressed-up version of herself for much of the time, Carri “tricks the eye” and throws viewers into a state of temporary identity confusion. One never knows when Carri or her double will appear.

Baudrillard suggests that seduction can rupture the “distinctive sexualization of bodies and the inevitable phallic economy that results” (1990: 10). In a postdictatorship context, such notions of seduction can offer strategies of resistance for the marked, visible body of the offspring of the disappeared and the official infrastructure that surrounds it. Baudrillard suggests that

seduction alone is radically opposed to anatomy as destiny. . . . It is there all at once, in the reversal of all the alleged depth of the real, of all psychology, anatomy, truth, or power. It knows (this is its secret) that there is no anatomy, nor psychology, that all signs are reversible. Nothing belongs to it, except appearances—all powers elude it, but it “reversibilizes” all their signs.

Carri refuses to posit her own anatomy (the daughter of disappeared parents) as a type of destiny in the film, opting for a program of feminine seduction instead of overt truth telling. ⁷

Seduction as a strategy for storytelling takes on a politically incorrect hue (quite literally) where Carri’s treatment of the testimony of her family members and her parents’ friends and acquaintances is concerned. While Beverley would undoubtedly applaud the fact that Carri includes both interviews and testimony—a move that situates her in the very milieu of identity politics feared by neoconservatives—the testimony is peppered with untruths and banalities. The interviewees do not seem trustworthy, and in at least one case neither does the film crew. For example, the first subject interviewed (a woman who supposedly lived next door to the Carris while they were in hiding in a small working-class town) wavers in her responses when asked about an abduction that took place on her street. At first, she denies having been present on that day: “It was my sister who was here that day.” She says, “I don’t remember anything.” Then she seems to recognize Carri and asks what her name is. “Now I remember you,” she says. “There was a girl named Albertina . . . I suppose she was three but I don’t remember.” Carri replies, “Yes. Three years old.” The woman then repeatedly emphasizes that she may or may not recognize Carri because so much time has passed and “kids change.” The woman denies knowing what happened to the Carri family when Carri asks her directly. “Sometimes I’m here and other times I’m not,” she replies, becoming increasingly nervous about the tenor of the questions and the presence of the camcorder. Carri seems to use the camera in this scene as a weapon, designed to catch a liar by surprise. What this nonprofessional-grade camera captures, with clinical precision, is a series of distinctly untruthful expressions.

Critics of the film, such as Javier Campo, deny that Los rubios has a place in the collective memory of the dictatorship (Campo and Dodaro, 2007: 51):

Trying on wigs is not the best way of constructing a collective memory of what took place during the dictatorship. And to criticize the ex neighbors of the Carri family . . . is no less than a perception that suffers from a contextualistic vision of the social processes that were instituted by the dictatorship. It is not that the neighbors are “ungrateful” but that they are people the system fell upon, attacking them on all fronts.

Campo misses an important point. Carri also unveils her own deceitful nature as part of this interview and continues to deal in untruths throughout the film. Toward the end of the scene, the woman asks the crew, “Who is going to see this?” The cameraman replies, “No, no. Don’t worry. It’s our university project,” bringing the sense of the untruthfulness of the encounter full-circle. ⁸ While Los rubios probably began as a school project, we learn later in the film that Carri was seeking production funding from a prominent national film board.

Other comrades of Carri’s parents are interviewed, but the interviews play sporadically on a monitor in the background like props. The interviewees recount fragments of the minutiae of daily life, rendering the content of their testimony spurious. At certain moments, Carri offers her own testimony and retells the experience of her older sister, who was tortured, but both of these “testimonies” are delivered indirectly, by the actress version of Carri. Nouzeilles (2005: 274) suggests that testimonies in this film are “constructions and not literal translations of real experiences.” For example, before the actress is filmed recounting Carri’s memories, we see Carri directing her on how to act out the scene. Carri instructs her to say, “We suppose they were murdered at the end of that same year,” in order to avoid repeating “I” too many times. “And don’t repeat the year either,” she says as she runs out of the frame to film. What follows is not the scene in which we hear Carri’s story but a series of somewhat random pastoral shots of the countryside, intercut with close-ups of the actress’s face as she rides on the back of a tractor. The fact that we are not rewarded with a full rendition of Carri’s testimony at this point in the film but, rather, provided with a random moment of fun and play adds to the vertiginous sense of identity confusion and seduction that permeates its whole. Seduction alone is radically opposed to anatomy as destiny. Carri invites the viewer to know her but then undermines that enterprise altogether at every turn. In the end she never lets the viewer fully know her or penetrate her history.

Carri explains that she has to reconstruct the contents of her sister’s testimony because she refuses to be interviewed, “just as she refused to talk when tortured or later, to the truth commissioners.” Her restaging of her sister’s testimony is doubly deceptive. She presents it as a story twice removed from its original source—mediated by Carri and delivered by the actress. Additionally, the story is offered with a deep reluctance and a caveat about the whole notion of this type of revelation. At one point the actress version of Carri draws a diagram of her sister’s torture cell from memory because, as she claims, the sister refused to offer her own drawing for the film. The scene reaches the level of absurdity when the actress laughs and reveals that she can’t actually draw.

Carri’s strategy of seduction appears to have met its match when the film crew learns that the Argentine National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) has registered official disapproval of her approach to her parents’ legacy. During this pivotal scene, the crew sits in Carri’s small office and ponders the contents of a convoluted fax criticizing her fictionalization of her parents’ story and denying the project funding. At this point the film’s auteur qualities give way to a strong anti-elite, collective streak reminiscent of performative documentaries; Carri not only demystifies filmmaking but unveils it as a collective process that changes as it takes place. ⁹ After the film institute’s fax has been read aloud, the crew tries to decipher its meaning and decide how to proceed with the project. Both Carris (director and actress) weigh in, as do the sound woman and the cameraman. There is a great deal of debate and laughter until Carri finally suggests that they all “get back to work.” This is not to suggest that the institute’s criticism is unimportant to her. On the contrary, this rejection scene is another way in which she signals her resistance to being absorbed by an official registry of traumatic memory.

Postmemory and Postmodern Disjunctions

In her reading of Los rubios, Gabriela Nouzeilles (2005) draws upon Marianne Hirsch’s (1977) concept of “postmemory” to describe HIJOS art. Hirsch calls postmemory “a very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (1977: 22). Alison Landsberg’s (2004) celebration of the modern mass media and film in particular for their ability to offer a type of “prosthetic memory” resonates with this idea. Landsberg suggests that cinema and experiential museums like the Holocaust museums in the United States and the Naval Academy Museum (EMSA) in Buenos Aires allow people to “experience an event or a past without having actually lived through it” (48). ¹⁰ This proposition rests upon the postmodern assumption that memory is always already mediated by popular culture and thus is itself a mass media product. While the idea of prosthetic memory stresses engagement with and empathy for the traumatic experiences of others, Carri gestures toward the possibility of prosthesis in her film (primarily through the actress version of herself) only to indicate its deficiencies and limitations when it comes to memory. She exploits the proposition that memory is always already mediated by continually distancing the viewer from access to her memories. At one point in the film, she states that her memories began in the fantasy space of the countryside (where she was sent to live with her aunt and uncle after her parents’ abduction). This moment—which references the opening scene of the film, the general sense of child’s play throughout, and the final scene in which we see the real Carri teaching the actress version how to ride a horse in the countryside—underscores James Berger’s (2007: 607) criticism of the concept of prosthetic memory: “The traumatic symptom in symbolic form cannot simply cut through its social-symbolic environment and imprint itself directly on the body or the psyche. The transmitted symptom is impure; it is a thorough mixture of traumatic effects and other features bearing on contemporary social concerns, generic histories, economic motives, fantasies of healing, terrors of disintegration.”

Upon closer inspection of the rejection-fax scene, the dialogue that ensues can be seen to point to the complexity of the social-symbolic environment of Argentina during the progressive, neo-Peronist Kirchner years, in which memory discourse and the politics of remembering are alive and well. Before Nestor Kirschner became president of Argentina, only two of perhaps thousands of Dirty War torturers and military commanders had stood trial. Thus, the rejection scene serves to illustrate Nouzeilles’s and Beverley’s shared point that postmodern disjunctions make progressive intellectuals nervous. “They’re dictating what the tone of the film should be,” one crew member says in an obvious reference to the Kirchner, Peronist political party by way of the INCAA. “They need it,” says another, suggesting, at worst, the possibility that documentaries about the disappeared can serve as political propaganda and, at best, that there is an established conventional history that is somehow threatened by Carri’s unconventional project, in which uncovering truth or untruth is anything but a clear-cut process. Campo suggests as much when he admonishes Carri for “turning history into a game” and for obscuring her parents’ memory behind a Playmobil collage (Campo and Dodaro, 2007: 49).

The crew comes to the conclusion that the national film institute is looking to Carri to make the film of her generation, that is, to live up to her inheritance by redeeming the deaths of her parents with a respectful, glorious, biographical narrative. Carri responds that someone else should do this; she doesn’t want to. Members of the crew then make offhand references to the effect that radicals of the previous generation “need to feel like heroes now.” For committed members of the political left and for those who work in the area of human rights, this moment of mockery in the film can only produce a sense of discomfort. Documentary filmmakers may also be uncomfortable with Carri’s style because it breaks with the truth-telling tradition of documentary film as a representation of reality, a window onto the repressed world of victims, a film genre whose appeal rests precisely on respecting certain techniques that insure that the viewer is seduced by the truth of its discourse as opposed to the artifice of the fiction film. In a way, by inviting viewers to become conscious of the perverse nature of seduction and to discover a new relationship between film, memory, and “truth,” Carri risks losing their trust.

The national film institute and (with the film’s release) many critics have condemned Carri’s film as too postmodern in its fictionality and thus untruthful to the memory of her parents. The tyranny of the signified that postmodernism threatens to rip open and the violence of its law are now housed in the annals of an official memory of the Dirty Wars. This presents an obvious paradox. While Carri deserves to tell her story however she chooses, she is asked by the national funding institute to assimilate her work to memory narratives that are already known and written. Instead, she creates a traumatic story whose truth lies somewhere along the fault line between the mythic and the real. As Andreas Huyssen (2000: 13) points out:

The geographic spread of the culture of memory is as wide as memory’s political uses are varied, ranging from a mobilization of mythic pasts to support aggressively chauvinistic or fundamentalist politics . . . to fledgling attempts, in Argentina and Chile, to create public spheres of “real” memory that will counter the politics of forgetting pursued by postdictatorship regimes either through “reconciliation” and official amnesties or through repressive silencing. . . . The fault line between the mythic past and the real past is not always that easy to draw—one of the conundrums of any politics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects.

Los rubios reflects a keen awareness of the fine line between memory and fantasy. In fact, the film is structured around the seduction of this paradox. Even Carri’s most personal family memories are not immune from the film’s relentless interrogation of memory: “The memories of friends turn into political analysis. I’d like to film my six-year-old nephew saying: ‘When I find out who killed my grandparents I’ll kill them.’ But my sister won’t let me. I have to think of something, something that will be a movie. All I have are vague memories, contaminated by so many versions. Whatever I do to get to the truth will probably take me farther away.”

While critics such as Campo dismiss the film for distorting or eclipsing the memory of noble political struggles, Nouzeilles suggests that its political incorrectness (which I locate in its dark humor and manipulation of testimony) seems to be its most powerful contribution to critical thinking. Indeed, the film’s political incorrectness is not just a case of youthful irreverence. It points to a critique of ossification or politicization of memory that makes Carri nervous and that should make others of her generation nervous. She does not disrespect testimony or its seriousness, nor does her use of the form reflect Sarlo’s feeling that testimony has become synonymous with a reality show or akin to a circus of victims. Rather, testimonies demonstrate that the act of remembering is problematic and bound up in fantasy, sentimentality, and doubt. ¹¹ Carri’s own story of the abduction (the closest we come to direct memory in the film) is inflected with doubt and intertwined with her sister’s story. The actress says, “The man who was holding me put me in a car. I assume . . . I think it was a red Ford, but maybe I imagined that. I don’t know if some memories are real or if they are constructed from my sister’s memories.” At this point, Carri seems to have reached the limits of her memory’s capacity to produce the truth, which underscores the point that, taken to its extreme, Los rubios can be understood as questioning the tendency of its own genre to fulfill a collective sense of emotional emptiness by overproducing comforting images of resistance and sacrifice in the name of authentic democracy and a return to the rule of law.

Conclusion: Irreverence and The Ruin Of Representation

Michele Montrelay’s (1993, cited in Owens, 1985: 68) notion of women as “the ruin of representation” reinforces a feminist reading of Los rubios. By including the scene in which her project is rejected for funding, Carri addresses the problem of privilege that feminist theory returns to again and again—that women are “only represented; . . . always already spoken for.” She refuses to master the narrative of her parents’ disappearance the way the committee might like, opting instead to tell her own story about growing up under assumed identities with the help of toys, stop-action animation, and dressing-up.

The humor and fictional play in Los rubios undoubtedly contributed to its rejection by the INCAA as an inappropriate way to remember the disappearance and murder of Carri’s parents under the dictatorship. The reenactment of their kidnapping is staged as an alien abduction using toys, complete with a spacey, science-fiction soundtrack, evoking the corny science fiction films of the 1950s. These scenes of child’s play and fantasy enhance the more deeply troubling scenes, such as Carri’s testimony and a scene toward the end of the film in which we see the real Carri fleeing the scene of her father’s abduction. In this scene she is clearly distraught, having just been told by an eye-witness that her father’s face was burned by cigarettes as he was hauled off. In these moments of serious play, one is reminded of Todd Haynes’s underground film Superstar, the irreverent depiction of Karen Carpenter’s story using Barbie dolls. When one sees the actress version of Carri in her tiny workspace, one can’t help but laugh at the giant poster (in French) for John Waters’s film Cecil B. Demented, a film about a young director’s struggles to produce his first film. The poster covers most of the wall space, hovering over the actress as she types text into her computer, one slow finger at a time. The poster’s caption reads “In order to make his first film, he had to convince a Hollywood star.” Along similar lines, Carri responds to her sister’s refusal to tell her story on camera with a certain element of sardonic wit: “I replied, ‘Since when was a camera a mechanism of torture? I must have missed that chapter of art history.’”

Part of the postmodern appeal of Los rubios seems to come from its refusal to be easily categorized. Nouzeilles (2005: 264) asks, “What kinds of political responses are possible in societies in which spectacular images of pain and violence have become part of a mass media-driven circus?” Perhaps to answer this question we might return to Baudrillard’s notion of seduction, which leads to the reverse of the spectacular in its opposition “at all times, in all places to production. Seduction removes something from the order of the visible, while production constructs everything in full view” (1990: 34). By deliberately removing parts of her story from the visible, Carri leaves room to explore what she sees as potential dangers of official versions of the truth. Lingering behind the scenes is an irreverent sense of humor that works to transform mourning rituals into joyful sites (Nouzeilles, 2005: 275).

Carri’s personal quest for meaning does not result in the certifiable facts and clear-cut closure commonly associated with traditional documentary filmmaking. If anything, it seems to render the act of drawing deep conclusions about meaning superfluous. What, then, is the value of a story like Carri’s to the greater social struggle to preserve memory in order to prevent such atrocities from occurring again? What, if anything, opens up in her apparently postmodern rejection of truth, facts, and mastery? Owens (1985) might suggest that it is the possibility of melancholic contemplation of longing and loss. After all, how does one tell a story about parents who were always longed for but never there? Carri’s film suggests that within the grand narratives there are smaller, quieter but no less significant narratives of longing and loss. The confrontation between her style of storytelling and the INCAA’s ideas about the way in which controversial memory should be treated ends up being a cornerstone to the film’s overall message about identity, postwar Argentina, and Carri’s generation. As it turns out, the INCAA’s rejection of her treatment of memory as insubstantial comes as no surprise if we understand the project in the context of Pauline Rosenau’s concept of “skeptical postmodernism.” Rosenau takes into account the social power of the subject (albeit constructed) and all of the privilege and power that comes with it. She suggests that the postmodern individual finds meaning in the process of creation within and for a limited community. Meaning is created on a very personal, as-needed basis, but this does not imply any particular integrity of the seeking subject or, in a modernist sense, “that people are free, conscious, or self-determining” (Rosenau and Rosenau, 1992: 53, 56). Whatever meaning is created by the postmodern individual, it cannot be verified as truth. Carri depicts this notion of creating meaning in the absence of truth in a fast-paced stop-motion animation scene. We see a plastic toy person in front of the toy farmhouse that represents the home in which Carri lived with her aunt and uncle after her parents were killed. The toy person stays rooted to the spot in front of the door while its headgear rapidly changes (a cowboy hat, a motorcycle helmet, a crown). In the accompanying voiceover, Carri says,

One needs to create one’s own identity when that identity is threatened. In my case, the threat began during the time of terror and violence, when saying my last name meant danger and rejection. Today saying my name in some circles means strange looks, a mixture of confusion and pity. To develop yourself without the one who gave you life becomes an obsession, at odds with daily life, disheartening, since most of the answers have been lost in time.

While Rosenau would celebrate Carri’s floating identity—rooted in loss and often articulated through narcissism, fantasy, and humor—as a product of skeptical postmodernism, this unrooted identity is deemed inappropriate time and time again by her critics. Carri’s depiction somehow cheapens or threatens the apparent veracity and stability of her parents’ legacy as radical Montoneros.

Ironically, although Carri did not want to make the film of her generation, apparently she did. The film has achieved a great deal of national and international attention. Carri’s response to the INCAA’s rejection (telling the crew to get back to work) calls to mind Owens’s (1985: 71) idea that “one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice,” an idea that seems to identify grand master narratives everywhere, even in radical revolutionary history. Carri’s destabilization of her own identity is more than a game or a filmic conceit. As in the case of the transvestite killer in Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) and the serial killer masquerading as a child in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), her identity has something threatening about it, something that is more than simple child’s play. The simultaneity of the real and mythic “Albertinas” in the film speaks to the unresolved nature of living in a state of flux as time and history march on.