Memory or postmemory? Documentaries directed by Uruguay’s second generation

Introduction

The turn of the century brought the coming of age of the second generation of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone – Argentina (1976–1983), Chile (1973–1990) and Uruguay (1973–1985) – and an array of first-person narratives produced by artists of this generation. Many of them made first-person documentaries which academics have tended to analyse drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ (see Lazzara, 2009; Nouzeilles, 2005; Page, 2005; Ramírez, 2010). This term was originally coined to define the memory of the second generation of the Holocaust, more precisely, that of the children of Holocaust survivors (Hirsch, 1992–1993: 8). Hirsch (1997) argues that

[p]ostmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (p. 22)

Given the traumatic characteristics of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, many scholars have found Hirsch’s concept useful for their analyses. Indeed, in her latest book, Hirsch (2012) notes the resonance of the concept of postmemory in other contexts beyond the Holocaust, among which, she includes the dictatorships in Latin America (pp. 18–19). This claim, however, has been mentioned only in passing by Hirsch. This article aims to build on Hirsch’s work in order to explore the specificities of the second generation of the Southern Cone. More precisely, it seeks to show that the applicability of this framework to the cases of the Southern Cone is not always straightforward, given the differences between these two contexts.

This article explores the films Secretos de lucha (Secrets of the Struggle, Maiana Bidegain, 2007) and DF Destino Final (Final Destination, Mateo Gutiérrez, 2008) as examples of first-person documentaries made by directors born during or just before the early phase of the Uruguayan dictatorship. ¹ Although these directors have in common that their fathers personally suffered the abuses of the regime, being imprisoned and tortured, their personal experiences were quite different. Bidegain was born during the exile of her militant father, who kept his memories to himself for over 20 years. This gave Bidegain a certain distance from the traumatic event and the place in which it occurred. In contrast, Gutiérrez’s father was murdered and the director of DF remained in the context where the assassination took place. Gutiérrez was therefore exposed on a daily basis to the memory of the assassination of his father, a renowned politician. The loss of his father and the permanence in the place where the traumatic event took place did not give Gutiérrez the distance experienced by the children of survivors in exile. This distance is one of the main characteristics of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. While both directors belong to the same generation, the situations they went through have shaped their approaches to the recent past differently, and this is made clear in their films.

This article argues that it is necessary to take a closer look at the diversity of experience lived by the second generation of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone. The study of these two examples provides an opportunity to explore the different paths followed by young artists when highlighting the need to address the recent dictatorships of the Southern Cone. For the purpose of the analyses of these films, this article explores the concept of postmemory. Specifically, it suggests that the distance generated by exile and the difficulties of the surviving parents to talk about their traumatic experience – both explicit in Hirsch’s concept of postmemory – appear in Bidegain’s film. This means that postmemory is useful for the analysis of Secretos de lucha. However, this is not the case for DF, since this film is about Gutiérrez’s own memories of the context of impunity protecting those who assassinated his father. The analysis of Gutiérrez’s film in fact demonstrates that there are members of the second generation whose memories are similar to those of the first generation. Growing up in the society under dictatorship, several children have been exposed daily to the traumatic event, which in Gutiérrez’s case was the abduction and assassination of his father. In these cases, the characteristics of postmemory, such as ‘displacement’ and ‘belatedness’ (Hirsch, 1999: 8), are not present; these children have their own memories. This diversity of experience, as the analyses demonstrate, has an impact on the audiovisual practices of these young artists and on how they relate to the recent past.

Before exploring both documentaries, I will provide an overview of the Uruguayan case; then explore the relevance of these films and their contribution to building collective memory and memory politics; and finally, consider the limits of the term postmemory when applied to all memories of second generations.

Context: dictatorship, silence, memory

The Uruguayan dictatorship began with a coup d’état on 27 June 1973 and, as Francesca Lessa (2011) points out, it was extremely oppressive: ‘[a]t the time, Uruguay earned the macabre title of the Torture Chamber of Latin America, due to the brutality of repression’ (p. 179). It lasted until 1 March 1985, when President Julio María Sanguinetti took office. The Uruguayan re-establishment of democracy was based on a law by which the state would renounce the exercise of its punitive powers: the Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado – usually known as the Expiry Law – was passed on 22 December 1986. This meant that the military would not stand trial. Two popular consultations took place in order to annul this law – a referendum in 1989 and a plebiscite in 2009 – but the results of both were negative. In February 2011, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights passed a sentence against Uruguay based upon the consideration that this law was incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights. ² This was the beginning of a controversial debate that ended with the Uruguayan parliament passing a new law by which the exercise of the state’s punitive powers was re-established on 27 October 2011 (see Lessa, 2012).

During the years of dictatorship, Uruguayan exiles joined international organisation of human rights to protest the abuses and crimes committed at the time (see Markarian, 2005). Since the early re-establishment of democracy, actions whose purpose was to prevent these crimes from being forgotten were mainly organised by local human rights associations and some political actors. In the mid and late 1990s, some testimonies and public debates present in Argentina had a strong impact in Uruguay. ³ Moreover, some children who were handed over to adoptive families – when their Uruguayan or Argentine parents were abducted – were found and they recovered their biological identity. This evidence made it difficult to continue avoiding the legacies of the dictatorship. Hence, President Jorge Batlle (2000–2005) established a Peace Commission in August 2000. ⁴ This was the first time that a Uruguayan Government accepted the need to deal with the crimes committed during the dictatorship. Therefore, these crimes were brought to the attention of the society. Although not everyone was satisfied with the work of this commission, especially because the perpetrators were not to be prosecuted, it was a first step towards public debate around the dictatorship. It was from 2005 onwards, however, that more systematic actions were taken by the Executive Branch. In that year, Tabaré Vázquez – leader of Encuentro Progresista, the left-wing coalition – took office. The Expiry Law was still in force but it allowed the investigation of some specific cases (see Allier Montaño, 2010: 67). Some of the actions promoted by the Executive Branch included the excavations in military fields to find the whereabouts of the disappeared and investigations of specific cases of abduction and the changing of children’s identities. Some of these cases were even taken to court (Allier Montaño, 2010: 253).

Since 2005, the memories of the dictatorship have been present in public discussions of Uruguayan society. As regards the production of documentary films, documentary maker and historian Virginia Martínez also considers 2005 as a year in which the conditions of production improved. Martínez (2008) notes that ‘the past was liberated from the interdiction into which it had been forced and society started to be more interested in it’ (p. 117). This is reflected in the number of documentaries produced after this year on the recent dictatorship. ⁵ Before exploring two of them, it seems appropriate to reflect upon the contribution of these documentaries to building collective memory.

Films, collective memory and politics

Maurice Halbwachs is seen as the founding figure in the development of the idea of ‘collective memory’ and in affording special significance to the influence of social context on individual memory. ⁶ The idea of collective memory is relevant to this article in at least three different ways. First, as Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002) has noted, the concept of generation is based on the idea of ‘collective experience’ (p. 280). Although the second generation explored in this article gives evidence of the diversity of experience they have been through, these young men and women share the collective memory of the crimes perpetrated on their parents’ generation. Second, Halbwachs (1992) considers the family to be a privileged social group capable of enhancing the individual’s capacity to remember (p. 54). This social group is indeed presented, by the documentaries explored in this article, as one of the most effective bearers of memory. Third, after the filmmakers decided to release their films publicly, the collective memories of their families became part of the broader public collective memories.

Not only are the screenings of these films relevant for building collective memory, but they are also potential generators of what Alison Landsberg has called ‘prosthetic memory’. According to Landsberg (2004), when watching a film about the past, ‘the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live’ (p. 2). In the films analysed in this article, there are two layers of prosthetic memory. On the one hand, the directors of the films have a prosthetic memory of that which their parents have been through. On the other hand, their films are generators of prosthetic memories in those who watch them. Landsberg (2004) considers that ‘[t]he resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics’ (p. 2). The making and public screening of these two films is particularly significant in political terms for a society in which the majority has explicitly decided not to deal with its recent dictatorial past. ⁷

Astrid Erll (2008) highlights the ‘potential for memory-making’ of fiction films and novels (p. 395). Erll (2008) considers that ‘those potentialities can only be turned into actualities within pluri-medial contexts. The “memory-making film” as well as the “memory-making novel” are made in and by the media networks surrounding them’ (p. 396, italics in original). ⁸ While the documentaries analysed here have not received the broad media attention described by Erll, her concepts are relevant to the reception of both films. ⁹ DF, for example, was the film chosen by several human rights associations to be screened at ‘Semana contra la impunidad’ (Week against Impunity), a week of activities to protest against the 27th anniversary of the coup d’état, organised in June 2010. ¹⁰ In the case of Secretos de Lucha, the film is frequently shown by SERPAJ (Service for Peace and Justice) and Montevideo’s Museum of Memory to groups of high school students who are studying the recent dictatorship. ¹¹ Both films show ways in which members of the second generation contribute to the remembrance of the recent past.

Memory or postmemory?

Having discussed the relevance of films as memory-makers in general, and of these documentaries in particular, I now explore the most appropriate theoretical framework for analysing them, bearing in mind that both directors are members of the second generation of Uruguay’s dictatorship but that they have approached the recent past in different ways.

Andreas Huyssen has considered the dictatorships of the Southern Cone to be among the events which favour memory narratives. In particular, discussions regarding the Holocaust and traumatic events experienced in different places led to what Huyssen (2000) calls ‘the globalization of Holocaust discourse’ (p. 23). He argues that, ‘[i]t is precisely the emergence of the Holocaust as universal trope that allows Holocaust memory to latch on to specific local situations that are historically distant and politically distinct from the original event’ (Huyssen, 2000: 24). However, the use of theories that have not specifically been designed for these contexts has generated a series of debates and adaptations. ¹² Elizabeth Jelin is one of the Argentine scholars who has worked on memory studies with specific reference to the Southern Cone. She highlights the importance of new generations and the inquiries they make in preventing these events from being forgotten (Jelin, 2003: 101). However, it is precisely the diverse experiences lived by the second generation of the Southern Cone, which challenge some existing theoretical frameworks.

The term postmemory has been used to explore the works of members of the second generation of the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, including first-person documentaries. In the case of Argentina, postmemory has usually been considered useful when exploring several documentaries made by artists whose parent(s) still remain part of the 30,000 disappeared people left by the regime. This is the case, for example, in Los Rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), Papá Iván (María Inés Roqué, 2000) and M (Nicolás Prividera, 2007). In Chile, films such as Remitente: Una Carta Visual (Tiziana Panizza, 2008) or La Quemadura (René Ballesteros, 2009) were also explored through this concept. Scholars such as Nouzeilles (2005), Page (2005), Lazzara (2009) and Ramírez (2010) have incorporated Hirsch’s theoretical framework in their analyses focusing on the generational distance and highlighting the fact that the artists belong to the second generation of the respective dictatorships. However, for this article, the concept of postmemory does not seem to be applicable to both films, even if both of them were directed by members of the second generation. This case suggests that being a member of the second generation is not enough to have a postmemory. The diversity of experiences lived by these children have an impact on how they remember.

When Hirsch coined the term postmemory, not only were the temporal gaps between the two generations emphasised but also the spatial dislocations. Hirsch proposed this concept inspired by the history of her own family, the photographs of surviving Jewish families and, more specifically, the work of the artist Art Spiegelman, son of an Auschwitz’s survivor; all these people share the fact that they have been displaced from their place of origin (see Hirsch, 1992–1993: 3–9, 1997: 17–22). In her texts, Hirsch indicates several places where she lived with her family such as Bucharest and Vienna, before settling in the United States; however, for Hirsch, her cultural home is her parents’ Czernowitz. When Hirsch coined the term, she had not been there, but she considered Czernowitz to be the ‘space of [her] postmemory’ (1997: 226). Displacements create a need to inquire about that which has never been experienced. In this respect, Hirsch (1996) emphasises ‘[h]ow much more ambivalent is this curiosity for children of Holocaust survivors, exiled from a world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased’ (p. 661) and considers that ‘[t]heirs is a different desire, at once more powerful and more conflicted: the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair’ (p. 661). The experience of exile, so closely related to the survival of Jews during the Holocaust, inspired Hirsch to coin the term postmemory; this experience then gives an important clue to evaluate the applicability of this concept to the second generation of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone.

The Argentine scholar Beatriz Sarlo has heavily criticised the concept of postmemory by drawing not only on Hirsch but also on James Young (2000), who has also adopted this concept in the context of the post-Holocaust generation. Sarlo’s (2005) main argument is that the ‘vicarious’, ‘mediated’, ‘fragmentary’ and ‘subjective’ characteristics referred to by these two authors are not exclusive to memories of second generations (p. 135). However, Sarlo (2005) does not focus on the fact that beyond these characteristics, Hirsch has intimately linked the concept of postmemory to experiences of exile and displacement (see p. 129). Exploring specificities of members of the second generation in Argentina, Sarlo (2005) concludes that ‘there is no “postmemory,” but shapes of memory which cannot be divided into memory of those who experienced an event and memory of their children’ (p. 157).

However, although I agree with Sarlo that the concept of postmemory is not necessarily appropriate to explore memories of the second generation of any traumatic event, I find the term useful in considering memories of those who were born or grew up in their parents’ exile. Sarlo’s revision of the term postmemory nonetheless illustrates a need for careful adaptation when applying concepts originally coined for different contexts, since the experiences lived by members of the second generation are as specific as their memories.

On the one hand, postmemory would adequately apply to the memories reconstructed by Maiana Bidegain in her film Secretos de Lucha. She was born in France – in her Uruguayan parents’ place of exile – and, only when she was 22 years old, did she learn that her father and some of her aunts and uncles had been political prisoners, tortured and forced into exile. Hers is a search from scratch, in a place where she did not grow up. Her return to Uruguay could be seen as those ‘narratives of return’ on which Hirsch (2012) focuses; as she puts it, these are narratives ‘in which children of survivors return to find their parents’ former homes, to “walk where they once walked”’ (p. 205).

On the other hand, the term ‘postmemory’ does not help to explore the memories of Mateo Gutiérrez, director of DF. ¹³ Gutiérrez is not exclusively dealing with the memories of the horrors suffered by the previous generation like Bidegain; he is also addressing his own pain provoked by the abduction and assassination of his father. Moreover, he continued living between Buenos Aires and Montevideo; so, even if the landscape changed, as it always does through the inevitable passage of time, he grew up with it. ¹⁴ Drawing on Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002), Gutiérrez could be seen as a member of a 1.5 generation. Suleiman (2002) defines this generation as ‘child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of the Jews’ (p. 277, italics in original). While in her thought-provoking article, Suleiman acknowledges difficulties in defining such a generation, her work is instrumental in emphasising the importance of taking into account the diversity of experience of the children of the Holocaust. Indeed, this scholar calls for ‘multiple approaches in thinking about child survivors, and the acceptance of approximate rather than tidy categories’ (Suleiman, 2002: 289). ¹⁵

Gutiérrez, strictly speaking, is a member of the second generation. ¹⁶ However, as he has been there, where the traumatic events occurred, his memories are similar to those of the first generation. His case does not fit the characteristics explored by Hirsch in the concept of postmemory and serves to illustrate that the prefix ‘post’ is not always necessary to explore the memories of the second generation. Gutiérrez’s starting point is different from Bidegain’s. That is why, in contrast to hers, his search is less concerned with reconstructing and understanding what occurred distantly in time and space, and more with lifting the veil of silence and impunity on the recent past. Due to the public resonance of his father’s assassination, there is an official, albeit incomplete, version of events. Gutiérrez then embarks on the task of rewriting this official history, and trying to keep the discussion of the crimes perpetrated by the dictatorship in the public sphere. While Bidegain begins a search in which she finds a side of her own personal history, ignored due to her father’s silence, Gutiérrez confirms and emphasises the absence of political will to throw light on the recent past. He does not choose to represent loss or the difficulty of accessing the past, as many second-generation artists have done (see Lazzara, 2009: 150). On the contrary, he chooses a documentary style disguised as journalism, which still makes explicit his first-person take on the events.

First-person documentaries are considered in this article as examples of the ‘performative documentary’, which, as understood by Stella Bruzzi (2006), are documentaries which ‘feature the intrusive presence of the filmmaker’ (p. 187). However, both filmmakers ‘intrude’ their documentaries in different ways. In the case of Bidegain, her film serves to anchor herself in the collective remembrance of a place which is part of her story, but in which she did not grow up. In the case of Gutiérrez, the first-person narrative allows him to offer a different perspective to the official narrative.

Born in exile: postmemory inquiries in Secretos de lucha

Maiana Bidegain was born in 1977 in Bayonne, France. She is the daughter of two Uruguayans who, after 1 year of exile in Buenos Aires, decided to settle where her father’s parents were originally from. Aged 22 years, Bidegain discovers that settling in Bayonne was not simply a return to the family’s roots, as she had been told. This documentary shows her search for truth through the reconstruction of her paternal family’s past. I argue that Bidegain’s experience of exile and impossibility of accessing the traumatic experience lived by her father provide an example which is worth exploring through Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. This analysis therefore focuses on her need to visit specific places related to her father’s history, thus considering the film to be a ‘narrative of return’ (Hirsch, 2012: 205). The representation of the impossibility of seeing certain places because they have been ‘erased’ and the difficult ‘access to repressed stories’ (Hirsch, 1997: 243) are also explored.

The establishing shot of the film is in San Sebastián airport. Bidegain’s journey starts in the Basque Country; the same place where her ancestors’ journey started, many decades before. Accompanied by her father, she will travel long in time and far in space to reconstruct her family’s past and therefore satisfy the need to ‘visit the places from which her parents were evicted’ referred to by Hirsch (2012: 214).

During the credit sequence, it is emphasised that this is her journey and that it is a private narrative, as Bidegain makes use of the voice-over to tell of the reasons that motivated her to generate a paternal family reunion and to gather testimonies in Uruguay. The sequence finishes with the image of her father and his seven siblings making a toast. It is the year 2002 and the first time that they have all been together since 1968. By means of a dissolve, the scene is followed by a black-and-white picture of the siblings when they were younger. Bidegain’s voice-over links both images: ‘gathered in the family house “Aterbea”: Aterbea in Basque means “the shelter”’. The family is ‘the shelter’, and that is why, through editing, those words are synchronised with the old picture. Indeed, in Bidegain’s case, the family members are the bearers of memories and those who provide her with answers. ¹⁷

The film portrays the military as a threat to Bidegain’s family. Indeed, the siblings had not been together for 34 years, due to the physical displacements caused by exile. The second generation, as a consequence, is also displaced. This explains why, to re-locate herself, Bidegain needs to see certain important places. ¹⁸ Therefore, in her ‘return’, places are visited which are linked not only to her father but also to her aunts and uncles. ¹⁹ However, a significant sequence illustrates how inaccessible some places can be for the second generation because they have been ‘erased’ (Hirsch, 1997: 243).

The sequence starts with Jean Paul Bidegain, the director’s father, in a car that is about to cross a bridge between Uruguay and Argentina. The driver is off-scene and J.P. Bidegain is driven out of Uruguay, which symbolises his expulsion and the beginning of his exile. He is carrying a digital camera and is taking photos of the present while carrying a family album, or what Martha Langford (2006) calls a ‘repository of memory’ (p. 223), on his lap. The camera that is filming the documentary can be seen in the rear mirror. As pointed out by Hirsch (1999), ‘[c]amera images, particularly still photographs, are precisely the medium connecting first- and second-generation remembrance, memory and postmemory’ (p. 10). In this sequence, the father’s memory and Bidegain’s postmemory try to bridge the gap between past and present, but some places have changed forever and will only remain in the memory of the first generation and in the family album. During the journey, one photo from the album the father is carrying is zoomed-in upon, and it shows a house which is dated ‘September 1976’. Bidegain and her father go to find the place where the family lived in exile for 1 year. However, when they arrive, the father discovers that the house has been demolished and that there is a new block of flats there. This photo becomes a ‘memory work’ in the sense presented by Anette Kuhn (2010), as it ‘undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered’ (p. 303). He looks at the album and at the picture of the house, and realises that the house is no longer there. To his astonishment, the house has been erased from the landscape.

The film makes explicit two times of recording: in 2002, when the siblings are reunited for the first time, and in 2005, when they meet to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of Tito, Bidegain’s eldest uncle. However, the editing does not follow a linear chronology when presenting the testimonies. This specific choice suggests that, in Bidegain’s search, not only are there places which were erased but that there is also always ‘something else’ that may be told later, or never. This emphasises the difficult ‘access to repressed stories’ (Hirsch, 1997: 243) while pointing at the ‘secrets’ to which the title of the film refers. This is generated by aesthetic choices such as the change in the rhythm of the film, which slows down, and a dissolve that finishes in a black screen. These choices, usually announcing the end of a film, do not lead to the actual end; here, they serve to introduce two false endings before the real one.

In the first false ending, Bidegain’s father walks along Mauléon in the Basque Country, the site of the origins of the Bidegain family. This scene is followed by a sequence of black-and-white family photographs with which any spectator could identify. As Hirsch notes, ‘[t]he conventional nature of family photography makes the space for this identification, this erasure of time and space. We might leaf through any of our own family albums and find similar photos’ (Hirsch, 1997: 252). This opens up a space for collective memory. If this were the real ending of the film, it would have shown a clear round trip that started and finished with the same pictures of the siblings. However, reality is more complex and memory is neither clear nor neat. There is always something else to be discovered, and so the film resumes, capturing in a close-up the name of the house ‘Aterbea’, where the film started in 2002. This sequence, filmed before several others, is deliberately edited afterwards; this highlights the difficulty of accessing some memories.

The second false ending starts in ‘Aterbea’, where there is a passionate dialogue between Bidegain’s father and his sister, both of whom were imprisoned and tortured before going into exile. They exchange ideas on how human it is to hate the torturers and whether or not they should be forgiven. In other words, they discuss how to overcome the feelings of revenge and how they withstood the tortures by thinking that those who inflicted them upon their bodies were morally deprived people. This dialogue is followed by a phone conversation that Bidegain has with one of her father’s torturers. He is portrayed as a cowardly man who does not want to face the camera or meet her father. He justifies what he did through the claim that he was ordered to do so. After this sequence, archive footage of a speech by the army is inserted, followed by the ceremony in the main square of Montevideo in which the first democratically elected president Julio María Sanguinetti (1985–1990) took office. The parallel between the private and the public spheres is explicit. The discussion between Bidegain’s father and aunt had also taken place in the public realm, where people wondered if the military should be forgiven or judged, especially after the Expiry Law was passed in 1986 during Sanguinetti’s presidency. Indeed, the voice-over that has been added to the archive footage refers to the Expiry Law.

The archive footage of Sanguinetti taking office dissolves into the footage of the ceremony during which Tabaré Vazquez became president, in 2005. Those 20 years are compressed in an ellipsis which emphasises and reinforces the attitude of silence and forgetting. While filming this ceremony, Bidegain’s voice-over gives information on cases of generals involved in the dictatorship that were taken to court and investigations that were carried out after 2005. This second false ending continues as far as the intertitle that informs us of the imprisonment of Julio María Bordaberry, the President that handed the power over to the Army in 1973. However, there is one more twist.

The third and real ending starts with a rally in favour of ‘truth, justice, memory and never again’, in which thousands of Uruguayans march along the main street of Montevideo; commonly known as Marcha del silencio (March of silence). This rally, organised by ‘Mothers and Families of the Disappeared’, has been held every 20 May since 1996 to remember the murderer in 1976 of the parliamentarians Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, the former Tupamaros William Whitelaw Blanco and Rosario Barredo (Allier Montaño, 2010: 155). ²⁰ It also commemorates the absence of all the disappeared, whose names are mentioned one by one. This public event dissolves into the private celebration of the golden wedding anniversary of Bidegain’s uncle, at which the whole family is present. This editing suggests how important the family is for keeping memory alive. On the public level, the memory of the families of the disappeared, gathered and organised into human rights associations, plays a fundamental role. On the private level, each family is seen as the body in charge of preserving memory. The last long shot is taken of the whole family and turns into a black-and-white picture. A record is kept for the family album and for transmission to future generations.

No official full stop to memory: DF Destino Final

The Marcha del silencio (March of silence) referred to in Secretos de Lucha provides a link to exploring DF, as this documentary deals with the four assassinations remembered in Montevideo since 1996. This case has had a particular resonance in Uruguay since the re-establishment of democracy, in particular regarding the assassination of the two parliamentarians. Actually, it was one of the few cases investigated by the Uruguayan Parliament, once democracy was re-established (Allier Montaño, 2010: 50). This case was also supposed to be excluded from the jurisdiction of the Expiry Law, when it was passed in 1986 (Allier Montaño, 2010: 67). However, this was changed in 1989, by a decree passed by the Uruguayan President Julio María Sanguinetti, and the case was legally closed (Trobo, 2005: 278). It was reopened in 2002 and, in 2006, Julio María Bordaberry, Uruguayan President in 1973 that handed power to the Military, and Juan Carlos Blanco, Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1976, were condemned for the assassinations (Allier Montaño, 2010: 237). Even if legally ‘solved’, enquiries on this case continued, due to the lack of information provided. A year before DF premièred, for instance, the documentary film Aquellos nuevos asesinatos (‘Those new assassinations’, Guillermo Garat and Nicolás Golpe, 2007) was released. This documentary investigates this case, gathering testimonies about the lives and deaths of the four Uruguayans.

In the case of DF, Gutiérrez gathers together the testimonies of family members, friends and the political figures of the time in order to reconstruct the image of his father. Moreover, not only does Gutiérrez deal with his own family history, but he also attempts to reconstruct those of the other three victims. In contrast to Bidegain’s narrative of return, which fits into Hirsch’s framework of postmemory, Gutiérrez’s film deploys characteristics of a memory between both generations. As a member of the second generation, he needs to be told what happened to the generation before him. This is clearly illustrated by the repeated use of talking-head testimonies. However, because he has been there, he also needs to respond to the silence promoted by the state. As Jelin (2003) puts it, ‘[w]hen the state does not develop official and legitimate institutionalized channels that openly recognize past state violence and repression, the conflict over truth and over “proper” memories develops in the societal arena’ (p. 44). Gutiérrez’s film is indeed a narrative of memory, which appeared as the result of approaching a traumatic recent past; it is one example of the narratives of memory referred to by Huyssen. These narratives ‘counter the politics of forgetting pursued by postdictatorship regimes either through “reconciliation” and official amnesties or through repressive silencing’ (Huyssen, 2000: 26). While narratives of postmemory also contribute to avoid forgetting and build collective memory, as illustrated by the analysis of Secretos de Lucha, these narratives of postmemory have specific characteristics which are not present in Gutiérrez’s documentary. Postmemory is not always the most effective framework to analyse a first-person documentary directed by a member of the second generation. This is especially the case if the director is not the child of survivors and stayed living where the assassination took place.

Gutiérrez chooses not to appear in front of the cameras or use voice-over to give his opinion and add important non-diegetic information inaccessible to the spectator. One can therefore draw the conclusion that these choices indicate the pursuit of objectivity (see Bruzzi, 2006: 15–46). Indeed, his style has been seen as ‘classic’ (Ros, 2012: 187) and ‘investigative’ (Rufinelli, 2013: 64); however, drawing on Bruzzi, I consider it ‘performative’. Gutiérrez’s intrusion into the film is explicit, even if achieved through different strategies to Bidegain. This style, disguised as objective, empowers him to rewrite the official history surrounding his father’s assassination. Moreover, the use of the first person also allows him to do so. As pointed out by Lazzara (2009), drawing on Sarlo, ‘[t]he truth of the first person, despite its problematic nature, seemed to guarantee legitimacy, confirm identity, and secure a place in relation to history, society, and the nation’ (p. 148). I therefore argue that DF denounces the intention to put a stop to memory from the perspective of someone who has directly suffered the loss of his father and the silence surrounding his death.

Gutiérrez intrudes into the documentary on several occasions, two of which are written: in the case of the initial intertitle, in which the word ‘my father’ appears next to his father’s name, and later in the film, when the label ‘mi viejo’ (my old man) is superimposed on the photograph of his father’s dead body. In the other intrusions, his voice can be heard, for example, when his mother is giving her testimony, when Cecilia Michelini explains how the bodies were found, when some interviewees – such as Luis Alemañy – address him as the son of Gutiérrez Ruiz, and when he is interviewing Sanguinetti, the president of the transition. All these intrusions take part at key moments of the film, and are present on both the private – when talking with the mother – and public level – when questioning the former president. No matter how ‘objective’ the documentary seems to be, it is not. Actually, drawing on Bruzzi (2006), these interventions ‘acknowledge that performance – the enactment of the documentary specifically for the cameras – will always be the heart of the non-fiction film’ (p. 187). The documentary is as constructed as all the testimonies given, no matter how objective they claim to be. This search for objectivity and for presenting the documentary as one based on trustworthy research, while also revealing its constructed nature, reflects how difficult it is to approximate this recent past.

As Sanguinetti is one of the main figures of the transition and a fervent supporter of the Expiry Law (see Lessa, 2011: 182–185), the sequence in which Gutiérrez responds to his testimony is relevant. In addition to explaining that he wanted a negotiated transition with the military, Sanguinetti refers to the cases of the deaths of Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz. ²¹ In short, Sanguinetti explains that nothing could be done in Uruguay to solve the cases, and that he was not aware of the participation of the Uruguayan military in Argentina. This is when Gutiérrez asks Sanguinetti if he had any doubt about the participation of the Uruguayan military in detention centres such as Orletti (Argentina). This question makes Sanguinetti hesitate, and there is an uncomfortable pause, but he finally avoids the question by stating that the crime was committed in Argentina, that it had to be investigated there and that nothing could be done in Uruguay. This sequence is very powerful, not only because of Gutiérrez’s voice, but also because of the close-up of Sanguinetti’s face as he hesitates and tries to give a coherent answer. According to Ros (2012), it is in this sequence that the director’s position is made clear: ‘the government boycotted the commission and prevented the incriminatory information from being public’ (p. 190). This seems certainly to be the case, and I would add that the director, in this sequence, is also seeking to provoke the audience and promote the discussion of the crimes committed during the dictatorship. While Ros (2012) contends that ‘[t]he film offers answers to questions that the government was supposed to address but actively avoided’ (p. 190), I would suggest a different reading which focuses on the information Gutiérrez withholds.

To any informed spectator who knows that the case has already been legally closed and that two people were declared accountable for the crimes, the words of Sanguinetti are hard to comprehend. It could seem ambiguous, then, that no information is given in the documentary regarding the aforementioned sentence passed in 2006 against Julio María Bordaberry and Juan Carlos Blanco. Indeed, this is not revealed at all. An uninformed spectator would not know that the case has been legally closed in Uruguay. This decision shows that the documentary is not objective. Drawing on Marita Sturken (1997), who notes that ‘[w]e need to ask not whether a memory is true but rather what its telling reveals about how the past affects the present’ (p. 2), I consider that holding back the sentence is to give importance to the process. In an interview, Gutiérrez clearly states, ‘sometimes I fear that trials put a final stop to a process that has not finished’ (La República, 2008). Indeed, it is not a minor detail that a film called Final Destination has no full stop and no final destination. What is final is the death of these Uruguayans, but their cases are still remembered, through several narratives of memory.

Comparative remarks and conclusion

The analyses of Secretos de Lucha and DF have opened up a space for exploring the Uruguayan transition to democracy and the way in which some members of the second generation have related to the recent past. While the directors of both films belong to the same generation and share the fact that their fathers personally suffered the abuses of the regime, their experiences are different and so are their memories. This is seen in their films, both of which offer first-person narratives exploring different styles, and so lend themselves to analysis through different theoretical frameworks.

Bidegain’s history is closer to that of the second generation of the Holocaust considered by Hirsch, as she was born in exile and was unaware of her father’s history for over 20 years due to his silence. This director embarked on a return journey to understand what happened in a place in which she did not grow up. However, the case of Gutiérrez is different, because he is more directly linked to the society which has chosen not to deal with the recent dictatorship. He is confronting not only the pain suffered by the generation which preceded him, but also his own pain resulting from the loss of his father. Even if he is, strictly speaking, a member of the second generation, his memories are torn between the first and second generation.

The images of the disappeared as heroes or victims which have been, for example, part of the Argentine landscape, with varying intensity, throughout their democratic transition (see Lazzara, 2009: 153–154), were not present in Uruguay. The Uruguayan transition was based on silence and the refusal to address the recent past. As pointed out, it was only after 2005 that the recent dictatorship became more accessible. In this context, it seems absolutely significant that two filmmakers, whose parents have directly suffered the consequences of the dictatorship, have decided to contribute to the construction of collective memory by releasing their documentaries at a time when there was a favourable climate for discussion. In fact, their ‘memory-making potential’ has begun to turn into an actuality, due to the promotion of both films by human rights associations and the good reception of the general public.