Documentary Film and the Recovery of Historical Memory in the Southern Cone (2015)
Undergraduate: Maura Thornton
Faculty Advisor: Samuel Amago
Department: Biology
This project explores themes of historical memory in documentary films produced between 2010 and 2015 in Chile and Argentina. Designed for Western audiences, these four documentaries illustrate the transmission of memory from the private, familial sphere to the global, public domain and demonstrate how the "mute trace" of memory marks and characterizes a space, whether urban or rural. In the aftermath of historical trauma, the formal strategies of representation within these films confront the "surfeit of memory" in contemporary society, dynamically balancing the dissemination of traumatic experience with its commercialization.