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Abstract
This article surveys early documentaries about the Malvinas War, through an analysis of Jorge Denti’s Malvinas, historia de traiciones (1983), the first such film about the 1982 war by an Argentine filmmaker. Forty years after this conflict, this article recuperates this frequently overlooked film in order to analyse how its narrative dialogues with different imaginaries and identities of the sixties and eighties – influenced, of course, by the experience of state terrorism in the seventies. Paying special attention to Denti’s political and cinematographic trajectory, this article focuses on the film’s use of testimony and its construction of an epic around the idea of popular organisation that underscores the tensions between different epochal perspectives.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Dr. Mariano Mestman for various discussions that undoubtedly helped to make the issues addressed in this article more complex and profound.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 All quotations from the film and from source texts in Spanish have been translated anew for the purposes of this article.
2 Regarding the use of archival material pertaining to this conflict in cinema see Caresani (Citation2014).
3 For an analysis of space and affect in recent Malvinas documentaries see Depetris Chauvin (Citation2014).
4 We refer to those documentaries filmed during the first 15 years after the conflict, which generally attempt to explain and contextualise the war.
5 For an analysis of these films see Margulis (Citation2020).
6 Hernán Confino (Citation2018, 351) explains that the Montoneros leadership offered their help to the juntas, for it considered the territorial claims fair, independently of their being articulated by their enemies (the collaboration did not take place in the end). Vitullo (Citation2012), in turn, discusses the position of a group of Peronist exiles gathered in the Grupo de Discusión Socialista de México, who supported the war.
7 These are unequal ties and many of these documentaries underscore this aspect, by focusing on the nineteenth-century British invasions, the unfairness of the agro-export model, etc.
8 For this reason the analysis will privilege specifically these two moments.
9 Regarding the different ways in which the war was read and interpreted, see Guber (Citation2012).
10 The chant directs the accusation towards Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, member of the junta and president of Argentina during the war.
11 Regarding the debates around the use of testimonial accounts in Argentina in the post-dictatorship see Garibotto (Citation2019).
12 The first mass mobilisation, called by Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) under the motto of “Paz, pan y trabajo” (“Peace, bread and work”), took place on 30 March 1982, in the midst of a recession and under the implicit quest for a democratic reopening. This demonstration constituted a point of inflection, signalling the moment when the street was regained as a space of demonstration and public protest, in a context of oppression and violence, and has been read as one of the triggers of the invasion two days later. Expectedly, the demonstration was violently repressed and ended with one death and at least one hundred arrests. For an analysis of the imagery in support of Malvinas in Plaza de Mayo, and those of other demonstrations pertaining to the conflict, see Varela (Citation2013).
13 In Argentina, the Ford Falcon is a car model that is often associated with kidnappings and other clandestine operations carried out during the dictatorship.
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Paola Margulis
Paola Margulis is Profesora Adjunta in History of Communications Media at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is an affiliated researcher with the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and researcher with the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani. She has edited the volume Transiciones de lo real: Transformaciones políticas, estéticas y tecnológicas en el documental de Argentina, Chile y Uruguay (2020, Libraria) and is author of the book De la formación a la institución: El documental audiovisual argentino en la transición democrática (1982–1990) (2014, Imago Mundi) and of various research articles on Latin American political cinema published in specialised journals.