The Rise of the Witness: The Informative Mode of Cinematic Remembering

This chapter explains the emergence of an informative mode of remembering through film in a context where witness testimony became the main device for denouncing state atrocities. In Argentina and Brazil, documentary filmmakers took on the task of interviewing witnesses and piecing information together to build logically ordered narratives about the past. The view of documentary as a reliable means to transmit knowledge about the historical world is central to this mode, as I explain in relation to various examples and the closer reading of two films: Cazadores de utopías/Hunters of Utopia (David Blaustein 1996) and Hércules 56 (Silvio Da-Rin 2006). I argue that although these and other informative films have made an undeniable contribution to memories of anti-dictatorship resistance, their overreliance on the possibility of ‘recuperating’ the past generates commemorative discourses in which eyewitness testimony is equated with historical fact and the past is depicted as complete and concluded.