How We Remember: The Reflective Mode of Cinematic Remembering

This chapter explains the rise of new modes of cinematic remembering from the early 2000s, in a context of greater public receptiveness to debates about the dictatorial past. As awareness about the dictatorial period increased and a certain consensus about past atrocities was established, filmmakers’ previous concern in documenting information was increasingly replaced by a desire to explore the ways in which we remember the dictatorial past. Hence there was a shift of attention from memory as content to memory as process. As part of this shift, documentarians engaged in a critical reassessment of testimony and broadened their perspectives to include questions such as what constitutes memory, how we remember, who is entitled to remember and what compels us to forget. Such inquiries have encouraged filmmakers to develop new strategies that include (and often combine) aspects of the ‘essay film’, autobiography, autofiction, theatrical performance, video art and photography. The variety of films that resulted from these combinations cannot be overstated, but for heuristic purposes, they can be grouped into three further modes of cinematic remembering. The reflective mode is the focus of this chapter. I explain its emergence as the result of a cross-generational dialogue between veteran directors and newcomers, particularly younger filmmakers associated with the so-called ‘post-dictatorship generation’. After a discussion of Patricio Guzmán’s sustained contribution to memories of the Chilean dictatorship, I focus more closely on two examples of reflective documentaries: La ciudad de los fotógrafos/The City of Photographers (Sebastián Moreno, 2005) and Retratos de identificação/Identification Portraits (Anita Leandro, 2014).