7. Malvinas, civil society and populism: a cinematic perspective^*

Joanna Page

Argentine films on the Malvinas War often turn the story of an international conflict into one about human rights. They position themselves within a much larger archive of images depicting the brutality of Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship, the regime that ordered the invasion of the Islands in 1982. Since the return to democracy, the imperative to uncover and denounce the military’s crimes towards civilians – whether committed on the Islands or on the continent – has forestalled other ways of remembering the war that do not focus on the reckless adventurism and violence of the armed forces. Films on the Malvinas draw heavily on the themes and discourses of films about the dictatorship, not least in their polarised representation of civil society as innocent victim or (more rarely) guilty accomplice of the regime.

This essay discusses two recent documentaries by Julio Cardoso that provide an alternative, if no less schematic, perspective. Where post-dictatorship films – especially those made by children of the disappeared – express rupture and disillusionment with regard to the ideology of left-wing militants in the 1970s and particularly their belief in a popular revolution, Cardoso’s films Locos de la bandera (2005) and Malvinas: Viajes del bicentenario (2010) trace continuities and look for a common denominator. Far from representing civil society as victim or accomplice, these films transform it into the pueblo, the bedrock of Argentine society, bearer of popular and nationalist values and staunch in its defence of freedom against the nation’s elite and its imperial invaders. A strategic appeal to discourses of the 1960s and 1970s enables Cardoso to construct a revisionist reading of the nation’s history in which the Malvinas War is extricated from the context of the dictatorship’s crimes against its own citizens and treated as one more battle in the long and ongoing struggle of the pueblo against oppression. This version of history is just as politically determined as the other. However, by revealing blind spots in what have now become hegemonic representations of the war, these films do make a contribution to the important task of bringing greater diversification to post-war memory.

Cinema and desmalvinización

Many consider that a process of ‘desmalvinización’ (demalvinisation) held sway after Argentina’s defeat in the war over the Malvinas in 1982. The term has been used to refer to the official silence imposed upon the returning soldiers and the state’s reluctance to provide compensation, as well as to a more insidious kind of social invisibility with which the war was cloaked as a humiliating misadventure conducted by a brutal regime from which society wished to distance itself. Vicente Palermo argues, however, that while the Malvinas war was treated in this manner, this has allowed the Malvinas cause, the claim to sovereignty, to flourish unquestioned, as – in the often-repeated phrase, possibly coined by García Márquez – ‘una causa justa en manos bastardas’ [a just cause in the hands of bastards] (Palermo, 2007, p. 352). While blame for the war could be laid squarely at the door of the dictatorship, the wider cause, and the specific version of nationalism underpinning it, have remained impervious to critical interrogation (p. 283).

Cinema since the return to democracy in 1983 has certainly colluded in reducing the Malvinas War to just another arena for the dictatorship’s brutality. Many films of the early post-dictatorship period in particular were primarily concerned with bringing to light the extent of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the armed forces. The political urgency of this task led in many cases to a wholesale demonising of military officers who had subjected terrified and demoralised conscripts to torture and abuse on the Islands just as they had persecuted dissidents and civilians at home. From the very beginning, however, it was clear that the denunciation of military violence in the context of the Malvinas War provoked more complex responses from those who had fought in the war. The portrayal of the conscripts in Los chicos de la guerra (Bebe Kamín, 1984) as victims of their military superiors – frightened, inexpert adolescents press-ganged into an absurd battle – provoked angry responses from many ex-combatants. The soldiers’ own personal convictions about the purpose of the war entirely disappear in the film’s representation of a conflict that seems only to take place between conscripts and officers. As Rosana Guber states, ‘Los británicos sólo proveen el escenario donde se despliega el drama argentino’ [The British only provide the stage on which the Argentine drama unfolds] (Guber, 2004, p. 88).

This sidelining of the nature of the war as a territorial dispute with Great Britain is repeated two decades later in Tristán Bauer’s Iluminados por el fuego (2005). What have now become stereotypical images of the war are paraded enthusiastically past us. The conscripts are again depicted as terrified, demoralised and too caught up in the business of survival to be able to conjure up any patriotic sentiments; their sufferings – hunger, frostbite, exhaustion – are exacerbated by a lack of proper equipment and clothing, as well as the brutal treatment by their officers. While much truth is to be found in these allegations, Iluminados por el fuego (like Los chicos de la guerra) simply repackages the war as a set of divisions within Argentina to which Britain appears to play the role of mere accessory. Full blame is placed on the dictatorship: as Esteban, the ex-combatant protagonist reflects, ‘la improvisación, el sadismo y la traición de los que habían torturado a su propio pueblo nos habían llevado a la derrota’ [improvisation, sadism and the treachery of those who tortured their own people had led us to defeat]. The war continues today, but only in the sense that in the film’s present (the financial crisis of 2001–2002) citizens face the need to fight for their survival again, betrayed once again by the state, this time through its failure to provide social and economic protection. This rather crude analogy is underlined by Gastón Pauls, the actor who plays Esteban, speaking about the film: ‘También habla de la guerra cotidiana en el hoy, de una guerra que continúa. Una guerra que todavía tienen los ex combatientes y una guerra que tienen los cartoneros, los pibes que están limpiando los vidrios en la esquina’ [The film is also about the everyday war of here and now, a war that is still going on. A war that the ex-combatants are still involved in, as are the rubbish-pickers and the kids washing car windscreens on the street corner] (Ranzani, 2005).

The lyrics of León Gieco’s song ‘La memoria’, which plays in full at the end of the film while we see Esteban paying homage to the dead in Darwin Cemetery, place the war within a much broader (and over-generalised) history of violence and exploitation in Latin America. Both Gieco and Bauer ignore the wider significance of the Malvinas claim within the national imaginary, reducing the war to a cruel and expensive mistake from which the nation should move on as best it can. The discourse of closure in Iluminados por el fuego – Esteban returns to the Islands to ‘cerrar la historia’ [bring the story to a close] and exorcise the ghosts of the past – ironically announces the film’s own role in closing off a number of potentially productive points of conflict or tension in memory of the Malvinas. Iluminados por el fuego provides a clear example of the way in which reducing the war to an irresponsible adventure on the part of the dictatorship effectively erases the ongoing Malvinas cause, the historical claim to sovereignty over the Islands that has not yet been resolved. I turn now to another film, also released in 2005, which also appropriates discourses of memory developed in the post-dictatorship context. However, it does so precisely to mark a clear divergence from these and to reintroduce the Malvinas as a national cause that cannot be reduced to the war fought by the military regime in 1982.

Locos de la bandera and the transmission of political thought

Julio Cardoso’s Locos de la bandera adopts the perspective of the son of a soldier killed in action, now grown to be the same age as his father when he died. As I shall show, the film establishes a clear dialogue with productions since 2000 which have been directed by the children of militants disappeared under the military regime, including Papá Iván (María Inés Roqué, 2000), Historias cotidianas (Andrés Habegger, 2000), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), HIJOS, el alma en dos (Carmen Guarini and Marcelo Céspedes, 2005) and M (Nicolás Prividera, 2007). One of the key differences between Locos de la bandera and these other films, however, is to be found in the way that it imagines and performs inter-generational transmission. If the films made by children of the disappeared bear witness to a deep rupture in the transmission of political thought between the older generation and the younger, Cardoso’s film demonstrates a much greater continuity between them. While Locos de la bandera is successful in resituating the war within the broader historical framework of the Malvinas cause, it goes to the other extreme by obscuring its embedding within the context of the dictatorship. The film makes a contribution to contemporary debates about the relationship between the Malvinas and a resurgent nationalism by considering what form patriotism might take in democracy; however, it reinforces many of the long-standing tenets of Argentine nationalism which, for Palermo and others, have remained unquestioned as a consequence of the excision of the war from the cause itself.

Locos de la bandera was made in collaboration with the Comisión de Familiares de Caídos en Malvinas e Islas del Atlántico Sur [Commission of Relatives of the War Dead in the Malvinas and Islands of the South Atlantic]. As one might expect, therefore, the film centres on the experience of mourning the death of a son, father, husband or brother in the war, and on the importance of acts of commemoration. But it moves beyond registering the legacies of loss, defeat and silencing to mount a searching investigation of the meaning of the war for the present. Neither its propositional form, nor its emotional weight, nor its political seriousness would seem to invite comparison with the playful Los rubios, released two years earlier, a film that has been criticised for casting both the violence of the dictatorship and 1970s militant activism in a frivolous or over-subjective light (Kohan, 2004; Sarlo, 2005, pp. 146–51). However, there are surprising points of convergence between the two films. Tracing these will throw into relief the very different approach taken in Locos de la bandera to the task of memory.

Both films explore the second-generation perspective of someone who was a small child during the dictatorship but is now of a similar age to the parents who were disappeared (in Carri’s case) or the father who died in combat (in the case of Locos de la bandera). Both hover between testimony and fictional performance: Carri employs an actress to play her part in many of the scenes; and an actor is also used in Locos de la bandera, in this case a composite figure given the generic name ‘Juan’ to signify that he stands for many children in a similar position: his story is made up of the testimonies and experiences of a generation. Echoing some of the distancing devices used in Los rubios, Juan is present on screen but always silent: we hear his questions and reflections only in the form of a voice-over. Both films contain fictional reconstructions of the past, but ones in which the mimetic illusion is deliberately destroyed: in Los rubios, the abduction of Carri’s parents is performed by Playmobil figures filmed in stop-motion animation and the film includes shots of the director telling her protagonist how to play her role; in Locos de la bandera, the verisimilitude of the re-enacted war scenes (performed by actors and shot in Río Gallegos) is undermined by the chronologically impossible intrusion of Juan into these shots.

Both films adopt a highly reflexive approach, insisting on the mediated quality of memory. In a voice-over at the beginning of the film, ex-combatants in Locos explain that their memories take the form of brief images, not ‘recuerdos propios’ [memories of their own] or ‘un recuerdo completo’ [a complete memory] but ‘pequeñas imágenes sueltas […]. Puedo contar anécdotas pero no son mías, yo sé que no son mías’ [brief, disconnected images […]. I can tell anecdotes but they’re not mine, I know they’re not mine]. In Los rubios, Carri – through Analía – acknowledges in a very similar way that she is unable to distinguish between her own personal memories and those of her sisters: ‘Lo único que tengo es mi recuerdo difuso, contaminado por todas estas versiones’ [The only thing I have is vague memories, contaminated by all these versions]. The films also establish a similar mise-en-scène for the child’s detective work. Like Carri’s actress, Juan writes in a notebook surrounded by documents, photos and other objects from the past. Recorded testimonies play in the background while the camera focuses on the protagonist in the present who, like us, is listening, watching and trying to fit everything together.

For different reasons, these films do not share the denunciatory stance adopted by some of the other children of disappeared militants, evident in productions such as HIJOS, el alma en dos. Carri’s film is not a manifesto against the crimes of the past and the impunity of the present, but a more personal exploration of the impact of loss and absence. Cardoso explicitly warns us against the dangers of dividing society too neatly into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. As images of murky water and foggy landscapes fill the screen, Juan reminds us: ‘Hay quienes necesitan inventarse un pasado transparente, donde sólo haya buenos y malos’ [There are those who need to invent a transparent past for themselves, inhabited only by the good and the evil]. He goes on to observe sagely: ‘Por lo general, los que recuerdan así se anotan siempre del lado de los buenos’ [In general, those who remember in that way always chalk themselves up on the side of the good].

It is evident, too, that Locos positions itself in dialogue with many films about the dictatorship in its strategic appeal to the lexicon of human rights discourses. One mother interviewed, whose son’s body was not recovered, speaks of the difficulty of mourning without a body and claims that her son ‘es un desaparecido’ [is one of the ‘disappeared’]. On one of the official visits family members have been able to make to the Argentine cemetery in the Malvinas, one of the mothers tries to comfort another who does not know which of the many unidentified crosses marks the spot where her son was buried. Consciously or unconsciously, in telling her that ‘ todos son nuestros hijos’ [they are all our children], she echoes one of the key declarations of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. These appropriations are fully part of the film’s project to construct the Malvinas as an axis for possible national reintegration.

However, despite the number of discourses it shares with post-dictatorship cinema, Locos de la bandera insists that the soldiers who went to the Islands were not mere victims of an abusive regime fighting to retain credibility: instead, they went as protagonists of a military venture, serving a popular, national cause, namely the claim to sovereignty over the Islands. This shift belongs to a diversification of discourses that, for Federico Lorenz, became evident on the 20th anniversary of the war in 2002, when ‘[l]os hombres que habían combatido se transformaron en modelos a imitar’ [the men who had fought became models to imitate] (Lorenz, 2012, p. 374). The early 2000s saw a similar shift in the representation of 1970s militants, restoring agency to figures previously depicted merely as victims of state terror (Jelin, 2007, p. 337). Films made by the children of disappeared militants, such as Papá Iván, M and Historias cotidianas (Andrés Habegger, 2000) have focused precisely on their parents’ choice to remain involved in militancy in the face of very likely capture and death. In the same way, Locos de la bandera does not present the soldiers who went to Malvinas as victims, but as patriots who willingly risked their lives for the sake of a national cause.

Here, however, is where an important divide opens up between Locos de la bandera and films made by children of the disappeared. Carri, Roqué, Habegger and Prividera struggle but largely fail to understand and accept why their parents sacrificed so much and left them with an unrecoverable loss. In Los rubios, Analía recites: ‘Me cuesta entender la elección de mamá. ¿Por qué no se fue del país? me pregunto una y otra vez’ [I find it hard to understand my mother’s decision. Why did she not leave the country? I ask myself again and again]. In Historias cotidianas, Habegger struggles to understand the choices his father made, doubting that he would be able to give up his own life for such a reason. Roqué in Papá Iván explains that she made the film with the aim of trying to understand why her father did what he did, but she does not fully reach that point and admits that ‘prefería tener un padre vivo antes que un héroe muerto’ [I would rather have had a living father than a dead hero]. In contrast, the sons and other relatives of the Malvinas combatants in Cardoso’s film not only understand their sacrifice but have fully adopted the cause for which they died. Carri reflects in Los rubios that she lives in ‘un país lleno de fisuras’ [a country full of rifts] and one of these rifts is clearly the discontinuity between the ideological orientation of her generation and that of her parents. Locos de la bandera posits instead the possibility of generational continuity. Leandro de la Colina, the son of a pilot killed in the war, speaks earnestly about the example his father has given him of a life sacrificed for others and feels a ‘traspaso’, a kind of transferral, from him. Juan, who remembers at the start of the film that his father ‘no pensaba en la guerra. Pensaba en lo que la Argentina pudiera llegar a ser si estuviera completa’ [didn’t think about the war. He thought about what Argentina could become if it were complete], ends up taking exactly the same attitude to the material he has collected: he discovers that ‘no me importa la guerra ahora’ [the war doesn’t matter to me now] but that instead – repeating precisely the words of his father – ‘pensaba en lo que la Argentina podría llegar a ser si estuviera completa’ [I thought about what Argentina could become if it were complete].

Although both Locos and Los rubios make use of imaginative reconstructions and are structured around an investigation, these devices are put to very different ends. If in Los rubios the inclusion of fiction announces the impossibility of any resolution to the film’s search for identity, in Locos its use does not undermine the quest for knowledge but facilitates it. The insertion of Juan as an observing presence in fictional reconstructions of the past is certainly a self-consciously artificial and anachronistic device and appears to replay Carri’s emphasis on the mediated nature of memory. In mocked-up archival footage cast in appropriately bleached tones, Juan surveys the intense activity of volunteers packing boxes of food and other supplies to send off to the war and watches sailors rush past him in the burning passageways of the Belgrano. His presence on screen clearly announces the footage to be simulated, as does the conspicuous use of filters and lenses to produce sepia tones or a grainy archive effect. Anachronistically, he appears to be of the same age in these scenes from 1982 as he is in the film’s present in 2006. However, the purpose of such reconstructions in Locos de la bandera is not to suggest the elusiveness of the past but the reverse: to dramatise the transfer of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next.

These reconstructions, in which Juan seems to share the same time and space as the combatants at war, recall some of the techniques used in the photography and visual art produced by children of the disappeared, in which montage is often used to simulate an encounter between the child and the absent parents.¹ Paradigmatic of this approach are the photo collages created by Lucila Quieto, suggesting likenesses between a parent and child who would never otherwise be able to share the same space.² Another example would be Conversación con Antonio,³ in which Gabriela Bettini photographs herself in a stance that suggests that she is conversing with her father, whose portrait hangs on the wall beside her.⁴ As Jordana Blejmar argues, this juxtaposition of temporalities ‘breaks with the linearity of history and invites us to read the past not only for what it was but for what it should have been’ (Blejmar, 2012, p. 114). These patently impossible encounters are also, in the words of Ana Amado, an attempt to ‘recuperar lazos entre lo que es y lo que fue’ [recover ties between what is and what was] (Amado, 2004, p. 49).

A similar desire motivates the interpellation of Juan in Locos into scenes from the past, but here it is fully realised. The final reconstruction on the battlefield marks the culmination of his search, providing a moment of complete recognition and identification. With the help of an insert shot at the crucial point, when Juan looks down at one of the fallen soldiers, he sees himself lying there in uniform. Is he projecting himself into that experience, or is he imagining his father lying there, who would have been of the same age as Juan is now? Either way, the encounter with the past is complete, marking a difference from the photo montages of Quieto and Bettini, which always bear witness to absence and rupture. The fictional reconstructions of Locos de la bandera therefore perform a function that is entirely opposed to their role in Los rubios and in many other films and visual artworks by children of the disappeared. If, in Carri’s film, fiction and fantasy are used to demonstrate the impossibility of accessing the past, in Cardoso’s, fiction performs an encounter with that past and demonstrates the unbroken continuity between one generation and the next.

A divergence is also evident in the two films’ treatment of objects of memory. When he visits the Malvinas, Juan finds there ‘una forma de mirar. Es una mirada que está siempre en contacto con su tierra’ [a way of looking. It’s a look that is always in contact with the land]. Locos de la bandera constructs a vision that is intimately bound up with a physical relationship with earth and material objects. In Carri’s film, photographs and other objects testifying to the past are emptied of meaning and eventually discarded in favour of the blond wigs donned by the whole film crew, but these – while they echo the childlike playfulness of the film or express new forms of companionship – remain signifiers of false memories, reminding us of the neighbours’ mistake in remembering the Carri family as blond. In Cardoso’s film, objects are successful carriers of the past into the present and the future; and they also serve to link an individual past with that of the nation. Juan touches everything he comes across on the Islands: remnants of clothing and rusting machinery. One by one, he handles all medals, photos and rosaries kept by the family members of soldiers who died in the war and runs his fingers through sand recovered from the sea bed beneath the Belgrano. All the family members who have visited the Malvinas since the war have brought back handfuls of earth or stones. One woman keeps hers in a flowerpot, while others have displayed theirs in little shrines in a corner of their homes. Carri reflects in Los rubios that ‘cualquier intento que haga para acercarme a la verdad voy a estar alejándome’ [any attempt I make to get closer to the truth takes me further away from it]. For Juan, in contrast, the past is there; it can be touched; it can be understood.

The film’s emphasis on the material is entirely consonant with a claim that is first and foremost one about land, about physical territory. The marble monument to the fallen erected in the cemetery is not just significant as a permanent reminder of the loss of life, but (as Leandro de la Colina clearly states) part of an ongoing sovereignty claim. It is not simply an object of memorialisation but the physical presence of Argentina on the Islands. That part, at least, is not in dispute, says Leandro. The transfer of stones, earth and other objects from the mainland to the Islands and back again is a performative action in Locos de la bandera which demonstrates not just the historical intermingling of these areas of land but an ongoing campaign for their future integration.

If, for Carri, her country is ‘lleno de fisuras’ [full of rifts], for Cardoso, it is ‘lleno de escombros’ [full of rubble]. Both films depict the nation as divided and littered with ghosts from the past that have not been properly put to rest, but for Cardoso that rubble is formed of stones from which memories and a sense of national identity can be rebuilt. As Juan reflects: ‘Escribo desde un país lleno de escombros. Miro el pedregal, y escucho decir que aquí no hay nada más que piedras falsas. Los recuerdos son como las piedras. Están ahí. Esperan a que vos decidas cómo usarlas. Y acá yo veo piedras. Piedras que según cómo las mires, podrían sostener tu casa’ [I write from a country that is full of rubble. I look at the rocky ground and I hear people say that there is nothing but imitation stones here. Memories are like stones. They are there. They wait for you to decide how to use them. And here I see stones. Stones on which, depending on how you see them, you could build your house].

Underlying both Los rubios and Locos de la bandera is a call to remember the past differently, or at least to allow space for different memories. But Cardoso’s film explicitly acknowledges the relationship between how we remember the past and what we build for the future. If it is true, as Juan freely acknowledges, that among those who fought the war were ‘cobardes, traidores, oportunistas, vendidos, incompetentes’ [cowards, traitors, opportunists, colluders, incompetents] it is also true that ‘uno se parece a los recuerdos que elige conservar. Y yo quisiera ser mejor. Por eso miro y busco’ [you take on the appearance of the memories you choose to preserve. And I want to be better. So I look and search]. The way we remember the past in Locos is not simply about being faithful to that past; it is also about finding ways to become something different, and better, in the future. For that reason alone we should remember not just the stories of abuse or incompetence, but also those of courage, solidarity and sacrifice. This is the vision that is lacking in many of the films made by children of the disappeared, who find little or nothing to emulate in either the sacrifices made by their parents or the complicity and apathy of society at large.

Of course, by rejecting portrayals of the combatants as victims, the film is certainly guilty at times of recasting them as glorious heroes. Some nuances of representation do emerge, however, for example in the depiction of officers both as brutal disciplinarians and as courageous protectors of the men in their charge; and these moments contribute to the work of adding what Lorenz has called ‘densidad histórica’ [historical density] to memory of the war (Lorenz, 2012a, p. 328). In one of the fictional reconstructions we see an official sentence a conscript to an ‘estaqueamiento’, a form of military ‘discipline’ in which a soldier is left stretched out between stakes in the ground and which has been roundly condemned in many texts as an example of the kind of human rights abuses often performed by military officers during the Malvinas War. However, the episode – replayed in so many films on the Malvinas – gains complexity here as we understand that it is the third time that the soldier in question has deserted his post and left his companions in danger and one of these has been badly wounded (mortally, we suspect) as a result. Although there is no whitewashing here of the brutal or improvised nature of the conduct of the war, much is found to praise in the dedication and professionalism of a good number of those involved in fighting it and taking many difficult decisions along the way, including officers, many of whom were not torturers but showed great heroism in protecting the conscripts under their command.

In the context of the 30th anniversary of the war, Lorenz identified the need for new approaches to memory that might take us beyond what he calls ‘la falsa dicotomía entre patriotismo y democracia’ [the false dichotomy between patriotism and democracy] (Lorenz (2012b), p. 58). ‘La democracia va acompañada de la patria’ [Democracy goes hand-in-hand with the homeland], says one mother in Locos de la bandera. In certain respects, Locos de la bandera opens up a way of thinking about the relationship between patriotism and democratic citizenship that would have been unthinkable in the early post-dictatorship period. Luis Alberto Romero, for example, has signalled the extent to which the inculcation of a hatred of the regime, a weight of feeling that guaranteed the solid embrace of democracy, came, and continues to come, at the expense of a genuine historical understanding of the period (Romero, 2002, p. 118). The fact that ‘condenar parece ser más importante que comprender’ [to condemn seems to be more important than to understand] ironically threatens the basis of democracy itself, as such a Manichean approach has led to a new form of intolerance of those who do not fully participate in what has, at points, become an unthinking denunciation of the regime and everything it is seen to stand for, even erupting in acts of violence.⁵

The greatest lesson the war can teach us, the film seems to suggest, has little to do with either irresponsible war-mongering or epic heroism and much more to do with models of citizenship based on self-sacrifice and mutual support in times of crisis. One ex-combatant considers that ‘[d]e todas las enseñanzas que me dejó Malvinas, la primera y fundamental es que uno consigue objetivos, en grupo, buscando el bien común’ [of all the lessons that the Malvinas has taught me, the first and most fundamental is that one achieves one’s aims by working as a group, seeking the common good). Picking his way through the war-strewn battlefields of the past, Juan realises that the comradeship and the sense of striving towards a common goal which many ex-combatants remember would be of great value in the here and now: ‘Pienso en lo que podría ser el lugar donde vivimos si nosotros pudiéramos mirarnos con ojos tan atentos como los que se miraban acá, entre compañeros’ [I think about what the place we live in could become if we could regard each other as attentively as they did here, as comrades]. Far from viewing it as a particularly nefarious episode in the military regime’s campaign of national terror and fragmentation, Locos de la bandera elevates the Malvinas cause as a collective project around which a sense of nationhood can be rebuilt.

In an essay on ‘desmalvinización’, Cardoso observes: ‘El asunto que nos ocupa es cómo se construye un punto de vista común […] en este verdadero campo de batalla por el significado de las cosas en el que se ha convertido la postguerra’ [The issue that concerns us is how to construct a common viewpoint […] in this veritable battlefield for the meaning of things that the post-war period has become] (Cardoso, 2011). The quotation neatly articulates the tension at the heart of Locos de la bandera. A discursive openness akin to that of Los rubios is suggested by the film’s imaginative reconstructions, its use of a questioning child’s perspective and its insistent return to the word ‘eligir’ [to choose]. But Cardoso’s phrase here, ‘cómo se construye un punto de vista común’ [how to construct a common viewpoint] is telling. How does one construct a common viewpoint without closing around a single view of the past or the future?

In fact, of course, the film does close around a particular version of nationalism, based on the notion of territorial integrity. It is evident in the reverence shown towards earth, sand and stones carried symbolically between the nation’s provinces and between the Argentine mainland and the Islands, acts of intermingling which seem to prophesy the eventual reintegration of the lands. Territorial integrity is one of the key tenets of Argentine nationalism identified by Palermo, powerfully expressed in the Malvinas cause (Palermo, 2007, pp. 209–10). The film’s insistence on the value of shared goals points us to Palermo’s analysis of the importance of the idea of unanimity in Argentine nationalism, again exemplified in discourses on the Malvinas: ‘Malvinas indica el camino: si los argentinos estuviésemos en todo unidos como lo estamos en Malvinas, entonces a la Argentina le iría bien’ [The Malvinas show us the path: if we Argentines were as united in everything as we were on the Malvinas, then everything would go well for Argentina] (p. 18). Despite its apparent openness of form and discourse, and its appeal to the values of democratic citizenship, then, the film locates the collective project it proposes within a narrow and exclusionary version of nationalism.

Civil society and populism in Malvinas: Viajes del bicentenario

There is a sequence that is often repeated in films about the Malvinas: the archival footage of the moment at which Galtieri announces the invasion on 2 April 1982 to an overflowing Plaza de Mayo. The news is met with an ovation by the exultant thousands gathered below. How might we explain such a ringing endorsement of a bloody regime in a square that had, only three days earlier, witnessed a mass demonstration against the dictatorship? In Palermo’s words, attempts to account for the widespread support for the war has only resulted in ‘pseudo-explanations’, such as a collective delirium, which effectively sidestep the question of collective responsibility (Palermo, 2007, p. 299). Viewed in the post-dictatorship context and with the hindsight of defeat, this sequence from the archives becomes charged with a kind of shame, reflected in its compulsive repetition in so many films. These are phantasmal images, with all the grainy tones and exaggerated melodrama of a cheap and badly directed film, an apt metaphor for Oscar Luna (see above) for the war as whole.

The ‘theory of the two demons’, recently revisited by Pilar Calveiro (among others), refers to the tendency, especially in the first years of the post-dictatorship period, to depict civil society as an innocent victim caught up in a battle fought between left-wing militants and the authoritarian state (Calveiro, 2008, pp. 137, 148). Both Palermo and Lorenz observe a change in perspective towards the dictatorship and the 1970s that has made it possible to raise the question of society’s complicity in that battle and thereby to begin to construct a more nuanced understanding of the period. Both maintain, however, that while memory of the dictatorship has begun to open up in this way, ‘[n]ada semejante ocurrió en el caso de Malvinas’ [nothing like that has taken place in the case of the Malvinas] (Palermo, 2007, p. 299).

This key difference between the politics of memory of the dictatorship on the one hand and the Malvinas war on the other is patently visible in cinema. In the first films of the post-dictatorship period, such as La historia oficial (Luis Puenzo, 1985), the predominant vision is one of a society that knew nothing about what was going on. In later films, particularly those documentaries directed from 2000 onwards by children of the disappeared, society is instead charged with both complicity and complacency. Among the most acerbic critiques of civilian society under dictatorship is delivered by M. The director, Prividera, strongly suspects that one of his mother’s companions is at least partly responsible for her disappearance by collaborating with the armed forces to pass them lists of those actively involved with the Montoneros. With a cold fury he denounces the present failures of the state and of society as a whole to reconstruct what happened to the disappeared and to keep their memory alive. Monuments are overgrown by bushes, or in need of restoration; the quest for information about his mother sends him bouncing from one agency to another, with no centralised data bank in existence ‘en un país donde nadie se hace cargo de nada’ [in a country in which no one takes responsibility for anything]. From the civilian informants who propped up the regime to those who still respond with fear or indifference to the task of remembering the dictatorship’s victims, we are all – in Prividera’s film – responsible for their disappearance.

Los rubios also constructs a devastating vision of the fear and indifference which supported the regime during the dictatorship and are still rife today. When interviewed, one neighbour lets slip that it was she who had collaborated with the military in the kidnapping of Carri’s parents, an event that left the neighbourhood – she declares, with some satisfaction – much quieter and safer. The Carris had moved to the area in accordance with the Montonero policy of ‘proletarización’ through which militants were supposed to acquire the habits and perspectives of the working classes, idealised as the fount of virtues such as simplicity, sacrifice, solidarity and altruism. This image of the pueblo for which Carri’s parents and so many other militants were prepared to sacrifice their lives is radically undermined in Los rubios.

A parallel shift towards a questioning of the role of civil society has not taken place in films about the Malvinas. They consistently offer, instead, a depiction of a deceived, helpless society, such as that represented in La deuda interna (Miguel Pereira, 1988), in which the war becomes yet another form of exploitation of the masses by the elite, highlighting a much broader problem of inequality and social division. Compared with films such as La deuda interna, Los chicos de la guerra or Iluminados por el fuego, Cardoso’s productions have received a much more limited distribution. However, I suggest that they merit close attention, particularly with regard to the explanations they proffer concerning the massive support of the war and the alternative vision they provide of civil society, here transformed into the pueblo, bearers of a popular nationalism that transcends the events and the context of the war. The difference is remarkable: if in M civil society is thrust into the dock, in Cardoso’s film it is promoted to the role of hero.

If post-dictatorship cinema registers rupture and disillusionment with the militant ideology of the 1970s, and above all with the idea of a united, revolutionary pueblo, Cardoso’s films find continuities. Here we see, revived, precisely that image of the pueblo that is destroyed in the films by Carri and Prividera. In Locos de la bandera, the oft-repeated scene of jubilation in the Plaza de Mayo is inserted into a broader narrative about the masses’ support for the war, linking that scene to others showing the donations of clothes, food and other goods that surpassed the regime’s capacity to distribute them. As the mother of a soldier who died in the war claims: ‘No se puede decir, fue todo un manejo de la dictadura’ [You can’t say it was all driven by the dictatorship]. For Juan, it is clear that taking responsibility for that support is the duty of all: ‘A quién no le gustaría tener una historia tan simple como el título de un diario. Pero no hay esas historias. La verdadera tragedia del olvido empieza cuando uno pretende tener una historia pero la quiere contar como si no hubiera sido parte de ella’ [Who wouldn’t like to have a history that is as simple as a newspaper heading? But that kind of history doesn’t exist. The real tragedy of forgetting begins when someone claims to have a history, but wants to recount it as if they weren’t part of it].

It is a wise observation, although of course it is much easier to assume responsibility if the history recounted is one of glory and not of defeat or genocidal acts. As Juan continues: ‘El 2 de abril de 1982 no sólo recuperábamos Malvinas. También empezábamos a recuperar la libertad. La misma gente que dos días antes salió para decirle basta a la dictadura estuvo con todo el país diciéndole basta al imperio. No hay nada de raro en esto. La gente reconocía su bandera mucho mejor que su gobierno’ [On 2 April 1982 we did not only recover the Malvinas. We also began to recover our freedom. The same people who two days earlier had taken to the streets to say ‘enough’ to the dictatorship were there with the rest of the country, saying ‘enough’ to imperialism. There is nothing strange about that. The people were identifying with their national flag much more than their government].

This repositioning of Malvinas as a popular, national cause that transcends the war becomes the main thrust of Cardoso’s Malvinas: Viajes del bicentenario. The film narrates the battle of the Comisión de los Familiares de Caídos en Malvinas e Islas del Atlántico Sur to erect a monument in the Argentine military cemetery on the Malvinas. The monument was successfully completed in 2004 and inaugurated five years later. Between the first film and the second, Cardoso took up the directorship of the Observatorio Malvinas, based at the University of Lanús, an institute founded in 2009 with the aim of developing pedagogical materials on the Malvinas for schools and teacher-training. This new emphasis is evident in the much more didactic approach of Viajes del bicentenario. The young narrator of Locos de la bandera, who questions what he sees and reflects on the difficult task of memory, is replaced in Viajes del bicentenario with an anonymous, diligent, and mute primary school pupil.

The film opens in Perdriel, an iconic location chosen for reasons that are made clear in the first sequence. Famous as the site of a battle against English troops in the first British invasion of the Río de la Plata in 1806, in 1834 Pedriel also became the birthplace of José Hernández, author of the celebrated epic poem Martín Fierro (1872), identified in the film as ‘la obra más importante de la autoafirmación cultural’ [our most important work of cultural self-affirmation]. That the same site should have witnessed two events of such national importance is not presented as a coincidence in the film. As if expressing an entirely obvious connection, one of the presenters recites: ‘José Hernández, Malvinas […] la autoafirmación a través de la lucha, la autoafirmación a través de la cultura’ [José Hernández, Malvinas […] self-affirmation through battle, self-affirmation through culture]. ‘No hay casualidades’ [There are no coincidences], they agree, reverently, as if Hernández and the Malvinas were two irrevocably entwined threads of some divinely authored narrative rather than two events deliberately juxtaposed to produce a specific reading of Argentine history, inscribing them both in a popular, nationalist and anti-imperialist genealogy.

As well as interviews with relatives of the war dead, the documentary is packed with commentaries from historians allied with the Instituto Nacional de Revisionismo Histórico, created by presidential decree in 2011, including Pacho O’Donnell (the Institute’s Director), Ana Jaramillo and others whose work has received approval as advancing the aims of the Institute, such as Francisco Pestanha. Its aim is clearly to install the Malvinas within a popular nationalist agenda and thereby to advance both the Malvinas cause and that of historical revisionism. The Malvinas War is presented as just one more landmark in a long history of conflict between Argentina and Great Britain that – Cardoso’s interviewees claim – has played a vital role in Argentina’s self-definition as a nation.

The film even provides us with a recommended reading list to accompany its revisionist approach. The books shown higgledy-piggledy on a table, as if piled randomly, have on closer inspection been carefully placed, both to advertise the works of those involved in making the documentary and to canonise a revisionist curriculum for the nation’s schools. Here we see, for example, Rául Scalabrini Ortiz’s classic of revisionist history Bases para la reconstrucción nacional, as well as the complete works of Rodolfo Kusch, whose philosophical reflections were very much informed by indigenous thought and popular wisdom. These are jumbled up with maps of the Malvinas and works by Pestanha and Jaramillo. Prominent in this jumble of texts is an essay originally published by Jose Hernández in 1869 with the title ‘Islas Malvinas: Una cuestión urgente’. In it he defends the depth of feeling provoked by the loss of the Islands, an assault on the territorial integrity of the nation which has caused grave upset, ‘como si se arrebatara un pedazo de nuestra carne’ [as if part of our own flesh had been wrenched from us]. The powerful image of a mutilated Argentina returns to shape the nationalist sentiment of Cardoso’s film.

If, for Palermo, the Malvinas cause unites all the most powerful doctrines of Argentine nationalism, the same could certainly be said for Viajes del bicentenario. As well as the axioms of the territorial integrity of the nation (now mutilated), we also find the nation as the victim of ransacking by imperial powers and its own elite classes, together with the doctrine of unity, without which the country will not be able to reclaim its glorious destiny (Palermo, 2007, p. 106). This doctrine presupposes a form of regeneration that will put right the ‘descarrilamiento’ [derailment] that the country has experienced, casting it from its destiny of greatness (Palermo, 2007, pp. 104–5). In Viajes del bicentenario this regeneration is articulated in terms of the ‘patria grande’ [the great country, meaning the integrated Latin American continent], a discourse formed in the continent’s liberators’ dreams of political unity that went on to be highly influential in the armed struggle of the 1970s. There is mention in the film of the strategy of ‘sudamericanizar’ [South-Americanising] in relation to the Malvinas cause, with reference to the current policy of Argentina of seeking the support of other Latin American countries for their claim to sovereignty. However, the use of this term also links the Malvinas cause to the anti-colonialist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. It is suggested, for example, that Argentines are ‘ciudadanos del sur de la patria grande’ [citizens of the south of the great country]. Along these same lines, the monument to the war dead in Malvinas becomes ‘un homenaje a la libertad de todos los pueblos americanos’ [a homage to the freedom of all [Latin] American peoples]; in Darwin Cemetery, the relatives have erected ‘una bandera espiritual y cultural americana y argentina’ [a spiritual and cultural flag that is both Argentine and [Latin] American]; the construction of the monument is even described as ‘América recuperándose a si misma’ [[Latin] America recovering itself ]. This version of the past, and of the cause that stretches into the future, clearly erases the dictatorship from the Malvinas War. It is as if the pueblo itself had taken up arms to confront its old imperialist masters.

The locating of the Malvinas within a longer history of popular, anti-imperialist struggles is not new. From 1982 onwards many veterans have appealed to this same history when speaking about their comrades’ sacrifice (Lorenz, 2012a, pp. 228–9). These voices could not properly be heard in the period immediately following the war. As Lorenz observes, at this point ‘el rechazo social a la violencia no dejaba margen ni para la reivindicación bélica ni para la revolucionaria, ambas asociadas tanto al estado represor como a las organizaciones guerrilleras, los “dos demonios” funcionales a la necesidad autoexculpatoria y refundacional de la democracia [society’s rejection of violence left no room for the justification of war or even revolution, both associated with the repressive state or the guerrilla organisations, the ‘two demons’ that facilitated the self-exculpation needed for the re-founding of democracy] (p. 373). That the war should now be seen as an arena of glory and sacrifice, and that Malvinas should be re-established as the keystone of popular nationalism, bears witness to the powerful confluence and mutual promotion of three recent trends: a revival of popular nationalism, the active appeal to 1970s discourses on the part of Kirchnerism and the resurgence of historical revisionism (sanctioned by the state).

In disconnecting the Malvinas cause from the war started by the military in 1982, one might consider that Viajes del bicentenario takes a step towards thinking about the forms that patriotism may take under democracy. When the mother of a soldier killed in the war says ‘no hay democracia sin patria’ [there is no democracy without the motherland], she opens up at least the possibility of thinking about patriotism in a way that is not defined by the violent repression of the military regime. The only possible path that the film contemplates, however, is that of populism. For O’Donnell, speaking in the film, ‘siempre han sido los sectores populares los que verdaderamente supieron definirle al enemigo y enfrentárselo’ [it has always been the popular classes who really knew how to identify and confront the enemy], whether in the English invasions of 1806, the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado of 1845, or the more recent war of 1982. O’Donnell maintains that, ‘indudablemente han sido los sectores populares, los que siempre tienen más conciencia, ¿no es cierto?, del concepto de patria’ [it has undoubtedly been the popular classes who have always been more conscious, isn’t that right, of the meaning of the motherland]. Suddenly, the conflict over Malvinas becomes not a war declared by a military regime in which the pueblo plays the role of innocent bystander or guilty accomplice, but an expression of the enduring importance of the Malvinas cause in the popular imagination.

In its eagerness to re-invent the Malvinas as a discourse of national unity, the film emphasises the fact that the project of erecting the monument was brought to completion with the support of all sectors of Argentine society. Among the many references in the film to beginnings and ends, openings and closings, one family member urges us to ‘pensar que somos hermanos. Yo creo que ése es el capítulo que se abre’ [think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. I believe that this is the chapter that is beginning]. However, this discourse of apparent inclusivity and integration hides its real character as a principle of exclusion. By anchoring Malvinas so firmly in patriotism, a syllogism is set in motion: one cannot be patriotic if one does not support the claim for sovereignty.

This popular nationalism is clearly embedded in a Catholic matrix. In fact, Viajes del bicentenario is constructed not so much as a documentary-as-educational-tool as a documentary-as-religious-act. A close relationship is established in the film between national unity and the Catholic faith. This can be seen, for example, in those sequences that show the statue of the Virgin on its journey through every province of the country before arriving to preside over the inauguration of the new monument to the war dead on the Malvinas. The documentary dedicates a sequence of considerable length to the mass that is held as part of that ceremony. We see relatives presenting offerings to the Virgin in the name of the fallen; and we watch while they place rosaries, photos, prayer cards and other objects of religious and sentimental value in a glass box displayed in the cemetery. Indeed, the whole film takes on the form of a religious act of worship in which we witness rituals of great symbolic significance, we participate in moments of reflection accompanied by music, we learn to venerate holy objects and we follow the faithful in their search for spiritual comfort. If how to remember the war and how to recover the Islands are topics for debate, religious faith invites no such conflict or divergence in opinion. The documentary constructs its spectators, and by extension civil society as a whole, as members of the flock. We are given two missions: to keep a candle burning in the name of the dead; and to unite under the banner of restoring Argentina’s sovereignty over the Islands.

To historicise, perhaps

Cardoso’s documentaries on the Malvinas construct an idea of the pueblo and of civil society that is, in comparison to the documentaries produced by children of the disappeared, significantly closer to that of the 1970s. It is certainly true that the continuity they imagine is rather deceptive: phrases such as ‘la patria grande’ and ‘el pueblo’ are taken up again here as if nothing had happened during the period that separates us from the 1970s. One might well ask to what extent the appeal to these discourses is a genuine attempt to historicise and not to invoke, in an ahistorical manner, terms that now float free from their temporal anchoring in a very different context.

At the same time, to represent the war as one more episode in a long-held claim to sovereignty (dating back to 1833) and an even longer struggle against imperialism is to attempt to understand it, not as a sudden and senseless event that came out of the blue, but as an event that can be historicised. Here we may appreciate a convergence with recent shifts in post-dictatorship memory, which has begun to treat the violence of the military regime not as an inexplicable event that arose from nothing but as a continuation and an intensification of characteristics already present in society, as suggested by Luis Alberto Romero and Hugo Vezzetti among others (Vezzetti, 2002, p. 47; Romero, 2002, p. 120). In a similar manner, Viajes del bicentenario attempts to explain what for other films has remained an isolated and inexplicable event: society’s support for a war conducted by the military regime. Instead of sweeping that support under the carpet or attributing it to a case of collective hysteria or delusion, Cardoso turns it into a key episode in the history of popular nationalism in Argentina.

If the valiant, wise and glorious pueblo can arise again as it does in Cardoso’s films, blameless and the repository of the nation’s hopes, it is because – unlike civil society in films about the dictatorship – it has not spent time in the defendants’ dock; and because Cardoso completely severs the noble Malvinas cause from the atrocious regime that started the war of 1982. Cardoso’s documentaries provide disquieting visions of an uncritical nationalism that appears to be gaining force in the present, but in many ways they do not err in their reading of the past and particularly of its nationalist and populist legacy for the present. If nothing else, these films open up alternative ways of remembering the war that are not confined to post-dictatorship denunciations of human rights abuses. As Calveiro reminds us: ‘La repetición puntual de un mismo relato, sin variación, a lo largo de los años, puede representar no el triunfo de la memoria sino su derrota’ [The exact repetition of a single story, without variation, over the years may not represent memory’s triumph but its defeat] (Calveiro, 2005, p. 8).

References

Amado, A. (2004) ‘Órdenes de la memoria y desórdenes de la ficción艐, in N. Domínguez and A. Amado (eds), Lazos de familia: Herencias, cuerpos, ficciones (Buenos Aires: Paidós), pp. 43–82.

Bettini, G. (2003) Recuerdos inventados, available at http://www.gabrielabettini.com/RECUERDOS-INVENTADOS (accessed 16 Oct. 2018).

Blejmar, J. (2012) ‘The truth of autofiction: second-generation memory in post-dictatorship Argentine culture’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.

Calveiro, P. (2005) Política y/o violencia: Una aproximación a la guerrilla de los años 70 (Buenos Aires: Norma).

— (2008) Poder y desaparición (Buenos Aires: Colihue).

Cardoso, J. (2011) ‘La postguerra como campo de batalla’, in No me olvides, available at: http://nomeolvidesorg.com.ar/wpress/?p=613 (accessed 16 Aug. 2018).

Guber, R. (2004) De chicos a veteranos: Memorias argentinas de la guerra de Malvinas (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia).

Jelin, E. (2002) ‘La conflictiva y nunca acabada mirada sobre el pasado’, in M. Franco and F. Levín (eds), Historia reciente: perspectivas y desafíos para un campo en construcción (Buenos Aires: Paidós), pp. 307–40.

Kohan, M. (2004) ‘La apariencia celebrada’, Punto de vista, 27 (78): 24–30.

Lorenz, F. (2012a) Las guerras por Malvinas (1982–2012) (Buenos Aires: Edhasa).

— (2012b) ‘Malvinas invita a pensar un patriotismo en democracia’, Perfil (7 May), pp. 58–9.

Luna, O. (1999) ‘Veterano, pasajero del tiempo’, Página/12 (1 April), available at https://www.pagina12.com.ar/1999/99-04/99-04-02/psico01.htm (accessed 16 Oct. 2018).

Palermo, V. (2007) Sal en las heridas: Las Malvinas en la cultura argentina contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana).

Quieto, L. (2007) Arqueologías (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes).

Ranzani, O. (2005) ‘“La guerra acá no se contó”’, Página/12 (8 Sept.), available at https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/5-370-2005-09-08.html (accessed 16 Oct. 2018).

Romero, L. A. (2002) ‘Recuerdos del Proceso, imágenes de la democracia: Luces y sombras en las políticas de la memoria’ (La Plata: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de La Plata), pp. 113–22, available at http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/32617 (accessed 16 Oct. 2018).

Sarlo, B. (2005) Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).

Vezzetti, H. (2002) Pasado y presente: guerra, dictadura y sociedad en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).

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* This essay was written in 2012 as a reflection on debates surrounding the 30th anniversary of the Malvinas War. For this reason, it does not include a discussion of films produced since that date, and refers to the political context of the Kirchner government in place at the time in Argentina. A Spanish version of this essay was published as ‘Malvinas, sociedad civil y populismo’ in María Angélica Semilla Durán, comp., Relatos de Malvinas: Paradojas en la representación e imaginario nacional (Villa María, Córdoba, Argentina: Eduvim, 2016), pp. 301–31.

1 The question of intergenerational transmission in photography, film and other art works by children of the disappeared is extensively explored in Blejmar (2012).

2 Some of these collages are published by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in a catalogue to accompany an exhibition held in 2007 with the title Arqueologías.

3 From Recuerdos inventados (2003).

4 See http://www.gabrielabettini.com/RECUERDOS-INVENTADOS (accessed 16 October 2018).

5 In this respect, Romero argues: ‘Una cosa es mostrarle a los vecinos de un barrio que una persona de apariencia normal es fehacientemente un torturador; otra muy distinta es su linchamiento’ [It is one thing to demonstrate to those living in a particular neighbourhood that an apparently normal person is irrefutably a torturer; it is another thing entirely to lynch him] (2002, p. 117).

6 Oscar Luna, ex-soldier and psychologist (Luna, 1999).