Abstract
This article proposes the following two research questions: how do Chilean audiovisual documentaries aesthetically and narratively produce images of the recent past in Chile? How do they shape that past? In particular, we ask about the relationship between history and memory in four documentaries about the military coup and the traumatic consequences it had for hundreds of Chilean men and women. The documentaries are Para no olvidar (Ignacio Agüero, 1981); La flaca Alejandra (Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard, 1994), Estadio nacional (Carmen Luz Parot, 2002) and Allende, mi abuelo Allende (Marcia Tambutti Allende, 2015). Our theoretical-methodological approach imbricates perspectives from the field of communication with those of aesthetics and documentary. We recognize documentary films as agents of mediation between spectators and images, such a form of mediation that makes the past present, visible and audible. The type of mediation we have called interpretative pacts, and we identify three types that imply different emphases on history, memory, or the interweaving of both.
Keywords
interpretive pacts; Chilean documentary; history; memory; dictatorship