Iconic Fictions: Narrating Recent Argentine History in Post-2000 Second-Generation Films

Abstract

This article examines a recent trend in Argentine post-dictatorial cinema that has not received sufficient critical attention: post-2000 fictional films by second-generation film-makers that go back to a child’s or a teenager’s perspective, and to an ‘archaic’ pre-1990s format. By focusing on a political thriller that I find paradigmatic of this recent trend, Gastón Biraben’s Cautiva/Captive (2005), I argue that these films (which I call ‘iconic fictions’) should not be read as additional examples of contemporary second-generation narratives. Instead, I propose that their formal exception attests to an intra-generational tension regarding the representation of recent history (in particular, regarding the representation of 1970s political activism). In these films, the use of fiction (and of a child’s or a teenager’s perspective) allows for a predominance of iconicity over indexicality – a predominance that entails crucial ideological connotations for contemporary Argentina and that demands a re-examination of the efficacy of representing history through a child’s or a teenager’s lens.