Affective Moments in the Films of Martel, Carri, and Puenzo by Inela Selimović

Author:Inela Selimović
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Ghostly Pasts and Contested Silence in Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda: El médico alemán (2013)

Wakolda: El médico alemán (2013) uniquely tackles socio-individual memory by way of having the featured family members engage in selective silence. Silence emerges in an affective way in Wakolda. It is a radically different kind of silence, for instance, from the one José Ortega y Gasset classically recounts.97 Puenzo tackles this form of silence by focusing on a close-knit Argentine-German family, whose interpersonal openness and extroversion gradually fade. All family members grow considerably more quiet, perturbed, and vulnerable, as they acquire an unexpected German acquaintance. In tracing both voluntary and involuntary betrayals within the represented familial microcosm, the filmmaker also affectively remediates the influx of fugitive Nazis to Argentina prior to and immediately after WWII.98

Aesthetic, journalistic, and scholarly takes on the complex historical ties between Nazism and Argentina are hardly scarce.99 Thematically, Puenzo’s Wakolda is part of such representations, as she fictitiously sets up her film story from within a Nazi-welcoming community near Bariloche in 1960. In this fictitious filmic narrative, imbued with factual hues regarding the represented era, Wakolda appears to focus on a politics of unaccountable social quiet against the need for ethically based outspokenness regarding the Nazi presence in Argentina during the post WWII era. Unlike Raúl de la Torre’s Pobre mariposa (1986), which head-on allegorizes Argentina’s response to the fall of Nazi Germany in the 1940s from within Buenos Aires, Puenzo subtly portrays the social quiet and perplexity toward the Nazi integrations into Bariloche’s “everyday life”100 in the 1960s. The filmmaker carries out this project by fictionalizing the whereabouts of one of the key political figures of the Third Reich—Josef Mengele. Inspired by Puenzo’s novel Wakolda (2009), the plot of which is indeed significantly different,101 the film fictionalizes a time when the real (historical) traces of Mengele had arguably vanished in Argentina and the official search for fugitive Nazis had intensified globally.102 Known notoriously as the “Angel of Death,” who is featured as Helmut Gregor in the film, Mengele fled Germany for South America in 1949—that is, four years after the Nazi regime collapsed.103

By situating the film’s narrative in 1960, Wakolda imaginatively attempts to revisit what might have occurred to Mengele—and, by extension, perhaps to other fugitive Germans with strong sympathies towards the Nazi regime—while in hiding across South America. This attempt inevitably brings Puenzo’s film closer to contemporary debates on the politics of memory (inter- and trans-generational) in Argentina, especially since the film debuted during the Cristina Kirchner administration, a time when memory was increasingly “a matter of the state.”104 Yet Wakolda stems from a radically different vantage point, historically and mnemonically. Breaking away from those thematically congruent, even if discursively different, filmic narratives on memory that emerged at the outset of the twenty-first century, which have abundantly revisited the 1970s’ impact on the present, Puenzo cuts further back into the mid-twentieth century to address a ghostly past of equally challenging modes of repression. Puenzo’s film does not necessarily seek to voice survivors’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.