Liliana Ruth Feierstein: Project Description

The Child’s View of Terror and Its Treatment in the Post-Dictatorship Society of Argentina.

Fantasy experiences arise primarily during childhood, at a time when the borders between reality and fiction are still blurred. In a world where anxieties cannot yet be coped with rationally, the “magical,” or “supernatural,” blends easily with the everyday. Freud himself characterized the uncanny as a childlike remainder in our psychic apparatus. For precisely this reason, the experiences of the generation that spent its childhood under a dictatorship are different from those who were adults at that time. More than fifteen years ago, a new movement of young filmmakers in Argentina who grew up during the period of dictatorship began to reflect upon the collective traumas of their generation in their films. In films such as  Kamchatka, ALUAP, Líneas de teléfonos, Hermanas, Los Rubios, M., or Historias cotidianas, the experiences of state violence are presented from the child’s (or adolescent’s) perspective. The “resonance” of social events, as the children experienced them in games, songs, or interpretations, is addressed, for example, in the short film ALUAP (Paula), which refers to the metaphor of Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass, a figure that permeated Argentine childhood and represented that experience in the “realm of terror,” a world of nonsense, arbitrariness, and nightmare. My project is positioned at the intersection between psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and film studies. It will pursue the traces and marks left behind by the childhood experience of dictatorship, and it will present possibilities for critically coming to terms with these remnants.