Perpetrators in films about Southern Cone dictatorships: from archetype to intimate circle

Abstract

In the filmography portraying the Brazilian dictatorship, the characters of torturers and civil collaborators usually fit into well-defined archetypes of antagonists and supporting roles. The article traces a cartography of these archetypes in a corpus of Brazilian fictional and documentary works made since the democratization, identifying the figures and nuances at stake: the truculent torturer; the torturer with signs of conscience; the businessman sponsoring the repression; the physician covering violations; the priest aligned with the regime. Regardless of these nuances, in all the cases the guilts and complicities are circumscribed within the formulas of crystallized archetypes, relegated to a microcosm of "villains" distant from the social fabric. A second movement of the analysis proposes the comparison between this general panorama and two specific documentaries: 70 y Pico (Mariano Corbacho, Argentina, 2016) and Adriana's Pact (Lissette Orozco, Chile, 2017). Both are directed by descendants of individuals linked to the repressive structure of the dictatorships of their respective countries. In the way of the subjective documentary that investigates the interfaces between family memory and history, these films shed light on less obvious characters in the orbit of repression; common persons that integrate a gray zone extremely close, where the social support to the authoritarianism is rooted.