Curating the Archive: Film, Photography, and Memory
While all of the actors in the play are involved in reenacting either their own experiences or the experiences of their parents, for the purposes of this analysis I will focus on the reenactments of three of the actors because of the range of techniques they display.
The first examples of reenactment I discuss here involve Liza Casullo, the daughter of intellectual parents who were forced into exile in Mexico during the dictatorship because of their involvement as militants in the leftist guerilla group Montoneros. The play begins with a prologue, in which clothes cascade from above onto the stage. Liza falls last onto the pile of clothes. She picks up a pair of jeans, walks toward the audience with her hands in the pockets, and says: “When I was 7, I used to get dressed up in my mum’s clothes and parade around the house, tromping on her dress like a miniature queen. Twenty years later I find a pair of my mum’s Lees from the seventies, and they fit me just right. I put the jeans on and start to walk towards the past” (Arias, 2019, p. 47). In the reenactment of past events, and particularly battle reenactments, there is a great deal of attention given to attire and the importance of either donning original attire, if possible, or refashioning period-specific garments to create the most authentic possible representation of the past. Here, then, is a perfect example of adherence to this technique. Liza puts on her mother’s jeans, and not only is it the original piece of clothing, but the jeans fit perfectly, accentuating the intergenerational bond between mother and daughter and perhaps also the genetic predisposition to inherit certain traits like height and weight from our parents. It should also be noted that all of the actors in the play are the same approximate ages as their parents in the scenes they reenact of them, and this, according to Jordana Blejmar, creates a compelling mirroring effect or superimposition of past and present (2010, p. 8).Sosa has discussed at length the ways in which clothing creates a “strange dislocation of time” in the play; she writes that “something profoundly uncanny emerged from this particular combination of costumes and flesh”
Figure 13.1 My Life After, Lola Arias.
Source: Permission from Lola Arias.
(2014, p. 106) (see Figure 13.1). There are numerous examples of this “combination of costumes and flesh” throughout the play that generate this uncanniness, or in Bill Nichols’s words, the “sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique” (2008, p. 74). In another scene, actors put on their parents’ clothes and tell the audience something about the item of clothing. For example, Mariano says, “These are the original overalls that my dad wore for racing his cars. His name is stitched onto the pocket: Horacio Speratti. My dad was shorter than me, so they’re a bit small” (Arias, 2019, p. 58). But Arias does not let the audience fetishize the original too much, as evidenced by Blas’s statement, “My dad’s cassock got lost, so the theatre gave me this one, which is a bit big for me” (Arias, 2019, p. 58). The play’s archive of props is composed of both original objects and their substitutes. It is in moments like these in the play that Arias reminds spectators humorously that they are in the theater, and that, in spite of the play’s ability to resuscitate the past and generate a sense of the real through objects, photographs, videos, and recordings, it relies heavily on fiction to do so.
This blending of fiction and autobiography can be seen in the following scene, “Childhood Photos,” in which Liza reenacts a newscast as her mother, a news presenter for the program Telenoche in the early 1970s (see Figure 13.2). Before Liza begins the reenactment, stills of the newscast with her mother and her co-presenter are projected on a screen midstage. Liza tells the audience about the incredible double life that her mother had led before her parents were forced into exile: “When she was young, my mum
Figure 13.2 Liza Casullo reading the news in My Life After, Lola Arias.
Source: Permission from Lola Arias.
had two faces.
One was that of a Montonero guerrilla, but the other was the pretty girl who read the news” (Arias, 2019, p. 54). Liza further explains that the news from that time period was often censored, and that she wasn’t sure what her mother read on television, but that she would read newspapers from that period and imagine her mother reading the headlines (Arias, 2019, p. 54). After this preview about her mother, Carla and Pablo help Liza dress up as a news presenter, and they sit her down in front of a screen where she pretends to read the news. At one point, a photographic image of her mother, taken directly from the footage of her as a newscaster, is projected over Liza, and their faces, perfectly superimposed, seem to collapse the past and present, creating a spectral effect. As Blejmar observes (2010), this technique of superimposition is reminiscent of Lucila Quieto’s photographic work “Archaeologies of Absence,” in which Quieto projected photographic images of parents disappeared during dictatorship onto their children, whoThe Body as Time Machine 263 were seated between the projector and a blank wall, to create the impression that the children formed part of the original image with their parents (p. 8). Quieto’s work, much like the reenactment scenes in Arias’s play, creates the sensation that the children are being inserted into the past, but only partially, because the agency of the children in the present is too great, whether because they are foregrounded in the photographs, in Quieto’s case, or because they are literally embodied and performing onstage, as in Arias’s case.In the next scene, titled “Exile,” Liza reads from a script describing the events leading up to and following her parents’ exile. The premise here is that the actors are creating a movie about Liza’s parents, so while Liza assumes the role of director, the rest of the actors are in charge of the lights, camera work, and playing the parts of Liza’s parents. Let us return briefly to Arias’s assertion that none of the actors in the play can be replaced.
In spite of establishing this autobiographical imperative, Arias is delightfully carefree in allowing actors to play the roles of others within the framework of the play, as this movie scene demonstrates. This insistence on roleplaying in the framework of the play has implications for how notions of truth and legitimacy have evolved in Argentina’s post-dictatorship period. As Elizabeth Jelin notes, “if legitimacy for expressing memory of a painful past is socially assigned to those who suffered repression on their own bodies or those of their kin, this symbolic authority can easily (consciously or unconsciously) slip into a monopolistic claim on the meaning and content of memory and truth” (2009, p. 200). When performers engage in imaginative role-playing of others on stage, they defy the rules of autobiography and are allowed, for a moment, to interpret historical narratives regardless of whether or not they experienced the events portrayed onstage. Broadening access to diverse roles and subject positions with regard to the past may open up “symbolic space for a reinterpretation and resignification of the meaning of the conveyed experiences” (Jelin, 2009, p. 200). What is at stake here is the “construction of a more democratic, inclusive, and civic engagement with the past” (Jelin, 2009, p. 200). Arias’s work offers an example of how theater may gesture toward this possibility.Liza reads from the script, divided into three scenes—the first taking place in an apartment in Buenos Aires (pre-exile), the second during exile in an apartment in Mexico (during exile), and the third in a different apartment in Buenos Aires (post-exile)—and gives the actors playing her parents instructions:
Blas: We have to leave the country.
Carla: Why?
Blas: Someone sent me a death threat.
Liza: My mum blinks.
Carla blinks.
Blas: Will you marry me?
Liza: She makes a face like a robot. He walks over to her. Close-up: they kiss for seven and a half minutes (Arias, 2019, p.
60).Upon witnessing this scene, one asks what kind of movie this would be. A thriller? A dictatorial melodrama? The text is dramatic and suspenseful, and yet under Liza’s directorial control, there is a delayed response between her enunciation of the text and the actors’ movement. This delay in action lends the actors’ movements a distanced, even ironic feel. Affectively, this would seem to contradict a common objective of reenactment, not only to replicate the historical event accurately but also to resurrect the emotion of the original moment through reproducing the past event. The goal of generating closeness and emotional identification with the past is complicated in this case because children are reenacting the personal and often traumatic experiences of their parents. In Arias’s work, the intimacy generated by family connection is in some ways the premise rather than the aim of reenactment. In a complex way, here, reenactment may even serve to create distance with the past, especially under the directorial control of children, eager, in some cases, to provide testimony of their parents’ experiences but at the same time to foreground their own agency in the present. Approaches that focus on the practice of reenactment in the context of the arts are perhaps more likely to explore the effects and implications of consciously creating distance through reenactment. In dance, for example, Timmy de Laet (2017) suggests that “while dance reenactment might share with its more popular counterparts the appeal to sensory immediacy, it turns the format into an artistic strategy that exploits, rather than covers up, historical distance” (p. 1). Arias plays with this distancing technique in the play’s many “remakes,” alternating between creating playful, ironic, yet distanced portrayals of the past and creating emotionally moving and intimate depictions of events that seem to fuse past and present experience.The end of this scene documents the return of Liza and her family to Buenos Aires and Liza’s first memory of the city.
Here Liza leaves her directorial role and reenacts the scene herself:Liza: Now me!
Close-up of Liza looking at the camera.
Liza: Scene 3. 1984.
Interior. Apartment in the Once neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.
This is me when I was 3, standing in front of a blind. I look through the slats and see my parents’ city for the first time. Close-up of my ear.
Liza stands in profile and the camera does a close-up of her ear (Arias, 2019, p. 61).
This scene is important because it marks one of the few times in the play where children reenact their own past experiences instead of those of their parents. Liza’s first-hand memory here complicates the possibility of her identifying exclusively with the second generation, often tasked with reflecting on their parents’ lived experiences. In this last scene, Liza speaks in first person, reciting her memory and then reenacting it. It is an evocative example of reenactment as bodily memory and archive: on the one hand, she acts out a childhood memory onstage, and on the other, she contributes to a body of knowledge on the past.