Thrilling Histories: Replaying the Past in Genre Films

Abstract

As detailed in the introduction, Beatriz Sarlo, Nelly Richard, and other scholars have underscored the connection between contemporary media’s unheralded penetration of daily life, the invidious growth of consumer culture, and the waning of historical sensibilities. In countries like Argentina and Chile where the dominant neoliberal politics have consecrated the work of truth commissions as the sole, official means to deal with the dictatorial past, these intellectuals (along with activists and artists) have worried publicly about transmitting the lessons of recent history to a younger generation more concerned about watching old 1970s reruns on retro cable channels or downloading the latest video games. In Brazil, efforts to recall the repressive actions of the military regime (1964–85) have been even more difficult. As noted by Leslie A. Payne, until the 1990s there was an “absence of institutional mechanisms for addressing past human rights violations” and human-rights activists have found it difficult to “devise creative methods of overcoming security-force and societal silence.”¹ While Payne argues that the Brazilian media has not sensationalized the past, film scholar Luiz Zanin Oricchio suggests that the rise of an individualistic (vs. collective) and generally depoliticized ethos in the 1990s made it difficult to make films about power dynamics and to discuss the years of dictatorship in substantive ways.²