Digital Mimicry and Visual Tropes: Some Images from Argentina

Abstract

The accounts of historiography published by Roland Barthes and Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the linguistic devices that underlay historiography’s representations and discourses.¹ Both embedded in narrative structures, history and fiction were found to resemble one another, as “whatever the differences between their immediate contents (real events and imaginary events, respectively), their ultimate content is the same: the structures of human time.”² This chapter aims to extend—and at some points, revise—the groundwork laid by Barthes and White in order to focus on specifically visual, rather than linguistic, tropes that may be used to construct a reflexive idea of temporality in films.³ I have taken particular inspiration from Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the intrinsically reflexive nature of narration and of the mutual borrowings between fictional and historical narratives, adapting his theorizations to embrace film, a medium to which Ricoeur rarely refers in his work. This development is a natural one, given cinema’s emergence at the turn of the century—to borrow Mary Ann Doane’s description—as “a privileged machine for the representation of temporality,” as a result of its “ability to inscribe movement through time.”⁴