Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with footage from an ethnographic film experiment about the life of a convicted military officer in post-authoritarian Argentina who remains silent about the perpetrated violence. The project searches how to provoke visuals that actually expose the violence through its absence.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper deals with footage from an ongoing ethnographic film experiment about the life of a convicted military officer in post-authoritarian Argentina. To remain faithful to his stubborn, yet deeply uncomfortable, silence about the crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship (1976-1983), has been an ongoing ethical and epistemological challenge. Imagining the military pact of silence therefore prompts alternative ways of ethnographic representation. But how to provoke visuals of silence that actually expose the violence through its absence? The film experiment looks for ways to depict the absence of violence in his life without reproducing denial or justification of the perpetration. Analytical awareness that our (audiovisual) descriptions of violence are basically inadequate (Crapanzano 2010) is key to the project. In philosophy this inadequacy of language is properly known as sous rature (e.g. under erasure). It involves crossing out a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. The word is "inadequate yet necessary" (Derrida 1976). It means that there is no better word found. Erasure here does not mark a lost presence; erasure rather represents the potential impossibility of presence altogether (ibid). It is thus not the particular signs that are placed under erasure, but the whole system of signification. The workings of cinema could be seen as acts of progressive erasure: one image and one sound superseding the previous one creating an impression of fractional removal (Galpin 2017). The ethnographic film experiment can therefore ultimately be seen as a film under erasure.