What Lies in the Gutter of a Traumatic Past: Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood], Animated Comics, and the Representation of Violence
Independent Researcher, La Crosse, WI 54601, USA
Humanities 2018, 7(1), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010022
Received: 11 December 2017 / Revised: 1 March 2018 / Accepted: 1 March 2018 / Published: 6 March 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wounded: Studies in Literary and Cinematic Trauma)
This essay focuses on the animated comics in the representation of violence in Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood] (2011), a cinematic narrative of the seventies in Argentina. Drawing from animation and comic studies and adopting a formalist approach, the following analysis proposes ways in which the remediation of comics in the film underscores traumatic aspects of state terror and revolutionary violence and the problematic intergenerational transmission of memory of the 1970s–1980s militancy. Specifically, I comment on how the switch from photographic film to the animated frames draws attention to the blank space between the frames and thereby hints at the traumatic in what is left out, repressed, or silenced. While the gaps resist the forward motion of closure, paradoxically they allow for the suture of the frames/fragments in a postmemorial narrative, although not without a trace of the traumatic. Finally, extending the concept of the gutter as a liminal space, I analyze the connection between the animated scenes representing violence and the testimonial and documentary elements placed in the closing titles, a connection that asserts the autobiographical component of the film and enacts the conflictive character of intergenerational memory.
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Keywords:
comics; violence; Argentine film; children of the disappeared
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MDPI and ACS Style
Ghiggia, M. What Lies in the Gutter of a Traumatic Past: Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood], Animated Comics, and the Representation of Violence. Humanities 2018, 7, 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010022
AMA Style
Ghiggia M. What Lies in the Gutter of a Traumatic Past: Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood], Animated Comics, and the Representation of Violence. Humanities. 2018; 7(1):22. https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010022
Chicago/Turabian StyleGhiggia, María. 2018. "What Lies in the Gutter of a Traumatic Past: Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood], Animated Comics, and the Representation of Violence" Humanities 7, no. 1: 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010022
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