Transnational Memories and Post-Dictatorship Cinema

"Tatiana Signorelli Heise's monograph on post-dictatorship cinema in Argentina, Brazil and Chile convincingly demonstrates the importance of memory studies in understanding how cinema functions as a powerful agent for remembering, processing remembrances, and constructing mnemonic discourses about the horrors of life under dictatorships. This book is also a dizzying display of scholarship at the crossroads of cinema and memory studies as it moves beyond a national framework for remembering, adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary and comparative approach to film."

- Daniel Biltereyst, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Ghent University, Belgium

This book investigates the role that cinemas in Brazil, Chile and Argentina have played in reconstructing memories of the most recent military dictatorships. These countries have undergone a distinctive post-dictatorship experience marked by unprecedented debates about human rights violations, the silencing of victims and accountability for state crimes. Meanwhile, politically committed filmmakers have created an extensive body of work addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath. This book employs a transnational and comparative approach to examine the strategies that these filmmakers have used to render visible what has remained hidden, to make reappear what has disappeared, and to reinterpret historical actors and events from a contemporary perspective. Through attention to the specific properties of the medium and the socio-historical context in which films have been made, it describes the different cinematic modes of remembering that emerged in response to wider memory frameworks in South America.

Tatiana Signorelli Heise is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow's School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She has published on political cinema, trauma studies, documentary activism and the sociology of film. She is a frequent collaborator with the Havana-Glasgow Film Festival in Glasgow and the IberoDocs Festival in Edinburgh. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, an MA in the Sociology of Contemporary Culture from the University of York's Sociology Department and an MPhil in the Sciences of Communication from the University of São Paulo. She has worked for an environmental and animal welfare organisation in the Amazon region of Brazil and has a prior career as a journalist in São Paulo.