Prividera's Film 'M'

M
Nicolás Prividera’s film M (2007) is the result of a long investigative process whose goal was to understand the circumstances of his mother, Marta Sierra’s disappearance in 1976. The director adopts a first person perspective and carries out his search like a detective. In reflexive, metacinematic style, Prividera’s process of research and filming take center stage. Throughout the film, the detective-son not only investigates and uncovers, but also assumes the emotional baggage that being the son of a disappeared mother implies. To research his mother’s death, he turns to human rights organizations as resources but constantly runs into bureaucratic red tape. When he turns to the testimonies of those who knew his mother personally, their

(1936), in which Rosa tells Quentin the story of his family: “His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts.” From the onset, then, Prividera longs to explore a community—a narrative community—because, for him, searching for “echoes” of his mother is part of a process whose goal is to reconstitute a community in which he can subsume individuality, socialize his pain, and, in Benjaminian terms, generate ‘experience.’ Even though that community no longer exists, Prividera still pursues it as a method of questioning the society in which he lives. We clearly observe this when one of his mother’s comrades prefers not to bear witness on camera; the director expresses his discontent, claiming that bearing witness has nothing to do with desire, that it is not an individual decision, but rather an obligation she has to society. Later, he adds: “How could I not be angry? We should all be angry,” implying that despite his efforts, impotence and anger will sometimes

The directors are aware that they must speak from a different place than their parents did, that is, from a narrative community in crisis. This crisis is inexorably linked to a historical shift in the status of the subject. Indeed, the way in which subjects were produced in the revolutionary moment is quite different than how they are produced today. If, in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a subject meant situating oneself in the world and recognizing oneself as a historical subject, that is, as a protagonist who could potentially effect change in the world, today utopian narratives have all but died. Today’s subjects, like these filmmakers, have instead turned inward toward personal fictions. The problem is no longer the individual’s discontent with society (as in the 1960s and 1970s), but rather the individual’s discontent with his or her own individuality. We can therefore begin to understand the dichotomy between the two generations that appear in these films: one fought for utopia and clearly saw itself as a protagonist of history; the other, devoid of master narratives, can only cite those master narratives in the form of personal fictions crafted at an unbridgeable distance from the revolutionary moment. The representational vision of the