In Tabula rasa, Perel returns to the ex-ESMA, but this time to record, between July 2012 and January 2013, the demolition of one of its buildings, the so-called “módulos de acomodación” (accommodation modules) where soldiers slept. The building was demolished to create a museum and memorial about the Guerra de las Malvinas (The Malvinas War, 1982). Using fixed shots and diegetic sounds characteristic of Perel’s cinema, the film opens with a working table and a computer that shows an image of the site. This first shot is crucial and marks an important distinction with El Predio insofar as it situates, from the very beginning, the filmmaker as a researcher and active witness whose job is to document destruction. From then on, Perel recovers the …show more content…
Memory sites are alive while they are discussed and intervened by everyday practices. Some critics, like Hugo Vezzetti, criticized the division of the buildings among different human rights organizations and argued that the site did not achieve its objective of engaging civil society “in the creation of a material artifact of memory that is national in scope [and that generates] knowledge about the past.” Yet even if some critics and citizens were disappointed about the ways in which the ESMA site was used, almost no one was aware of the demolition that Perel’s film shows. In a dossier on Perel’s work, for example, Adrián Gorelik writes about how surprised he was when he watched the film: “I don’t think I’m the only one who found out about the demolition by watching the film . . . or who learned that the objective of the demolition was the creation of a museum and memorial about the Malvinas War.” According to Gorelik, Perel’s position regarding the destruction is very clear. He is shocked. The director thus shares his aesthetically austere amazement at this historic site whose story, he feels, demands to be told. Perel films the destruction by concentrating on the bulldozers and in tedious and long shots of the production of rubble. By the end of the film, piles of rubble accumulate. Some of them are packed up, making it such that one cannot help but wonder if they are going to be exhibited somewhere on ESMA’s
Monuments and museums are arenas of public history and for the formation and articulation of identities and narratives.[1] Decisions taken as to the formation of museums and the selection, display and organisation of exhibits are influenced by criteria which are not necessarily politically neutral; these may especially involve devices of political elites to emphasise aspects of communal togetherness and thus exert control over communities.[2] Memory and commemoration of past events and generations is by its nature a political and contested act, especially in sharply divided societies.[3] It is no surprise that recently established governments and states should particularly concern themselves with the production of such forms of festivities, commemorations, and monuments.[4] As rulers of a sharply divided society, unionist elites in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of its eventful creation in 1920-1 had particular reasons to concern themselves, and did concern themselves, with such strategies of power.[5] The integration of the province's Catholic minority may have been, or may have been felt to be, beyond the rulers of Northern Ireland;[6] but this very fact heightened the importance of preserving the highest possible degree of political unity under unionist hegemony among the Protestant majority.[7]
...teenth century in South America. His articulation of the disastrous and catastrophic event was detailed, strong, and emotionally invoking. It compelled me to think about how things could have been. What if the viceroy had fully succeeded? What if he had never tried to change Lima’s political, social, or architectural structure? And how might that have affected such a cultural epicenter of that time period? He gives the audience an opportunity to nearly relive the event, but also experience a part of the event aside from the natural disasters that were just as effective to the people of Lima, their future, and the future of their city.
La Operacion is a documentary film that talks about the massive sterilization campaign that occur in Puerto Rico and left one-third of the Puerto Ricans woman population sterilize. The documentary is complete in a sense that it shows maps, data, people speaking of their personal experience, but the most important aspect of it that it shows footage of the surgery. The repetition of the surgery scene gives an idea that this surgery was a common practice of everyday life in Puerto Rico.
Mexico, once home to ancient cultures like the Maya and Aztec which ruled vast territory expanding from present day South America all the way up north to present day western United States now reduced to roughly half its size. The cause of this dramatic loss of land was contributed to the expansion of the United States and secession of southern provinces, now Central America. The loss of land not only affected Mexico’s presence of power but also affected hundreds of thousands of native people. This was just the beginning of what would come to be known as the land struggle and the fight for land grants, something the United States government would not acknowledge nor recognize.
This analysis will explore these cinematic techniques employed by Pontecorvo within a short sequence and examine their effects on our understanding of the issues and themes raised within the film.
“Poems differ as much as the people who write and read them, or as much as music and movies do” (Mays 846). Poems are the most difficult form of writing to analyze because they can be interpreted differently. Poems are composed of figurative language. Many times poems can be overanalyzed or not analyzed enough which could lead one to obtain an idea out of the poem that the writer never intended to provide.
History has a strange way of coming back around when it comes to human civilization. It has been said repeatedly that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. However, just because there is a potential for danger in the future, this does not mean that humanity must ignore what once was. History is normally remembered through what is known as a memorial. When a memorial is put into physical representation, it is then known as a monument.
When the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 rocked New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C., the word “tragedy” was used on a grandiose level around the world. For the people who lived close enough to experience the events first-hand, they may not have even called it a tragedy; perhaps they called it a misfortune, retaliation, lack of a strong government, unreal, or maybe even rebirth. In the coming years after the attacks, everything between standing united as a nation to declaring a war had flourished; but how has that left us - the land that has no distinct ethnicity - feel about each other? Why is it that fear is usually missing in the affective mnemonics of memorial sites, which, after all, are signifiers of some of the most horrific violence in human history? Do memorials dedicated to these attacks bring us together in terms of understanding, or is it just continual collective grief? This paper will cover the global complexity of the 9/11 attacks, the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial in Liberty State Park, NJ, and factors and theories that memorials do influence a sense of complexity. The ground of public memory is always in motion, shifting with the tectonics of national identity. I chose the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial as my topic of observation as I, personally, visit a few times throughout the year to pay respects to people I personally knew who perished in the attacks to the World Trade Center. I was in the 5th grade when this happened, and had absolutely no clue what was going on until my father did not return home until two days later with a bandage wrapped around his head and his devastating recollection of what happened just before he arrived to his job. The emotions that I feel within myself compared to others will...
Professor LaFleur in lecture on November 11 mentioned, “Museums were extremely powerful in shaping the way people saw the world” (Lecture 007). This same reasoning is why Fusco and Pena embark on this ethnographic journey. By displaying “A Savage Performance”, we see that they are subverting the past notions of ethnography. Ethnographic museums as the ones Sara Baartman was displayed in served a purpose and created a certain kind of discourse. “Discourse do not simply reflect reality, or innocently designate objects; rather they constitute them in specific contexts according to particular relations of power” (Lidchi, p. 185). Lidchi goes on to say that ethnography was created by the dominant culture in the imperial c...
Duncan’s (1991) analysis of western museums is defined through the theme of “durable objects” as a criterion to judge the heritage of American and European art as a ritual of the modern state. In this manner western art museums are built like “temples” as a symbolic and figurative representation of greatness of western culture throughout the world: “[They] are more like the traditional ceremonial monuments that museum buildings often emulate—classical temples” (Duncan 90). This interpretation of American/European museums defines a dominant source of cultural heritage that ritualizes
The Holocaust Memorial Museum was built to honor those who were directly affected by the Holocaust. “Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never” Elie Wiesel (“Holocaust Encyclopedia”). While some believe the building of the museum was a political act for President Carter, others were very optimistic of the outcome. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was a marvelous achievement for this country and those who dedicated their time and effort to this wonderful building. This museum not only has an interesting history and opening, but exhibits inside are nothing in comparison to the statistics of this grand foundation.
Engelhardt, I. (2002). A Topography of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust at Dachau and Buchenwald in comparison with Auschwitz, Yad Vashem and Washington DC. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes.
Post-mortem photography was, and still is, seen as a psychologically unhealthy practice, even when such photographs are historical documentations. Photographs taken during the liberation of concentration camps in the 1940's happen to be some of the most controversial, yet they are crucial to remembering the great tradgedy. Some opponents against post-mortem photography believe that atrocity photographs taken from the Holocaust should be hidden from view as they do nothing to honor the memory of the victims. The photographs by these opponents are seen only as morbid, without any historical value. But despite post-mortem photography's unpopularity in the 20th century—and still today—it was an essential tool in the documentation of the Holocaust and its victims. Therefore, post-mortem photography is not only vital to remembering and educating about the disaster, but also to remembering the individuals which memorial photography attempts to preserve.
nos presenta en uno de los planos narrativos una visión que resulta "realista" y espontánea, al cruzar de plano nos encontramos con una versión sobrenatural de los mismos eventos; a pesar de ello, el author
Mu¨ller, J. W. 2002,Introduction: the power of memory, the memory of power and the power over memory, in: J.W. Mu¨ller (Ed.) Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, pp. 1–35 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press).