Tabula Raas The Guerra De Las Malvinas

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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

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