What remains of the dictatorial archive:

the survival of images of Chilean dictatorship, 1989-2019

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of access to images – photographic and audiovisual – produced and prohibited during the civil-military dictatorship nevertheless published or released during the post-dictatorship. In this sense, we understand that the images of the dictatorship are part of what remains of the dictatorship in visual terms, and that their re-readings, from 1989 onward, allow us to address the problem of the political power of images in our recent past, to be able to compose, from there, a form of resistance to oblivion. For this reason, we are particularly interested in the film Imagen Latente (1987) by Pablo Perelman, the documental series Chile, las imagenes prohibidas, broadcast on TVN in 2013, and the photobook Chile from Within by Susan Meiselas, published during 1990 and reissued in

Chile in 2015. Such choice corresponds to a double criterion: on the one hand, they are cultural productions that circulate from the documental to the fictional through the images of the dictatorial context and, on the other, they propose various layers of reading and public that, as a whole (film, series and photobook) reach broader audiences to impact the imagination and social memory of Chilean post-dictatorship. Our hypothesis maintains that the historical reconstruction of the post-dictatorship, based on a truncated archive, has implications for the construction of the archive itself and, therefore, for recent memory in Chile, and consequently for the identity and politics of society in the country, especially its cultural productions. Indeed, the images of the post-dictatorship – audiovisual and photographic – allow us to access and complicate the consequences of the dictatorial trauma and the lack of access to certain images, disputing the traditional forms of composition of an “official” archive.