Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the past in Albertina Carri's Los Rubios

‘Historical memory today is not what it used to be’, states cultural critic Andreas Huyssen in the opening paragraph of his recent book on historical trauma and the politics of memory. The title of the book, Present Pasts (2003), underlines the particularity of a time increasingly out of joint, in which the past has become confounded with the present. Echoing widespread unease among progressive intellectuals, Huyssen is positive and yet anxious about the political and ethical consequences of such postmodern temporal disruptions. While history, once a powerful vehicle to create a lasting link between community and nation through the monumentalization of a common past, keeps losing credibility and political weight, we are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of historical fictions fed by a museummachine that turns everything into signs of an omnivorous past. The vociferous condemnation of history is thus paradoxically accompanied by the irresistible seduction of the archive and its endless supply of stories of human achievement and suffering, ceaselessly recycled and exploited by the market and the media (Huyssen, 2003: 5). Out of the ruins of conventional history emerge, multiple and contradictory, the fractured discourses of memory. Particularly noticeable among them are those accounts dealing with personal and traumatic experiences, available to the public through countless autobiographies, diaries and all sorts of testimonial accounts. Literature, art, film, as well as photography have all provided their own renderings of the traumatic and the confessional. The globalization of the experience of the Holocaust as the dominant hermeneutical model with which to explain different historical experiences of exceptional violence is another defining feature of the new cultures of remembrance. The questions raised by a present out of joint are both multifaceted and politically pressing. What kind of politics of memory is possible today? How can one maintain an ethical stand and a claim for justice when historical truth is being questioned as such? What kind of political responses are possible in societies in which spectacular images of pain and violence have become part of a mass media-driven circus? And, moreover, how can the future be imagined in a culture transfixed by fetishized versions of the past and numbed by the unlimited promises of consumption? These and other related questions are being asked in many regions across the world, and are particularly relevant in those countries where the arrival of late capitalism and global culture was preceded by periods of exceptional violence and oppressive political regimes. In the Southern Cone, the discrediting of history and the mediatic explosion of memory coincided with the end of bloody military dictatorships and the beginning