Malvinas una representación inconclusa (Malvinas: An Inconclusive Representation), an essay written by Lara Segade for the Argentine film magazine Kilómetro 111, starts off by exploring the ways in which storytelling – both fictional and testimonial, written and visual – has explored the Malvinas Islands (what we know as the Falklands) long before the war between Argentina and the UK started in 1982. In examining the ways in which they have been perceived through time, Segade uncovers their dual nature: they are both an Argentinian territory and an image that is foreign and hidden because of their geographic distance. The first time this distance acquires tangibility, she writes, is in the correspondences certain actors who were related to the islands kept, seeking to describe the irresolute relationship they have, to this day, with their “legitimate proprietors”. This distance is both geographic and emotional. In particular, Segade considers a letter written by Augusto Laserre, the then Head of the National Navy, who describes the frightening solitude of the islands, where “a silence never interrupted” reigns, recalling the words of Charles Darwin in his A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World: The Voyage of the Beagle: “Una tierra ondulada, de aspecto desolado y triste” (“A wavy territory, of a desolate and sad aspect”) (Segade, 80).
The war began over a hundred years after Laserre wrote this letter and left around a thousand dead and the islands’ sovereignty unresolved. Some of the survivors and veterans of the war, now in their fifties and sixties, are actors, landscapers, gardeners, painters, and police officers. These are the protagonists of Argentine artist/filmmaker Lola Arias’s first feature Theatre of War (Teatro de guerra). The Berlinale, where the film had its world premiere and was awarded both the CICAE Award and the Award of the Ecumenical Jury, describes it as a “staged documentary in which Argentine and British veterans of the Malvinas conflict encounter each other”. In the process of gathering these men to recall, reenact and thus re-signify their war-tinged past, her work remedies the solitude described by Laserre in his letter.
Both the words spoken by the men and the way in which they are spoken are “desolate and sad”, as Charles Darwin writes in his memoir, because they exude the experience of having faced death, of having perpetuated it, and of having chosen not to stop it. One of the British veterans describes a moment in which his gang invaded an Argentine trench, stealing their food. “To this day, I’ve never touched a tin of corned beef because it reminds me of killing people,” he relates. A flag, a pair of boots, a song, a poem, a blanket, an image of clouds that resemble the shape of the islands – these appear as fragments of memory that then give way to theatrical and musical representations of the battlefield. The movement between these instances has a fluidity that arises from both the disfiguration of memory, and the fear of losing it. When Marcelo, one of the Argentine veterans, describes the aftermath of the war in his life, he says, “I was afraid that the medication would erase my memories”.
Arias takes the testimony of Lou, one of the British veterans, as the film’s central narrative. The precise moment at which an Argentine who spoke English died in his arms becomes hazy, disfigured by time and trauma. As part of the symbolic make-up of the film, water plays an important role in that disfiguration, of both the islands and memory. It is no coincidence, then, that a swimming pool is the film’s setting. Lou repeats the anecdote several times, and each time it is different. In choosing to relay his narrative in this way, Arias seems to imply that the details of the story are not the true subject of interest: what finally lingers is the effect it has on its narrator. Theatre of War only contains one short excerpt of found footage of the islands. It thus becomes clear that Arias’s interest does not reside in their symbolic landscape, but rather in their human landscape, which is nevertheless intrinsically political.
The protagonists of Theatre of War, Lou Armour, David Jackson, Rubén Otero, Sukrim Rai, Gabriel Sagastume and Marcelo Vallejo, are introduced to us against the same blank wall. They list their names, ages, ranks, roles in combat and current profession to the camera. Arias films their faces frontally, with a desire that seems to seek confrontation through transparency. Then the camera turns, opening up to a wider frame that reveals the artificiality of movie making. There’s a white studio fabric, the sound recorder is present, and the microphone often appears hanging at the top of the frame. Against this backdrop, the men start reenacting certain events of the war. Later they sing about it. At another stage, they chose costumes and start walking without direction or purpose across a white room, from time to time forming couples and talking. The Argentines speak in English and the British speak in Spanish. The language transposition is meant to signify an exercise in empathy. Then they repeat the cycle. Similarities can be drawn between Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and Arias’s Theatre of War, but whereas the former seems to stay in the morbidity and regret of deaths perpetuated, the latter is a work of linguistic, colonial, gender and generational confrontation that pushes towards the empathy of collectivity. The trauma of the past is expressed in the woundedness of the present and through this expression finds a type of sanctuary.
Segade, L. (2015, October). Malvinas una representación inconclusa. Kilómetro 111 ensayos sobre cine Nº13 Registros del acontecimiento político, 79-95.
