PUBLIC TALK: Memories of a Dictatorship: Working Through Trauma in Chile�s Documentary Cinema since 1990

In this presentation Antonio Traverso will discuss strategies of working through trauma deployed in political memory documentary cinema produced in Chile since 1990, the year that symbolises the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship. Traverso will give this discussion a focus by means of an analysis of documentaries in which Chilean survivors/witnesses return to the traumatic memories and attempt to confront the perpetrators. The presentation’s title and material are derived from his in-progress monograph.

Antonio Traverso is senior lecturer in Screen Studies at Curtin University. In Australia since 1987, he was originally born in Chile. Traverso has published essays on political cinema and written and directed short experimental videos. In 2008 he was co-convenor of the Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering international conference, Perth. He is co-editor of Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media (Routledge, 2011); Living Through Terror: (Post)Conflict, (Post)Trauma and the South (Routledge, 2011); and Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010).