REVIEW
The unspeakable
Feminine resistances: the
figure of the republican
women in Carolina
Astudillo’s documentary
cinema
Born under Chile’s totalitarian regime and currently living in Barcelona,
Laia Quílez Esteve filmmaker Carolina Astudillo returns to her home country with Lo
Universitat Rovira i Virgili indecible (The unspeakable) to recover the story of Gabriela Goycoolea.
Gabriela Goycoolea de Vos was kidnapped in November 1974 and taken to a detention centre by State agents, who accused her of
belonging to the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) | Film still
Fragment. Full article originally published at the Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies. Volume 8, Number 1
A
s in El gran vuelo, this film recovers an individual experience that, when These testimonies were taken from the National Commission on Political Prison and
articulated in story-form, becomes a collective memory. However, the narrative Torture Report, commonly known as the Valech Commission. The fact that Astudillo
strategy used in this brief documentary differs completely from that used later selects an exclusively male group to read the female victims’ testimonies of torture is not
in her first feature-length film. In El gran vuelo, Astudillo only resorts to the use of found coincidental: ‘I wanted them to be men, not only to serve as a counterpoint, but also to
footage when she wishes to appeal to the past and to reflect on the images inherited from it. capture what would happen to them as they read these experiences narrated by women,
Lo indecible, however, uses the word in its full sense, in the form of a testimony, focusing how their bodies would react, what would happen with their voices, what they would feel’,
on a figure that floods the fourteen minutes of the film without rest. she explains in an interview (Wallace 2013).
The voice in this film is still in the process of healing - in this case, it belonged to In a similar way to that found in Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann’s magnum opus about
Goycoolea, a woman who was kidnapped by soldiers in 1974 when she was principal of a the Holocaust, Astudillo uses this kind of witness, each filmed in his everyday setting in
small school in Santiago de Chile. She was then confined in a clandestine detention and the present (a tailor shop, a library, a hospital, a park, a kitchen), precisely to stage her
torture centre, accused of collaborating with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria conviction that the shadow of this past continues to darken the present and that injuries,
(Revolutionary Left Movement, or MIR). Here, Goycoolea’s story functions as a multifaceted though invisible, remain hidden beneath the skin, hidden in every corner. The reading of
prism through which other memories of horror are projected, a story that refers to her but these strangers’ writings, choral but also distanced, even cold, removes emotion from a
also to all the victims of the Pinochet regime. If memory is fragmentary, if it is impossible shocking and horrifying story, and thus ‘also makes the viewer uncomfortable, a viewer
to evoke atrocious abuses suffered first-hand without error, without distortions, without who, in most cases, does not want to keep listening’ (Wallace 2013).
an overt or involuntarily amnesia, then an audio-visual
transcription of such events must also lack unity, closure, In fact, while we come to know in detail the nightmare experienced by other female
definitive answers. To emphasize this quality throughout victims of totalitarian terror through these readings, Goycoolea’s story speaks to us,
Goycoolea’s testimony, Astudillo has seven male Chilean citizens through faltering words and inevitable silences, about the difficulties of remembering and
(a tailor, a lawyer, a doctor, a young passer-by, etc.) read explaining what happened to her loved ones, thus avoiding creating a visual memorial of
fragments of a seemingly infinite letter that contains detailed this tragic period. Lo indecible is not so much about reliving the horror of the dictatorship
testimonies of torture suffered by women in the MIR. as it is about reflecting on the impossibilities memory confronts when evoking the past.
Watch “The Unspeakable” at www.europeanmemories.net/magazine
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
42
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
43