Cinéma portugais, dictature et image absente : une archive sensible de transmémoires

Sur 48 (2010) de Susana de Sousa Dias et A toca do lobo (2015) de Catarina Mourão

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse how two recent Portuguese films, 48 (2009) by Susana Sousa Dias and A Toca do lobo (2015) by Catarina Mourão, address the challenge of the absent image and the « non-inscription » of the memory of dictatorship in Portuguese society. The esthetical and political scope of the cinematographic strategies used to represent repressed memories is grasped with the help of two key concepts: the archive of the sensible and transmemory. On the one hand, through its subjective and interval-based logic, the archive of the sensible allows us to understand forms of cinematographic memory making which do not replace an “absence” with a “presence, avoiding the effects of overdetermined identification or a patrimonialisation of memories. On the other hand, by opening memorial transmission beyond postmemory to non-linear temporal and spatial relations, transmemory accounts for the fictional dimension at work in the subjective appropriation of the past in the present. In both cases, truly canonical documentary form is displaced.