Reanimating the Domestic Still Life

Abstract

T H I S A R T I C L E C O N S I D E R S D E S C R I P T I O N S O F V A C A N T I N T E R I O R S I N postdictatorial Southern Cone literature and film as self-reflexive memory work that, in evoking the horrors of political violence in conjunction with ostensibly tranquil domestic scenes, reinscribes the domestic sphere in historical time. Focusing on the work of Patricio Guzmán, Paz Encina, and Juan José Saer, I argue that the practice of describing empty homes serves not only to underscore the absence of their disappeared occupants but also to question the political dimensions of nostalgia. For survivors of the military dictatorships in Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina, the desire to longingly reconstruct a more innocent time and space before politics intruded upon domesticity plays all too easily into the nationalistic nostalgia key to the conservative ideology of these regimes. This article contends that, in film as in literature, the objectivist technique of pausing the narration to reproduce photograph-