Opening Cracks in the Image. 48 and Corporate Accountability: Cinema as a Trace of Structural Violence in the Dictatorships of Portugal and Argentina

Abstract

This article examines 48 (Susana de Sousa Dias, 2009) and Corporate Accountability (Jonathan Perel, 2020), two non-fiction films that, through a radically austere formal approach, critically interrogate the status of the image in order to expose the structural violence perpetrated during the dictatorships in Portugal and Argentina. Although they draw on different materials –the filming of police photographs in Portugal and contemporary footage of factory sites in Argentina– both works operate in similar ways by opening images to critical interpretation and unraveling their different strata. Both arise from their authors’ commitment to reexamining the history of their respective countries as an exercise in democratic responsibility in the face of oblivion and impunity, in which questions and answers must be continually reformulated. The present study analyzes the formal strategies that make this critical opening possible, approaching images as dense surfaces composed of multiple layers that demand to be read and interpreted in depth. From a theoretical perspective, the article engages with concepts developed by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Didi-Huberman, whose reflections on the image are articulated with the filmic proposals of Sousa Dias and Perel.