(Auto)biographical Documentaries as Audiovisual Microhistories of Pinochet's Chile

Abstract

Historians work with documents as sources to research the past and elaborate a narrative. This article proposes that documentary filmmakers perform a similar practice, excavating the past by working with audiovisual documents to produce a documentary film, thus allowing stories of anonymous people to emerge. I elaborate on historian Carlo Ginzburg's approach to microhistory and propose to study this type of documentary as audiovisual microhistories. That is to say, as an experimental practice that pays attention to small-scale research units to access previously unknown stories and explore how they interrelate with the wider historical context. Here, I analyze three Chilean documentaries that focus on the recontextualization of home videos produced during the late 1980s and the 1990s, covering events spanning from the end of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship to the transition to democracy: Story of my Name (Historia de mi Nombre, Karin Cuyul, 2019), Adriana's Pact (El Pacto de Adriana, Lissette Orozco, 2017), and Guerrero (Sebastián Moreno, 2017). To do so, I borrow historian Rudolf Dekker's notion of ego-documents and suggest that amateur videos work as first-hand testimonies that reveal the experiences of these anonymous people and their pasts.