The weight of the past: Trauma and testimony in Que bom te ver viva

Abstract

This article examines representations of trauma in Lúcia Murat's Que bom te ver viva (How Nice to See You Alive, 1989), a semi-documentary focusing on the experiences of former political militants who, like the director herself, were arrested and tortured under Brazil's military dictatorship. Despite having limited distribution at the time of release, the film has since gained status as one of the most significant representations of State-sanctioned violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It has received renewed attention more recently as Brazil enters a new period of reckoning with human rights crimes committed during the military regime. I first consider elements of trauma theory and their potential for better understanding the ways in which the film establishes connections between individual suffering and the wider sociopolitical realm. Essential to the film's understanding of historical trauma are processes of 'acting out' and 'working through' which I explore along with the need, partially fulfilled in Que bom te ver viva, to create a witness to traumatic events. This is combined with an examination of stylistic strategies. I argue that the film's flexible and unconventional aesthetics is a crucial means through which it can represent certain experiences associated with trauma and perform a radical re-envisioning of history. Amongst the many victims of the regime who were invited to give their testimony to the National Truth Commission was film director, screenwriter and producer Lúcia Murat. In what follows I shall first consider some elements of recent trauma theory and their potential for better understanding the cinematic and political strategies central to Que bom te ver viva. This leads into a discussion of the mixed modes of representation, realist and nonrealist, adopted by Murat, and to an examination of how those modes contribute to a reenvisioning of this traumatic history. Essential to the film's understanding of historical trauma are the processes of 'acting out' and 'working through' that I shall explore along with the requirement, in part fulfilled by Que bom te ver viva, to create a witness to traumatic experiences. Finally, it is also my aim to contribute to the scarce scholarship on a director whose films are so significant for Brazil's cultural memory. Some of these arguments find expression in Que bom te ver viva, which not only includes its own comparisons between survivor experiences in Nazi concentration camps and in Latin America's illegal prisons, but is also rife with allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis.For LaCapra (2001), the challenge is not that we should direct attention away from the Holocaust when discussing trauma, but that we should apply the theoretical frameworks that derive from its study to other historical events in which these frameworks might prove useful.Accordingly, I will use his reformulation of the concepts of 'acting out' and 'working through' to demonstrate that, although Murat's film relies on one of the central tenets of trauma theory (individual tes...