A film by Albertina Carri, produced by Barry Ellsworth
Argentina, 2003, 89 Minutes, Color
A Women Make Movies Release



REVIEWS

NEW CITY CHICAGO

By Ray Pride

What if your parents were killed, you were cut off from family memories, no mythology of self-knowledge with which to grapple, to hope to grasp? An inventive, daring, heart-wrenching Argentine personal documentary, Albertina Carri’s collagist "The Blonds" traces her attempts to recover her family’s history after her popular mother and father were "disappeared" by the military dictatorship—abducted, murdered—when she was 3 or 4 years old. Carri inserts level after level of narrative subterfuge—an actress plays the director, for instance, interrogating the real-life neighbors of her passed parents. There’s playful gamesmanship throughout, such as animated Legos offering up a bucolic fantasy of happy family life to contrast with her spotty memories of the past. A worthy descendant of Argentineans like Borges and Cortazar, Carri’s film was one of the sterling thrills of a visit to the 2003 Independent Film festival of Buenos Aires, where it swept the local awards. It’s genuinely inquisitive, poetic and unrelenting work. She can’t let go of memory. You won’t let go of hers.

CHICAGO READER

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle [Stendhal] writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.

--W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

I don't know if some memories are real or if they're my sisters'. --Albertina Carri in The Blonds

When I was in junior high school in the 50s I associated Stanley Kramer's name -- first as a producer, then as a producer-director -- with offbeat, somewhat worthy highbrow ventures such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., The Wild One, and The Caine Mutiny. Lots of people did. Liking these mainly black-and-white movies could be a snobbish badge of small-town sophistication, roughly akin to subscribing to the Saturday Review, and I was as susceptible to this as anyone.

By the time of The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), my respect for Kramer had sunk. I could see how he'd conflated art with education and other self-conscious middle-class ideals, making him a little dubious as a gray eminence. And I saw those movies' smugness and self-righteousness and the lack of imagination in his directorial style. I started to look at these films as reprehensible, tantamount to antiart statements.

I expressed my distaste for Judgment at Nuremberg to Bertha, a Russian emigre living in my Alabama hometown who went to the same Reform Jewish temple as my grandfather and who drove him and others crazy with her procommunist opinions. She thought it was the greatest movie ever made, and she told me indignantly, "You'd feel different if Hitler slaughtered most of your relatives." In other words, the movie's subject matter made any question about art or emphasis irrelevant -- the same judgment some people later made about Schindler's List.

Bertha apparently thought the hokey star turns by Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, and Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg did the job of bearing witness to the Holocaust. She didn't have the option then of seeing Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1956), Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), or Muriel (1963). Like Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah, these films implicitly argue that morally apt and honest representations of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the torture of Algerians aren't easily arrived at.

The issue isn't whether atrocities are shown; it's the attitude toward them. One might also question whether the past is ever truly knowable, especially given all the entertaining and photogenic substitutes for it that keep coming along. The etching of the town that interfered with Stendhal's memory of the place has a parallel in Kramer's or Steven Spielberg's aggressive image replacements. By contrast, Resnais and Lanzmann are concerned with the sense of absence created by images even when they purport to tell us everything. Night and Fog, unlike Shoah, shows us concentration camp survivors and corpses, Hiroshima, mon amour gives us actual and restaged evidence of the bomb's effects, and Muriel offers a long verbal account of torture but refuses to show us any of it. The key line in Marguerite Duras' script for Hiroshima, mon amour, spoken by the Japanese hero to the French heroine, his lover, immediately undercuts all the real and ersatz newsreel footage: "You know nothing of Hiroshima."

I don't mean to limit this distinction, which is essentially moral, to one between Hollywood movies and art films. Samuel Fuller's most ambitious war movie, The Big Red One (1980) -- coming in a recent reconstruction to the Chicago International Film Festival in October -- straddles these categories, implying both that the violence of war can be shown and that it can't. Fuller believed in most Hollywood conventions, but he believed even more in his own combat experience during World War II, and he realized that sometimes the former were inadequate when it came to representing the latter. Schindler's List can be seen as a Hollywood movie or as an art film, but either way Spielberg seems as untroubled about the task of representing the Holocaust as Kramer was.

We like to think we're more thoughtful about such matters today than we were a half century ago, but I wonder. Albertina Carri's The Blonds (2003), a provocative Argentinean feature playing this week at Facets Cinematheque, deals with the filmmaker's efforts to uncover information about her leftist parents, kidnapped and murdered in 1977, when she was only four years old, during Argentina's "dirty war." Her film's a lot closer to Shoah than to Judgment at Nuremberg. (This is why I can't imagine it turning up in the ultraconventional Chicago Latino Film Festival.) It's won significant acclaim and recognition in Argentina even though it refuses to offer the comfort and certainty of a conventional documentary -- something that has alienated part of the mainstream press. "Too much of the film is in a mood of chin-scratching detachment," complained A.O. Scott in the New York Times, "and this creates a vacuum in which its powerful, confrontational moments lose their force, the trauma of the past pushed nearly out of reach."

In many ways Carri is even more avant-garde than Lanzmann or Resnais. She hired an actress, Analia Couceyro, to play herself in the present, walking around her old rural neighborhood and interviewing people about their memories of four-year-old Albertina, her two older sisters, and her parents. But she never allows us to forget that we're watching an actress, and periodically shows herself directing Couceyro, sometimes in successive takes. She also reflects on the seemingly insuperable obstacles she faces in recovering as well as representing her past: "My sister Paula doesn't want to appear on camera," she says at one point. "Andrea does, but she says all the important things when I turn the camera off." Later she says, "All I have are vague memories contaminated by so many versions." On other occasions, she offers us animation -- Lego toys in front of a dollhouse that represent her family and various animals in the neighborhood when she was four, sometimes accompanied by relatively realistic voices.

When big Albertina asks the neighbors about little Albertina, it's not always clear whether Couceyro or Carri is asking the questions; most of the neighbors remember next to nothing, so Analia can easily stand in for Albertina. What they do remember often seems unreliable. One woman recalls that everyone in the family was blond -- the source of the film's title -- but we see and hear nothing to support this claim. Then, very late in the film, we see Couceyro, Carri, and various crew members walking around the neighborhood in blond wigs, suggesting that maybe Albertina's true family is her team of collaborators.

For her scruples Carri seems to be paying a hefty price -- a limited audience outside Argentina. No such price is being paid by Margarethe von Trotta, whose highly conventional Rosenstrasse opens this week at mainstream venues. This movie deals with the little-known protests of Aryan German women married to Jewish men who were held by the gestapo in a building on Berlin's Rosenstrasse in 1943. There aren't any Hollywood star turns, but the glitzy period re-creation glories in the kind of burnished arty look The Conformist and later the Godfather movies made famous, and von Trotta isn't shy about playing up the tear-jerking elements. Her fictional story is also about a little girl losing her parents, told as a series of flashbacks from the present, when the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Manhattan interviews the non-Jewish German woman in Berlin who briefly raised her mother. Most of this is rather muddled, because the daughter wants to understand why her mother objects to her marrying a non-Jew, and what she discovers by way of explanation is how her mother's life was saved by a non-Jew. Everything seems to get sorted out by the end, but more for the characters than the audience.

Conventional wisdom would say that von Trotta's film comes from and speaks to the heart and Carri's comes from and addresses the head. But I think Carri's quest is largely a search for her own identity, and her avant-garde methods derive mainly from gut instinct. Experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer has frequently cast several actresses to play herself or her autobiographical heroines in tandem, clearly concluding that using a single actress would be some form of cop-out. Stanley Kwan's ravishing biopic Actress (1991), about Shanghai silent-film actress Ruan Ling-yu (Maggie Cheung), also refuses to limit its journey into a lost past to either fiction or documentary, choosing instead to acknowledge that both are problematic.

Carri may well have created so many difficulties for herself and the viewer because she had no choice, at least if she wanted to remain honest. But there are gains as well as losses. As writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky puts it, "The film avoids the solemnity and ideological simplifications common to many cinematic treatments of the desaparecidos." The real subjects are "the impossibility of compensating for such a lack, the brutal severing of family ties, memory's search for facts -- and unstoppable fictionalization of what it finds." Yet as one hilarious sequence shows, the film initially failed to get state funding because Carri's murdered parents were intellectuals and she insisted on interviewing their neighbors rather than more "important" figures -- i.e., other intellectuals. (We see the film crew reading aloud from the bureaucrats' snobbish letter.)

Von Trotta, who's obviously less personally invested in her story, seems more than a little calculating in her efforts to wring tears. It doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that, like Kramer, she's interested first in addressing a wide audience and second in teaching a history lesson. Yet the sort of lesson she has in mind, like Kramer's and Spielberg's, includes a certain amount of uplift and closure -- and so becomes a kind of tranquilizer that frees us from the burdensome task of trying to remember the past in all its ambiguity.

VILLAGE VOICE

By J. Hoberman

The youngest of three sisters whose leftist parents were arrested and "disappeared" during the course of Argentina's late-'70s dirty war, Albertina Carri boldly plunges into the murky depths of her own—and the national—past with The Blonds.

Neither documentary nor psychodrama, Carri's film is a mysterious combination of the two. (In that it resembles two other recent Film Forum attractions, Amie Siegel's Empathy and Pearl Gluck's Divan.) What's remarkable about The Blonds is how it continually thwarts generic expectations. Carri interviews neighbors with no interest in her family's fate beyond establishing their own exoneration. She records her parents' old comrades on videotape but uses the material for little more than secondhand accounts of the detention center where her parents were confined and presumably executed.

The Blonds, which is mainly concerned with the ways in which the unknown past informs the inchoate present, has affinities to E.L. Doctorow's novelized rumination on the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, The Book of Daniel. Similar conflicts churn the surface here. Carri's sisters refuse to speak on camera. Mysterious forces must vet the project, and the filmmaker responds with her own form of subterfuge. She employs a stand-in for herself and occasionally dramatizes childhood fantasies with animated Lego tableaux. In the end, this Borgesian hall of mirrors is a clutter of recollections and inconclusive interviews that suggests the impossibility of getting at any representational truth.

Tripping over fragments of fragments, Carri searches through thickets of fantasy and memory for a narrative line. Her parents were called "los rubios" (the blonds). But why? Was any member of the family blond? Whose memories are whose? The weather is always overcast in this engaging expression of moody bafflement. The Blonds is unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream.

VARIETY

The most complexly structured of this year's Argentine films, "The Blonds" treads a delicate line between documentary and fiction to reconstruct the kidnapping and murder of director Albertina Carri's parents during the military dictatorship. Flanked by a number of new docs on the subject of the desparecidos (the "disappeared"), "Blonds" is by far the most innovative and successful in bringing the horrors of the period to the present, by analyzing the way memory and identity are constructed. Its experimental techniques will keep some auds at a distance, but should be appreciated by festivals. Pic won a number of prizes at the recent Buenos Aires film fest, including audience award and best new Argentine feature nod.

Mixing the personal feel of Carri's feature bow "I Don't Want to Go Home" and the studied eccentricity of her short "Barbie Can Be Sad, Too", which was narrated entirely with dolls, "The Blonds" ambitiously attempts to find a fresh approach to a subject that still opens emotional wounds in Argentina. Pic begins with a film crew investigating the 1977 disappearance of political militants Ana Maria Caruso and Roberto Carri by interviewing residents of the neighborhood they lived in at the time they were abducted. Strikingly, the neighbors find little to say about the family, which included three small daughters (Albertina was 4 years old), and less to criticize about their deaths.

At the same time, model toys are employed in other scenes to represent transparent fantasies about happy family life -- until a plastic spaceship swoops down and whisks away the parent figures. Although Carri herself is glimpsed in the film, her "role" as filmmaker/bereaved daughter is doubled by young thesp Analia Couceyro. This somewhat defuses the film's emotional charge, while at the same time underlining how difficult it is to construct an identity for oneself in the absence of such basic figures as a mother and father.

But generally the pic avoids the danger of letting its formal concerns overpower its emotional ones. Camerawork is personal and eclectic, while office decor is dominated by a poster of John Water's "Cecil B. DeMented" showing Melanie Griffith tied to a chair and gagged. Poster takes on ominous meaning when the talk turns to how prisoners were tortured.

Gagging also refers to pic's criticism of Argentina's new state film financing system, which recently became entirely based on film scripts. The film crew at one point peruses a letter from the agency refusing "The Blonds" financing, claiming the gravity of the subject warrants "a more rigorous documentary approach."
 
Camera (color/B&W), Catalina Fernandez (color, digital-to- 35mm); editor, Alejandra Almiron; sound, Jesica Suarez. Reviewed at Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (competing), April 23, 2003. Running time: 83 MIN.

NEW YORK TIMES

By A.O. Scott

"The Blonds," an autobiographical semidocumentary directed by Albertina Carri, which opens today at Film Forum, is the second film shown in New York in the last few weeks to deal with the aftereffects of political repression in Argentina in the 1970's. Like Gastón Biraben's "Captive," which was part of the recent New Directors/New Films series, Ms. Carri's film concerns a child whose parents were among the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped, tortured and killed during the military junta's "dirty war"against leftists, and who must, years later, contend with the pain and confusion of events she barely remembers.

In this case the child was Ms. Carri. She returns with her film crew to her old house and interviews neighbors about her parents and their fate. The movie's title comes from one elderly woman's insistent (and erroneous) recollection that all of the family members — Ms. Carri, her parents and her two sisters — had blond hair. Memory, especially when filtered through a guilty conscience, plays tricks, and so does film.

In addition to appearing on camera herself, Ms. Carri is played by an actress (Analía Couceyro), one of several strategies that complicates "The Blonds." Film Forum's publicity materials refer to this technique as Brechtian, but Godardian may be a better word, since the film has the fractured syntax and ruminant self-consciousness of Godard's late cinematic essays. It is not so much a documentary as a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary.

If this sounds a bit maddening, it is, though the confusion that "The Blonds" induces is clearly part of its intention. The film's open-ended, recursive structure is central to Ms. Carri's intellectual agenda, which is to emphasize the deceptive, indeterminate nature of the truth. It is sometimes hard to tell, though, whether she wants to explore the ways that individual and collective psychology contrive to blur and distort painful or shameful aspects of the political past, or whether her concern is with the grander, more abstract and ultimately more banal tendency of any representation to falsify what it tries to depict.

Too much of the film is in a mood of chin-scratching detachment, and this creates a vacuum in which its powerful, confrontational moments lose their force, the trauma of the past pushed nearly out of reach.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

By David Sterritt

FOUR STARS

Director: Albertina Carri. With Analía Couceyro, Jesica Suarez, Santiago Giralt, Albertina Carri. (89 min.)

This highly offbeat documentary focuses on the filmmaker's effort to find out the fate of her parents, who "disappeared" and probably were killed during Argentina's notorious "dirty war." What distinguishes the movie is its inventive, multifaceted way of questioning whether the "truth" of past events can ever be separated from the memories, longings, and scanty evidence that inextricably surrounds it. Highly recommended. Originally titled "Los Rubios."

TIME OUT

By Josh Rothkopf

Memoir is, almost certainly, the trickiest material to bring to the screen compellingly, requiring cinediarists to plunge into a black hole of potential solipsism -- taking an innocent crew with them -- and somehow emerge on the far side of mass appeal. Think of the worst aspects of today-I-ate-a-chicken-salad-sandwich blogging and you'll understand why such endeavors are rarely indulged by paying customers (at least this one).

What a relief, then, to report that THE BLONDS, wrapped in oblique political commentary much in keeping with the quasijournalistic style of French collagist Chris Marker, shies admirably from such navel gazing. No doubt it helps that Carri, a 30-year-old Argentine, has a ghostly story to tell: When she was a young girl, her activist parents were kidnapped and murdered by the junta conducting the "Dirty War." Employing the Brechtian device of casting an actor (Couceyro) to play her adult self, Carri propels her camera down police-station corridors and sedate neighborhood streets, inviting memory and imagination to fill up the scene of the crime.

What Carri's rambling investigation gains from fresh tactics -- one stroke involves a faux-naïve restaging of the abduction, using plastic dolls and a toy spacecraft descending to a theremin's warble -- it loses, expectedly, in precision. As the director's surrogate wanders in a crop field wearing a blond wig (it's a long story), you get the slightest whiff of an unexamined life. But Carri has time; based on this first step, her future entries might be worth taking seriously.

FILM FORWARD

Albertina Carri, daughter of left-wing revolutionaries, was four years old when her parents "disappeared," victims of Argentina's Dirty War. Now, 31 years later, she pieces together her family history and the story of their disappearance. Instead of turning the camera on herself, Carri hires an actress. "My name is Analia Couceyro. I play the part of Albertina Carri,"

Couceyro tells the audience, revealing, from the start, that even documentary film, like memory, is fabricated. Throughout, Carri reconstructs scenes with stop-action animation featuring Playmobil figurines. The plastic figures hangout by the pool, barbecue and dance. Like the use of the actress, the animation puts distance between the viewer and the film.

However, this also underlines the fact that it is simply impossible for a child to accept that her parents have simply vanished. At one point, Carri says, "To develop yourself without the one who gave you life becomes an obsession." She needs to construct a narrative about her family life in order to have an identity.

Carri also visits the neighborhood where she lived when her parents were taken. Several of the neighbors remember her family, and one claims that they were all blonde. The audience knows that Carri is a brunette, and like her, we are puzzled by this assertion. Also puzzling is that the neighbors have little to say on the topic of the kidnapping. Ultimately, Carri's questions are left unanswered and she is forced to forge a new family with her film crew and cast of one, all of whom sport blonde wigs by the end of the film.

Although the filmmaking is personal, the use of an actress, footage of the film’s production, and the continual awareness of the camera diffuse the emotional impact. However, on an intellectual level, the film is just challenging enough to keep us engaged while Carri explores the impossibility of coming to terms with the inexplicable loss of a parent. "It's something that doesn't have an end," says one interviewee. "That's the most painful; there's no closure."