Dictator Portraits: Interventions on the Archive in Documentaries about Augusto Pinochet

Abstract

In the Chilean post-dictatorial period, documentary cinema was responsible not only for amplifying the denunciations of human rights violations, but also for creating portraits of Augusto Pinochet that challenged the official ones articulated during his government. Two documentaries from this period, I Love Pinochet (Marcela Said, 2001) and El Caso Pinochet (Patricio Guzmán, 2001) can be perceived as exercises within these searches. In these cases, the proposal of new portraits are related to two links: the one that can be established with the legal-aesthetic practices of the infamous images and the executio in effigie and the one that can be established with the interventions on the official, media, archives of the dictatorship.