The Active Archive: Haptic Reconstruction in Albertina Carri's Los Rubios (2003)

Abstract

The fragility of memory beyond any specific context is a biological and universal bodily process. That is the initial reflection behind Albertina Carri’s 2003 Los Rubios, a film that, through its retelling of autobiographical events from the Argentinian Dirty War, breaks documentary conventions and maximises the audiovisual medium to portray an erased history. Aligning with frameworks from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, this paper contends that the process of historical reconstruction is best questioned when audiences are encouraged to experience agency through the body rather than through a passive, institutionalised historical reconstruction. In Los Rubios, director Albertina Carri utilises haptic visuality, a technique examined by Laura Marks, in which the images pursue a sensorial response from the eye. Through an audience that encounters the reconstruction of events via a sensory experience, new perspectives can be formed. The methods utilised by Carri to present either past or contemporary documented archives, such as photographs and testimonies, encourage the body to notice and reflect on the gaps and fragility of a nation’s collective memory. By intentionally foregrounding the inability to achieve a linear or truthful reconstruction, the documentary moves beyond the political dichotomies and heroic iconographies often promoted under conventional mediations of collective memory managed by national institutions. Ultimately, the paper concludes that Los Rubios transforms the human body itself into a momentary active archive, proposing embodiment as an alternative, sensorial way of processing information that allows historical reconstruction to remain a flowing and ever-evolving process of reparation, functioning under the now, rather than a set of definitive truths left behind in a fixed and empty past.