Following the award-winning debut Abrir puertas y ventanas (2011), La idea de un lago, the second feature film by Swiss-Argentinian filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, takes inspiration from writer and poet Guadalupe Gaona’s photo book Pozo de aire (2009). Gaona’s book explores the absence of a father figure, who has disappeared during the military-civil dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983)[1], and La idea de un lago undertakes a complex process of cinematic transposition — more than an adaptation ­— given that Mumenthaler herself is the daughter of political exiles in Switzerland, where she lived until returning to Buenos Aires at the age of 19 to study film. Besides chaining together subjective memories and experiences — as well as the collective memory of the military-civil dictatorship — La idea de un lago, like Pozo de aire, places texts — including excerpts from Gaona’s book read, in a Brechtian mechanism, to camera — and images in tension. But the film breaks loose from Gaona’s text by fictionalising — somewhere between reconstitution, fabulation and imitation of the aesthetic of Super 8 and VHS home movies (the fabrication of “false” images from family archives) — the auto-biographical events being narrated. This double game — a game of textual bifurcations, a game of systems of representation — makes La idea de un lago a singular object in the field of films about the dictatorship — and, in particular, of second-generation films made by the children of the desaparecidos — which constitute an entire genre of cinema in Argentina, just as in other countries of the Southern Cone, like Chile.

This cinematic transposition of the trajectory of Inés (Carla Crespo and Malena Moiron) — a 35-year-old photographer who, haunted by the disappearance of her father in 1977 and awaiting a child, decides to contact the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team — unfolds against the backdrop of both general history and the history of cniema in Argentina in its historical-political and formal dimensions. Rodolfo Walsh, in his Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar, described the repressive practices of the dictatorship and its modus operandi of disappearances[2] as “absolute torture, timeless and metaphysical”[3], while, for Claudio Martyniuk, there remain traces of State violence to this day: “Astray, crushed, destroyed in common. Society, a spectre. The Country, rubble”[4]. Cinematic representations of the dictatorship have historically been characterised by the transition from militant films of denunciation to different modalities of filmic commemoration, and to structural and methodological processes of discursive analysis. As Los Rubios (2003), by Albertina Carri, and 17 Monumentos (2012), by Jonathan Perel, formally and epistemologically violate the presuppositions and conventions of cinema regarding the history and memory of the dictatorship — both through their formal ruptures and also their questioning of the “sanctification”[5] of the desaparecido figure and the memorialist politics of the State, respectively —  La idea de un lago also transgresses, not so much by moving to a fictional system of representation, already tested in earlier works, but by its treatment of the dialectic between absence and presence through a sensorial aesthetic, evocative and semi-figurative, infused with the tension between shot and out-of-shot.

The mediated, indirect disentanglement of the memory of the dictatorship and the “de-bewitching”[6] of the figure of the desaparecido are present, linguistically, right from the start, in the title of the film. Mumenthaler explores the idea of a “lake”, meta-linguistically working on the gap between the use and the mention of the word. The lake of childhood is here endowed with an animist force (note the process by which its perceptive point of view is built and activated, in the sequences where child Inés is watched from the moving waters), while the meta-linguistic dimension, as well as the logic of the film’s dialogue, installs a tension between stated perspectives. The “idea of a lake” points towards a precise stated position (a determined perspective on the lake, perceptive and/or cognitive), while the logic of the dialogue (the dialogue between discursive instances) unsettles and casts this position adrift, setting in motion the de-crystallisation of a memory that is multiple (and not just singular).

In parallel, this de-crystallisation of memory, also present in the spatial dynamic consisting of multiple narrative and historical layers, is what drives the story — the narrative of the film, but also the broader history and the cinematic canon itself — forwards.

Operating on a politics of intimacy — alongside contemporary Argentinian cinema and the filmographies of directors like Lucrecia Martel and Matías Piñeiro — La idea de un lago adopts a stripped-back, sober aesthetic (an almost systematic refusal of close-ups), punctuated by musical sequences in which the rupture between material and dream spheres is undone, centred on Inés’s family nucleus, on the figures of her mother and brother and the relationships that are woven and unpicked between these three in different spaces and times (Buenos Aires and La Angostura, in the south of Argentina; the various temporal layers, which culminate in the third last shot of the film, a temporally indeterminate shot, analeptic or proleptic, a leap into the past or the future). The absence-presence of the father is outlined between allusion and figuration in the only photo of Inés with her parent, amplified and scrutinised on the photographer’s computer, placing in tension the lived memory and the technological memory, moving through those topoi of memory, the metonymic spaces, the silences and what is unsaid. A hauntological[7] film, composed from traces coming from the past, La idea de un lago takes disappearance and its vicissitudes and makes it into an out-of-shot, evoked, convened, spectralising, semi-figuratively and sensorially, the space of representation. The night-time sequence of the children playing in the shadows, which establishes an intricate game of gazes between the camera’s perspective and child Inés’s perspective — recalling El espíritu de la colmena (1973), by Víctor Erice — epitomises this dynamic. Out of the darkness and emptiness, these places of memory and images that contradict their assertive logic, come encounters and confrontations with the ghosts of the past and the possibility of negotiating the future.

1 The military-civil dictatorship initiated in 1976 was not an isolated repressive political system, but the result of a succession of military interventions, which included, from 1966 to 1970, the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía.

2 It is estimated that around 30 thousand people were tortured and “disappeared” during the dictatorship of 1976-1983.

3 Walsh, Rodolfo, “Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar”. Serie Recursos para el Aula, Archivo Nacional de la Memoria, pp. 8–13. Available at: http://conti.derhuman.jus.gov.ar/_pdf/serie_1_walsh.pdf (accessed on 17 July 2023), translation by the author (all translations are by the author).

4 Martyniuk, Claudio. Esma: fenomenología de la desaparición. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2016, p. 47.

5 Idem, p. 55

6 Ibidem

7 Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993.