The deconstruction of the family film archive in Daughter Rite and El silencio es un cuerpo que cae

Abstract

Like other social spaces considered natural and immutable, the family institution has been criticized from queer-marxist positions. These have taken it as part of the gear of social reproduction and, consequently, as one of the places where the disciplining of bodies is produced in a sense assimilated by the capitalist system of binarist and heterocentric roots. Based on this understanding, they have directed the critical effort towards the questioning of the familiarist narratives that hide the function of the family institution through its romanticization, as well as towards the opening of imaginative and practical horizonts that make possible the affirmation of a way of generating kinship that is not subordinated to the primacy of the biological-genetic. In this article we will replicate this double gesture in the field of audiovisual culture. First, we will examine, through Roger Odin and Marianne Hirsch's perspective, the way in which family mythology is underpinned through the creation and visualization of the family film archive. We will then look at those film productions in which the filmmakers critically engage with their own film archive in an attempt to make visible the family violence it conceals and/or the histories of dissidence that, inhabiting it, it ultimately silences. Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite and Agustina Comedi's El silencio es un cuerpo que cae are the works that delimit our field of study. Finally, we will discuss the contribution of these filmmarkers to the task enunciated by Donna Haraway (2020) in Staying with the Trouble.