Haunting photographs and temporal landscapes: Remembering through traces in La idea de un lago/The Idea of a Lake (Mumenthaler 2016)

This article explores the links between memory and materiality in the Argentine film La idea de un lago / The Idea of a Lake . It assumes that material memory, understood as the process of remembrance that results from the engagement with material traces of the past (objects, places, landscapes), is a recurrent trope by which contemporary documentary filmmakers criticize official discourses on memory from the Kirchners’s era. In this context, it reads La idea de un lago as a fictional text that performs this mode by using photographs and landscape – as those traces of the past that bring it to the present – to embody the conflicting relationship that children of the disappeared hold with the traumatic absence of a parent. At the level of cultural memory, this translates into a narrative of the dictatorship that does not problematize – as non-fictional work did – but rather reinforces kirchnerist politics of memory.