To think about the question of what it means to create responsible visual representations of traumatic pasts, I have frequently returned to Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflections on the “representability” and “sayability” of the Shoah, which can provide a framework for thinking about the Guatemalan context as well. That the Guatemalan genocide, like the Holocaust, was conceived and planed by humans implies that, as much as it pains us, both historical episodes are indeed thinkable and human. Films and photographs play a key role in detonating this thinking because they provide material support for our imagination and shape our ethical engagement with others’ suffering. To that end, Didi-Huberman’s discussion of four gas chamber photographs taken in Auschwitz by Alex, a Sonderkommando member who smuggled the photos out of the concentration camp, speaks to the power that images have to contest denial and provide a window through which we might glimpse the horrors others have endured. For this to happen, though, we must be willing to gaze upon those images empathetically and try to imagine and understand what happened.
Thomas…show more content… Her documentary shatters traditional foundations of familial and social ties, which in Guatemala have been historically defined by the ethnic divide separating nonindigenous (ladinos) and indigenous people. At the same time, it challenges representational modes in which the intellectual coopts the other’s voice or uses it to specific ends. Instead, Cuevas explores new modes of narrating the nation in which a situated, gendered body articulates an “I” capable of listening to the voices of others. What makes this film unique, then, is how it disrupts a dominant Guatemalan national discourse that provokes indigenous repression and extreme
