The Hidden Canon: The Official Story
On collective memory, cinema as truth-telling, and the 1985 Best Foreign Feature
It’s been almost a whole year, but we’re going to try to bring this series back. While having access to cinemas again has kept me up to date with the films of the times, I’ve been neglecting the under-discussed gems that were my initial impetus for starting this newsletter over a year ago. I’m going to try to be better with my Criterion Channel/MUBI usage this year, and with that comes more entries to the Hidden Canon. If that interests you (or you just need more reading material in your inbox), do subscribe below and tell your friends if you think they’d be into this kind of stuff too!
The Official Story (1985)
TSPDT Rank: #2,546 (#336 of the 1980s, only film by Puenzo in the top 20,000)
Right after graduating from college but before I started at my first job, I did some volunteer work for an organization that was looking to set up an online museum and resource bank centered on the Martial Law era in the Philippines. For my readers who are unfamiliar with modern Philippine history, this was the 21 years (1965-1986) the country endured under Ferdinand Marcos, 9 of which (1972-1981) were officially spent under martial law and the rest unofficially so. During this period, the ruling party plundered billions from the national coffers to fund a two-decade spending spree and consolidated their political power through arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killings, with some sources citing up to more than 3,000 killed and 70,000 incarcerated during this period. By the numbers, it was a protracted human rights disaster that has continued to hamper the Philippine project even today.
As part of the gig, I had to interview people who lived through that time but had warm memories of it. Being young and having just gone through four years of the quote-unquote “liberal arts college brainwashing” pundits are always railing about, I was struck by their responses when asked broadly about what they remembered from those years: Law and order, infrastructure, the Nutribun. It all felt very slice-of-life, especially for a time that’s rightfully remembered as being extraordinary for all the wrong reasons, but as this pandemic has taught us, the truth is even the most extraordinary times feel mostly like business as usual for the lucky ones.
After the session, I talked to my boss about how odd I found it all to be, the interplay of perspectives that shape our understanding of history, and especially its fresher chapters. How can people remember pastries with fondness but hand-wave the broader injustices around them?
“Those are what sticks,” she told me. It’s easy to convince people not to question a good thing, because no one ever wants to.
Released a few years after the fall of Argentina’s military junta in 1983 but set just before it, Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story is an Argentinian production that is eerily attuned to this Filipino experience of historical dissonance. Perhaps this is owed to the shared colonial history between the Philippines and much of Latin America, but many Filipinos will have a moment of recognition watching this chronicle of an insulated bourgeoisie who slowly discovers the corruption her privileges are built on and thus is compelled to search for some form of justice, even as it dawns on her that it would mean sacrificing everything she held dear. Winner of the 1985 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature*, the film is a living document of the class dynamics in a country under crisis, bursting with a hurt that can only come when the wounds are that fresh.
(*) Film nerd aside: Akira Kurosawa’s Ran—which got him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and is now considered one of the greatest movies ever made—would’ve likely taken this home had it been nominated, but after Kurosawa offended much of the local film industry brass by skipping his movie’s premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, Japan opted not to submit it for the award.
The film follows Alicia Maquet (Norma Aleandro), an upper-middle class high school teacher married to Roberto, a government official (Hector Alterio) whose nebulous position and obligations cast a menacing shadow throughout the proceedings. Alicia is unable to have biological children, but they have an adopted daughter named Gaby (Analia Castro), brought home by Roberto under mysterious circumstances five years ago. Beyond the walls of the couple’s tastefully maintained apartment, Argentina’s Dirty War rages in the streets, with suspected subversives (like Alicia’s childhood friend Ana) being taken away and tortured for the flimsiest of charges. Many of them never come back (they are known as desaparecidos), and those who give birth in captivity are even separated from their babies, whom they may never see again. As she learns more about the breadth of cruelties employed by the current administration, she begins to wonder if her beloved Gaby might be one of those stolen children.
An early scene clues foreign audiences in to both the horrors of this era in Argentina’s modern history as well as the stark insularity of many in the bourgeois class who directly or indirectly benefited from the status quo. Tipsy on eggnog while reconnecting after seven years apart, Alicia asks Ana (Chunchuna Villafane) why she had stolen away to Europe without saying goodbye. After some hemming and hawing, Ana recounts her month-long captivity under the secret police, breaking down into tears as she talks about being tortured and raped; a disbelieving Alicia can only respond by naively asking whether Ana had thought to report it. It is a painful and all-too-familiar conversation, exquisitely acted by Villafane and especially Aleandro, whose reactions to her friend’s pain is telling in its multifaceted uncertainty.
Aleandro’s central performance is incredible throughout, a potent vehicle for emotional veracity as the sheltered mob wife slowly discovering and becoming disgusted with the injustices upon which her picture-perfect (one of the film’s posters is literally a Christmas card photo) life is built. Considered one of Argentine cinema’s greatest stars, she was exiled to Uruguay and then Spain for her outspoken progressive views in the 1970s when the junta took power; The Official Story was her first Argentinian production in 9 years. Her personal stake in the film’s message imbibes her turn with a uniquely thorny quality. On her role in the film, she once said, “Alicia’s personal search is also my nation’s search for the truth about our history”.
Louis Bickford, a professor on global human rights at New York University (NYU), casts this search for truth as a “battle for memory”. In his article “Memory and Truth-Telling in Latin America”, he uses the term “collective memory” (or “societal memory”) to refer to the version of events that is endorsed by the state and taught to students through history books: The “official story”, if you will. He outlines the two sides of this battle: The “hegemonic” approach that argues for forgetting as the only way a nation can move forward, and the “counter-hegemonic” approach which attests that moving on in a truly restorative manner requires meaningfully confronting the injustices of the past.
Bickford very quickly diagnoses this debate as artificial, given that enforced forgetting is simply denial at best and historical revisionism at worst, and proceeds instead to outline the ways in which Latin American countries such as Argentina have engaged in active remembering. These include establishing truth commissions to determine the scale of the atrocities and corresponding reparations demanded, holding human rights trials against primary offenders to bring them to justice, and setting up dedicated museums and archives to ensure that this era in their country’s history is not easily forgotten. Finally, he adds a brief postscript on art’s role in this project, particularly as a means to facilitate dialogue by meeting audiences at an emotional as well as an informational level.
The Official Story belongs to this tradition of active remembering, and its power as such lies in its expert entwining of the personal and political, understanding that one can never truly be extricable from the other. There is no explicit author tract, nor is there any overt depiction of state-sanctioned violence. Everything is suggested or shared secondhand, as would befit the perspective of a protagonist who begins the story sheltered from the true horrors of her time. Along with Alicia, we are given the latitude to grapple with the latent evil of the world we see, without ever really glimpsing its darkest and most depraved corners.
Nor are film’s characters stand-ins for political ideologies, but rather human beings who negotiate the incumbent political paradigm based on their own ideals or worldview. In other words, they are people. We recognize ourselves in scenes like when the conservative Roberto argues with his liberal father and brother at the dinner table, or when Alicia’s radicalized students bristle at the dogmatic, by-the-book approach she initially takes to her history class. This is how most of us interact with politics, and in depicting those moments with veracity, the film is able to sprinkle in its themes without teetering into overt moralizing. It is humanism, which is inherently political just as the human experience is.
Despite this, one scene is nonetheless able to capture the visceral terror of a military raid. During her fifth birthday party, Gaby steals away to her room for some quiet with her dolls. Suddenly, a heavy-looking black boot kicks open her door, and for a second my heart seizes up. It is only her young cousins, who storm in brandishing toy guns and making a mess out of her things, but Gaby is understandably terrified and breaks into tears as her mother rushes in to comfort her. Even several days after seeing the film, I find myself haunted by it, even as I myself am privileged enough to be more like Alicia than Ana. Such is the power of cinema.
I will not spoil the ending here, but it is open-ended enough to invite interpretation. Like many great films founded on a moral knot, it doesn’t neatly resolve its narrative threads but leaves us with the details that matter while only hinting at the rest. If entire nations couldn’t find closure even after forty years, what right have we to demand it in two hours from a film tackling that very same conflict? By the end of The Official Story, we are invited to sit and grapple for a moment, both with the film and the real-life context that bore it. It is a moment I hope we can all spare.
While writing this article, I reached out to my old college history professor, who had been the one to introduce me to Bickford’s article in his class, to ask for a copy of it. While looking for his email, I stumbled upon an old essay I’d written for that course around the time the family of Ferdinand Marcos maneuvered to covertly inter the dictator in the Cemetery of Heroes. Rereading it, I was reminded of the earnestness of my own voice nearly six years ago, when I was perhaps too mawkish for my own good. It is always a bittersweet feeling, to revisit a version of yourself that could believe in things more deeply even as they didn’t understand them quite as well as they does now. You both pity and miss them.
And yet I still believe many of the same things I did then, even as my view on them is perhaps more measured now, tempered by the sort of disappointments that inevitably come over the course of six more years’ worth of tread on the tires. This is why I keep coming back to writing despite my historically hot-and-cold relationship with it. We have a both a human compulsion and moral responsibility to speak truth to power as best we can, even as the vocabulary and syntax we use to do so must evolve as we continue to navigate being people among people. At the very least, we owe it to the rest of us to interrogate and challenge our own preconceived notions of the truth, before adding this refined personal memory to the ongoing tapestry of the collective.
We are all storytellers. We are all stories.
Where to watch: This is up on the Criterion Channel until the end of the month. It is also available to stream on HBO Max and Kanopy, and to rent or buy wherever you rent or buy your movies.
So that was more than 2,000 words. I didn’t set out to go on for this long, but it turns out I had a lot to say about this one. Hoping y’all had fun with it. There’s much more in this one beyond just the film, so would love to chat! Unless you’re a paid troll, which given the subject matter, is a real risk. Who knows how strong their web-scraping capabilities are these days?