The second mode, metamemory, is perhaps best illustrated by Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003). Metamemory discourse, through generational and aesthetic-methodological distancing, seeks to reveal memory’s limits, both individual and collective. In this mode, a lack of information about the hero figure’s death eclipses love bonds; it introduces an aesthetic and narrative distance that flattens affect. In Carri’s experience, when so little is known, when life is in such turmoil, it is difficult to speak from a place of emotion. Los rubios, therefore, sublimates affect, casting it as a void, and chooses to focus instead on illustrating memory’s limits and its decidedly performative and fictional qualities.
To that end, Los rubios juxtaposes metadiscourse about memory’s mechanics with the craft of filmmaking.
…show more content…
Her mother’s personal reflection about her decision to leave Macarena in Cuba surfaces in their present-day conversations, underscoring MIR’s patriarchal/military structure, on the one hand, and its gender bias, on the other. In MIR’s strict value system, a true militant gave up everything for the revolution, disavowing affect and emotional attachments to parents, partners, and relatives. As many former female militants have asserted, the revolutionary organization became a kind of “uterus,” the place where all forms of social interaction and relationships took place. The militant, like Che Guevara, was the one who sacrificed himself and his family for the “people’s” cause. Personal interests were always subordinate to the revolution’s demands. Militancy required discipline and a stern sense of sacrifice that was masculine and military in nature, first and