The way memory works, as a discursive and cultural mechanism that produces meaning and identity, has always been linked not only to how the past is reinterpreted and valued, but also to the kind of object that is thus reconstructed. This is the case, for example, with nostalgia, that emotion of time centered on the past’s very “pastness” and on its impossible apprehension. In the cultural construction of memory, the flow of time is transformed into meaning, into narratives often poised between the enchantment of a return to fullness, to the origin, to what has been lost and continues to be revisited, and disenchantment, the annulment and “horror” that often characterize traumatic memories of political and collective violence that have destroyed ways of life and, at times, entire worlds. Starting from these premises, and looking at post-dictatorship Chile as a moment of “erosion” of the very meaning of a community, I shall analyze four films by two directors who have worked halfway between the enchantment of the pre–dictatorship past and the disenchantment brought about by the failure of the socialist collective struggle represented by Salvador Allende government, between the cathartic power of fiction and the apparent distance and rawness of the “document” and of “reality”, together with the power of the dictatorship’s mechanisms of alienation. By investigating the visual, narrative and discursive strategies and devices of Salvador Allende (2004) and Nostalgia de la luz (2010) by Patricio Guzmán; Post Mortem (2010) and El Conde (2023, produced and distributed only on Netflix) by Pablo Larraín, the essay aims to describe how the story of the return, or reinvention, of what has been and has gone, may contribute to a semiotics of the forms of cultural time, to their enchantment and disenchantment.
Keywords: Chile; Trauma; Erosion; Patricio Guzmán; Pablo Larraín; Nostalgia