“Argentina 1985”. Between the media and the mediatizations.

Spanish version in Hipermediaciones.com

Everything and the opposite of everything have been said about Argentina 1985, the film directed by Santiago Mitre that describes the Trial of the Juntas, the judicial trial of the members of the de facto military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Since the movie premiere, articles, papers and interviews have proliferated. Political and social readings largely displaced aesthetic interpretations. In this article I will analyze Argentina 1985 from an eco-evolutionary media perspective. The reconstruction of the Argentine media ecosystem of the 1980s carried out by the production team is so detailed -and by no means marginal in the development of the plot- that it is worth stopping to investigate how the characters communicate and through which media.

The media

Argentina 1985 opens with one medium and closes with another. The first scene begins in a car, one rainy night, while the prosecutor Julio Strassera returns to his house listening to the radio. Later on, television will appear, which will be presented in a classic “Simpsons” situation of family consumption in broadcast mode: Strassera and his family watch Minister Antonio Tróccoli’s speech, a piece of oratory that went down in history as the most quoted (and repudiated) example of the “two demons theory.”

It’s interesting to go back to the opening sequence of The Simpsons: first broadcast in January 1990, in the series’ second episode (“Bart the Genius”), that scene was arguably born old. In August 1991 Tim Berners Lee uploaded the first web page to his server and ignited a process of audience fragmentation that continues to this day. That family reunited in front of the small screen is a memory of the past, an image that comes from that pre-web world that Argentina 1985 presents us so well.

In another scene, the front pages of the newspapers appear in a kiosk. Given that the feature film is largely a Strassera biopic, this presence of radio, television and the press serves to contextualize the national situation and incorporate the echoes of the media and political agendas within the plot. On the other hand, the mass media are technological markers that, as semiotician Algirdas Greimas used to explain, serve to “spatialize” and “temporalize” the discourse. As in other audiovisual productions set in the 1960s or 1980s -I am thinking of Mad Men or The Americans-, the media serve the same function as the ubiquitous cigarettes or the popular and elegant Renault Fuego coupé that appears in Argentina 1985. It is undeniable that this story takes place in Argentina in the mid-eighties.

But communication devices do not end with the mass media. Argentina 1985 proposes a very rich media catalog that only leaves out a couple of devices (we’ll come back to them, to the absent media). Let’s look at some situations. On the one hand, we have all the analogue media typical of the judicial bureaucracy, from those endless files to sealed documents. In an interview, prosecutor Julio Strassera once said that “our computer was a series of cards.” The film shows on numerous occasions that judicial analogue machinery that, forty years later, does not seem to have evolved much.

In this pre-smartphone media ecosystem, the characters of Argentina 1985 communicate through private landlines (where the prosecutor and his family receive threats) and public ones (journalists dictating the news to their respective outlets in Entel’s orange booths). And I return to the cigarettes: the absence of mobile phones also operates as a temporary mark. All this reminds me of the story “Hansel and Gretel’s mobile phone” by Hernán Casciari:

How horrible literature would be — all of it, in general — if the mobile phone had always existed, as my four-year-old daughter believes. How many classics would have lost their dramatic knot, how many plots would have died before being born, and above all, how easily the most famous intricacies of the great fiction stories would have been solved.

During the judicial process, other media were used, such as slide projectors or amplification equipment that appear occasionally in the film. In a nod to contemporary thrillers, the Strassera’s team also uses calendars, maps, threads and post-its (which were introduced to the market precisely at the beginning of the 1980s). The prosecutors had to demonstrate that the repression had been implemented throughout the Argentine territory. By not having operated directly and in the front line in the torture and disappearance of people, this ‘national vision’ was the only way to accuse the commanders of the dictatorship.

Is that your walkman?

If there is an emerging medium that characterizes the 1980s, it is the Walkman. The little device launched by Sony in 1979 and produced continuously until 2010 (!) was one of the signs of that time. Sony was founded by Akio Morita (a physicist) and Masaru Ibuka (an engineer) in 1946. Morita was the genious behind the walkman:

I remembered that one time when my daughter, Naoko, came home from a trip she ran upstairs before even greeting her mother and first put a cassette in her stereo. Ibuka’s complaint set me into motion. I ordered our engineers to take one of our reliable small cassette tape recorders we called Pressman, strip out the recording circuit and the speaker, and replace them with a stereo amplifier. I outlined the other details I wanted, which included very lightweight headphones that turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of the Walkman project (…) And while I expected people to share their Walkmans, we found that everybody seemed to want his or her own, so we took out the “hot line” and later did away with one of the two headphone jacks on most models. I had been convinced the Walkman would be a popular product, but even I was not prepared for the response.

By 2010, 200 million units had been sold. Without becoming a pure and simple sign of rebellion (as perhaps the jeans or the electric guitar in the postwar period), the Walkman signified the possibility of constructing personalized “soundscapes” and perceiving movement through urban spaces from a different perspective. It is no coincidence that the most rebellious character in the film, the prosecutor’s daughter, is the user of this new mediatization device. Her father, on the other hand, listens to classical music on a traditional Hi-Fi system, a device that also distinguishes (Pierre Bourdieu dixit) some still wealthy Argentine middle classes.

Returning to the mass media, it is interesting to point out that, as Eliseo Verón would have said, they not only appear in the “recognition phase” (the prosecutor listening to the radio or his Hi-Fi equipment, the family watching Minister Tróccoli on television, etc.) but also in “production phase”. If television and photo cameras proliferate in the room where the trial is taking place, while the testimonies of the victims are recorded through microphones, another scene shows the raid of a radio studio by police forces . All these reflections lead us to another issue: the mediatization of the Trial of the Juntas.

The mediatization

How was the Trial of the Juntas mediatized? Although the trial was public, the dimensions of the room -as seen in the film- did not allow a large attendance. At the time, only a few minutes a day were broadcast on television (without audio) due to pressure from the military, who did not want society to listen directly to the statements of the victims. I just read on Wikipedia that lawyer Bernardo Beiderman organized a “secret operation to take the videos with the recordings of the trial to a safe place. The judges feared the disappearance of documentary evidence. On April 25, 1988, Beiderman traveled to Oslo, Norway, together with other six judges”. The videos were kept together with the original text of the Norwegian Constitution in an atomic bomb-proof room.

Given the evident operational limitations, the trial was mediated by the Argentine broadcasting media, but indirectly. As an example of this indirect mediatization, we can mention the scene from Argentina 1985 where the prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo participates as a guest at the Bernardo Neustadt’s TV program, the most outstanding political analysis space of those years. In the original video, the prosecutor dedicated himself to commenting on the news in the press, perhaps the medium where the Trial of the Juntas was best mediatized.

Beyond the fact that it was mediatized on radio and television programs, in 1985 the trial was widely reported in the print media, which abounded in documentary evidence (quite a lot), photos of the courtroom (few) and (many) shorthand transcripts of the testimonials. One of the most outstanding productions that, if it had appeared in the film, would not have been out of place at all, was El Diario del Juicio published weekly by Perfil between May 27, 1985 and January 28, 1986. At the Centro de Documentación y Archivo Oral “Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” all copies of this historic journalistic production can be consulted online. Magazines –such as the mythical Humor– also contributed to building the Trial of the Juntas through the media (in the image, the cover of Humor n. 164 — December 1985 by Carlos Nine and the first cover of El Diario del Juicio).

In terms of a material(ist) theory of mediatization, we can say that the Trial of the Juntas was mostly mediatized in “liquid” (“modern”) media such as the press, radio, and television. In these media the case was constructed following a linear sequence, in a more or less continuous flow of news that followed its own rhythm, as if it were a serial judicial drama until the great final staging (Strassera’s closing statement). If the trial had taken place in 2023, it is most likely that its mediatization would be largely “gaseous”, in media such as Twitter and TikTok, and through snack microtexts bouncing through the networks like crazed molecules condemned to an ephemeral existence.

Closing

If Argentina 1985 opens with the radio, it ends with a series of black and white photographs. Throughout the entire film, the photos leave an iconic footprint that serves to set the time and highlight, in case there were any doubts, that it is a movie based “on real events” that should not be repeated.

Nunca más (Never more).