Space-Temporality on Political Violence in the Audiovisual Production of the National Center of Historical Memory. The Case of Mampuján: Chronicles of a Displacement

Abstract

This paper analyzes the documentary Mampuján. Chronicles of a Displacement, produced by the National Center of Historical Memory and that tells the story of the people who, in the year 2000, lived the uprooting of the town of Mampuján — a municipality of the department of Bolivar — because of the Colombian armed conflict. The objective is to understand how, in this documentary, temporalities and spatialities that provide frames of visibility to interpret the past are constituted. We propose the thesis that this film has a linear structure that configures an analogous way of understanding the recent history of political violence in Colombia and that, at the same time, carries a risk of under and over exposure for the people of Mampuján. Methodologically, an analysis is made from the perspective of visual studies and hermeneutics, with an emphasis on the study of the narrative of the documentary from its way of organizing the different composing elements to the rhythm in which it exposes them. The analysis allows us to conclude that documentary films have the potential to constitute historical knowledge insofar as they reconstruct and recall past events. In the case of the production of the National Center of Historical Memory, we find that its documentaries contribute to the formation of our ways of seeing and understanding the political violence experienced in recent Colombian history. Thus, the article presents an advance in the reflection on the visual devices related to the war in the country.