Behind the Neoclassical Façade: A Haunted National Monument in Chilean Film

Abstract

This article analyses filmic representations of the Chilean presidential palace (La Moneda), an emblematic site at which narratives of past violence, national exceptionalism and emancipatory anticipation intersect. I build on a growing corpus of work that uses film analysis to explore the spatiality of dictatorship memories and legacies in the Southern Cone. Unlike more conventional “sites of memory”, La Moneda is simultaneously a functioning government building, a site of violence, and an object of heritage. This complex temporal fabric makes it a powerful space for political interventions, a setting that can sharpen the continuities and symmetries between different historical events and periods. Drawing on theories of inheritance and haunting, I first examine the hegemonic temporalities of progress and heritage that frame the building, moving on to reflect on the alternative temporal imaginaries offered by film. In these texts the palace is haunted by images of its own destruction in 1973, as well as by the figure of Salvador Allende, whose prophesy of future emancipation sits uncomfortably with triumphalist accounts of the Chilean democratic transition. Through my analysis, I explore how site-specific struggles for historical justice are imbricated in resistance to ongoing state repression, and the formulation of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.