Violence and the abject in Bajo este sol tremendo (2009) of Carlos Busqued and El otro hermano (2017, Israel Adrián Caetano)

Abstract

The Argentine director Israel Adrían Caetano made a very good film adaptation of the novel Bajo este sol tremendo (2009) of Carlos Busqued, called El otro hermano (2017), in which the past of the dictatorship is linked to the narrative present through the violence of a former military air force officer. The only desire of this protagonist, called Duarte, is the money he earns with kidnappings and through corruption, which is part of the systemic violence. Duarte is a sordid man, everything in him is horrible and at the same time strangely attractive; this is why he is correlated with the notion of the abject of Kristeva (1982). His representation differs from that of the militaries of the dictatorship in the «cinema of the disappeared», which will be demonstrated by a brief analysis of Garage Olimpo (1999), by Marco Bechis. The abject, contradictory personality of Duarte also characterizes the ambiguity of the violence represented in El otro hermano, which causes the same effects of attraction and rejection in the implicit viewer and leads him to a mediatic and generic reflection.