1978 screened at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024
Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina fell under a military dictatorship which conducted a Dirty War of state terrorism against anyone perceived to be socialist, leftist, Peronist or subversive – or, as Moro (Mario Alarcón), the dreaded leader of a remote detention centre, summarises it in Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s 1978, “evil”. For he and the men working under him – not just military thugs like Carancho (Carlos Portaluppi) and Baviera (Jorge Lorenzo), but even the priest Alsina (Santiago Ríos) and the doctor Berges (Gustavo Bonfigli) – believe themselves to be working for a just, even a moral cause, even as they rape, torture and murder their way through the students that they have arrested. Only young recruit Miguel Altamarino (Agustin Olcese) questions the actions of this brutal death squad and raises ethical objections to their conduct – although there are limits to what he can say in an environment where anyone who questions the prevailing authority and authoritarianism can quickly end up on the rack with the other captives. Here, merely resisting places you on the side of evil.
The date of this film, enshrined in the title, is important. For in 1978, in part to present an improbably benign face to the world, Argentina hosted – and eventually won – the World Cup, and the events of the film take place over the night the Final was being broadcast, so that the atrocities unfolding in the detention centre are underscored by the national triumph transpiring on the centre’s televisions and radios. Not only does this ironise everything, but it serves as a constant reminder that there is a much bleaker reality underlying the genre thrills which the Onetti brothers are placing on screen. In fact, even as the match plays out in the background, 1978 opens with a different game. For the crew in the detention centre are engaged in what seems like a good-natured round of cards, until it is revealed that one of the players is bound, bloody and gagged, and terrifyingly aware that he is playing his last hand. That uneasy interplay between outrage and fun will permeate the film, whose state players know how to have a good time doing bad things. It is also, of course, a crucial element in the workings of the horror genre itself, where enormity is always packaged as entertainment.
Over the course of the evening, some information acquired through torture leads the squad to take in three more prisoners (Gustavo Pardi, Maria Eugenia Rigon, Justine Ceballos), as well as the heavily pregnant Irene (Paula Silva) whom the three were keeping manacled in a basement. Moro and Carancho get to work fast trying to determine who this unknown cell might be – but in a radical shift of genre, ideologically bleak realism gives way to hallucinatory Satanic pandemonium, as the death squad is made to look genuine evil in the face (even if they never recognise their own), and the hell that they have made of the detention centre becomes grotesquely literalised. This falls somewhere between the politicised torture porn of Lucio A. Rojas’ Trauma (2017), and the cultified police detentions of Anthony DiBlasi’s Last Shift (2014, remade by DiBlasi as Malum, 2023), Dodo Dayao’s Violator (2015), Can Evrenol’s Baskin (2015) and Tilman Singer’s Luz (2018).
What the death squad is doing in that detention centre is “unforgivable”, which might explain why the diabolical forces that have entered their domain make such short shrift of them. Yet perhaps the key image in 1978 is the cultists’ Necronomicon-like leatherbound tome, whose last pages are left conspicuously blank. For here, history is unfinished and never-ending, and we are all playing our part in writing and illustrating its macabre text. Similarly Miguel has his own unresolved trauma from the past that has made him who he is today: a not altogether willing, nor entirely unwilling, puppet for an unconscionable regime, and someone who has always been unwittingly, unhappily working with the devil. Accordingly, viewers are left uncertain whether, with the likes of him, the future – our present – is really in safe hands, even as trauma is passed on down Argentina’s different generations.
strap: Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s political horror sees Argentine history as a diabolical house of cards whose game remains unfinished
© Anton Bitel
