Dora García intertwines politics, psychoanalysis and performance into Second Time Around. This staged documentary orbits the figure of Oscar Masotta, a pivotal theorist in the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s, whilst it is important to keep in mind that it is not a biopic about the theorist. Masotta’s ideas on Lacanian psychoanalysis, politics and changed the cultural landscape of that 1960s Buenos Aires. The title Second Time Around is taken from a story by Julio Cortázar, a contemporary of Masotta, which recounts the climate of psychosis and uncertainty caused by the trauma of disappearances in Argentina.
In Second Time Around, García weaves together a sequences of seemingly disparate scenes that are bound by the figure of Masotta and the trauma of Argentinian dictatorships. These become manifest in the most innocuous of incidents, shots of posters plastered along a wall advertise their own transmission, to the more extreme, a person tied up in white cloth and ropes and is carried and left in a forest. The film works at revealing hidden connections with history and the present, the threat of return, perhaps, perpetually looming.
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