It was a severe disappointment, Beyle [Stendhal] writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d’Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. —W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

I expressed my distaste for Judgment at Nuremberg to Bertha, a Russian emigre living in my Alabama hometown who went to the same Reform Jewish temple as my grandfather and who drove him and others crazy with her procommunist opinions. She thought it was the greatest movie ever made, and she told me indignantly, “You’d feel different if Hitler slaughtered most of your relatives.” In other words, the movie’s subject matter made any question about art or emphasis irrelevant—the same judgment some people later made about Schindler’s List.

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We like to think we’re more thoughtful about such matters today than we were a half century ago, but I wonder. Albertina Carri’s The Blonds (2003), a provocative Argentinean feature playing this week at Facets Cinematheque, deals with the filmmaker’s efforts to uncover information about her leftist parents, kidnapped and murdered in 1977, when she was only four years old, during Argentina’s “dirty war.” Her film’s a lot closer to Shoah than to Judgment at Nuremberg. (This is why I can’t imagine it turning up in the ultraconventional Chicago Latino Film Festival.) It’s won significant acclaim and recognition in Argentina even though it refuses to offer the comfort and certainty of a conventional documentary—something that has alienated part of the mainstream press. “Too much of the film is in a mood of chin-scratching detachment,” complained A.O. Scott in the New York Times, “and this creates a vacuum in which its powerful, confrontational moments lose their force, the trauma of the past pushed nearly out of reach.”

Carri may well have created so many difficulties for herself and the viewer because she had no choice, at least if she wanted to remain honest. But there are gains as well as losses. As writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky puts it, “The film avoids the solemnity and ideological simplifications common to many cinematic treatments of the desaparecidos.” The real subjects are “the impossibility of compensating for such a lack, the brutal severing of family ties, memory’s search for facts—and unstoppable fictionalization of what it finds.” Yet as one hilarious sequence shows, the film initially failed to get state funding because Carri’s murdered parents were intellectuals and she insisted on interviewing their neighbors rather than more “important” figures—i.e., other intellectuals. (We see the film crew reading aloud from the bureaucrats’ snobbish letter.)

Directed and written by Albertina Carri

With Analia Couceyro

Rosenstrasse ★ (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta

Written by Pamela Katz and von Trotta

With Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Martin Feifel, Jurgen Vogel, Jutta Lampe, Doris Schade, and Fedja van Huet.