Documentary Constructions of Filial Memory in Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect and Nicolás Entel’s My Father, Pablo Escobar

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing renewed ways through which memory might be retrieved, preserved, manipulated, and performed. Several recent documentaries, including Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003) and Nicolás Entel’s My Father, Pablo Escobar (2010), have broadened our perspective on the ways filial relationships may be remembered and reproduced, particularly when, as in these cases, the father, a public figure, has been lost to the son. Kahn’s film focuses on his father, the architect Louis Kahn, who died when Nathaniel was eleven; Entel films the story of Sebastián Marroquín, the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s son, who seeks redemption from his father’s violent past. Both documentaries deploy personal memory but also a range of home movies, documents, personal interviews, and newscasts, among other elements, to build up for the son the person of his father. The project of developing the film becomes the process of reconnection with or detachment from a father and his legacy—an artistic and cultural legacy for Kahn, an illegitimate son, and a violent one for Marroquín. These documentaries thus become more than journeys of personal connection, disaffiliation, or reappraisal of the figure of the father. They are also cultural artifacts that reimagine public figures, reconstructing their lives and careers and acknowledging the particulars of their legacies. This article examines the manner of filial relationships that the sons establish through their video projects through a juxtaposition of personal memories with public life, to arrive at a necessary closure.

These documentaries lie at a critical junction between life writing, memory studies, and media studies. Paul John Eakin, in How Our Lives Become Stories, defines the most common form of what he calls the “relational life” as those autobiographies “that feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of either (1) an entire social environment (a particular kind of family, or a community and its social institutions—schools, churches, and so forth) or (2) key other individuals, usually family members, especially parents” (69). The texts thus privilege the enactment of intersubjectivity, as they blur the boundaries between autobiography and biography, heightening a sense of dialogue or the attempt at a dialogue. The kind of relational life narrative I engage here, the father–son story, is one of the most ubiquitous articulations of intersubjectivity. G. Thomas Couser provides a cogent frame for my examination of these two films, as he explains that these texts seem

predominantly driven not by the desire to memorialize a beloved or admired father but by the impulse to shore up, repair, or compensate for a flawed relationship. That is, the books are best read not as static representations of fathers, whether favourable or not—indeed, very few are successful at rendering their subjects as complex human beings—but rather as attempts to claim or even fashion a relationship with a father who is somehow absent, because of death, geographical distance, or emotional reserve . . . Rather, the narratives make public claims to, and about, the relationships between the authors and their fathers.

(135)¹

Couser calls these texts “narratives of filiation,” a term he prefers to the more commonly used “memoirs of fathers,” because, he notes, the term “filiation” highlights “their relationality, their rootedness in a sense of entitlement and their intent to enact some kind of engagement with the father, living or dead,” absent or present, legitimate or illegitimate, good or bad (135).

When the parent has been absent or distant when alive, as seems most often the case with fathers in this type of memoir, the sons cling to the bits of personal memory they might possess or turn to the forms of supplementary narratives that other family members can contribute to the creation of as coherent and complete a portrait of the father as possible. These supplementary data take, in the first place, the form of stories but also include all the archival documents a family might possess, including letters, photographs, and home movies. In an age of increasing digitization and...