Educational Media Reviews Online

Once upon a time, Elsa Sánchez tells the narrator of El Eternauta’s Wife, she led a “wonderful life” with a “celebrated husband and four wonderful daughters.” Her husband, Argentine writer Héctor Hermán Oesterheld, had created the metaphorical, political and socially conscious graphic novel El Eternauta in 1957. This famous graphic novel transcends traditional comic books as its lone hero searches for his family in a post-apocalyptic world. El Eternauta has become part of Argentina’s cultural identity.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, as Argentina descended into 18 years of a political and military dictatorship, first Sánchez’s daughters then her husband spoke out against the regime. Soon her four daughters, two sons in law and her husband were “disappeared,” killed for their political opposition.

El Eternauta’s Wife tells the story of Sánchez’s experiences, while juxtaposing black and white filmed images from the graphic novel of a lone man wandering through a deserted urban landscape searching for his family, accompanied by the sound of his respirator and the howling wind. While El Eternauta becomes a symbol or opposition, Sánchez, cooking in her kitchen or looking through a family photograph album, becomes a symbol of a living victim and the long-term consequences of governmental terrorism. She now works with other widows and survivors, including the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, and speaks out on behalf of her grandchildren and their future.

Despite the filmmaker’s attempt to create a more hopeful ending, featuring Sánchez and her grandchildren together for a photo shoot, Sánchez’s well-deserved anger and bitterness cannot be masked. She tells the narrator: “I lost everything. I don’t know why I am alive.”

El Eternauta’s Wife is well shot and edited. It creates an effective contrast between the interviews of Sánchez and others with the ominous looking, but tragic, fictional figure of El Eternauta with his goggles, gasmask and hoodie. That contrast evokes the horrors of before and the hope of now. Although background information is contained in the film, educators who want to show this film could supplement it with a brief introductory summary of Argentine politics and society since the 1950s.