The people are missing: rethinking a collectivity that has come to pass through the traces of archive

Cepedal, E. 2024. The people are missing: rethinking a collectivity that has come to pass through the traces of archive. Archives of Radical Cinema. Radical Film Network Conference Madrid 2024. Madrid 19 - 22 Jun 2024

TitleThe people are missing: rethinking a collectivity that has come to pass through the traces of archive
AuthorsCepedal, E.
TypeConference paper
Abstract

In contemporary cinema, various authors (Périot, Bande, Godard) pose that archives constitute a repository from which, as Walter Benjamin suggests, images of the past “attain to legibility only at a particular time”. Only by knowing how to look at these images and what they have survived, as Didi-Huberman contends in Images in spite of all, can history can be freed from its absolute and abstract past and uncover potentialities in the present. The presentation is a reflexive exercise on how through my own research-led practice, cinema, when operating through these traces, opens up possibilities to construct counter-discursive narratives that question hegemonic historical canons. My film El Cine, 5 rescues and activates the archive of a local photographer during Franco’s dictatorship in a small mining community in Asturias. The film’s dispositif manifests that the archive, when connected to other fragments through montage, shapes memory as a means and not as an instrument to unveil the past (Benjamin). In this particular time in which the images become legible, their counter-discursive rearticulation becomes a political gesture, an act of resistance against the disappearance of a collectivity. In Cinema 2, Deleuze considers that the existence of a contemporary political cinema, must imply the absence of the people. If the people are no longer there, the political filmmaker cannot represent them, but she nevertheless has the opportunity to forge an indeterminate and creative future by facilitating the construction of a new people. This premise is of vital importance in a place like Asturias whose collectivity, formed around a way of life and a workers' movement that has already disappeared, needs the responsibility of local filmmakers with the memory and the construction of that new people. I will reflect on what the repurposing of this archive achieved and what new meanings have emerged through the finished film.

Keywordsresistance, class-consciousness, archive, post-memory, montage
Year2024
ConferenceArchives of Radical Cinema. Radical Film Network Conference Madrid 2024
Accepted author manuscript

Related outputs

El Cine, 5
Cepedal, E. 2023. El Cine, 5. Gijon International Film Festival

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