Hauntological Archives: Fabulation and the Politics of Memory in Ramón Lluís Bande’s Rearguard.

This paper examines how Ramón Lluís Bande’s Rearguard (2024) transforms archival materials into a site of political fabulation. Drawing on photographs, illustrations, and texts produced during the Spanish Civil War, the film reconstructs an imagined revolutionary cinema that never existed historically. Through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of fabulation and Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectral return, I argue that Rearguard reworks archival fragments in order to reactivate revolutionary becoming beyond the history of revolution itself. Rather than treating the archive as evidence of a closed past, the film presents Asturias’ antifascist experience as an unfinished history whose aspirations continue to resonate within contemporary political struggles. In doing so, Rearguard demonstrates how radical cinema can transform archival memory into a space for imagining collective futures.