New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015

This article reflects upon some of the current uses of archival footage in contemporary Chilean television dating from the late Pinochet’s military dictatorship. It focuses on the case of the fiction series Los 80: Más que una moda/The 80s: More than a Trend (2008), which revisits everyday life under the dictatorship, as a means to analyse the afterlife of documentary footage that has been marginalized for decades by local television. Shifting the discussion away from an analysis of character identification or critical views on nostalgia, it focuses on the productive possibilities offered by the usage of archival material, particularly ‘unofficial’ sources. Drawing from the concepts of ‘approximation’ and ‘archive effect’, I argue that by re-appropriating creatively a wide range of archival footage this series offers a ‘mise-en-scène of fact and history’ whereby viewers can insert their own desires and opinions about the country’s past, thus contributing to the forging of necessary debates acknowledging Chile’s recent history.

This article considers the stories behind the production and screening of two very different Peruvian films that reveal much about the way the archive, the archival object and archival fragment have worked to disrupt and force a reconsideration of key moments in Peruvian political history of the twentieth century. One, a feature film by Francisco Lombardi, Ojos que no ven/Eyes That Don’t See (2003), provides a provocative perspective on the impact of the televisual revelations of the corruption at the heart of President Fujimori’s government (1990–2000). The second, a documentary made by Kurt Hermann at the behest of the military, Alerta en la Frontera/Border Alert (1941) offers a patriotic recording of the border campaign against Ecuador, which was banned at the time and had its first public screening 70 years later. This analysis suggests that the delay in viewing events of such national importance forces not only a reconsideration of those events and their disruptive effect on a collective, official sense of national history and identity but also a questioning of the way that contemporary political figures and events might be considered. This article also takes account of the key role of Peru’s national film archive in shaping the nature of national heritage, culture and memory.

This article explores the importance that using archival footage has for both film exhibition and questioning the truth behind images. It focuses on El dirigible/The Airship (Dotta, 1994) and C3M: Cinemateca del Tercer Mundo/Third World Cinematheque (Jacob, 2011), a fiction and a documentary, respectively, to suggest that the incorporation of archival footage invites us to reflect upon local film and sociopolitical history, while guiding us through the archive of Uruguayan cinema. This article argues that in the case of cinemas where there is no established filmmaking tradition and where access to the archive is restricted, incorporating sequences from past films fulfils an exhibition role that necessarily acknowledges and gives visibility to the work of previous practitioners. Moreover, it explores how this practice underscores the tensions between past and present, and questions the ability of audio-visual documents to provide trustworthy evidence to both reveal and challenge the narration of history.

This article examines the use of archival footage in Colombian cinema, following three lines of enquiry: film as meta-history, film as montage and video recycling as counter-information. First, the section on ‘film as meta-history’ studies the historical discourse on Colombian cinema in three films by Luis Ospina: En busca de María/In Search of María (Ospina and Nieto, 1985); the series on film history De la ilusión al desconcierto/From Illusion to Confusion (2007); and the ‘epic collage’ Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger (2007a). Second, ‘film as montage’ addresses Fragmentos/Fragments (Santa and Campos, 1999) and Paraíso/Paradise (Guerrero, 2006), two films that critically address the discontinuity and fragmentation of Colombia’s history. Finally, ‘video recycling as counter-information’ explores the media news as a source of archival construction through a group of five films produced by students and professors at the University of Valle (Cali, Colombia) that show a more radical way of understanding television news produced during periods of political polarization.

This article explores the use of cinema in Argentine artists’ videos. In an age of open access to myriad moving images, the production, distribution and consumption of films and videos have reduced their costs and become a common popular activity. This contemporary visual excess seems to be dominated by postmodern processes of citation and resignification of objects and images in circulation, taken mainly from the mass media and the Internet. Accordingly, this article aims to examine experimental Argentine video productions that not only cite but also use cinema as an inter-trans-medial dispositif and thus as a source of renewal of video art. It studies ways in which video has moved from its dialogue with television to that with the cinematographic, from addressing archives or ‘found’ footage to problematizing, in a Bourriaudian vein, the use of ‘cultural artefacts’.

In his documentary Pulqui, un instante en la patria de la felicidad/Pulqui: An Instant in the Land of Happiness (2007a), Alejandro Fernández Mouján follows Argentine plastic artist Daniel Santoro’s attempt to recreate a plane prototype from the Peronist era, the Pulqui II. Santoro’s goal is to build a machine that not only looks the part but that can also fly, however briefly. This article pays attention to the way in which the film – parallel to this rather simple plot – sheds light upon the fascinating phenomenon of Peronism in Argentina. The notion of the archive is central to the film, both as something existing in oral and visual form – quoted at length and freely by Fernández Mouján – and as something that can be reproduced and brought back to life through the actual model of the plane. Through these uses of the archive, the film offers a critique of the socio-economic situation of Argentina post 2001 that might also be read as a criticism of the first Peronist project. In apparently innocuous ways Pulqui … is a critical tool that might allow an attentive viewer to think through some of the key events in contemporary Argentine history.

Defa After East Germany, Brigitta B. Wagner (ED.) (2014) Rochester: Camden House, 349 pp., ISBN: 9781571135827, h/bk, £57.00

La Televisión Durante La Transición Española, Manuel Palacio (2012) Madrid: Cátedra, 472 pp., ISBN: 9788437630687, h/bk, 22.90

Experimental Film and Anthropology, Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino (EDS) (2014) New York and London: Bloomsbury, 208 pp., ISBN: 9780857858221, p/bk, £19.99

On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary, Lutz Koepnick (2014) New York: Columbia University Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9780231168328, h/bk, £24.00