migrant thoughts cinematographic intersections ] hambre [ espacio cine experimental Migrant Thoughts : Cinematographic — Intersections / Nicole Brenez... [et al.] ; edition compilated by Florencia Incarbone ; Florencia Incarbone Sebastian Wiedemann. - 1st ed. - Sebastian Wiedemann Vicente López : Florencia Incarbone, 2020. 204 p. ; 20 x 14 cm. proofreading Mariano Blatt ISBN 978-987-86-7203-8 Alicia Di Stasio Mario Valledor 1. Film analysis. 2. Film criticism. I. Brenez, Nicole. II. Incarbone, Florencia, comp. translation III. Wiedemann, Sebastian, comp. Alicia Bermolen CDD 791.4361 Alejo Magariños Daniel Tunnard Sebastian Wiedemann design Micaela Blaustein font Alegreya Sans by Juan Pablo del Peral Prologue 7 — Migrant Thoughts. Images as a Gesture of Resistance florencia incarbone and sebastian wiedemann Interval 15 — Image, Fact, Action, and What Remains to Be Done nicole brenez Intersection I: Memory and Archive 53 — Marta Rodríguez: Memory and Resistance andrés bedoya ortiz 69 — Glaring Absence: Viral Archives in Albertina Carri’s Restos and Cuatreros jens andermann Intersection II: Literature and Philosophy 81 — Faces that Remain, Any Given Face. The Films of Pedro Costa and the Fictions of Maurice Blanchot carolina villada castro 91 — The Clearing in the Woods. Carelia: internacional con monumento, by Andrés Duque cloe masotta 111 — The Transformation of the Poetic Animal carlos m. videla Intersection III: Decolonizing the Image 131 — Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords tess lea and elizabeth a. povinelli 153 — Dy(e)ing is Not-Dying. Nova Paul’s Experimental Colour Film Polemic tessa laird Interval 163 — Improvisation. The Controlled Accident yann beauvais 190 — About the Authors la radicalidad de la im migrant thoughts. image as a gesture of resistance florencia incarbone and sebastian wiedemann To migrate is to move from one place to another, seeking to sustain the flow of life. It’s common practice in the animal world, usually in response to periodic or seasonal cycles: penguins migrate to look for food, to escape the extreme cold, to mate and to nest; elephants wander the great African plains in search of water sources, while monarch butterflies undertake transatlantic journeys to warmer climes. For human animals, reasons for migrating may include a lack of guarantees of personal liberties, economic needs, precarious or non-existent healthcare systems, or religious perse- cution, to name just a few, moving a whole life from a familiar territory in response to prevailing forces that violently provoke such a departure. The untimely nature of this forced displacement is lived in the flesh, and on numerous occasions jeopardizes the lives of those who, with no other al- ternative, decide to take the risk of constructing their destinies beyond the borders of what is familiar. Migration naturally means displacement, and in that movement the sensibilities that inhabit the spaces are multiplied. Traditions move from one place on the planet to another, cultures mix as a possibility of open- ing up to differences and the discovery of life practices of an other who addresses and inhabits the world with sensibilities that diverge from one’s own. Migration expands the horizon of possibilities, enables exchanges, brings about a shift in the notion of community as a closed body and, de- spite the violence, embraces the individual’s life potential. migrant thoughts 7 To think like a migrant means to think outside of what is normalized, structured and expected. It is about exposing oneself to something that, because of its difference, may be a danger and at the same time an oppor- tunity for complete transmutation. The bravery of those who throw them- selves into the unknown lies in trusting that what lies beyond the visible is a potential to be discovered, making it possible to beat the asphyxia that has become a fact of life, increasingly restricting the most vital essence of bodies in their everyday lives. The irremediable, inevitable search for a decent life is the condition of any living person, something which nonethe- less in human animals is considered a luxury and a privilege of the few. As a publishing act, Migrant Thoughts argues that the image is inevita- bly nomadic and inexorably migrant and, as Henri Bergson reminds us, is everywhere. Everything is image. We are images among images, and in this respect film is no more than one of the media through which images move. Images become a gesture of resistance, as by being just an image and not a just image, as Jean-Luc Godard said, they are worthy and can never be subdued by power, despotism or an all-too human will corrupted by the idea of ownership. They are pure potential for resistance, as they are not a luxury, or a privilege, and much less a possession. On the contrary, they are the permeable condition of passage so that a living thing does not become stationary or stagnant. The image can of course move on the screen, but at the same time, the image makes a whole screen, a whole surface where it can continue. It continues in bodies, in writing, on these pages, as in poli- tics, archives, memory, literature, and philosophy. The image migrates, and in its wake it provides and proposes intersections, intervals. That is, it ad- vances through life affirming what is living as a cinematographic gesture and, in turn, it exceeds and goes beyond film itself. Or, to put it another way, where cinema itself has to open up to metamorphosis, it becomes a gesture of editing between blocks of text. As editors we have proposed a montage in three parts, with two intervals (opening and closing) as false cuts in a flow of images which could certainly exceed and migrate outside of the fragile content of this book. Just as penguins, elephants and butterflies don’t belong to the map or to the measurements that human animals draw, nor do the images and the potency of thought that these images bear belong to a disciplinary condi- tion. Images do not belong: images resist, images exceed, images migrate. 8 florencia incarbone and sebastian wiedemann Like a cinematographic editing idea but with different media, we propose then a journey, a wandering that knots and nests between three intersections, affirming not only the dynamism of thought among images, but above all images’ constitutive condition of heterogenesis as a differ- entiating force where to migrate is simply to open up to the other that brings variety. As processes of mutual implication and inclusion, we have called these intersections Memory and Archive, Literature and Philosophy, and Decolonizing the Image. Opportunities for thought as “betweens” and “middles” where, as film and book editors, we want to communicate this feeling of precariousness in migration, of being incomplete, and therefore, this disposition to become, to be again, and differently. Migrating and not perpetuating oneself, never completely realizing or effectuating image or thought, making them always incomplete. Being always just passing through, inhabiting seasons and atmospheres in the eternity of the instant where something unthinkable can unfold and be expressed. Thinking with and between. The moving aspect of thought that be- comes matter vibrating in the encounter with the body of film. Fleeing, becoming im-migrant, errant, fearful that film will close in on itself. Open it, let it move, be part of an ecology that passes through the images, but is not reduced to a single medium; let it become potent in the encounter with heterogeneous materials. More than film, cinematographic intersec- tions, unexpected encounters with images that force us to think, that move thought, that make it migrant, that launch it on adventures interwoven with literature, poetry, anthropology, philosophy, music, politics, ecology, nature, life... Migrant Thoughts. Cinematographic Intersections, as a gesture of film editing that becomes literary, begins with the interval proposed by Nicole Brenez, who puts to us a question about action. What is to be done? is pre- sented as the question that opens up possibilities to the vital limitation of the alienated individual. It’s about putting an end to the life mutilated by abuses of power and returning it to its plenitude, as a gesture of resis- tance. This question motivates the switch from speculation to praxis by such filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard and Masao Adachi. We are challenged to think about what happens when the facts morph into information, ques- tioning the supposed transparency (or lack of it) in communication, and raising the problem of falsifications and interventions that take place in this migrant thoughts 9 process. Processes of counterinformation have always existed in opposition to opaque information, seeking to destroy what intends to be invisibilized to expose it in the flesh. That libertarian will advances in the first intersection, Memory and Archive, and is what drives the filmmaker to make film: someone should tell this story, someone should denounce what is going on. Marta Rodríguez embodies this intention, giving a voice to those silenced by oppressive power structures. Marta and her partner Jorge Silva travel around Colombia, meeting peasants and indigenous people. These people are the protagonists of their own stories, past and present, and find in cinema the chance to be heard and show the everyday tragedies (precar- ious working and living conditions, discrimination) they are inexorably ex- posed to. Land, labour and memory are the central themes that resonate throughout Rodríguez’s filmography. Carlos Andrés Bedoya Ortiz takes us on a journey through her life, films and archive, inquiring into how the re- lationship between work and memory is established. This relationship im- plies an approach from discards, essays, recordings, mistakes, secrets, and private moments that Marta Rodríguez keeps alive in her Fundación Cine Documental/Investigación Social [Documentary Film/Social Investigation Foundation]. The “archive fever” that brings this intersection alive continues with the cinema of Argentine filmmaker Albertina Carri, analyzed by Jens Andermann.