STAB THE ARCHIVE | طعناً بالأرشيف
by Nour Ouayda
From finding lost footage to recycling archival material, ‘secondhand cinema [1]’ is the practice of making films through and with already existing sounds and images. The five films in this program all reuse audio-visual material to re-activate certain archives, deploying gestures that look at the past in order to reveal new meanings and propose new connections. It is not enough to simply open an archive, these works unhinge the images and the sounds—in some cases literally stabbing them—to uncover narratives that were often hidden, lost, and censored.
By looking at the background of fiction films, Rania Stephan and Kamal Aljafari turn their attention and ours to details lost in the margins of images: doors, gates, windows, walls, and streets of film sets as the traces of other stories, different from the ones told by the source films. In Stephan’s Threshold, an Egyptian sci-fi feature film that deals with a mad scientist experimenting with time travel, is condensed into an 11-minute experience of warped space/time that challenges the perception of a straight continuous flux of time that can account for the histories we want to narrate. Exploring a similar gesture in Recollection, Aljafari looks at the background of Israeli and American action films shot in his hometown of Jaffa, searching for those accidently passing by in the back. The filmmaker erases the main actors to focus strictly on his hometown and its inhabitants. “They were in the way”, he says. The fictional images become documents of a place that no longer exists, revealing its deliberate erasure by the Zionist occupation both in reality and in fiction. Stephan and Aljafari’s gestures are that of archeologists, excavating witnesses to retell alternative narratives.
In an echo to these two works, Eduardo Menz’s Las Mujeres de Pinochet juxtaposes two excerpts of news footage that give opposed experiences of life under the Pinochet regime: footage of Cecilia Bolocco Fonck being congratulated by the dictator for being the first Chilean to win the Miss Universe title in 1987, and the testimony of Carmen Gloria Quintana, who survived being set on fire on July 2nd 1986 by an army patrol during a street demonstration against the dictatorship. Menz layers the image of one video with the sound of the other and structures the film around repetition and insistence. He dissects the archival material and plows it open to reveal the dissonance between the two narratives, but more importantly to defy the ideals of beauty and power that the regime was propagating. Cecilia’s smooth face could clash with Carmen’s burnt skin, but Menz refilms the images and distorts them. Cecilia appears pixelated and badly framed. As the video’s texture renders the beauty queen’s skin rugged and unsmooth, the film brings a glimmer of justice to Carmen Gloria Quintana.
The use of pixelated and deteriorated images in these three works [2] challenge notions of smoothness and beauty imposed by the culture of high definition and high fidelity we see in Hollywood films and commercials. The works reject telling clear stories with clear images and sounds. Poor images, as Hito Steyerl describes them [3], hold the traces of their circulation, and often of their misuse, mis-preservation and censorship. They expose the lack of accessibility [4] and the level of control authorities apply on moving image archives. The ‘low/bad’ resolution of these images and sounds thus reflect the complexity and the violence latent within them. This direct relationship between the materiality of the sound/images and the narrative is very apparent in Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ Impressions for a light and sound machine, where the violence contained in the soundtrack literally infects the film’s surface/flesh. As a woman’s voice narrates the injustices suffered by her people, she utters the names of those who are now dead or have disappeared. It’s as if the name of each victim rips the image as it is being pronounced[5]. Nothing is left untouched and the celluloid of an old Mexican film is sentenced by the soundtrack[6], stabbed until it disintegrates and disappears.
At the heart of secondhand cinema practices is the distance that exists between the filmmakers and the process through which images and sounds were originally recorded. The fact that the filmmaker’s body was absent from that process creates a sense of foreignness that governs these films. Philip Widmann’s Destination Finale reveals this on various levels. Having found the footage in Ho Chi Minh City, both the man being filmed, and the person filming are unknown to the filmmaker and to us. The film is structured around this lack—or omission, as Widmann calls it—inviting us to fill in the blanks ‘with a combination of the visible with our imagination, knowledge, and memories.’[7] As our main character travels across Europe, we start to stipulate fragments of his identity, creating a playful and intimate relation with someone else’s private images. The last shot shows a suitcase bound for Saigon and intertitles closing the film indicate that the footage was probably shot a few months prior to the deployment of the U.S. Marines to South Vietnam. These final notes install a feeling of discomfort that we realize was somehow looming all along in the images, as we become the witnesses of a catastrophe about to occur.
[1] This term was coined by Austrian film critic Christa Blümlinger. She elaborates on this in her book Cinéma de seconde main : esthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux médias (2013, Klincksieck). The use of the term ‘secondhand’ to describe this type of cinematic practice is interesting in the way it simultaneously includes the hand, the gesture and the manipulation of the sounds and images.
[2] Rania Stephan and Kamal Aljafari both used pirated DVDs or Youtube files of VHS copies of the films they re-edited, and Eduardo Menz came across the footage he used on a VHS containing recordings of Chilean news.
[3] For more on the poor image, see: Steyerl, Hito. “In defense of the poor image”. e-flux. Journal #10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
[4] We generally pirate images and sounds that we do not have easy access to.
[5] The experience of this film seen in a cinema is so devastating and powerful, I remember crying when the woman started to list all the first names of the victims, I felt as if I knew them one by one.
[6] In her essay “Weightless Present: Films by militant audiovisual collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos”. (Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Serbia. December 2018. https://almudenaescobarlopez.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Weightless-Present_Alternative.pdf ), Almudena Escobar López writes that “the viewers see how the image disintegrates in the process of being seen; viewing becomes the sentence of the image.” She continues to elaborate on the important role of sound in Los Ingrávidos’ work. As the soundtrack becomes the center of attention, it strips the images bare, away from their ideological and mediatic representations. In Impressions for a light and sound machine, it is not only the act of viewing but also that of listening that sentences the image and devastates it.
[7] Widmann, Philip. “I Am an Omission”. in Sonja Kmec, Viviane Thill (eds.), Tourists and Nomads. Amateur Images of Migration. Marburg: Jonas 2012. 177.