Saturday 23rd November, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge (advance registration required).
http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/events/chile-on-film
Includes the first screening of my new video, ‘Chile: Divided Generations’ – a study of the politics of memory in Chile, extracted from a longer film, Interrupted Memory, on memory and politics in Argentina and Chile, coming soon.
Interrupted Memory is the title of the film I’ve been shooting over the last three months in Argentina and Chile, a documentary about memory and politics which follows the course of people in the act of remembering in front of the camera. Asked about their earliest political memories, people recollect incidents and recount experiences from childhood and youth often figuring popular militancy and rebellion, military coups and the state violence and repression which followed. In Argentina, an old trade unionist remembers a factory occupation; a woman speaks about being kidnapped by state intelligence at the age of seventeen; another of spending seven years as a political prisoner; a father and son tell the story of the other son who disappeared. In Chile, a woman remembers her Communist father being released from concentration camp in 1949, people remember the military coup of 1973 at different ages, and younger ones remember discovering they were living in a dictatorship. The oldest contributor is over eighty, the youngest are students occupying a high school in Santiago.
A psychologist in Chile and a psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires speak of psychoanalysis under dictatorship. The remembered experiences shape a collective narration of history in the two countries from a range of different angles, whose traces are also found in the archives that play off against the spoken word. In short, the film constructs a possible version of lived political experience, of collective living memory, which emulates the condition Gilles Deleuze found in films by Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault, where the stories people tell, he said, are never fictional. It concludes with reflections on the politics of memory, and the lacunae of today’s official discourses of human rights in the two countries, either because trauma, both social and individual, always leave traces that remain ineffable, beyond expression—or because some things are put aside as politically inconvenient or incorrect.
Interrupted Memory is currently in post-production. Filmed in Argentina and Chile, May-July 2013, it will run about 120mns. Made with support from IRSES/TRANSIT, British Academy, Santander Fund at the University of Roehampton.
Here’s the video of the Q&A after the DocHouse screening of ‘Secret City’ at the Riverside last May
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/68041329#[/vimeo]
Welsh hills covered in snow as the train snakes across country on the way back from Aberystwyth. Went there for a symposium on Cuban cinema, with scholars and filmmakers over from Havana, and other participants mainly based in UK universities; although these were not necessarily Brits, because after all, the academic world is thoroughly international. Indeed our intellectual culture (such as it is) benefits enormously from the attraction that Britain seems to have for scholars from all over the world (which becomes a problem when a Government starts playing political games with student visas). Read more
The death in Buenos Aires of Argentine filmmaker and theorist Octavio Getino was reported on the same day as that of the historian Eric Hobsbawm in London. Worlds apart and different spheres of activity, perhaps, but both contributed in major ways to the broad current of independent and international critical culture that grew up after 1968, even though Hobsbawm remained a Communist and Getino was always a Peronist.
For myself, I was lucky to have interviewed both of them on camera, Getino in 1982, and Hobsbawm more recently, in 2007. Hobsbawm was generous in contributing to a film I made about a relative of mine, whom he’d known (The American Who Electrified Russia)—which makes it difficult to extract. Getino we filmed in Mexico, for a documentary on the New Latin American Cinema for Channel Four (in its early days, when it was really innovatory and progressive). He explained for us the concept of Third Cinema, which he launched with Fernando Solanas in 1969, in an essay based on their experience making the extraordinary piece of political cinema that goes under the name La hora de los hornos – Hour of the Furnaces. Here by way of tribute is that interview.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVohdIUNuGk[/youtube]
It’s almost a year since anti-capitalist protestors, intending to set up camp in front of the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square under the banner of Occupy LSX, were ejected from the square and parked themselves instead in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. The result was one of the starting points for this film: a highly public debate about capitalism and the Church.
But there was also another power acting in the shadows to eventually eject the Occupiers – the City of London Corporation. An ancient body which dates back before William the Conqueror, before there was a parliament in Westminster, which zealously guards its autonomy and privileges to this day.
This is the subject of Secret City: a state within a state, with deleterious effects on democracy, politics and economics in London, the country, and the world, for the City is joint headquarters with Wall Street of global finance capital. In short, ‘Secret City’ isn’t just a film for Londoners – especially in these times of crisis, the role of the City concerns everyone everywhere.
Here’s the trailer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HJGLqMAQbk[/youtube]
‘Secret City‘ is a minimal budget film by Michael Chanan and Lee Salter, supported by the University of Roehampton. We tell the story though interviews with politicians, academics, writers, activists and campaigners, counterpointed with unfamiliar archive footage and a musical score by Simon Zagorski-Thomas taken from the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’.
Won’t solve your money problems, but it might make you think about why you’ve got them. ‘A Short Film About Money’ is a spin-off from a longer film I’ve been making with Lee Salter, ‘Secret City’, which launches soon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFcoelfewXc&feature=plcp[/youtube]
‘Secret City’ is an investigation into the Corporation of the City of London which governs the famous square mile that serves as joint-HQ with Wall Street for global finance capital. We originally thought we might include a sequence about the illusions of money, but in the end left it out, so instead we fashioned the footage we’d collected into the satirical short you can see here.
or ‘Me gustan los estudiantes’: Mario Handler at St Andrews
The Uruguayan documentarist Mario Handler came to St Andrews recently for a symposium revisiting New Latin American Cinema of the 60s through the Uruguayan case. The event was able organised by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, included a prety cogent overview of Documentary and Activism by Leshu Torshin, and a Q&A with Mario Handler by Gustavo San Román. This was my own contribution. Read more
Being written for presentation at ‘Marx at the Movies’, these notes address the topic from an angle which is rarely treated in film and video scholarship, that of the peculiar labour process and mode of production involved. Read more