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Deterioration as Documentation: Fashioning the Cinematic Artifact in the Documentary

2016; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/discourse.38.1.0069

1522-5321

Robbins,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Deterioration as Documentation: Fashioning the Cinematic Artifact in the Documentary Dylon Robbins (bio) There is an “archival art” that, according to Hal Foster, seeks to “transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia.”1 Through an engagement with archival materials, this art aims to recuperate and revive “failed visions” as “possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations.” The possibility of calling upon archival material as the point of departure for imagining social relations necessarily alludes to the history of how notions of the material are entangled with the social, with its evolution and transformation, and inevitably with their roles in shaping perceptions and ideas of the past.2 Michel Foucault, furthermore, has described inversely how the archive, the material it contains, and its organization manage to shape the very contours of knowledge and how it is produced and recorded, a formation and inscription made in anticipation of its potential or eventual incorporation.3 In particular, the archived film hosts an opportunity to reflect further upon these two dimensions, as the material features of a medium both embody and respond to the specific material and historical conditions that gestate and shape it, along with the precariousness and unpredictability of its storage and presentation. Arguably, this multifaceted materiality of cinema has constituted a central concern of [End Page 69] a significant body of works comprising diverse approaches to the archived cinematic object, making films that explore the porous boundaries between the documentary on one side and, on the other, those experimental or aesthetic explorations that shun narrative or exegesis to emphasize form and texture. William Wees described these found footage films as calling upon cinema’s “leftovers” and therefore as scavenging upon history’s waste, upon its forgotten and disregarded past, constituting, then, an inversion or reconfiguration of historical and thus archival priorities.4 Cinema in Latin America, however, has a distinct history of engaging with these material conditions, even making their impact and effects the central premise of a production that sought to foreground these conditions and thus elaborated in contrast to those other cinematic approaches whose production values permitted techniques that actively obfuscate any contradictions in their context or otherwise wipe away any of the other residues of history. Whether Glauber Rocha’s notion of an aesthetics of hunger, García Espinosa’s call for an imperfect cinema, or Rogério Sganzerla’s celebration of an aesthetics of garbage, an exploration of marginality, disfigurement, and refuse has an established trajectory at the center of Latin American cinema as a deliberate engagement with its historicity and materiality.5 The Latin American documentary, moreover, has played an influential role in shaping the truth criteria for cinema as a whole in the region, defining, as it were, important approaches to visual evidence and its relationship to the historical.6 This essay, then, explores some uses of archival footage in the documentary in a few Latin American cases. By situating precisely the uses of frequently degraded or damaged archival material in the conditions and arc of some of the central tendencies in filmmaking in Latin America, this essay suggests how the multiple dimensions of cinema’s materiality work to both reinforce and build upon some of the central critiques of the archive while exploring alternative notions of temporality and historicity in film. Documentation as Artifact To enter into an archive is to occasionally confront the taxonomic and organizational crisis created by some of its materials: incomplete indices and catalogs, records lost or corrupted in the transfer from analog to digital systems, and variants in the transliteration of non-Latin alphabets. Part of that crisis, beyond being organizational, involves these materials’ fragility. For example, 78-rpm [End Page 70] shellac records are brittle and can shatter and chip like glass if bumped or dropped. Residual acid in paper stock makes it so that photos, books, and prints crumble and break as they age. But film, whether acetate or nitrate, is especially precarious. Celluloid decomposes and becomes vinegary, and the organic compounds in its gelatin-based emulsion are a cozy substrate for the proliferation of molds and funguses that slowly render its images invisible. And indeed, if the film...