Chile, la memoria obstinada (“Chile: Obstinate Memory”) (Chile) Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 58 min., 1997 From all the films depicting the revolutionary climate in Chile in the 1970s, Patricio Guzmán’s Batalla de Chile was probably the most straightforward in narrative terms, and it ended up becoming a classic of worldly renown. In 1997 Guzmán went back to Santiago with a small film crew and revisited some of the people and places he had filmed twenty-five years earlier.
Los Rubios ("The Blondes") (Argentina) Dir. Albertina Carri, 89 min., 2003 Exploring different memory states counterpoised within the narrative, this film documents the search of director Albertina Carri as she investigates what happened to her family during Argentina's "Dirty War”. In this emblematic work on the (im)possibility of memory, cinematic enunciation bifurcates as director Carri appears on film as herself in some scenes, but also uses an actor- accompanied by a film crew- to portray herself in other scenes, in a self-reflexive exercise that turns the film into not so much a documentary, but a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary. With a highly fragmented visual style combining different narrative techniques, Los Rubios depicts how the past infiltrates a present fractured by memory and silence.
No es Crisis es Crónico. Colectivo C.A.S.I.T.A. Madrid, 2011, Through an exhibition at Complutense University’s Art School in Madrid, the C.A.S.I.T.A. Collective presented their Emotional Fragility Observatory, aimed at eliciting narratives, analysis and experiments on the fragility of affect in the context of precarity and existential insecurity triggered by the intersection of several current phenomena: the precariousness of work, the regulation of care and affective labour under Neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of virtual affect in the Internet, and the context of technological innovation.
Long Story Short (working title). Natalie Bookchin, Los Ángeles, USA 2013, Long Story Short (working title) is a film, a web documentary, and an online story archive. It uses innovative forms of storytelling, shapes its narrative by first building a large archive and out of it layering and interweaving hundreds of video diaries made by people in California facing poverty. This project crowdsources stories from hundreds of people sharing experiences and reflections on the causes and solutions to poverty in America.
EN CONSTRUCCIÓN / UNDER CONTRUCTION Gabriela Golder, Javier Plano, Argentina 2014, This is an ongoing project that proposes to think the world of labor from individual life stories. Cooperative Work Cintoplom (Argentina), represents a paradigm of control and management by a group of workers facing the loss of their jobs. The members of the cooperative tell and reflect on their experience in relation to work, lack of work, the phases until the recovery of the factory and the challenges of the future.
