From waste to worth, recycling moving images as a means for historical inquiry

Resumen

The aim of this thesis was to consider the recycling of moving images as a means for historical inquiry, and to reflect on how one temporality saw and wrote on another prior temporality through the traces born out of mechanical recording. The thesis examines how the tools of legitimation of one order in a given time can serve as the material for critical thought of another, how seeing images anew can serve as a space for scrutiny and reflection. The appropriation and re-editing of footage can play an important role in thinking historical events. It offers the possibility of cracking open a representation from within, instead of imposing a new view from above. To be able to arrive to this cracking open or, in Benjamin¿s terms, this brushing against the grain, the film has to take the risk of letting the footage remain open to doubts. The stress moves from the event portrayed to the portrayal itself, and what it says about communication and memory, technology and power. Consequently, this recycling of images also brings attention to the ways in which value is conferred or inferred, how certain images are defended as more ¿representative¿ and more worthy in detriment of others that are deemed waste. How both the events depicted and the images that come to represent them are ¿edited,¿ and this edition is not self-evident or unavoidable. It also underlines how events themselves are not immediately transferable, translatable. Events too are edited, mediated, and only retrievable as a combination of traces, memory and thought. The aim of the thesis was to offer a reflection on how we have come to experience historical events through moving images and to address some recurrent issues on the difficulties of the specific kind of mediation that recycled moving images offer. For this the thesis recurs to films that share certain characteristics: they are generally included in what is termed nonfiction filmmaking, these films have been built (and conceived) with previous footage, and they are essay films, or at least hold essayistic traits. The thesis analysis two films from the 1980s and 1990s, The Atomic Cafe (1982, The Archives Project) and Videograms of a Revolution (1992, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica) as case studies, and also includes a detailed analysis The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Esfir Shub, which offers an interesting contrast to the two case studies of the thesis, while sharing enough similarities to make the comparison relevant.