COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 1: CINÉ-GUERRILLAS

What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.

The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.

Mila Turajlić CINé-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS 2022, 94 min, DCP Based on resurrected 35mm footage shot by Stevan Labudović, the official cameraman of former Yugoslav President Tito, this documentary by Mila Turajlić takes viewers on an archival road trip through the insurgent historical streams and collaborative Third World networks that constituted and sustained the Algerian anti-colonial struggle from 1954-62. Turajlić follows Labudović’s work in Algeria through intimate interviews with him and Algerian revolutionary contemporaries, matching his newsreel footage – audiovisual testaments to tricontinental solidarity – with excerpts from his diary. Employing only images of the Algerian War not shown from a French perspective, CINé-GUERRILLAS wades through the media and propaganda battle that played out during the liberation struggle, where cinema was mobilized as a political weapon of resistance against colonialism and empire as well as a social, imaginative medium of world-making.

The screening will be introduced by artist, filmmaker, and researcher Carmen Amengual!

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