2025 Montreal Symposium
Session 6 - Making it Visible
Montreal, 29 April 2025
Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.
Cartographier l’absence
Nour Ouayda (Filmmaker)
In 1920, operators from the French company Pathé Gaumont were sent to Lebanon to document a pre-independence country under French mandate. One hundred years later, filmmaker Rami el Sabbagh and musician Sharif Sehnaoui discovered these images and saw their city through the eyes of these anonymous operators. The conditions under which el Sabbagh and Sehnaoui gained access to these images were precarious and circumstantial. Indeed, these images are scattered and buried under bureaucratic and legal layers that render them opaque and inaccessible. It was through a commission from an interdisciplinary festival in Strasbourg that they gained exceptional access to these archives to create a cinematic and musical work. This resulted in Topologie d’une absence (2021, 30 min), a second-hand film that revisits these images of Beirut under French occupation and reflects on their presence, but above all their absence.
The discovery of these archives was also the discovery of an absence. The absence here concerns both the archive itself and what it contains. It is an absence that reveals a silent violence, an act of concealment and power. These images carry within them past, present, and future erasures. This intervention will question the way in which the act of reuse in Topologie d’une absence orchestrates disappearance and appearance to map an absence that becomes the structuring form of a memory built on gaps and a violated territory, characterized by destruction and loss.
Genealogía y preservación de películas (de segunda mano) en América Latina
Carolina Cappa (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola)
"What an extraordinary compilation Cuba will one day make!", said Jay Leyda in his 1964 book Film Begets Film. This prophetic observation, made in the face of the avant-garde aesthetics that would later consolidate at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), included a footnote mentioning Eduardo Manet's 1960 film El Negro. This almost unknown film, which preceded the well-known work of Santiago Alvarez and the ICAIC Documentary Department, was the starting point for a project dedicated to early experimental examples of films made from other films in Latin America. At the intersection of film preservation and film research, the Second Hand project aimed to preserve films in need of care and access — in close collaboration with film archives as Cinemateca de Cuba and Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art — while at the same time creating a new genealogy of reuse films through lesser-known pieces such as El Negro, La Paz (Grupo Cine Liberación/María Elena Massolo, Argentina, 1968) or Made in USA (Christine and Kurt Rosenthal, Peru, 1974), among others. This re-reading of the past in the light of the present raised questions concerning the preservation of films that were born in the urgent spirit of political struggles, whose current conservation conditions are precarious, and whose possibilities of circulation may be questioned due to their original illegal making. This collective-based research project has also raised concerns about the emergence of new names that have also contributed to the history of cinema, many of them hidden behind underground or even clandestine filmmaking and lost over the years due to the historical lack of valorization of these rough, impure films.
Aproximaciones contemporáneas al archivo en la Cinemateca de Bogotá
Ricardo Cantor Bossa (Cinemateca de Bogotá)
How do we create memory exercises from audiovisual experimentation based on the archive? Is it possible to think of the archive outside the archive, perhaps as an "open workshop"? The Cinemateca de Bogotá, reopened as a Cultural Center for the Audiovisual Arts in 2019, with 53 years of history, has explored contemporary views and approaches to the archive through collaborative processes of creation, reuse and experimentation, expanding the insight and approach to audiovisual memory in different formats and media, enhancing its circulation and appropriation, generating new heritages as a result of expanded practices, digital cultures and interdisciplinarity. These processes have integrated methodologies such as hackathons and creative marathons; tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, free software; and formats such as video installations, mapping or dome content, among others, promoting exercises of creation, memory and preservation. Cinema in Colombia has been a mechanism for dialogue with our memory, identity and history. We are convinced that it is possible to propose a new preservation scheme that activates contemporary "expanded" mechanisms of dialogue in the present and future, creating an open preservation workflow with one foot in the archive and the other in appropriation and dialoguing with new forms of creation and research. This proposal will present possible answers placing words in the archive such as freedom, modification, remediation, co-creation, collaboration, hacking, and performance, twisting complexities from intellectual property, technological dependence, and archival practice, among others challenges. This presentation is co-written by Ricardo Cantor Bossa, Henry Caicedo Caicedo, Luis Felipe Raguá and Angélica Clavijo.
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