REGISTROS AUTOBIOGRÁFICOS Y MEMORIA EN CUATREROS (2017) DE ALBERTINA CARRI

Cuatreros (2017) de Albertina Carri parte de la historia de Isidro Velázquez, del que su padre escribió un libro, y sobre la que se realizó una película, Los Velázquez, que la dictadura argentina destruyó. A partir de ahí la directora narra su historia personal con el trasfondo del secuestro y asesinato de sus padres y la huella que ese hecho dejó en ella. La directora reflexiona sobre la implicación de ese personaje en lo personal, lo que nos lleva a la postmemoria, y lo colectivo, lo que enlaza con el acto afiliativo. Planteamos tres objetivos: situar el ensayo fílmico en la obra de la directora y el papel que juega el found footage y la polivisión o multipantalla; indicar las características que tiene como obra del yo (autobiografía y retrato autobiográfico), especialmente el uso de la voz off-screen; y realizar un análisis fílmico para comprobar las estrategias y mecanismos enunciativos. Abstract: Albertina Carri’s Cuatreros (2017) takes as a starting point the story of Isidro Velázquez, about whom her father wrote a book, about which a film was made (Los Velázquez), which in turn the Argentine dictatorship destroyed. From there, the director tells her personal story against the background of the kidnapping and murder of her parents and the imprint that that fact left on her. The director reflects on the involvement of this character personally, which leads us to post-memory, and the collective, which links with the affiliative act. This article has three goals: place the filmic essay in the director’s oeuvre and the role played by the use of found footage and multivision or multiscreen; indicate the characteristics it has as a work of the self (autobiography and autobiographical portrait), especially the use of the off-screen voice; and carry out a film analysis to check the strategies and enunciative mechanisms.

Revenge Remix: TERROR NULLIUS (2018) and the Politics of Sample Filmmaking

<p>TERROR NULLIUS (Soda_Jerk, 2018) is an experimental sample film that remixes Australian cinema, television and news media into a “political revenge fable” (soda_jerk.co.au). While TERROR NULLIUS is overtly political in tone, understanding its specific messages requires unpacking its form, content and cultural references. This thesis investigates the multiple layers of TERROR NULLIUS’ politics, thereby highlighting the political strategies and capacities of sample filmmaking. Employing a historical methodology, this research contextualises TERROR NULLIUS within a tradition of sampling and other subversive modes of filmmaking, including Soviet cinema, Surrealism, avant-garde found-footage films, fan remix videos, and Australian archival art films. This comparative analysis highlights how Soda_Jerk utilise and advance formal strategies of subversive appropriation, fair use, dialectical editing and digital compositing to interrogate the relationship between media and culture. It also argues that TERROR NULLIUS employs postmodern and postcolonial approaches to archives and history to undermine positivist, linear historical constructions and colonial mythologies. Building on these formal and theoretical foundations, this thesis also closely reads TERROR NULLIUS to scrutinise the accessibility of its arguments for Australian and international audiences: one reading utilises Donna Haraway’s cyberfeminist theory to interpret TERROR NULLIUS’ progressive identity politics, and the second explores the cultural and historical references imbedded in TERROR NULLIUS’ samples to unpack its commentary on contemporary debates in Australian politics (particularly regarding refugee detention and white nationalism). Ultimately, this multi- faceted analysis of TERROR NULLIUS’ form, content and references highlights the complexity of sample films’ political messages, which are radically open to diverse interpretations.</p>

Revenge Remix: TERROR NULLIUS (2018) and the Politics of Sample Filmmaking

<p>TERROR NULLIUS (Soda_Jerk, 2018) is an experimental sample film that remixes Australian cinema, television and news media into a “political revenge fable” (soda_jerk.co.au). While TERROR NULLIUS is overtly political in tone, understanding its specific messages requires unpacking its form, content and cultural references. This thesis investigates the multiple layers of TERROR NULLIUS’ politics, thereby highlighting the political strategies and capacities of sample filmmaking. Employing a historical methodology, this research contextualises TERROR NULLIUS within a tradition of sampling and other subversive modes of filmmaking, including Soviet cinema, Surrealism, avant-garde found-footage films, fan remix videos, and Australian archival art films. This comparative analysis highlights how Soda_Jerk utilise and advance formal strategies of subversive appropriation, fair use, dialectical editing and digital compositing to interrogate the relationship between media and culture. It also argues that TERROR NULLIUS employs postmodern and postcolonial approaches to archives and history to undermine positivist, linear historical constructions and colonial mythologies. Building on these formal and theoretical foundations, this thesis also closely reads TERROR NULLIUS to scrutinise the accessibility of its arguments for Australian and international audiences: one reading utilises Donna Haraway’s cyberfeminist theory to interpret TERROR NULLIUS’ progressive identity politics, and the second explores the cultural and historical references imbedded in TERROR NULLIUS’ samples to unpack its commentary on contemporary debates in Australian politics (particularly regarding refugee detention and white nationalism). Ultimately, this multi- faceted analysis of TERROR NULLIUS’ form, content and references highlights the complexity of sample films’ political messages, which are radically open to diverse interpretations.</p>

Introduction

The book’s introduction revisits questions around the ontology of photographic and filmic images in order to lay out the role of technology in making supernatural entities become part of everyday life. An examination of theories about the transition from analog to digital image capture considers the potential of photography, film, and video to expand our senses, enhance our perception of the physical world, and work as evidence. The indexical link between the object placed before the camera and its image extends to a discussion about the spatial relationship between the contents of the framed image and the surrounding physical world, which informs discussions about framing techniques in found-footage horror films and participative spectatorship in experiential cinema and video games.

The Ghost in the Image

The Ghost in the Image offers a new take on the place that supernatural phenomena occupy in everyday life by examining the horror genre in fiction, documentary, and participative modes. The book covers a variety of media: spirit photography, ghost-hunting reality shows, documentary and fiction films based on the Amityville and Enfield hauntings, found-footage horror movies, experiential cinema, survival games, and creepypasta. These works transform our interest in ghosts into an interactive form of entertainment. Through a transmedial approach to horror, this book investigates our expectations regarding the ability of photography and video to work as evidence. A historical examination of technology’s role in at once showing and forging truths invites questions about our investment in its powers, which is pertinent to the so-called post-fact scenario. Behind our obsession with documenting everyday life lies the hope that our cameras will reveal something extraordinary. The obsessive search for ghosts in the image, however, shows that the desire to find them is matched by the pleasure of calling out a hoax.

Beyond the frame

This chapter finds in the found-footage horror cycle an alternative way of understanding the relationship between horror films and reality, which is usually discussed in terms of allegory. It investigates theories about framing, considered both figuratively (framing the film as documentary) and stylistically (the framing in handheld cameras and in static long takes), as a device that playfully destabilizes the separation between the film and the surrounding world. The chapter explores the idea that documenting an event has the potential to contain it, which is relevant to both horror and documentary studies. A variety of found-footage horror films is considered, including the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and [•REC].

Fall

A common outcome of acrobatics, and a motif often combined with it, is the fall. The chapter ‘Fall. Descent to equilibrium’ discusses the recurrence of the motif of the falling human body in contemporary cinema, taking as a starting point Oliver Pietsch’s found footage film Maybe Not. Relying on Torben Grodal’s application of the notions of telic and paratelic to the film experience, referring to the use of cinema as metaphor for the mind proposed by Antonio Damasio, and interpreting several experiments on the perception of movement in film sequences whose temporality is manipulated, this chapter describes the modality through which cinema ‘regulates’ the fall by adopting a homeostatic process that reduces its traumatic character and, at the same time, enhances its expressive effectiveness.

Alone., Again

The Austrian experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold (b. 1959) created several late twentieth-century films that take a formal, interventionist approach to the use of found footage. This chapter explores how Arnold’s filmic inventions are made possible by his metaformal interventions at the level of medium—not in or on it, but instead with it. Such an approach counters a prevailing trend toward reading the resulting works, conspicuously Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as being inherently, that is, ontologically psychoanalytic in nature. I suggest, on the contrary, that while the film’s somatic effects on viewers may summon thoughts of Freudian theory, such interpretations are not part of the hidden or latent content of the original source films. We should, instead, acknowledge that such readings are epiphenomena of our charged emotional and psychosocial experience watching and listening to Arnold’s accomplished metacinematic creations.

Documenting the world at home and abroad : The Jacques Madvo collection

This thesis draws on the cataloguing and examination of the Madvo Collection at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) as the basis to determine the value of his independent non-fiction films and resolve possible scenarios for their preservation. The collection contains 240 canisters of 16mm non-fiction films and production elements that LIFT intends to use as a resource for found footage films. This raises several concerns for the future of the materials, the most critical of which is the physical destruction of the films. This thesis aims to create a record of Madvo’s oeuvre so that his work can be protected from LIFT’s claim to use it as found footage. It offers different uses for the materials, as well as a broader perspective on the cultural value of the collection, paying particular attention to its importance for the history of amateur films and home movies.