In We Began By Measuring Distance, long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.

Falling Lessons is a film that is articulated through a series of vertical ascending pans, connected together. When a filmstrip passes through a projector, the frames we see on the screen are actually upside down. That means that these vertical ascending pans in Falling Lessons, as they pass through the projector, are actually going down, and the people in the frame are kind of “falling” into a void. Amy Halpern claimed that, for this reason, Falling Lessons needs to be projected in film, and not digitally. The metaphor of falling, even if hidden from the audience, is a conceptual layer that needs to be there.
Even though Falling Lessons was shot in Los Angeles, and it is connected to this city and also to movements such as LA Rebellion (Halpern has collaborated with Charles Burnett and Julie Dash), Halpern is a New Yorker, and the film is inspired by New York, as it is very difficult to connect with someone else’s look in the frantic streets of the city. So, this is a film that gathers the gazes of a large number of people and animals.
Every individual looks straight to the camera, provoking somehow the audience, interpellating it, connecting it with primal emotions, almost calling it into action against all the violence in the world. There are all kinds of people: some calm, others with cryptic expressions, yet others with hurt, indignant looks, all demanding a reaction. Others surprise us, others smile. There are bodies in different states, skins transmitting their heat and pulses, moving or staying still. These gazes are shot in vertical ascending pans, which are connected to each other by different strategies, even using color and texture as links that at some point fabricate a sort of never-ending movement. The editing does not follow a causal or narrative line, it is rather a vehicle for a sort of confrontational hypnosis. These sorts of portraits are also put together with different sounds: sometimes the people are lip-synching words from films, sometimes there is a disturbing sound that makes us think of a palpable threat, sometimes there is music. The soundtrack is a collage as intricate as the image. Besides the gazes, there is a reconstruction of a scene of police brutality against a black child and his mother; and then there is a sort of rebellion. Because, somehow, Falling Lessons is a call for an awakening. It is a film that shakes our indifference by appealing to our body, in a possibility not yet sufficiently explored by cinema: that political awareness comes directly from our senses, that viscerally leads to action based on an instinctive connection with what is human.

Legerdemain, by Carlos Vásquez Méndez. A simple premise, amplified by the synchronization or desynchronization of the sound, the doubling of the sound for the action of a mirror, and the unusual protagonism of the sound made by mechanical devices that record images and sounds through physical contact.

¿Se puede deletrear la hoja?, by Valentina Alvarado Matos, puts together images of botanical studies and species with words, apparently descriptive. But this description adds a new layer of significance (and even of sense of humor) to the images, making us watch them in new ways. The point of departure is how to describe plants and landscapes seen for the first time, in Alvarado Mato’s research about travel diaries, specifically those of women travelers from Europe to Latin America.

From the use of language here, we go to Tecer linguas, by Beatriz Freire, in which we hear the same text by the Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol in several languages, woven together through layers of sound. In an empty factory, we are able to reconstruct with our senses a past now long gone through the sound of the machines and the voices of the women who worked there.

Taking this idea of expanding a space through the suggestion of an off-camera succession of events, 3-Minute Hells, by Amy Halpern, takes us through a series of vignettes or little scenes (hells) framed very closely. What appears in those frames, sometimes seemingly irrelevant, is transformed into a story thanks to the sound. Letting us imagine how what we don’t see in the frame affects what we do see, the duration of the scenes stretches or shrinks and we build scenarios in our mind’s eye. 

Picking up this idea of the mind’s eye, Rose Lowder uses a very simple yet powerful procedure in La Source de la Loire. Lowder spent several months recording the source of the Loire river, at the Mont Gerbier de Jonc, following its first kilometers of course. She first sows the images in our eyes, silent, and then she lets us alone with the sounds of the river. We make the montage in our minds, traveling that way to this green realm of peace. 

Another green realm of peace is the Casa de Campo, a relief for the citizens of Madrid, drowned in a city taken by asphalt and concrete. What used to be a royal property, hunting ground and park for the kings and queens, was given to the citizens of Madrid in 1931 by the Second Republic. Miriam Martin takes us, by the grace of the sound superimposed on current images of this public forest, to the history of what was a place of resistance and fight during the Spanish Civil War. After a long research, Martin reconstructed these sounds that keep us from forgetting the past. 

Wang Bing (edited by Claire Atherton)

Finding a form that can do justice to the content may be cinema’s most exciting challenge. If we are thinking of documentary, non-fiction film or cinema of the real, whatever you want to call it, sometimes a mise-en-scène is the most loyal way to stay close to the real. Because, after all, isn’t seating a person on a chair, under a light and in front of the camera a way of staging? That’s why Wang Bing’s Man in Black, a most sophisticated and stylized work in terms of its formal approach, might be the most rigorous (and loyal to “the real”) way to approach its subject: the Chinese modern-classical composer Wang Xilin, and his life full of political harassment, persecutions, torture, ostracization and overall suffering. 

In the film, Wang Xilin recounts his life: from his early days as an enthusiastic Party member – joining the People’s Liberation Army in 1949 – to his hard-won awareness that the ideology had become, as he puts it, “a cruel, merciless betrayal”. That marked the beginning of his ordeal which, at the same time, is the source of his gut-wrenching symphonies, as well as  his nervous breakdowns. What we see is an old man, naked, in the dark and wrecked interior of Paris’s Bouffes du Nord theater. First, following a ceremonial and guarded kind of choreography (as we will understand later, evoking the physical torture he suffered), then telling us his life in a sort of monolog. The montage of the film was made by Claire Atherton, and it is for sure marked by subtle but meaningful contrasts. While Wang is moving, the cutting rhythm follows his body’s rhythms in a way that becomes almost invisible, but at the same time it is able to affect our perception and prepare our state of mind to drag us inside the dark waters of Wang’s inner world. While Wang is speaking, there are brutal fights between his words and his own music invading the soundtrack. The segments are punctuated by the screen in black. The whole structure of the work condenses and distills the essence of this harsh story, taking us to the mental obscurities towards such a destiny could take a man’s life, and a man’s art.As many militant collectives understood (let’s remember Dziga Vertov Group, for instance), it is necessary to use new forms that escape the language of the oppressors. Man in Black is the expression of this quest, in which cinema finds its strategies to match the life’s story that is telling, instead of making the story fit into the narrow premises of a conventional product.

Sol e sombra, by Noémia Delgado, is the first film. It is the silent footage of one rehearsal for her 1976 feature film Máscaras, a camera test to learn how to shoot the ritual dances, how they look. Its lack of references, and its way of framing and using light, though, makes us think of an experimental-surreal film, of a study of movement and choreography, of an elusive tale of ghosts and monsters.

This fable appearance takes us to Cheshire Smile, by Amy Halpern. Its reference to Lewis Carrol’s Alice carries our thought to the book’s story, inflecting the girl and the rabbit in the film with some qualities alien to them. A dog in a path looks like a fantastic creature, and a rabbit in a towel acquires a strange intelligence. One may think that this is an abstract adaptation of the book, in which the elements are reduced to a minimalistic expression, just taken from some nowadays events that without this montage would have looked mundane.

Injury on a Theme, also by Halpern, is composed of some documentary images, some very simple staged scenes, and some outtakes from Falling Lessons, her 1992 feature film. The way in which the images are edited suggests a state of violence and tension, almost like a thriller that tells the story of a group of people living under the constant threat of a police state. In her own words, “A short sweet film concerning torture.” 

A Pousada das Chagas, by Paulo Rocha, that was edited by Noémia Delgado (who was very well known as an editor), could be seen either as a strange documentary on the Óbidos museum, a museum of Sacred Art, or as a fiction constructed with people (Luís Miguel Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo) declamating texts by Camões, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Cesariny, Tao Qian and Lao-Tzu with the works of art as scenery and atrezzo. In fact, the film was to be a documentary commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation, and ended up being a foundational film on Rocha’s trajectory, walking towards a radical formal approach. In his own words, “What emerged was a kind of modernist miracle play, a collage of voices, texts, objects, spaces, bodies, pulsations. Burning, suffering bodies, that radiated energy”. 

One can say that the remains are the main topic of Las cruces: the remains, in terms of what is left in the form of testimonies of the people who committed and witnessed the facts, in terms of how the places where everything took place look like today, as well as in terms of the human remains claiming for justice, lost in a mass grave for 44 years. Using these remains, Las cruces builds a montage that, in a detached way, shows us an exemplary case of the horror after the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. 

The events happened in Laja, San Rosendo, Bío-Bío Province, at a distance of 500 km south of Santiago. A few days after the coup d’etat, on September 11th 1973, 19 workers from the Corporación Maderera de Papeles y Cartones (a paper mill wood company) disappeared. They were on a blacklist of left-wing militants and labor unionists elaborated thanks to the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad, the fascist militia against Allende. They were executed and buried in a mass grave. Only in 2017, after investigations and false versions of the facts, did the carabineros involved in the killing decide to tell the truth about what happened. 

Las cruces is based on two types of materials. One of these types are the documents: official letters, police reports, judicial records, written testimonies and statements. These documents are either shown to us, filling the screen and in negative, or read by people from the community, stating at the beginning of each reading who they are and what they are reading. These materials are contrasted to the views of the sceneries as they are today: we see long shots of the landscape, the woodwork and the facilities, the village, the cemetery, the roads, as impassible witnesses of the past. As the executions were silenced and unpunished, what do we have left? By putting together these materials, the voices of the survivors over the views of the territory, the imagination of the audience does the work and completes the voids. The montage works as an instigator, since the images and the words collaborate to draw a non-recorded and hidden event. The coldness of the judicial records is contrasted with the human voices of the inhabitants of the territory. The empty spaces that dominate the film, in its detached dispositif, are contrasted with the parts of the film in which we see people. The language of the documents, stripped of any feeling in its quest for objectivity, is confronted at the end of the film to the people who remain, those who are still claiming for justice. We see their faces, and they become human, not only a number in a lost folder in a crammed archive. 

In El mar peinó la orilla, Valentina Alvarado Matos tries to intervene in the Catalonian seascape with several pictorial and sculptural maneuvers. The sea is what separates her from her homeland, in Venezuela, so one can imagine what it is like to look at the ocean thinking of what is going on on the other side of it.

In Trópico desvaído, the landscapes from Spain and from Venezuela, from the beach in Barcelona to the Maracaibo Lake, merge thanks to the montage of image and sound, trying to keep alive this “faded tropic” across the diaspora, watching each landscape through the filter of a fractured sense of belonging.

Mensor, by Carlos Vásquez Méndez, is a brilliant and dry landscape study, a formal device built with trees, soil and mountains, and with the use of the single frame and the zoom to suggest the measurements of the land through perceptual experiments. Behind this, what we find is the first occupied land returned to the Pewenche people by the Chilean State.

The Andean scenery is also what dominates Vientos del Oeste / Vientos del Este, also by Vásquez Méndez, a film that describes the landscape of Ollagüe, a small town in the Altiplano, in the border between Chile and Bolivia, and between the past and the present. As Vásquez Méndez was not allowed to shoot the frontier as such, he writes at the beginning of the film: “Then I thought I should shoot the border as one shoots the wind: it is not possible to see it, but you can perceive its effects.”

In Mafra e o Barroco Europeu, Noémia Delgado captures a landscape modified by human ambition. In the rural lands of Mafra, near Lisboa, there is a huge baroque palace-monastery, made by order of king João V, paid thanks to the gold coming from the colonies in Brazil. The implications of this megalomaniac project stuffed in such a humble village are behind this film (we show the short version without voice over), an intelligent montage that put together the severe building planned by the architect Johann Friederich Ludwig with the lush music by Karlof.

In Vuelta a Riaño Miriam Martín takes us through the landscape of Riaño’s reservoir, departing from the banal words of the sports commentators of the Tour of Spain to fill the T.V. silence as the cyclists passed by it. Down the waters of the reservoir, there was a village that was flooded in the 80s by the socialist government, accomplices of the economic interests of a corporation. Martín objects to the official version using a dialectical montage, inserting in this narrative what really happened to the people that lived and resisted there, the lives flooded mercilessly for the benefit of those in power.

In Alvarado Matos’s work, the hand of the artist creates collages “live” in front of the camera. Using cutouts and clippings, paint and other substances, pieces of paper, drawings, words and ceramics, the construction of the image, even if there are no cuts in the film, is a montage. Cruce Postal: Del Otro Nuevo Viaje, begins with her hands browsing through a set of postcards: passing from one to another is a way of cutting without cutting. Maps and landscapes and words are mixed together trying to build, in her words, an “affective map” and a “topography of memory”. 

In Propiedades de una esfera paralela there are two montages-collages going on: one is in her plastic exercises trying to bring the tropical warmth to the cold Canadian winter, and another one in the use of a double projection in which one image affects the other. A form of altering the landscape as a way to find her own space in the world. 

Rose Lowder has been working since the 70’s on trying to exploit the cinema apparatus possibilities to create a new type of moving images. One of her most famous findings is the work method with which she created her Bouquets, a series of one-minute films mainly (but not only) composed with flowers, as their title indicates. This method consists of “weaving” two different images frame by frame: she first records a set of frames with her 16mm Bolex camera, leaving blank frames in between them. Then she rewinds the film in the camera and she “fills” these blank frames with a different set of images. The result is a rapid-fire flicker of these two images intercalated, creating a unique mixture in the eye-brain of the viewer that makes colors and shapes clash. One can say that Lowder creates a perceptual collage into the eyes of the audience. In this group of films, we see different applications of this technique, as well as calmer images. What brings these films together, besides her aesthetic quest, is their concern with the environment expressed through landscape, flowers, trees, animals and human creations. Quiproquo, in a less frantic way, makes the industrial infrastructures that damage the earth clash with the surrounding nature, in a sort of fight.

Films such as Sources and Cote Jardin portray organic farms and gardens, in which human agricultural activities try to respect the environment. Jardin du Soleil and Sous le Soleil are studies on solar panels, a way of obtaining energy that coexists in harmony with different species of plants and insects.

Finally, the set of Bouquets we present here are called by the filmmaker “bouquets écologiques” because they explore different places, which for various reasons, are ecological. The 31-40 set of Bouquets travels to France, in Ardèche, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Tarn and Vaucluse as well as to Piemont, Italy. In this way, the formal concerns of Lowder’s cinema meet with a concern that should be a priority in the world nowadays.

Máscaras is the only feature film by Noémia Delgado. Born in Angola, trained in sculpture and painting, and working as an editor with filmmakers such as Manoel de Oliveira and Paulo Rocha, Delgado also studied documentary with Jean Rouch. The “mystery” of why Delgado didn’t make any other feature films after Máscaras is the same behind the story of other women of her time (let’s remember here Manuela Serra) who never got the support needed for developing a career as a filmmaker in a society, and in an artistic realm as cinema, ruled by men. The film is a crossover between ethnography, mise-en scène and poetry, that documents a series of rituals from six communities in the Trás-os-Montes region – Varges, Grijó, Bemposta, Rio de Onor, Podence and Bragança – and the preparation and development of festivals during the Winter Cycle: The Feast of St. Stephen, the young boys festival, Christmas, New Year, Epiphany and Carnival. All of them are celebrations of pagan origins that have to do with life’s cycles, in which a group of men perform a series of rituals with masks. As it happens in some fiction films (let’s say, Judex or Daïnah la métisse, the first that come to mind), the mask is an unsettling element superimposed on reality, as if it were a collage creating a sometimes surreal mixture of elements that alters the reading of the tableau, as Max Ernst’s did, for instance, replacing the head of a woman for a tarantula in a Victorian engraving. So, even being what we may call an ethnographic documentary, the very subject of the film creates a hallucinated vision that calls for primal fears and fascination.

Beyond this very elementary level of montage, the film reveals its powers in this field in other aspects, bringing to the fore surprising and powerful associations. For instance, in the use of music: besides the traditional music of bagpipes and percussion, some pictorial scenes, such as one of a group of men having dinner after one of the rituals, are edited with Renaissance music, which turns the whole sequence in an anachronic moment that could be happening now or centuries ago. A connection with the otherworldly is opened by the cutting in the scene in which the faces of the teenagers behind the masks, in the final section of the film, are edited together with the devils on a painting, establishing a link among them. Taking out the masked men from the village and the festivity, and placing them walking alone through the forest, with an ancient song, creates a sort of discreet détournement which is fertile land for fantasy. Last but not least, there is a dialogue between fiction and reality in the film that also brings together two supposed opposites. As Delgado wanted to film some traditions that have already disappeared, she made a recreation of them. There are some festivals and rituals in the film that are staged (and, curiously enough, this staging contributed to their revitalization), a strategy that is, on the other hand, an old documentary tradition coming from Flaherty’s times. Since ethnographic cinema, as most human creations, is the superimposition of what exists in the world and the subjectivity of the person who is behind the camera, adding yet another way of montage to the catalog of possibilities listed in this seminar’s program. 

Claire Atherton was the editor of all Chantal Akerman’s films from 1986 onwards. From the extensive and overwhelming filmography resulting from this long-lasting collaboration, maybe D’Est is one of the best examples of a montage that works in a dialectic way. We could even say, as a sort of joke, that in this sense the film was shot in former Soviet territories, which were also the birthplace of Eisenstein, Vertov and Kulechov.

D’Est is a sort of travelog of Akerman’s journey throughout Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, from summer to winter, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. What was happening in the human landscape of this territory after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism? The film is an answer to this question that relies on people’s faces and movements, in the sheer depiction of the places they live in, the houses, the streets, the fields, the beaches, day and night, young and old. In this sort of choral portrait of a broken nation facing a new era, there is not a causal narrative but rather a counterpoint system organizing the film. As what we got from D’Est is not a discourse but a feeling, its structure needs to follow a more instinctive logic. What articulates the whole thing, though, is light: the film begins in the morning, then moves across the day until reaching the night, and then, in a very symbolic way, it ends with a new dawn.

So, the film is a constant interplay between opposites: from collective shots to portraits of people alone; from location shots to scenes filmed indoors; from static camera to traveling shots. The colors also act as a way of developing these counterpoints juxtaposing warm-colored sections (orange, yellow) with others of dominant blue hues. There are no words in the film other than the ones captured as part of the ambient sounds. The voices are not translated or subtitled, as we are witnessing, together with Akerman, a mood that can not be explained with words. No meaning is imposed over the images, which many times are enigmatic. And that is part of their power. Atherton’s ideas on montage are, therefore, the perfect fit for such a project. Her taoist philosophy influences, that go in favor of flowing together with the essence of the images and sounds, were key to watch the footage for what it is. The film arises from the very matter of the shots, from the senses, from intuition, from emotion. For there is a particular type of intelligence and clairvoyance that illuminates unexpected ways for creating connections and associations between elements, that is, montage.

We begin with a zoological study of frogs. In Habitat – Batracien, Rose Lowder collects significant moments of a group of frogs on a pond: we see where they live and how they behave, in a rhythmic recording of water, light and color dictated by the batrachians movement.

Even though mtDNA 1Ca hg and Año cero, by Carlos Vásquez Méndez look like more edited pieces, they refer to this idea in different ways. mtDNA 1Ca looks like an anthropological study of the people from northern Iceland, but devoid of people. Only the landscape is the scenery of what we receive like a scientific recollection of data, in which even the title refers to the denomination of the genetic lineages of the people from this land.

Ensaio no Moinho, by Noémia Delgado, is literally the recording of a rehearsal organized for the festa dos rapazes in a mill, and is a documentation material she used for her film Máscaras. 

Ensayos sobre el exotismo [parte primera], by Carlos Vásquez Méndez, which is a sort of travelog made with the premise of using the “raw” material without editing, footage he collected in his trips to China, Morocco and Turkey. Taking its title from an unfinished work by Victor Segalen, the guide of the gaze here is a reflection on the exotic.

Only the landscape is the scenery of what we receive like a scientific recollection of data, in which even the title refers to the denomination of the genetic lineages of the people from this land. In the case of Año cero, the methods of field recording are at the center of the film: the cameras at work, the microphones capturing the environmental sounds, the patient waiting to capture the data needed, the forest and the mountains. The film is a reflection on time in a wider sense, on its representation and perception, on its measurement and on its historical roots. A sort of domestic treatise, taking its own matter (time) as form, since cinema is after all a series of images of space that are arranged in time.

Levantamiento de una isla and Arrojalatierra, by Valentina Alvarado Matos, are based on the work with ceramics, and also in the presence of the worker’s hand in the frame. The manipulation of the elements is key in both works. Levantamiento de una isla connects the idea of territory, geography and geology, with that of a pliable element that can be modeled or broken to construct a land tailored to the ideals and evocations of a person in the diaspora.

Arrojalatierra puts its focus on collectivity, labor and tactility. As the filmmaker claims, “Matter is present both in front of and inside the camera. In front we have ceramics, collectively mixed, molded, and shaped. Inside we have film (celluloid) collecting the light that comes from the world around Arrojalatierra. A film about making things that leave a trace in space and time.” Transformation is at the core of the film, as the matter changes its state constantly: it is molded, broken, burned and put back together, as it happens when editing a film. 

The work of the Portuguese artist Beatriz Freire does the same with textiles and cinema, also based on its material quality. Descartes (LAV) exposes the otherwise invisible process of splicing together filmstrips, using two strategies: sewing the fragments together with thread, and exposing the seams by freezing the frames. The theme of the film is its own assemblage. Two feminine labors are put together here this way: film cutting, which was a job for women in the early cinema times, and sewing, a feminized work either in factories or in domestic spaces.

In the performance re-Cordis, Freire connects the montage of a film that is being projected with a piece of woven material. She transfers the editing codes of the film to weaving patterns, weaving “live” a piece of textile that is the transposition of the montage. What we see in time, projected on the screen, is transformed somehow into space and matter, in the form of a piece of fabric we can touch. Also the discrete gestures of weaving are put into focus during the performance, bringing also to the foreground the montage of the film through this visible action connected to what is happening on the screen.

The name of this program (The Iranian Touch) is both a pun as well as a significant drive to the group of works we are putting together, all by the Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory. Let’s begin by saying that a strong censorship was set in Iran after the Islamic revolution in 1979. It works in a way that stimulates self-censorship and creates a culture of suppression (needless to say, behind this there is harsh punishment). This censorship, that nowadays pervades the internet, has controlled the cultural activities of the country since then, and of course cinema is part of it all. Tafakory delves into the Iranian post-revolutionary cinema, in part of her work, to look for the ways in which the filmmakers have surfed this repression to express sexual desire and yearning in an elliptical way. In works such as Irani Bag and Nazarbazi, we see the result of a thorough investigation and a thoughtful montage that bring together hundreds of films and theoretical and poetic texts. This is a complex matter, as the prohibition puts forward the imagination, creating a whole system of symbology that yields a myriad of metaphoric and poetic images that allude to the forbidden action: two bodies touching each other, caresses and kisses. There is beauty in these images, yet they hurt at the same time. Irani Bag shows us a “fun fact”: the bags, in Iranian fiction films, have been used as a vehicle for surrogate touch. The bag is the vicarial flesh, it is what connects two bodies for an instant in an apparently banal interchange.

Nazarbazi (that means “the play of glances”), on the other hand, goes beyond this, creating a montage in which there is an interplay among these images created to avoid censorship: there is indeed a play of glances among films, creating an experience in which estrangement and poetry are interwoven with a critical and political vision. The unspoken lies on the basis of the film, both alluding the physical contact, as well as the ambiguity of the prohibitions of the censorship that show through these sometimes enigmatic and expressive images created for its sake. The texts, that range from Forugh Farrokhzad to Jacques Derrida, spoke as the two sides of Tafakory’s work, in its combination of poetry with politics. As Tafakory states, “the film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema”.

As the erasure of women in Islamic regimes is on the basis of all this, Mast-del, on the other hand,  seems to exorcize the previous works, as it begins with two women touching, bringing to the foreground, as she says, “forbidden bodies and desires”. The work is composed of manipulated and layered footage, found and original, to illustrate the account of a date with an abrupt ending. The film establishes a bridge between cinema and what is outside of it, tending towards abstraction in its immersive and sensorial image and text treatment.

An expanded montage, an ephemeral film. This is a way we can describe Paracronismos II, a live event in which a number of 16mm projectors, a slide projector and some recordings are set in motion by two performers: Valentina Alvarado Matos and Carlos Vásquez Méndez. A parachronism, according to the dictionary, is “an anachronism that consists of supposing an event to have occurred after the time in which it happened.” Departing from this concept, that comes from Walter Benjamin’s ideas on progress (or rather against progress, somehow), Paracronismos II began trying to put into question the Western ideas of development. This departure point met with an archive of German and Polish educational films from the 50s and 60s, in which the artists found images related to this idea of a future based on productivity, extraction and exploitation of the land. From this excavation of images came the first associations and patterns present in the performance. Then, this image work met the texts from Versuch einer Witterungslehre (Essay on Meteorology, 1825), a book by J.W. Goethe, making the images reach a new level. From the collision of these ideas, images and words, new meanings came, as well as a poetic force, and an awareness of the point of view of these documents: the prevalence of science as an authority, as well as the white man’s gaze accepted as universal. 

This connection of thoughts and feelings can only be experienced during the live event. This “live” montage is not only linear, but also happens via juxtaposition, as we relate different images projected at the same time. And this idea of editing also relates to a non-linear way of thinking that could contradict somehow the canonical idea of progress that is rarely questioned in our society. 

One can even say that the bodies, the identities and the actions of the performers are also part of the montage we see, as well as the machines they use. Expanding, again, the idea of elements coming together and interacting, the tension and concentration that the event conjures amplify the meanings and the effect of the images in our minds. Separated from their original context, the films used here depart from their original scientific and cold quality towards a new dimension, thanks to the actions of the movements, the words and the voices of Alvarado Matos and Vásquez Méndez. A certain liturgy comes into play, as we congregate in a specific place and time to see this work. This way, maybe, the present can be turned into an anachronism thanks to these parachronisms. 

Going to the cinema has always been an event somehow detached from daily life: you enter a dark room, you lose track of reality and you dive into a film the same way you would dive into another dimension. But what happened when moving images entered domestic spaces, and started to coexist with our everyday lives? Andromeda, by Luciana Fina, takes us to that moment in which the TV was still new, and to a particular place and decade (Italy from 1966 to 1976) in which television was a tool for imagining a different future, for transmitting knowledge and culture, a sea of potentialities to explore. Fina studies and researches how, around this moment, television changed cinema and vice-versa. 

An interesting moment indeed, in which a new audiovisual language was being created, and in the case of Italian television, an era marked by a lively debate between artists, filmmakers and philosophers about the new medium. In the film, we can see scenes such as Umberto Eco interviewing Adorno or Pasolini discussing his work with a group of film critics and factory workers, but also some attempts to capture the reality of the working class, a documentary on how television works, a reportage on Arte Povera and other universal, iconic moments, such as the moon landing in 1969. 

But besides “curating” an impressive sample of Italian television archives, Andromeda can be seen as a reflection on montage in various ways, beyond how this selection is configured and put in a particular order. We see the TV. shows’ fragments through the eyes of a girl. A boring afternoon as many of us can remember, in which she goes from one program to another. Her life, together with these interspersed clips, forms somehow a montage. What happens around her, the soup on the table, the kids playing outside, is cut together with elevated debates and science fiction stories, with different worlds in an impossible dialogue between images and sounds. Her life, our lives, are affected by what we see on television, both things colliding to create new meanings. Another thought about editing brought by Andromeda is this sort of random montage that we elaborate through zapping: fragments of different kinds of audiovisual products are sewn together by chance, the cuts are untimely, the relationship among the contents may be inexistent or distant, and yet the result of bringing all this together can create an effect in our minds, can also produce meaning. But there is even one more level in these notes on montage brought by Andromeda. When the film “stares back” at us, sitting in the cinema theater, the narrative is inserting our own lives and bodies into the montage. We are also included in the cutting, we enter the film. Different dimensions and eras are “spliced” together. So, we leave the room thinking how what we have lived and the films we have seen these days make up, again, a dialectical montage.