![]() This fossil fuel geo-engineering project produces ever more greenhouse gases, leading to rising seas, and Biemann also investigates the contemporary effects as felt in Bangladesh’s delta. Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather examines ecologies of devastation, including industrial destruction of the earth, looking closely at the hydrocarbon extraction taking place in Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Yet it was also one that, in its iconography of monumentalized leaders, also divulges signs of the eventual eclipse of those imagined futures of emancipation also announced in this postal imaginary. Against such historiographic domination, The Otolith Group (composed of British artists and theorists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) rescues the diplomacy of 1960s Pan-Africanism, focusing on the emerging material culture of independence, specifically as constituted by the form of the postage stamp whose imagery proclaimed a new dawn of sovereignty. In some cases, the leaders of newly independent nations who promised self-determination, were brutally arrested, tortured, and summarily executed (as in the case of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of postcolonial Congo), the history of which is shown to be obsessively reconstructed by a former Belgian diplomat and colonial apologist in Augustijnen’s film. The era of postwar decolonization in Africa was one filled with the imagined futures of liberation and independence, futures gradually clouded over by neocolonial regimes of financial servitude to world markets enabled by dictatorial regimes. In the Year of the Quiet Sun, 2013ĭigital HD, Original version, subtitled, 33’ Patwardhan shows how Ambedkar’s demands for liberation and equality -comprising steps more radical than Gandhi had envisaged- live on in legend, storytelling, and collective song, in the subaltern aesthetics and just reason of India’s contemporary underclass, as revealed in the tragic story of Vilas Ghogre, a leftist poet and beloved street singer who hung himself in protest over the suppressed unrealized promise of Ambedkar’s vision.ĭigital HD, Original version, subtitled, 104’ The film investigates the revolutionary figure of Bhimrao Ambedkar, who led the struggle for emancipation of his people, earned doctorates abroad, and came to write the country’s Constitution, eventually rejecting Hinduism’s repressive castism in favor of Buddhism. Shot over fourteen years, this masterpiece made by the foremost Indian documentarian investigates the fraught circumstances of the country’s Dalits, denigrated as “untouchables” for thousands of years, denied education, access to religious institutions, and allotted the lowest forms of manual labor. Premiering in Spain with this screening, Jai Bhim Comrade traces the atrocity of caste in India through the songs, poetry, and resistance culture from below. This coming-into-being, however, is no exorcism or redemptive return-to-forgetting, but, to reanimate Derrida’s words, presents an ethico-political imperative: to “learn to live with ghosts, more justly.”ĭigital, Original version, subtitled, 199’ As such, this series offers a ciné-politics of decolonization that offers a critical antidote to pervasive amnesia, and a space where the post-militant image can be revisited. ![]() To be sure, most of the films in this series bear little resemblance to the collective revolt of militant cinema yet they do advance the erstwhile commitment to documenting violence, struggling against repression, refusing to forget, and striving for a better world. At the same time, the program alludes to the history of militant cinema, what the Argentine Octavio Getino, a film-maker and theorist of Third Cinema, would call ciné-politics, a popular and radical image that embodied the critical legacy of Avant-garde movements. The series borrows its title from the recent film Spectres of Sven Augustijnen (2011), examining the disquieting presences from times outside of the contemporary, it offers less an iconography of otherworldly beings than a conjuring of haunting disturbances existing at the edges of representation. The inclusions, diverse and necessarily incomplete, represent powerful examples that join poignant aesthetic formulation to inspiring political commitment, and have been drawn from a range of geographical contexts that reference history, culture, and politics in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Still others speak to the unfulfilled promises of the past that continue to live on, dormant in our present. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come. Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary.
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