‘No podemos hablar ya sino a través de los restos’: fragmento y fantasma del 68 mexicano en el cine experimental contemporáneo

Abstract

This paper explores a series of contemporary audiovisual practices that take up the task of revisiting a visual legacy of the Mexican 68, made public in a recent curatorial project of reappropiation of rare filmic footage of the epoch, Hacer memoria - Por ahi del 68… (Festival Ambulante 2018). This task is structured around the intersection of three different genealogies of film practices: first, the legacy of militant film collectives of the sixties and seventies, and the aim of making political interventions on the social sphere, as it is being revisited with a more or less self conscious affiliation; second, the experimental tradition, especially those practices making emphasis around the interplay of two axis: (re)appropriation and resignification of film footage, and the artisanal work with obsolescent film materials and formats, such as 8 mm, 16 mm or Super 8. Last, what has come to be known, at least for the last two decades, as “archive practices, that is, the task of rethinking historical narratives by way of “counter-archives” that help construct collective (post) memories seeking to undermine, and open up for a critical consideration, hegemonic narratives.