The Militant Image: A Ciné‐Geography

Abstract

The special issue of Third Text maps out a relational geography which takes as its nexus the radical politics and filmmaking practices of revolutionary decolonisation since the late 1960s and 1970s. The essays investigate the archives and afterlives of liberation struggle and revolution, with the aim to bring into productive proximity a series of dialogues between scholars and theorists, filmmakers, artists and curators thinking through what Okwui Enwezor has called 'the transnational public sphere' of militant, non-aligned and Third Cinema. The special issue includes a number of texts by filmmakers including Solanas and Getino, Eduard de Laurot and Margaret Dickinson that have not been published in English before or have been long overlooked, accompanied by scholarly contextualising essays. The Militant Image contributes to an important emergent body of work by artists, filmmakers and curators (Hito Steryl, The Otolith Group, Renee Green, Florian Zeyfang) re-assessing militant avant-garde work so that it might function as a resource for contemporary artistic and anti-capitalist activity. It brings together new international research on the aesthetics and cine-cultural politics affiliated with the non-aligned liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century. It includes new translations and reprints of key texts and manifestos, and theorises how the digital afterlives of militant films can re-animate moments of political intensity, renewing their relevance to contemporary art. The Militant Image constructs an alternative cartography of cine-cultural practices associated with the liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century. It thus calls into question the political constitution of the present through critical analysis and artistic responses to the aesthetics of Tricontinental liberation. Following on from the work of Okwui Enwezor, Kristin Ross and Nicole Brenez, among others, it produces new theoretical vocabularies through which to analyse and articulate the subjectivities, aesthetics and strategies of militant filmmaking so as to map out a transnational public sphere constituted through affliliation to Tricontinental politics and experimental film language.