Turning the camera into a weapon: Juan Piqueras’s radical noncommercial film projects and their afterlives (1930s–1970s)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the resonances between two moments in Spanish alternative film-culture history: the 1930s and the 1970s. We analyze how an anachronistic network of referents and practices regarding the democratization of film production and the political potential of nonprofessional film technologies was articulated across epochs. We locate these practices in an expanded genealogy of political nontheatrical film culture, from which the Spanish context has been largely excluded. To conceptualize these transhistorical echoes, we draw on some contributions elaborated by Jacques Rancière around the idea of anachronism and the missed encounters between radical theory and practice. As our case study, we examine how the project of an alternative film culture envisioned in the 1930s by radical film critic Juan Piqueras irrupted into two radical film formations that emerged in Spain in the 1970s: a new generation of radical critics known as the “Nuevo Frente Crítico” and a series of manifestations of militant cinema taking place in Catalonia.