Proyectos de investigación /

C3

Non-Aligned Film Archives

Research project committed to the preservation, restoration, and circulation of archives of a cinema in struggle against authoritarian narratives and models (colonial, state, capitalist, patriarchal, etc.), a cinema that has struggled to exist, and still struggles not to disappear into the margins of dominant histories. C3 is a project that questions our own gestures, movements and our approaches to the history of cinema, particularly tricontinental archives of militant, committed and transnational cinema from the 1970s.  

The title refers to the short-lived Cinemateca del Tercer Mundo, C3M (Uruguay from 1969 to 1972) for the production and distribution - often clandestine - of political films, as well as to the Moroccan magazine Cinema 3, committed to the reinvention of film language, which was banned after 4 issues in 1970.     Just like many films that remained unfinished and other attempts that were quickly aborted (notably in the fields of publishing, training, and cinephilia), these projects of a new, transnational, personal and radical thought and cinema collided, sometimes noisily, with simplifying and often destructive official political visions.

It is therefore in the gaps, in the hollows, in the wounds and in the absences that we must collect, inventory, document, and take care of the multiple narratives that inhabit cinema, freeing ourselves from the crushing weight of History in favor of a fragmentary approach based on lives, voices and traces. 

The project is based on several lines of research and modes of action: work with archives of film critics and filmmakers who were involved in a critical and decolonial cinema in the 1960s and 1970s; the study of a collection of magazines on transnational and radical cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (Asia, Africa, Latin America); or the research with the archives of filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani, in Rabat.  

The project will entail:  

  1. Not to make a hierarchy between traces: an old 16mm camera, a VHS, photocopied newspaper articles, a collected word will be just as valid as original negatives in our research.  
  2. To no longer limit or compartmentalize the gestures of a discipline (whether it be creation, distribution or preservation) and to allow ourselves to think of new methods of circulating films (through programs that will travel to partner locations).  
  3. To restore and reactivate the desire for cinema and the dreams of revolution carried by these filmmakers and to collectively imagine a future for these weakened cinemas that can be a place of archive or a platform for action (whether it be a physical, digital, editorial or other place).  

With this research project, we will try to think of possible tools, methodologies, alliances, and actions for a non-aligned film archive movement.  

Technical data sheet

Lead Investigator:

Léa Morin

Students 2024-2025:
José Emilio González Calvillo, Natalia Orasanin, Sara Médiouni Haidur, Stephanie de Marchi Ricci

Students 2023-2024:
Ana Júlia Silvino, Jan Baeta Salvany, Juliana Arana Toscano, Matteo Giampetruzzi, Nicholas Nahuel Turchi

Students 2022-2023:
Deva Pereda Areizaga, Laura Alhach, Mariana Torres, Paul Bonnarme

Timeframe:

2022 - ongoing

Languages: French