Proyectos de investigación /

Second hand

Reuse and deviations of Ibero-American cinema

The project Second Hand aims to research and recover films that reuse third-party materials and experiment with re-cutting, collage, and sabotage to articulate a critical discourse. Second Hand encompasses early works created in the Ibero-American context.

The project’s areas of research link audio-visual preservation with curation, which seeks to locate, identify, digitise, and restore difficult-to-access audio-visual works or those which must be preserved, while at the same time studying them from a historical, technical, and aesthetic perspective. The goal is to ensure the accessibility and circulation of the materials, and to provide the appropriate context in order to stimulate critical discussions in the present.

2021-2022: José Ernesto Díaz-Noriega

From 2021-2022 the project focused on the collection of films by the Galician amateur filmmaker José Ernesto Díaz-Noriega. This corpus enabled a broadening of the concept of “re-used cinema”, traditionally limited to compilation cinema and avant-garde, militant cinema. Díaz-Noriega’s amateur filmmaking practice, carried out at a gradual pace during the long period between 1936 and the late 1970s, is characterised by his satirical use of image and sound from the media and the history of cinema, all during the Franco regime. The Díaz-Noriega Villalba family and the Spanish Filmoteca collaborated on this work.

2022-2023: Cinemateca of Cuba

From 2022-2023, the project shifted focus to Latin America, through a collaboration agreement with the Cinemateca of Cuba, home to the prolific and avant-garde productions of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The cradle of recycling practices, the films made at the ICAIC were heavily influenced by a lack of resources and the circulation of foreign films and impacted by the anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution. In addition to Santiago Álvarez, a key reference figure in Cuban collage film, other filmmakers, including Eduardo Manet, Marisol Trujillo, Miriam Talavera and Pepín Rodriguez, used a wide repertoire of materials such as newspapers, magazines, photographs, graphic material, North American and Soviet films, newsreels, scientific films and folk music, combined with an excellent mastery of editing techniques and visual effects.

Four short films have been selected for research and digitisation during this second phase of the project: El negro (Eduardo Manet, 1960), L.B.J. (Santiago Álvarez, 1968), 79 primaveras (Santiago Álvarez, 1969) and Oración (Marisol Trujillo, Miriam Talavera, Pepín Rodríguez, 1984).

2023-2025: Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art

In the last two years of work, the project established a collaboration with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art - Berlin, an institution devoted to film and cultural heritage that operates as a cinema, a festival, a distribution company, and an archive. Following 60 years of cinema and festival work, Arsenal has a film collection encompassing 10,000 titles linked to avant-garde and political cinema worldwide.

For the first year of work with Arsenal, films made in the late 1960s by two groups of militant Latin American filmmakers were selected: La Paz (Cine Liberación, María Elena Massolo, Argentina, 1968) and 22 de mayo (Cine Urgente, Venezuela, 1968). In addition to studying the use of third-party material in the context of militant action in the 1960s, digitisation will allow access to films without limited circulation. In the case of La Paz, the research made it possible to discover a movie and a director previously unknown in Argentina. For the second year of work with Arsenal, films from the 1970s were selected: Made in USA (Christine Trautman Rosenthal and Kurt Rosenthal, Germany-Peru, 1974) and Descomedidos y chascones (Carlos Flores, Chile, 1972). Both films deal with Chilean society before and during the 1973 coup d'état.