Strange Objects

This project focuses on the first direct cinema training workshops run in Latin America in collaboration with the French association Varan. We will analyse a heterogeneous and fascinating set of hitherto forgotten documents in paper, photographic, video, and film format (in super 8) that will enable us to reconstruct the experience of several workshops held in Mexico and Bolivia between 1980 and 1983.

The Varan Association was founded in 1981 to support a radical education project: the Centre for Research and Training in Direct Cinema. Its origins date back to 1978, when an experimental workshop was held in Mozambique following the country's liberation from Portuguese colonial rule. Chaired by Jean Rouch and Jean-Pierre Beauviala, and managed by Jacques d’Arthuys, the Varan Association used all the diplomatic and financial resources at its disposal to deploy a large network of audiovisual workshops throughout the developing world. The cinema they imagined, those ‘strange objects’ halfway between ethnographic practice and activism, between experimental films and television reports, are a key factor for understanding the complex genealogies of independent, community, and resistance-oriented audiovisual practices in Latin America. However, they also reveal the two-fold nature of this kind of media transfer project, the material traces of which vanished in the countries in which it was carried out, and was conserved (albeit in a deactivated format) in French archives.

The project will work mainly with one of these archives: the Varan archives. In parallel, we will also work with their collection of films in super 8, held at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). We will also draw on various personal and institutional archives from France, Mexico and Bolivia, which will help us decentralise the memory of these workshops and add a degree of complexity to their analysis. At the end of the day, the aim is to reanimate these materials through the creation of a digital archive that will return them to what they always wanted (and deserved) to be: materials for constructing a popular audiovisual memory in Latin America.

Strange Objects project forms part of the Z-A (Filmakers’ Archive), a project run by the EQZE in collaboration with Medialab Tabakalera, which aims to create an archive and document centre on the poetics of cinema exploring how the profession and talent of making and viewing film has been communicated, taught, transmitted and shared. Other previous research chapters include the Genealogies of Learning project (2021-2023).

Principal investigator:
Miguel Errazu

Students 2023-2024:
Andoni Imaz, Andrea de la Torre Perleche, Claire Mullen, Júlia Izaguirre, Laura Gabay, Marga Almirall

Associated institutions:

Ateliers Varan, Medialab Tabakalera

Timeframe
2023-ongoing