Screenings

Gestures and Fragments. Collectivity in the Cinema of Óscar Menéndez and Joyce Wieland

The films in this session explore the radical ways in which various popular struggles have recorded their images and sounds. The unusual Historia de un documento (1971), filmed clandestinely inside Lecumberri prison, shows how political prisoners of the Mexican Movement of 1968 managed to present their situation using a Super-8 camera. In Solidarity (1973), Canadian filmmaker Joyce Wieland takes part in a demonstration. Framing just the feet of the marching participants, she sets out to find other gestures that express collective action.

Starting in the 1960s, Óscar Menéndez documented the peasant and worker mobilizations, the student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre. Under his coordination, Historia de un documento is the result of an attempt to communicate internationally the situation of the political prisoners of ‘68. With the help of colleagues and family, he sneaked a small Super-8 camera into the prison and, for several months, on visiting days, they brought in and took out the exposed rolls. With a naturally imperfect technique, they vividly record the steel bars and the meetings in the corridors, but also the scratches and the dust. In 1970, Menéndez travelled to Paris and managed to produce the film with the help of Jean-Paul Sartre and the ORTF channel. In spite of this, it was not officially screened, as both the Mexican and the French governments censored it.

In the case of Solidarity, 5,000 people demonstrated in April 1973 in support of the Dare biscuit factory workers’ strike. Unlike Menéndez’s film, we are not inside a prison, but by choosing an equally confined frame Wieland also invites us to protest the work of appearances. Faced with footsteps and legs, grass or asphalt, songs, encouraging speeches or murmurs and laughter, trying to inhabit the place of these struggles necessarily implies recomposing our sensitive universe.

Solidarity, Joyce Wieland, 1973, 16mm, 10 min; Historia de un documento, Óscar Menéndez, 1971, 16mm, 50 min.

16mm screening.

Copies provided by Light Cone and Arsenal, respectively.

Acknowledgements: Óscar Menéndez and Emiliano Menéndez.

Date
6 March 2025
Times

19.00

Access will not be allowed once the screening has started

Space
The Auditorium
Admission fee

€ 4 / € 3 Concessions
5-session pass: € 15 / € 12 Concessions
Friends of the CCCB: free of charge

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