Browsing by Subject "Structural cinema"

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    Geology, history and landscape in Los materiales (Los hijos, 2009)
    (Associació Cineforum L´Atalante, 2019-07-31) Suárez Sánchez, Juan Antonio; Belmonte Ávila, Juan Francisco; Filología Inglesa
    This article analyses Los materiales (Los Hijos, 2009) from formal, ideological, and historical perspectives. It places the film within the collective’s relatively brief trajectory, as well as within the longer history of structural-material film, directly alluded to in the film’s title. It underlines its structural-material features—as these were pioneeringly described by critics P. Adams Sitney and Peter Gidal—and situates the film in relation to recent political mutations of the “cinema of structure”, especially in relation to works that use structural procedures to explore the relationship between landscape and history from a critical-political perspective. The film shows that collective action ends up evolving into geological strata and fossilized remains as well as into a memory of place—narratives, often oral, that weave together personal experience and collective becoming. In addition to reflecting on history, the film fictionalizes its own process of production and the filmmakers’ mutual rapport. Finally, Los materiales also meditates on the politics of vision and visuality both through dialogue and through the deployment of formal resources that insist on disconnection, opaqueness, and the impossibility of seeing in an objective, totalizing fashion. In this regard, the film may be seen as part of a documentary tradition that highlights the limitations of the apparatus and the ambiguity of the moving image, and that seeks to engage the Other—the object of the documentary—in an open-ended, dialogic, and anti-authoritarian manner.-----------------------------------------