The birth of cinema as a modification of the latest reality reproduction technology at the end of the 19th century holds unlimited potential in its storytelling. Plastic arts (fine arts, sculpture), architecture with a long European tradition influenced the artistic side of its imagery composition. Meanwhile, literature and the performing arts, which emphasize language and established narratives, can place it in an elite position, where previously it only presented a record of everyday life that only ignited the technological fascination of the common public. 

But for every establishment there are filibusters. Filibuster has its roots in a term with subversive connotations (pirates, rebel militia) that has been appropriated into a political term and means policy challengers in a parliamentary system. Cinema filibusters realized the medium’s potential to scramble our ways of knowing. From avant-gardism to the construction of a new state, they disrupted the physicality of the medium (scratching celluloid, circumventing the shutter) to reconfiguring the ideology of the state through various montage theories. The development of this speech language encapsulates decades of socio–political history of the Western World by constantly leveraging its technological developments-sound film, color film, cameras and portable voice recorders.

Then, a major change occurred when the world constellation changed after World War II. The voices of the colonial subjects of the Western World appropriated the established language of cinema into the context of their own location. The filibuster cinema movement in the so-called Third World countries undermined elements of the Western worldview that had objectified and ridiculed their cultural heritage. The absorption of time and location, which had followed the Aristotelian narrative structure typical of the Western tradition, was dismantled. The truth values inherited from the Age of Enlightenment were questioned in the light of the complex experiences of the colonized countries. This learning goes back and forth, and Western filmmakers are in dialog with this way of storytelling. Cinema, along with other arts, no longer only questioned the noble position of its art in storytelling (in addition to the everlasting business profits), but how it presented an ethical tension between the subjects in front of and behind the camera and their relationship with the external context, which at that time needed to be resolved immediately such as colonialism, the Cold War, advanced capitalism to the most recent, the diaspora crisis. Cinema became the strategy of the filibusters.

The three films in this curatorial show the filmmakers’ strategies in disarming the legacy of issues that subordinate certain public conditions. We depart from three locuses that presuppose long-distance relationships, namely the St. Denis Canal, France – North Africa & Middle East; Atacama Desert, Chile – Cadiz, Spain; and a slaughterhouse on the border of Italy and the Balkans. All three inevitably imply a relationship of subordination between one subject and another. The perception of sites that contain historical and present-day trauma is navigated by filmmakers who come from the subordinated parties in these three films with reconstruction strategies.

Mal Tourne invites us to examine the canals in France as the site of recent violence against immigrants, the result of the Arab Spring conflict that gave birth to the great diaspora of the contemporary world. Diaspora, which throughout history has been a formative point in civilization, through this film is explained to be a new identity reconstruction project and its friction with the established state bureaucracy. From the play of canal grids, humans build identity fictions and legitimize their history according to the needs of the new location. 

Gold miners, clandestine cemeteries, and stories of filibustering colonialism shape communities in Antofagasta, Atacama Desert, Chile. Otro Sol brings together fiction, reality, and documents of the filibuster trial that disrupted community relations in the ruins of the desert settlement. The filmmaker’s reconstruction of cross-generational subjects with their colonial masters, Spain, as well as the lessons of gold prospecting become a tactic to show the structures of colonialism that still need to be eroded.

The structures of colonialism and advanced capitalism further gave birth to various industrial complexes, including food. Ingresso Animali Vivi makes an important reflection on the ontology of animals that have been the object of humans for a long time. The filmmaker, together with a dog, explores a site of a former modern farm on the border of Italy and the Balkans and reconstructs the spatial layout and artifacts of torture of farm animals through computer-generated imagery. The dog’s movement through the cold grids of the industrial complex presents a poignant poetry of human and non-human relations and the role of large-scale mechanization in them.

We can see these three films as the archaeological work of the filmmakers. Archaeological work that has the goal of reconstruction is achieved by filmmakers by excavating sites of violence, finding artifacts, archives and testimonies, no matter how forgetful or braggart the subject is. From these fragmentary findings, the filmmakers utilize their filibustering side, fully aware of the structures of subordination they have inherited and deal with a history that, even though it is beyond reality, has the urgency to be rethought.