Anachronism and the militant image: temporal disturbances of the political imagination

This special issue critically engages with key examples of Spain’s militant cinema from the 1970s and early 1980s, highlighting both their formal heterogeneity and complex temporalities. Very much like Pere Portabella’s 1976 Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones para una proyección de interés público, the period at hand appears as an amalgam of contradictory temporalities that coexist without ever coalescing into a bigger whole. Both Teresa Vilarós and Elena Delgado have questioned the effectiveness of perpetuating a narrative of the Transición and the interregnum that preceded it as a seamless temporal continuum.¹ This narrative effectively managed to transform the desire for “change” into a codified call for continuity and normalization. Considering how quickly these films were rendered obsolete, this volume interrogates the visual protocols that were activated by a normative, or consensual, temporality

Indeed, the term “militant film” itself carries much of the weight of the promises and failures of the 1960s and remains tainted by the violent iconographies of the 1970s. The transformation of ETA’s anti-Francoist militancy into terrorism provides an extreme example of Spain’s violent awakening into the Transición and el desencanto. Spain’s temporal and political contingencies before and during the Transición do not figure in this issue as peripheral or isolated but as constituting a unique vantage point from which to re-examine the European experience of authoritarianism and political violence and its anticipatory relationship with the hegemonic neoliberalism that followed them.

This special issue is specifically concerned with the survival of a militant visual language and a series of politically inflected gestures that, accurately or not, evoke earlier periods. The perceived need for chronological precedence deserves to be explored critically, and this volume proposes we read it as a symptom of a certain temporal turn in the understanding of political art – as even the most cursory glimpse at the programming of Spanish museums, galleries and filmotecas in the last 10 years will confirm.² This need to document, archive and even re-enact, belongs to a very distinct political genealogy and should not be conflated with the contemporary call for memorialization or the concomitant emergence of nostalgia in the Spanish public sphere. This documentary impulse is explicitly concerned with history as a political possibility rather than with memory as such.³ Interestingly, the art gallery and the museum have become key contexts for evaluating anachronism’s political potential.⁴

What makes Spanish militant cinema particularly fascinating is its inscription of its own temporal displacement. As a consequence, while European militant cinema is generally chronologically circumscribed from 1966 to 1977, Spain’s militant production extends well beyond that frame and often projects a self-conscious sense of lateness and anachronism. Accordingly, the issue at hand focuses on a narrow set of examples (Helena Lumbreras, Joaquim Jordà, El Colectivo de Cine de Madrid, José María Berzosa and Pere Portabella) – to the detriment of a more panoramic view of the period’s filmic output – in order to explore the conceptual implications linked to a productive understanding of temporal displacement.⁵ Joaquim Jordà’s 1980 factory film Numax presenta, for instance, is a latecomer to the “genre” and in some ways reads like a crystallization of its promises and failures, skillfully combining hindsight and mourning. In other cases, belatedness and obsolescence are mobilized strategically to different effect. The left-wing, critical costumbrismo of Helena Lumbreras, which strongly echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s interest in the working class’s seemingly regressive productions of knowledge, is contrasted with José María Berzosa and Pere Portabella’s denunciation of cultural obsolescence as a symptom of Francoism’s ideological bankruptcy. In addition, this issue includes an artistic intervention that centers on the visual archeology of both the militant and industrial pasts of the Basque Country. In this way, it responds to the fact that artistic practice and experimentation remain closest in spirit to the formal protocols of militant images of the past, as they strive to breach the constraints of theory and practice. As a result, this issue takes a compositional approach to the layers of anachronism crossing over each other in the midst of Spain’s political untimeliness so that they may illuminate one another.

Since Walter Benjamin’s call for a critical “tiger’s leap into the past”, failed promises and revolutionary failures have become a historical goldmine for the political imagination. Therefore, the call for the transformation of contingency into potentiality and choice as well as the political exploitation of anachronism has become pervasive. In this introduction, I will attempt a brief genealogy of anachronism in current debates in order to situate the temporality of Spanish militant cinema as an exceptional case study that complicates some of the received ideas that populate these discussions.

The complex temporalities of the cinematic image are key to this volume’s political mobilization of Spain’s recent past. Such a politicization of the temporal is by no means a conceptual abstraction, but rather is an exercise in materialism and materialization, as it entails a continued practice of historicization and a renewed interest in factuality. In this respect, cinema’s temporal agility, its ability to cross over and recombine different temporalities, is key to the politicization of the temporal. The fact that the cinematic image can also be played backwards is not just a technological quirk but part and parcel of the ways in which cinema forever transformed our understanding of time. Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s early insights into the time-image owe much to cinema as a medium; its temporal intensity, the density of its actuality, is a direct reaction to filmic technologies. Like the Spanish film theorist and activist Juan Piqueras, Benjamin was a contemporary of the first wave of militant filmmaking and a witness to its political promise. Although the “dialectic image” is to a large extent a Marxist reconfiguration of Benjamin’s “time-image”; it recurs in the temporal turn taken by the contemporary aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman and others, and has retained its currency in Spanish curatorial practices. Hence, in the critical genealogy invoked by this special issue’s rehistoricization of the militant image cinematic, time functions as a central political category.

This special issue, though not claiming to be exhaustive in its coverage of Spain’s extensive visual archive of the 1970s and early 1980s, aims to highlight militant film’s attempt to document and implicate itself in a plurality of political possibilities that, for the most part, did not come to fruition.⁶ Accordingly, it concentrates on militant film’s political mobilization of its own production whereby the cinematic image is not political because of its content but rather because its materiality and the conditions for its existence are constituted politically. Therefore, these films produce rather than reflect their political object. Numax presenta, El campo para el hombre and any of the films of the Colectivo de Cine de Madrid are equally as militant in their means of production and distribution as they are in their viewing and filming processes. The political operates here as a set of social relationships of production. The theoretical and practical commitment of these films lies precisely in delinking the stages in the production of images from the notion of spectacle and industry, and rearranging them differently to produce an alternative effect. Therefore, they emphasize the event of cinema and its production rather than be satisfied with a purely visual fascination with the filmic image.⁷

Cinema is, to an even greater extent than photography, the product of an encounter, of an event. The collaboration involved in the making of a film can be regarded as a democratic practice, a politicized social relationship. Militant film then is not just an expansion of our political vision but an intervention in its conditions of possibility. Therefore, although the indexical quotient of cinema is undeniable, militant cinema is concerned with its own factuality, with the traces of the event that produced it. We cannot remain at the level of cinema as technological reproduction. The “political”, therefore, is not an attribute of militant film but a trace of the constituent event of cinema in the Spain of the 1970s.

Accordingly, these militant images belong to “an order of pure events”, as Gilles Deleuze put it in his volume on the time-image. That is, they attach to and detach themselves from the world in which they originate to then return later as a supplement to what was already there in the beginning. Thus, they are caught midway between representing and transforming the world. It is in the space between these two functions – documentation and intervention – that their politicization takes place, in the form of the cinematic event.

Further, these films often survived and were transmitted through conversations in screening rooms as part of a generation’s political socialization, as events rather than just images: as the memory of a shared political space, and the witnessing of its ephemeral emergence and sudden disappearance. More importantly, militant film was addressed to “users” rather than viewers, as it was meant to be politically “useful”. Filmic images participated in a larger political arena that they were designed to help configure. Therefore, political film needs to be understood as a social object, a product of specific and contested conditions of possibility where formal and content-based commitment overlapped. One could say that the politicization of film functioned as a compensatory democratic practice that balanced out the democratic deficit in the Spanish national context.

Because of these very specific characteristics, some of the most widely accepted critical strategies to deal with the anachronism of images exhibit limitations when dealing with the complex temporalities of Spain’s belated militant film. Although nearly all of the essays in this volume share a consistent engagement with contemporary theories of anachronism, they are all grounded in historical and political practices that run counter to the aestheticization to which the concept has become susceptible. I will trace here just two of the most recurrent critical approaches to anachronism and highlight their problematic recourse to the aesthetic: Jacques Rancière’s poetic anachronism and Georges Didi-Huberman’s heuristic anachronism.

In his 1996 “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth”, Rancière develops a critique of the fear of anachronism in the Annales School and its tendency to obscure political events that interrupt the temporal continuum, mentality or ideological semblance of a given period. Interestingly, Rancière also claims here that anachronism is fundamentally a “poetic” concept. That is, while his claims for the need to embrace anachronism are political, over the course of his argument anachronism reveals itself as a modality of the poetic. This is the crux of Rancière’s general argument, as it hinges on a reconfigured relationship between the political and the aesthetic. However, by revealing the aesthetic protocols of untimeliness, he also curtails its political scope:

There is no anachronism. But there are modes of connection that in a positive sense we call anachronies: events, ideas, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning circulate in ways that escape any contemporaneity, any identity with time “itself”. (47)

The passage is worth unpacking, however briefly. On the one hand, anachronism disappears to become a “mode” that refuses to identify not with “a time” but with “time itself”. Rancière’s long-standing critique of identity gets in the way of the political intentions he proclaims. While disidentification remains a crucial strategy for thinking critically about the political, by being equated to anachrony, understood here as a disidentification with time, anachronism risks losing sight of any kind of historical specificity. By becoming anti-historical, anachronism is politically deactivated.

Nevertheless, because time, like politics, is a relational phenomenon, being “contrary to time” amounts to choosing not to intervene in the shared experience of our present. Insistence on historical intervention is the how these Spanish films constitute their militancy. Their use of anachronism cannot simply devolve into disavowal without concrete content. In their historical specificity, the examples studied in this volume prove over and over again that anachronism belongs to the realm of historicity, more precisely, to the empirical reality of historical experience. Thus, while they productively mobilize Rancière’s conceptual insights, they also reject their philosophical abstraction in favor of the historical and the political.

For his part, Georges Didi-Huberman’s emphasis on the temporal content of the image, what he calls the “sovereignty of anachronism”, is the basis of his understanding of art history. His “heuristic anachronism” is an effective visual dispositif or a protocol that privileges memory over other experiences of time (Didi-Huberman 70–76). When, in glossing Aby Warburg’s Nachleben, he points out that most images both precede and survive their viewers, he assumes and relies on an aesthetic continuum on which the image’s content remains strangely stable. While Didi-Huberman never questions the aesthetic nature of his examples (which always require the existence of a cultural past in order to exist), he remains oddly blind to their political possibilities. His images of the people are frozen because the event that produced them remains obscured as it does not fit into his visual iconography. At most, the art historian works within, or rather activates, a montage of never-ending anachronisms.⁸ It is here that the “art” in art history reveals its political limitations.

Yet, it is clear in any of the examples explored in this issue that art’s political import is contextual rather than intrinsic. It is, on the one hand, the expression of an encounter with non-art and, on the other, the product of a social relationship. Neither the political nor the aesthetic has any ontological valence unto itself,⁹ they are both relational and partial, and depend on the activation of the possibilities contained within the context in which they are situated.¹⁰ Militant cinema’s aesthetic impurity constantly echoes its constitutive and relational heterogeneity.

At the same time, it is often aesthetic judgment that is used to dismiss militant artistic practices like the ones presented in this issue. Aesthetic judgment can in fact become a censuring apparatus, as it presupposes a homogeneous temporality, a shared “horizon of expectations” that eliminates that which do not belong, and that is also capable of incorporating other discourses into its premises. Consequently, it is sometimes extremely difficult to distinguish between the overlapping judgments that operate in relation to militant film.¹¹ The critical dismissal of political art, and of militant cinema in particular, seems to fall into one of the following categories:

1. A temporal critique that considers them either “too early” or “too late” vis-à-vis the context they engage.¹²

2. An aesthetic judgment that deems them “too formal/experimental/aesthetic” or “not formal/experimental/aesthetic enough”.

3. A political assessment that labels them “too political” or “not political enough”.

These three kinds of judgments appear to belong to distinct spheres (the political, the temporal and the aesthetic), yet they reveal striking similarities. All three logics are subsumed under protocols of taste, of aesthetic semblance as a category of inclusion or exclusion. The logic of excess or lack exhibits an incapacity to deal with the rupture that marks the event of militant cinema. To be more or less of something is still to be more or less of that same thing. The danger here is for the aesthetic, the political and the temporal to become oddly interchangeable. However, the filmic examples examined in this issue constantly stress the unstable relationship among these three spheres and are presented as interventions that reassemble those relationships in a novel way. The problem of the perceived anachronism of militant film may paradoxically be a result of the promise of newness it contains. Consequently, the difficulty of adjusting the event of militant film to existing protocols is a measure of its success at interrupting the logic of identity and equivalences that lurks behind those judgments.

A political discourse that inhabits multiple, and often contradictory, temporalities, anachronism can be seen as a strategic reaction to the foreclosing of our political future. Endowed with the ability to harvest latent forms of the past in order to recover them politically, anachronism invokes the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg’s glossing of revolutionary time as “I was, I am, I shall be”, while upsetting its narrative progression. Indeed, the use of the archive in contemporary time-based art forms is above all an exercise in recombination, rearrangement and ultimately of filmic montage. Militant cinema may have initiated an exercise in the reconfiguration of the temporal that goes well beyond the hopeful embrace of anachronism as the refuge of political promise.

While it may be clear that temporal impurity is part and parcel of political discourse as the imagination of a heterotopic otherwise, militancy is often understood as a type of ideological and totalizing avant-gardism steeped in notions of futurity and in orthodox understandings of narrative progression. Yet, an interesting reversal takes place in the Spanish films explored in this issue. While official late-Francoist and Transición culture was strategically focused on the necessary unfolding of a predetermined future in order to survive, both political militancy and visual experimentalism exhibited a renewed interest in documenting the historical past, both as an archive of the factual and as a source for the possible. Hence, the notion of avant-gardism, both political and aesthetic, was turned on its head so that futurity might be traded for anachronism as a source of counter-images for a cinematic militancy. Yet paradoxically, rather than leave it at that, Spanish militant film points to the fact that the ultimate goal of this reversal was to affect and reclaim the contemporary by embracing its temporal complexity and unpredictability.

Although anachronism is absolutely essential to our experience of temporality, it cannot become an unquestioned paradigm when dealing with political art from the past. After all, a militant political understanding of present conditions has never only been about contesting the present but also about how to influence the future. In fact, militancy is often expressed as a quest and a desire to become of one’s time or, at the very least, to intervene in one’s time. The role of contemporaneity therefore cannot be absent in any discussion of the temporality of militancy.

Yet the contemporary is a not a seamless temporal unity either. If it were, there would no point in attempting to intervene in it politically. An understanding of the contemporary must also address its anticipatory nature, which resonates deeply with the political promise of militant cinema. Contemporaneity plays a fundamental role in militancy’s political desire, even when it takes the form of an absence (as was the case during the period at hand in Spain). Therein lies the promise of the political.

Hence, the films studied in this issue should be seen as a chance to further explore the role of temporality during a crucial period in Spain that has had a long-lasting effect on our collective perception of the promises and failures of the militant image. In this way, these at-times almost-forgotten militant films do not fail to remind us that the time of the political is always necessarily also a politics of time.

Personal note

While the autobiographical may seem oddly out of place in academic discourse, I am convinced it is deeply entangled with my fascination with anachronism as a temporal palimpsest. A pervasive sense of temporal displacement accompanied my growing up in the Spain of the 1970s and 1980s. Temporality was synonymous with nonbelonging. It was an experience in the interstices of temporalities that could never be reconciled. My grandparents belonged to the defeated Republican peasantry. Thus, I was familiar both with the anachronistic rhythms of rural life and the political displacement of the defeated and silenced. In hindsight, I often wonder if my grandparents’ stubborn embrace of rural anachronism, together with its at times reactionary morality, was not a confused attempt to protect themselves from the broken political promises that defined their life by creating the false continuity of an inherited habitus. My parents, on the other hand, embraced urban life and upward mobility, rejecting both rural ideology and the democratic memory of their parents – as it in effect superimposed the temporal and economic unevenness they were determined to flee. Thus, they bought into the upward mobility of a present that allowed them to travel seamlessly from Francoism to neoliberalism through consumerism, understood as a symptom of modernity’s temporal dominance. Meanwhile, I spent many years at a staunchly Francoist school that was at pains to keep at bay the images of Alaska and her Bola de cristal or Terra d’escudella, or the occasional encounter with experimental theater, film, dance and music happening nearby. These intermittent disruptions heightened my sense that the temporalities of my everyday life quite simply did not add up. In an attempt to escape the oppressive and mediocre environment of that religious private school, I managed to transfer to a secular and prestigious public institut and had a brush with the exclusionary practices of the educated Catalan bourgeoisie for whom people with my background were an obsolete absurdity. As a result of these mismatched temporalities, the celebratory and forward-looking nation-state that emerged during the Barcelona Olympic Games looked very much like a spectacular fairy tale. In retrospect, it was only through my migration to the United States, by inhabiting the presentism of a nation-state to which I am clearly “alien”, that it became possible for me to discern a personal and historical experience in which temporality continues to be a puzzle.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Sara Nadal-Melsió has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and New York University and is now a collaborator at the art residency SOMA in Mexico City. Her essays have appeared in Diacritics, RHM, JSCS and Avenç, as well as in various edited volumes. She is also the coauthor of Alrededor de/Around, a book on the photography and architecture of the last turn of the century. She is currently working on a manuscript, titled Europe and the Wolf, on the transmission of dissent in Europe’s musical legacy through a reading of contemporary art and experimental cinema. In February 2018, she will co-curate (with Carles Guerra) an exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona.

Notes

1. Vilarós offers a complex diagnosis of the fantasies underpinning the Transición in El mono del desencanto: Una critica cultural de la transición española. Delgado’s La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad democrática española builds on that earlier critique, tracing the legacy of the Transición by examining Spain’s continued attachment to consensus and normativity from 1996 to 2011.

2. There were two exhibitions in Barcelona at the beginning of 2017 that resonate with the topic of this special issue. The first was a retrospective of Alexander Kluge’s political interventions in the protocols of militant cinema, Gardens of Cooperation. The other – yet another instance of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s continued rehistoricization of Spain’s cultural dissidences – titled Gelatina dura: Històries escamotejades dels 80, focused on the visual counterculture of late Francoism and the Transición up to the Barcelona Olympics and the specularization of the city. In addition, the Filmoteca de Catalunya screened a series of rarely seen films of the period (from Jesús Garay’s Manderley to Paulino Viota’s Con uñas y dientes) alongside more recent attempts to engage with and reenact this filmic and historical legacy (such as Luis López Carrasco’s El futuro or Chema de la Peña’s 23 F: La película). These two shows, as well as the film series, share a critical genealogy and present a common goal: a call for alternatives to the official chronological understanding of temporal progression and a political investment in the anachronism of images that interrupt that continuum. This approach has by now become hegemonic.

3. There is another important development of anachronism that is invested in the return of repressed images from the past. For example, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma anachronism takes the form of a trauma – so that George Stevens’s first images of the Nazi camps haunt A Place in the Sun. Likewise, in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the historical dimension is a result of the suffering of the past. There has been a central Derridian derivation of this traumatic understanding of history in Spanish cultural studies. Jo Labanyi’s “History and Hauntology: Or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past” has been by far the most influential. The JSCS has recently published an issue on Spectralities, edited by Steven Marsh, that builds on Labanyi’s insights and extends into a reading of ghostliness as a constitutive property of the moving image.

4. Portabella’s 2016 Informe general II: El rapte d’ Europa, the second part of the landmark 1976 Informe general, which itself had a very reduced audience at the time of its release, has been almost exclusively screened in museums and other art institutions, and consequently derives a large part of its relevance from an anachronistic relationship to part 1. Moreover, the screenings have, in turn, exponentially increased the availability of the 1976 political film and retroactively transformed it into a foundational work for the period at large. The role of the museum in the renewed attention to militant filmic practices cannot be underestimated.

5. The history of the reception of Fernando Solanas’s and Octavio Getino’s 1968 La hora de los hornos in Spanish militant and clandestine circles alone could easily justify a special issue of its own (Mestman). The same would be true of the influence of figures like Fernando Birri or Oscar Masotta and their transatlantic trajectories, which could not be addressed in this issue but also merit critical reassessment.

6. The most complete history of Spanish militant cinema to date is Lydia García-Merás’s “El cine de la disidencia”.

7. Nevertheless, one should be careful not to overstate the role of dissent and rupture in anachronism. Anachronism can also be used, as it was during Francoism, to legitimate the present and create fictions of continuity. More importantly, it achieved that through a rupture in historical experience. This was clear to Ernst Bloch in 1932 when, in “Non-contemporaneity and Obligation to its Dialectic”, he urged the Left to employ the disruptive powers of temporalities that “contradict the now” before they were fully incorporated by National Socialism in the guise of reactionary nostalgia. Even Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, famously described how reactionary anachronisms “anxiously conjure up the spirit of the past to their service” to disguise the irruption of their newness (15).

8. The Uprisings exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman at the Jeu de Paume provides a perfect example of the limitations of this approach. The show is an endless chain of images of revolt that relate to one another through iconographic analogy. The events to which the images belong are relegated to the anecdotal and, as a result, the political content of their “insurrections” is flattened into quotable images. Examples can be added to or subtracted from this analogical series without any consequence to their aestheticized continuity. Thus, the photographic materials on the Spanish Civil War that were added when the exhibition travelled from Paris to Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Nacional de Catalunya did not introduce any significant change to the art historical premise of the display.

9. Rancière’s the political/le politique seems to refer to some intrinsic political nature that somehow manages to survive the messiness of politics/la politique. In contrast, Spanish militant film makes it clear that the goal is to travel from one sphere into the other, that is, to use the form of the political to intervene in the practice of politics.

10. This is the precise structure of Arendt’s thinking in what maybe her best-known definition of the political relationality: “Man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships”. (95).

11. Ariella Azoulay proposes a return to Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Kantian judgment of taste in order to question the nature of what she calls our contemporary “political judgment of taste”. Azoulay argues that the phrase “This is political” contains an implicit judgment of taste that subsumes it. It is therefore the expression of a reflexive rule that has the power to deny the political content of images. My three categories add a temporal dimension to her insights (92–95).

12. Kristin Ross traces the origins of Rancière’s interest in temporality to his 1975 critique of Althusser in La leçon d’Althusser. According to Ross’ glossing of Rancière, theorists like Althusser would never meet with the temporality of an insurrection like May 1968, for to them “it is never the moment, and it will never be the moment” (24).