Chile50: Politics and Aesthetics Screening Two: Unfinished Diary (Marilu Mallet, 1983)
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Chile50: Politics and Aesthetics
These film screenings, specially curated and organised by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), in collaboration with Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia (FIC Valdivia), commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Chilean Military Coup of 1973. The selected films invite us to reflect upon the challenges of memory and memorialization and the relation between aesthetics and the political. With a focus on materiality (bodies, photo-cameras, various urban or rural landscapes) and a strong emphasis on subjectivity, each of these films also allows us to dwell on the various methodologies of visual representation and the subtleties of the affective worlds and symbolic horizons they explore in their particular genre. Questions about archival practices, fiction and testimony, intimacy and state violence will guide the conversation with the respective directors who
will be joining us remotely for each of these screening events.
Curated and organised by: Margarita Palacios (m.palacios@bbk.ac.uk) and Daniela Larraiìn (d.larrain@mail.bbk.ac.uk)
10th November
Unfinished Diary (Marilu Mallet, 1983)
Documentary 48 minutes, Canada.
A young Chilean woman lives exiled in Montreal. She is a filmmaker. Day after day, she makes a film, a journal, in which documentary, fiction, and her subjective perception of reality fuse with each other, lend vigour to each other, thereby creating a new, original and highly personal Cinematographic language. It’s a diary of this exile, told from the angle of daily life, where details of no apparent significance gradually take on a disproportionate importance. It’s the questioning of this new Quebec society, in which two other cultures are already trying to co-exist. It’s the sense of horror that has been left behind, and the daily routine that gradually replaces it. In a moving self-portrait, realism gives way before the strength of emotion. The style is intimate, "feminine", but the backdrop is public - here "private life becomes political", when collective problems arise in everyday life. It's the sudden awakening to the necessity of keeping one's identity and the attempt to discover what lies deep inside oneself- an Unfinished Diary.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington