3 Horas 3 Minutosel género epistolar en el cine de no ficción contemporáneo

Résumé

This dissertation arises from creative research work on the epistolary film-essay in recent times. A theoretical and practical investigation is combined here with a creative exercise, in text and video format Goals As a means of communication that is nearly extinct yet still haunts our memory, the phenomenology of the postal letter- follows a hauntological regime of spectrality, at once poignant and indispensable in a world that is torn between anxiety and euphoria, screens and walks, songs and messages, images and viruses. Epistolary communication is characterized by the radical vulnerability of its spacing and its dissemination (in the Derridian sense); its undecidable interplay between presences and absences, oscillating between the tangible physicality of the postal object, and the spectral evocation of the distant sender- between the time of delivery and the inevitable delay in receipt. However fraught with contradictions and aporias, the challenge of transcoding this shared, interactive, two-way genre, and its multiple dance of absence and presence, into a cinematic forman ¿epistolary cinema¿- opens up a fascinating terrain precisely because of the impossibility of what it aims for, and because through that attempt and that challenge it might be possible to reformulate the potential of the contemporary cinematographic medium. Methodology This research project does not intend to cover all the epistolary non-fiction films from the last decade, but it does seek to present their main characteristics and the aesthetic dilemmas they deal with, as well as the theoretical frameworks underpinning their production. As a visual artist and non-fiction director myself, I try to project onto them not so much the external, superior gaze of a critic or a theorist, but rather an authorial gaze, interior to the process of research and creation itself, as reflected in the second part of this dissertation. In this document, critical scholarly writing, structured around the analysis of cinema and moving images, is intertwined with the perspective arising from my own creative practice in the audiovisual field, and both are combined in the methodology employed here. The sources I have used come from film criticism, texts on art, contemporary theory and feminism. The choice of audiovisual works to be studied is based on their relevance within an ongoing conversation about the difference between form and content, a conversation that constitutes both the discursive statement of the research and its object of study, addressing all the formats of absence and presence: overlapping times, external and internal exile, resistance in its various forms, futures and memories. In the course of the investigation presented here, the documentation and the analysis and the creative-practical project have been developed simultaneously through multiple intersections and overlaps, all of which converge onto the arguments in the last chapter. We have established that although the letter, which was once a textual structure typical of modernity, has now almost practically disappeared in its functionality as a means of communication, nevertheless its spectral form still somehow haunts certain forms of the epistolary genre surviving in different written or audiovisual media. The letter may be dead, but its ghost, the epistolary form, is still among us. Therein lies the hauntology of the epistolary: beyond its own material extinction, the letter as form has not lost its power to inspire, or spread into, other practices of cultural production. Epistolary cinema has often spoken a language coming from exile, diaspora or forced distances. This makes it both an intimate and radically subjective exercise in the illumination of experience, and also a shared exploration open to the birthing of an intersubjective truth. Such was also the inspiration for the research process leading here, during which I was granted the privilege and the gift (since the letter is always a gift) of reading and writing, listening and seeing, so many images and so many languages.