1968: A Blind Archive

Summary

El Grito (1968-1970) by Leobard López Aretche is one of the few movie testimonials "from the center of the student movement" about it's own development during 1968 and the brutal stranglehold on October 2nd at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolc. This collective document was made within the context of authoritarianism and state repression, which became paradigmatic for the modern history of Mexico. 1968: A Blind Archive of author Bani Khoshnoudi asks the following questions - What is the place of the "real" within the material that is composed of a multitude of fragments, prints and visions? How does the imagination work when structuring a political document of this type?

What we are trying to do is show how politics and social movements can also be based on illusions and the imagination. I consider myself to be a rather politicized person, but at the same time I try to question the impact that the image and sound can exert, because when they are together they become much more powerful and possess a tremendous amount of power… I mean political documents like El Grito - on the one hand they lose their historical and archival value because they are always approached the same way; they always become hommages to the same things. I do not mean to say that we should stop looking at the photographs from Tlatelolc, taken on October 2nd, but that we should put them in a different context, thereby producing a contradiction or discrepancy between image and sound, events and the moment. This can allow us to do a more extensive excavation and see if these images inhabit our interior or are foreign to us; then what are our perceptions, how they affect us, and what we can do with them and our bodies.

(Bani Khoshnoudi)

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