Vestiges of History: the Family Archive in Contemporary Documentary and Experimental Film

Abstract

In recent years both film archives and documentary

and experimental filmmakers have shown a growing

interest in preserving, collecting and re-using

home and amateur analogue film in search of new

ways of narrating and thinking about the past.

This forms part of a broader tendency to interrogate

history from the subjective and the corporeal.

In Mexico, filmmakers such as Natalia Almada,

Gregorio Rocha and Bruno Varela, along with the

Archivo Memoria project at the Cineteca Nacional,

propose various ways of working with such

filmic registers, discussing their status as a historial

record of a tangible past, as a seductive object,

as fragmented, prosthetic or mechanical memory,

and as a ritual artefact. These different uses of nonprofessional

footage propose various ways of intervening

in the contemporary public sphere.