Event overview
"Useful Cinemas/Useful Archives: Labour, History & Mediation in Latin American Film & Video" explores the conditions of making, preserving, and archiving audiovisual works
This symposium brings together researchers and filmmakers to reflect on the intersections of labour, the narration of history and archival practice in ongoing research on Latin American film and video. Participants will consider how feminist, educational, oppositional, and transnational film practices have been shaped by the material and institutional conditions of their making, circulation, and preservation.
Each session combines presentations with screenings of rarely seen films, fragments, and offcuts, opening space for collective engagement with fragile and heterogeneous audiovisual materials. The symposium aims to foster a seminar setting in which ongoing projects and methodological challenges will be shared and debated, from questions of historiography and archival care to the politics of reactivation and reuse. By placing research methods into dialogue with the modes of production and mediation under study, the event foregrounds the intertwined forms of labour involved in both historical film practices and contemporary archival work. In doing so, we seek to illuminate not only the afterlives of “useful cinemas” but also how these “useful archives” help challenge dominant ways of doing film history.
This event is co-convened by Miguel Errazu (Goldsmiths) and David Wood (University College London), with the support of UK Research & Innovation “Horizon Europe Guarantee” program through projects "Screen Internationalism: Audiovisual Pedagogies of Modernisation between Postwar Europe and Latin America" (EP/Y015088/1) and "Tracing Cooperation: Images, Memories and Archival Restitutions of Early Film Workshops in Bolivia" (EP/Z001919/1 ), the Centre for Visual Anthropology of Goldsmiths, University of London and SELCS-CMII/Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
Day 1
Tuesday, October 7
5-8 pm
Common Ground, Institute of Advanced Studies
University College London
Session 1. Archives of Third Worldism and Internationalism
With interventions from Dalila Missero (University of Lancaster) and David Wood (University College London).
Film screenings:
Extracts from Pan y dignidad: carta abierta de Nicaragua (Bread and Dignity: Open Letter from Nicaragua) (María José Álvarez, Nicaragua, 1983). 12 min.
Article 55 (Leo Seltzer, Bolivia, 1951). 11 min.
Session 2. Women Filmmakers In and Against the State
With interventions from Isabel Seguí (St Andrews University) and Julio Gonzáles Oviedo (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú).
Film screenings:
Excerpts from Los Ronderos (The Night Watchers) (Marianne Eyde, Perú, 1987), and La vida es una sola (You Only Live Once (Marianne Eyde, 1993).
Revolución peruana en marcha (The Peruvian Revolution On The March) (Bertha Saldaña Tejada, Peru, 1975). 10 min.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Oct 2025 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
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