Cinema as Assembly: Planetary Struggles, Planetary Cinema

Maori gatherings are called hui. The quality of the hui is determined by the quality of the voice that is calling the hui. Then it is determined by the quality of the response to that voice – who comes, and what they are prepared to talk about. You have to be a brave person to call a hui … Any worthwhile film involves a certain arrogance – the arrogance to call a hui, especially as a young person (under 50). If you are not brave enough to call a hui, you do not have much right to be handling the extraordinary resources it takes to make a film. Then again, the process involves humility, the humility to bend the technology to the rules of the hui – to allow the people, the whole people, to speak.
– Barry Barclay, 1990.11.Barry Barclay, Our Own Image: A Story of a Māori Filmmaker, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp. 12–13.

The indigenous commons, moreover, are far from being extinguished. Not only in the South of the American continent are vast territories governed by communitarian regimes, but, as the Zapatista movement has shown, new communal forms of social organization are continually being produced.
– Silvia Federici, 2018.22.Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018, p. 79.

One ought to imagine that at the moment the shutter closes in order to reopen again in a fraction of a second – to proclaim a new state, a new border, or a new museum – the people whose lives are forever going to be changed by the act are rebelling and do not let the shutter sanction such acts as faits accomplis.
– Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 2019.33.Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London: Verso, 2019, p. 7.

Cinema, capitalism and intersectionalism

The story of cinema starts with workers. The film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, shows the approximately one hundred workers at a factory for photographic goods in Lyon-Montplaisir leaving through two gates and exiting the frame to both sides.

But why does the story of cinema begin with the end of work? Is it because, as has been suggested,44.See John Roberts, ‘The Missing Factory’, Mute, 11 July 2012, metamute.org. it is impossible to represent work from the perspective of labour and only from the point of view of capital, because the revolutionary horizon of the working class coincides with the end of work? After all, the early revolutionary art avant-garde had an ambiguous relationship with capitalism: it provided both a critique of bourgeois sociability, whilst also reproducing the commodity form. Even the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, which so subverted the bourgeois sense of space, time and personhood, at the same time standardized and commodified reality with techniques of framing and editing that moulded images on the commodity form, for instance in stereotypical representations of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat.

Cinema was born at the intersection of industrial capitalism and empire, when images were endorsed with the animistic power of capturing the invisible. It put objects in motion, froze the proletariat into an alienated and spectatorial consciousness (as described by György Lukács), and, at the same time, made it productive and docile through techniques of chrono-photography, ergonomics, body mapping and ethnographic film. Early cinema oscillates between mass distraction, mass production and mass extermination, and brings together different modes of representation, social relations and forms of knowledge: documentary evidence, popular entertainment, magic, voyeurism, patriarchal social reproduction, ethnographic nostalgia, scientific violence and propaganda.

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the documentary movement founded by John Grierson in the UK was aimed not just at representing the new proletariat but also at sustaining the alliance between the working class and the state at an early moment of construction of what would become Keynesian capitalism. By the 1970s, social realist films were under attack from both feminist and Black film collectives for several reasons: their voyeuristic distance, rooted in uneven class relations between the film-maker (often male, white and middle class) and the subjects (often ‘the poor’, ‘the marginal’ or ‘the working class’); their victimizing approach; their lack of intersectional narratives; and their excessively materialistic and productivist focus on work, poverty and inequality.

The Third Cinema movement in the Global South radicalized cinema, using it as a tool of political mobilization against military regimes and colonial powers. Refusing the imperialist forms of commercial Hollywood films (‘First Cinema’) and of European auteur cinema (‘Second Cinema’), ‘Third Cinema’ devised democratic and participatory film processes, a popular and non-elitist visual grammar, grass-roots forms of production and distribution, and a powerful realist style that reflected ‘allegorically’ the condition of underdevelopment and ‘hunger’ of the Global South.55.See Glauber Rocha, ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’, in Ismail Xavier (ed.), Glauber Rocha. On Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2019, pp. 41–46. Cinema as tool of decolonial freedom is a way of unlearning imperialism, of challenging imperial ways of looking, not just inside the frame of representation, but also with regard to the social relations and power structure surrounding it. An unlearning that, for Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, implies the acknowledgement of what the camera doesn’t show.

In 1996, speaking at the British Film Institute, the film-maker John Akomfrah announced the death of Third Cinema, that is, of that political cinema aligned with a socialist, decolonizing impulse, but framed within the old modernist space of the nation state and with the industrial working class as privileged revolutionary subject. The aim of the Black Audio Film Collective, of which Akomfrah was a founding member, was to ground image-making in the diasporic experience of racism and violent nationalism, through which empire had reconstituted itself in Britain, stirring the documentary tradition towards a multisensory, expanded and prefigurative search for the form of cinema to come,66.See Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray, ‘The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography’, Third Text, vol. 25, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 1–12. and based on transnational post-cinematic diasporic spaces.77.Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Black Box’, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (exh. cat.), Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, p. 44.

During the 1990s, with cultural globalization or multiculturalism hiding racial ideology through ethnic naturalizations, media projects among Indigenous communities in the Global South opened new possibilities for the use of cinema. ‘Fourth Cinema’, as described by Māori film-maker Barry Barclay, rejects the nationalistic rhetoric of Third Cinema or the aim of creating a universal popular grammar, and insists instead on generating community-based languages and processes, putting at the core of the filmic process the reproduction of Indigenous knowledge and culture, to counter the genocidal violence of settler states. According to Indigenous philosopher Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Indigenous activism in the 1960s and 1970s was driven by a sense of outrage and injustice about the failure of education, democracy and research to deliver social change for people who were oppressed, and, as such, she saw a clear parallel with Marxist politics. At the same time, however, she argues there is a clear distinction between Indigenous and Marxist positions, the latter being rooted in European history and its evolutionary and teleological ideas of progress, which are at odds with many Indigenous epistemologies. In the 1990s, Indigenous films made by the community, for the community – the so-called strand of ‘Indigenous Media’ (Faye Ginsburg) – were used by settler states to co-opt Indigenous communities into accepting land privatization and mineral extraction by foreign capital.88.See Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. More recently, with the ‘returns’ of Indigenous and Black activism,99.See James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. indigeneity and blackness have been incorporated into the cultural economies of the Global North, often through Indigenous voices of privileged gatekeepers in the bourgeois and individualistic form of the first-person video essay or the reflexive autoethnography. A similar phenomenon has happened in relation to the so-called ‘videos of the squares’ that proliferated during the popular uprisings in the MEDA region in 2011, where the neoliberal appropriation of the aesthetics and the politics of the Global South happened in the form of the aestheticization of the ‘poor image’ and the commodification and marketing of the digital ‘vernacular’ archive in the form of ‘film commons’ and Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).1010.For instance, Peter Snowdon argues that the low-resolution aesthetics, dispersed authorship and socialized online distribution of films produced during the Arab Spring represent a new form of cultural commons. See Peter Snowdon, The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring, London: Verso, 2020.

Cinema as Assembly seeks to generate a space of radical decolonial and anti-patriarchal imagination that goes beyond the anthropologically reified and identity-based categories of the Indigenous, the Black or the vernacular image. We seek to use images to activate intersectional – anti-racist, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist – spaces of ‘visual sovereignty’.

But celebrating the Black radical imagination through diasporic poetic spaces based on relationality, opacity and multiple definitions, mediations and remediations is not enough.1111.See Robin Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. We need a new planetary imagination in support of the planetary struggle ahead of us.

Planetary struggles, planetary cinema

Responding to the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people in Palestine by the Israeli state, supported by the western imperial axis, there is the need to realign all anti-imperialist struggles along planetary lines. Learning from the Palestinian struggle against the carceral geographies of the Israeli state, we must reimagine the internationalism of the bundung in terms of constellations of autonomous struggles, zones of diverse and yet interconnected practices of resistance and sumud (resistance, militancy). We believe that ‘Palestine is Everywhere’ – in the anti-racist struggles of Black Americans in NYC, the struggles against loggers by the Yanomami and the Maxacali people in Brazil, those against mining corporations by the Yanamurru people of Northern Australia, the anti-gentrification struggles of the Latinx working class in L.A., and the Jamaican community in southeast London. Thus, fighting for Palestine means fighting against the patriarchal and racist genocidal violence of nation-states everywhere, a violence that in the occupied territories of Palestine is rooted not just in sheer military might and monopoly over basic economic resources, but operates also at the level of the imaginary, primarily through the register of the visible – in the colour of land without water, in the shapes of the mutilated Arab buildings and the surreal suburban order of the settlements, and on people’s very faces and bodies. Palestinian philosopher Edward Said often stressed the invisibility of the Palestinian struggle and argued that cinema could work as a remedy against such invisibility. But, since the looting of the Palestinian film archive by the Israeli military in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Palestinian cinema has been rendered invisible too. This loss of political memory connected with the looting of Palestine’s visual archives, particularly the films of the Palestinian Film Unit led by Abu Ali, coincided with the spread of a new neoliberal regime of visibility that further weakened Palestine’s visual culture, in the form of NGO projects of visual training and cultural regeneration, often in the name of international solidarity, or in the glossier version of ‘Arab cinema’ for the globalized culture industry.

Azoulay reminds us that learning to see in this genocide is a nearly impossible task, as Palestinian subjects are either rendered invisible (as passive victims or ghosts of history) or as hyper-visible agents of terror and violence.1212.See Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, ‘Seeing Genocide’, Boston Review, 8 December 2023, bostonreview.net. Indeed, images of violence and terror from the Arab region – ‘the pain of others’1313.See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin, 2004. – seem to have a special fetishistic power, triggering the voyeurism of western audiences, in the form of xenophobic online forums, underground amateur cinema, or imperial archives of counter-insurgency apparatuses. Even when made with the best intentions, for instance to provide forensic evidence in support of Palestinian causes, the act of ‘documenting the war’ reproduces the ontology of realism, the way of seeing like a state,1414.See James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. and the political economy of immediacy associated with ‘too late capitalism’.1515.See Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 2024.

We believe that the genocide in Palestine ‘is not an event’ but a model of an infrastructure that constantly returns1616.See Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, December 2006, pp. 387–409; and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity’, Lateral, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2016, lateral.org. – in the form of the plantation, the partition, the extermination camp, and in the carceral spaces created by walls, borders, markets and prisons. Cinema as Assembly seeks to undo and counter such tentacular, planetary, colonial infrastructure, by connecting different laboratories of struggle against settler colonialism – in Palestine, Brazil, Chiapas and Guinea-Bissau – via images, film-making practices and political gatherings aimed at developing a common insurgent imagination. We ask: What is the form of the planetary movement required in this historical moment, out of which new forms of imagination, including in cinema, can arise? It is as much, or as little, an aesthetic issue as it is about material infrastructures, economies and direct action.

Economies of film production and distribution

The economy of film production in First and Second Cinema is steeped in competition, vying for scarce funding opportunities and relying on market-driven exploitation potential to receive support. The studio system grants security to large-scale productions but is owner of the copyright and influences creative choices in order to maximize exploitation. As Teshome Gabriel states, ‘the sole purpose of such industries is to turn out entertainment products which will generate profits’.1717.Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982, p. 182. In the independent sector, financing usually comes from mixed sources – through public support like supranational, national and regional funds, through tax credits and rebates, through festivals and private equity investments, etc. Each comes at a cost, whether creative or ethical. Independent film always struggles with a scarcity of funding, creating an environment of precarity that affects creative and social aspects of the production. Perhaps most important is how time is shaped by this constraint, time that can mean the difference for an actor feeling safe in a new environment on set, bending with the will of nature as the rain and clouds pass, or a gesture of solidarity for a run-down crew. More money for the production means more time that can be procured, more motivation to work together, to stretch hours, patience and the collaborative spirit. If a film set can run smoothly because a project is well financed, what other possible modes of recognition can achieve a similar effect in the context of community-centred and horizontal production processes? What would a solidarity economy of film production rather than a competitive market-driven one look like?

In addition to the competitive economy of film financing, the same question exists in terms of the economy of power relations in film-making. A production is, in many ways, at its core a collaborative process. Each crew member offers something invaluable and unique to the production. Yet this collaboration is rigidly vertical in nature; it can be likened to a military chain of command with the director in auteur cinema and producers in the studio system at the helm. An auteur is celebrated for their uncompromising position and unique vision and style. The wish of the auteur is to wrest the film free from the grip of studios or even producers in order to be sole owner of the film. A sense of entitlement permeates the set and establishes a rigid relational order in both First and Second Cinema. What would a solidarity economy, in terms of a relationality that is based on practices of collective and creative commoning, involve in this context? How can inherent power contradictions be revealed, to break down the apparatus of these relations to allow for something else to emerge? How could the idea of copyright be reconceived to reflect these relations? Can we imagine the cinematic commons as an internationalist relational space of production and circulation of images based on anti-authorial forms of making, owning and circulating images?1818.See Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, London: Continuum, 2011. Cinema as Assembly brings to the fore a specific DIY, community-based, relational and amateur ethics that breaks with the alienated professionalism of commercial and auteur cinema.

The economy of film distribution also relies on market-based logic and notions of exclusivity. It is at this stage of a film’s life that it becomes a commodity and that profit takes precedence over access. To pay back investors, film-makers must seek distribution, where holdback periods can affect theatrical circulation, or sell to platforms like Netflix, Amazon and HBO, whose criteria are aleatory and entirely market-oriented. The broken nature of distribution is tightly intertwined with the problems of financing film sales; it is a buyer’s market, leaving little to the film-maker or producers in terms of recoupment or net profits. Often to carry out theatrical runs, distributors rely on support from public funds or festival grants to ensure the film’s exhibition. Films can premiere at an A-level festival yet never be distributed nationally in their country of origin. While the director and producer may wish for the film to be circulated as widely as possible, the economic logic of film distribution is based on exclusivity. Further, commercial distribution turns the film into a passive commodity for consumption and voyeuristic leisure. In addition, although social engagement is a highly valued commodity nowadays, film festivals tend to censor more politically radical films. Palestinian cinema, for example, has a long history of international censorship in the mainstream film festival circuits. The fields of experimental film and artists’ film tend to reproduce the market logic of the conventional film industry in terms of authorship and intellectually high-niche ‘products’ embodied in the unique copy.1919.See Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. But the diffusion of digital technology in the film and art industries has also fostered alternative modes of circulation, informal economies and solidarities with the ‘poor image’.2020.Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, no. 10, November 2009, e-flux.com. How might we begin to institute film distribution based on these informal economies and fugitive solidarities amongst subaltern people and images? What type of audiences can be born from spaces designed around community-building and engagement beyond the screening itself? Rejecting the idea of film distribution as singular event, Cinema as Assembly considers alternative forms of cinematic distribution – travelling cinemas, community projects organized by women and people of colour from working-class backgrounds, labour organizations and public spaces – as sites of contestation and the creation of new worlds. It also considers how to feed and sustain distribution in the Global South, through processes of translation, subtitling and infrastructural development. Cinema as Assembly seeks to respond to and challenge the dominant forms of the economy of film production by shifting the focus to horizontal processes of community- or territory-based film-making and visual sovereignty, by bringing people together through collective improvisation, cooperative labour and activism, and by favouring process over output.

Palestine is a vital laboratory for thinking through the material infrastructures and ‘economies of resistance’ of film-making. Subject to the imperial economies of peacebuilding and cultural reconstruction set up within the frameworks of the Oslo and Paris agreements (establishing Israeli dominance over the economy), the Palestinian cultural sector has been systematically ‘de-developed’ (as opposed to ‘dependently developed’) through forms of conditional funding, aimed primarily at an oversized and westernized NGO industry, whose market logic has destroyed freedom of expression by means of operational targets, bureaucratic protocols and human rights universalism. After 7 October, the Palestinian cultural sector, including the film industry, has been directly erased, shut down and annihilated.2121.See Rana Anani, ‘The Genocide War on Gaza: Palestinian Culture and the Existential Struggle’, L’Internationale Online, 10 September 2024, internationaleonline.org.

In response, cultural organizations have formed an alliance of solidarity initiatives, resource sharing and informal economies called owneh (mutualism), which seeks autonomy from the imperialist framework described above. Owneh is a form of cultural and artistic commoning, both material – of office spaces, computers and labour – and immaterial – of ideas, projects and common affects. In parallel, an underground digital infrastructure – of Telegram and off-grid servers – is being developed for autonomous film circulation, distribution and storage. We know from history, from the cinema da fome (cinema of hunger) of Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha to the digital film avant-garde in contemporary China, that images become militant when they mould their economies and processes of production and distribution to the material and political circumstances of their making, developing a specific revolutionary aesthetic and power of counter-imagination. We argue that a similar space of counter-imagination is emerging in Palestine today, amid the social and economic apartheid and the human and cultural genocide imposed upon it by the State of Israel.

Cinema as commons

Commons are worlds in movement. They are communities that create forms of life in common and that together produce, share and are continuously transformed. The term ‘commons’ can signify three things: (1) a pool of natural and/or human resources; (2) a community of people with reciprocal and sharing relations; and (3) acts of working together towards the reproduction of the community.2222.See Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, London: Bloomsbury, 2017. It is only when these three dimensions come together that we have real commons. ‘Commons’ also implies specific forms of participatory governance (collective monitoring and conflict resolution, self-determination and nested levels of authority) reflecting the practical urgencies, grass-roots knowledge and embodied skills of the commoners. In spatial terms, commons are neither private nor public – neither collective nor individual. They are relational thresholds and spaces of radical openness reflecting the autonomy of the collective. Affectively, they refuse ideological forms of identification and belonging and the cynicism or ‘cruel optimism’ of capitalism.2323.Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.  They demand fugitive attachments; precarious affects; silent, sensuous and embodied knowledge production; and continuously shifting and co-evolving relations.

The aim of the Cinema as Assembly project is to explore and valorize the social relations, economies and temporalities that exist at the edges of the technological apparatus of the camera, and to connect with histories, people and entities who have been systematically excluded from the colonial machine of cinematic representation. Cinema as Assembly is a proposition of contestation and reparation against art conceived as a space of white privilege, capitalist speculation and neocolonial appropriation. Breaking the ossified enclosures of the culture industry and veering away from the monetized and hierarchical processes of production, distribution and consumption of images associated with capitalist leisure – the other side of the ideologies of scarcity, competition and self-interest – Cinema as Assembly explores economies and practices that thrive on solidarity, mutualism and reciprocity.

The project goes beyond the notion of aesthetics or the cinematic event – the shoot, the screening and the mass entertainment – and engages with images in terms of enduring relationality, kinship,2424.The model of cine-kinship is embodied in Filipa César’s project Luta ca caba inda (‘The struggle is not over yet’), intended as an ongoing collective process of solidarity-building based on actualizing the legacy of revolutionary film praxis in Guinea-Bissau, across generations. See Filipa César, ‘A Grin Without Marker’, L’Internationale Online, 17 February 2016, internationaleonline.org. fugitive attachments,2525.See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. and diasporic and Indigenous sovereignty.2626.See Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010; and Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. It interrogates cinema before and beyond the act of filming, in terms of trans-generational movements, cine-geographies,2727.See Eshun and Grey, ‘The Militant Image’; and César, ‘A Grin Without Marker’. nomadic imaginary,2828.Teshome H. Gabriel, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’, Critical Interventions, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 187–203. and more than human dwelling.2929.See Povinelli, Geontologies; and Nancy Wachowich, ‘With or Without the Camera Running: The Work of Inuit Film-Making’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2020, pp. 105–25.

Cinema as Assembly is conceived not as a practice of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial critique, but as a process of decolonial and post-capitalist imagination, which takes radical alterity as the condition of the present. The cinematic commons is not the return of the colonial project of an ethnographic urge to salvage primitive communism. Rather, it is an invitation to use the anthropological imagination to prefigure and bring into existence utopian life projects, radical worlds and alternative modes of instituting. Anthropology shows that the institution of the commons is universal and cross-cultural, and that although commons have been endangered throughout history by colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, they have nonetheless resisted, and not only through the logic of survival or sustainability. On the contrary, they have developed powerful ontologies of beauty, excess and luxury in countering the dehumanizing and violent infrastructures of capitalism. In fact, lurking in the background of the bourgeois ideologies of artistic beauty, possessive individualism and economic progress is a dry and desolate landscape in which most people put up with a destitute, dull and ugly existence. With the notion of cinema as commons, we want to reclaim an aesthetic and political vision of plenty for the future.

Elsewhere I have argued that there is an invisible canon underpinning Indigenous, Black and communist radical imaginaries, based on practices and imaginaries of self-determination, dignity, horizontal decision-making, co-production, respect for the Earth and the ethics of living a good life. I have called this revolutionary canon ‘the horizon of the commons’. In fact, Cinema as Assembly resonates with the vision of a Fourth Cinema, laid out by Barry Barclay, as a form of gathering (hui) and communal assembly that entails, at the same time, collective knowledge-production, reciprocal exchange and a cosmopolitics of connectedness.

Cinema as Assembly is based on:

Mutual economy: Cinema as Assembly is a form of co-production of knowledge and reciprocal labour (tikanga).3030.See Stuart Murray, Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema, Wellington: Huia, 2008, p. 26. In it, the film-maker acts as guardian or mediator, rather than as author. Besides, it is the commons and not the film-maker who owns the film, and this form of ownership is as much spiritual as it is material. Living images cannot be detached from place, stored, archived or sold. Thinking about cinema as a commoning of living knowledge implies a different understanding of law and property than that of possessive individualism. Images as living knowledge are a form of anti-property. In the book Our Own Image, Barclay asks: If film is a stage, rather than an authorial output, why make people pay? What are the economies of film production and circulation that sustain the cinema of the commons? If the mutual, cooperative and relational labour implicated in cinema as commons is also ecologically sustainable, what is the broader political ecology of the art commons? What are the relationships between cinema as common knowledge and the commons as immaterial copyright regime?3131.See Barclay, Our Own Image.

Pedagogy of unlearning: The first living knowledge underpinning the cinema of the commons is based on radical imagination rather than visual evidence. Besides, it is moved by a sociology of absences,3232.See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 45. that is, by a desire to connect to and valorize the ghosts, the untold stories, the censored paths, the unnamed victims converging at the margins and the edges of the image. Living knowledge is knowledge in movement – folk, oral and anti-monumental. Likewise, there is an active process of unlearning through de-instituting whilst developing and enacting economies based on community ownership and democratic governance, creating new institutions that are not defined by formal conditions but rather a commitment to transformation.3333.See T.J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 25.

Archive of the present: The origin of modern cinema is inscribed in the history of imperial ethnography and industrial capitalism; in the staging of uncanny encounters with Indigenous ghosts, proletarian masses and capitalist fetishes; and in the material extraction of silver, copper and labour from the colonies. Contemporary commercial cinema reproduces the linear temporality of the colonial archive, enclosing and neutralizing the present in between a memorialized past and a glorified future, made of catharses, resolutions and revolutions. Barclay’s notion of ‘archiving-in-the-present’ challenges such imperial temporal logic, expanding the present into the ancestral past and into futures that are already present, already in the frame. Cinema as Assembly expands the notion of reciprocity in time, considering images and visual archives as forms of trans-generational and transcultural exchange and ‘cine-kinship’.3434.César, ‘A Grin Without Marker’.

Social gatherings: Film as commons is based on reciprocal, collective and circular processes, in which the capturing of reality through images is preceded by collective conversations that go into the creation of the film script and is followed by a collective conversation at the moment of the film screening within the community. In this circular process, the boundaries between film-making and film distribution/reception are blurred and, according to Barclay, film becomes not so much a product but a stage for communal assemblies. In Barclay’s films, the very film process intercuts with real assemblies by the community (hui), which he often films from a distance of twenty or even fifty metres with 300mm or 600mm lenses. Moreover, the film screening is not an artistic event, but a specific modality of gathering mediated by images, in which conviviality is as important as judgement. Cinema as gathering considers images in terms of sovereignty and self-determination. First it ‘talks in’ and then it ‘talks out’, contaminating the outside with its relational logic. The social gatherings provoked by cinema as commons can take multiple forms, as recuperation; care and nurturing for the more-than-human world against the logic of extractivism of settler states and mining corporations;3535.See Povinelli, Geontologies. South-to-South solidarity;3636.See César, ‘A Grin Without Marker’; and Gabriel, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’. decolonial and anti-imperialist actions;3737.See Nitasha Dhillon, ‘Life, Film, and Decolonial Struggle’, World Records, vol. 4, 2022, worldrecordsjournal.org; and Azoulay, Potential History. historical reflection;3838.I am referring to the lecture performance of Zeyno Pekünlü and Begüm Özden Fırat, After the Event, held at the Museo Reina Sofía, which explored the afterlives of political mobilizations via visual archives and found footage. and the building of political autonomy.3939.See Natalias Arcos, Poetica de la Resistencia: Cine y Audiovisual Zapatista, unpublished manuscript, 2020.

Ontology of movement: The cinema of the commons is the medium of the movement necessary for the world to be made anew, all day, every day. In Māori ontology, humans are Tangata whenua, that is, extensions of places, which convey and extend the agency of land, forest and water. Likewise, for Barclay, cinema is Taniwha, that is, the medium through which ‘things pass’ and through which people are reconnected to places. If cinema shapeshifts and moves across different material and immaterial mediums, it must be accessed in multisensorial ways and not only visually – in terms of resonance, attunement, listening,4040.See Tina Campt, Listening to Images, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. care, support and holding. An ontology of movement also inspires experiments of film screenings aimed at producing visual literacy in rural areas,4141.Third Cinema film-makers often organized nomadic and travelling cinema screenings. See Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, London: Pluto Press, 2001. reterritorializing the filmic experience,4242.Anouk De Clercq, Where Is Cinema?, Berlin: Archive Books, 2019. or creating Temporary Autonomous Zones and profane rituals through the constituent power of images.4343.I am referring to a series of outdoor screenings in the Greek mountain village of Lyssarea, organized by experimental film-maker Gregory Markopoulos as sacred rituals, in which he functioned as a sort of oracle or healer. See Gregory Markopoulos, Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos (ed. Mark Webber), London: The Visible Press, 2014.