Editorial: Cinema as Assembly

Cinema as Assembly is a collective of scholars, curators, film-makers and activists who use cinema as a space for gathering and for direct action, and as a way to imagine and implement post-capitalist, decolonial worlds. The project is part of Museum of the Commons, L’Internationale’s current four-year programme. The practitioners involved in Cinema as Assembly operate at the threshold of pedagogy, art and activism, through trans-local, noncommercial and nonhierarchical communities of practices, in autonomy from the mental and material enclosures of nation states and corporations, which are responsible for the aestheticization of Indigenous and decolonial politics and the domestication of activism by means of creative capitalism.

Cinema as Assembly uses cinema as a practice of liberation to establish new protocols of being and making together, informed by critical anthropology,11.Ghassan Hage, ‘Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, pp. 285–308. a mode of enquiry that asks what it means to be human from an anti-racist, anti-patriarchal and anti-bourgeois perspective.

Acknowledging the colonial and capitalist logic of western cinema – its fetishistic and voyeuristic ways of looking, its economic entanglement with the military–industrial complex, and its ontological movement of imperial capture and annihilation – Cinema as Assembly draws inspiration from the legacies of the liberation-cinema movements from the Third and Fourth Worlds, while seeking to actualize these in the contemporary anti-imperialist struggle, which needs to be reframed as planetary.

Cinema as Assembly believes that decolonizing culture and promoting different cosmopolitical views is not enough. The cinema of liberation must also change the material and structural circumstances in which the global cultural industry operates, creating alternative economies of production, circulation and distribution, through horizontal processes of consciousness raising, decision-making, cooperative labour, self-determination, solidarity, direct action and long-term engagement with communities in struggle.

The notion of ‘cinema as assembly’ comes from Māori film-maker Barry Barclay’s vision of cinema as ‘community gathering’ (hui),22.Barry Barclay, Our Own Image. A Story of a Maori Filmmaker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 12.  with its own sovereignty and autonomy from the material and ideological infrastructures of nation states. Unlike the one-dimensionality of white capitalist cinema, Indigenous cinema has a thick and polyphonic quality, being at the same time political, material, cosmological and aesthetic. Indigenous cinema is not just leisure or entertainment. It is the art of making social connections, enhancing symbolical regeneration, inhabiting political autonomy and rehearsing material ‘survivance’.33.For Anishinabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, ‘survivance’ is the mixture of survival and resistance that marks the conditions of Indigenous lives. See Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

‘Unlearning imperialism’ (to use Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s terms),44.Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London: Verso, 2019. Cinema as Assembly seeks to reconnect the cinematic image to the histories, agencies and voices of the people, objects and social relations that have been erased from mainstream forms of representation and values, as opposed to capitalist value in the singular. Following these hidden histories, hauntologically, Cinema as Assembly wants to imagine forms of living otherwise – that is, concrete alternatives to the current regime of patriarchal and racial capitalism. Cinema as Assembly resonates with the notion of ‘the commons’, intended as a community gathered in difference, with the shared goal of breaking colonial, patriarchal and capitalist enclosures, and sustaining forms of life in common.

The Cinema as Assembly project will establish four intensive sites of cinematic intervention, in the form of workshops, research-based residencies, film production and learning circles, in four locales in the Global South that are deeply affected by the violence of colonial capitalism, namely: Ramallah (Palestine), Malafo (Guinea Bissau), San Cristóbal de las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico), and the Maxakali territory of Minas Gerais (Brazil). As well as forging South-to-South solidarities, these residencies will inform discussions and actions in social centres, cultural organizations and museums in the various nodes of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) (Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Naples, Venice, Athens, Istanbul and New York), forming organic connections between film screenings, discursive gatherings and direct actions at the planetary level.

Within the frame of L’Internationale Online, publishing will mediate, contextualize and further the project of Cinema as Assembly, for both the organizations involved and the platform’s wider readership. As Cinema as Assembly unfolds, L’Internationale Online will publish a number of contributions by practitioners involved in the project, alongside an online curriculum of films, reading lists and translations. As per the overarching approach of the platform, publishing represents an integral, component part of ongoing research, rather than offering conclusions, summaries or quantifiable outputs.

The newly commissioned essays by members of the collective and its community, under the first rubric of ‘Liberation Cinema’, will offer a space in which to reflect on the notion of cinema as assembly through the authors’ specific film and/or curatorial practices. Although informed by theory, these essays are not in any way academic or specialist. Their knowledge is rather practice-based, grounded in specific modes of gathering around images and activating them for political purposes. This is the case with the work of Filipa César in Malafo, the first of the contributions in this strand, and an artist whose long-term engagement embodies the methodology and politics of the project at large. The accessibility of César’s contribution, as with others to come, is further enhanced by its multimedia format, which brings together images, text and sound, whereby multimodality also contributes to the unlearning of traditional forms of knowledge production. While varied in their content, common threads and vocabularies will run through the series of essays in line with the principles of liberation cinema.

The second part is conceived under the umbrella of ‘Pedagogies of Unlearning’ as an online curriculum for liberation cinema, including films and texts from the Global South that are often unavailable in the North. Concurrently, translations of films and related written material into Arabic and Spanish will be published for our communities of activists and practitioners in the Global South. Following Cinema as Assembly’s organic combination of discursive, practice-oriented and assembly-based approaches to images, the online platform will support discussions and workshops led by our community on the ground, as well as being developed and nourished by them. We hope the ‘Pedagogies of Unlearning’ will expand and coalesce around diverse paths and visions of liberation cinema.

Through the Cinema as Assembly project – the collective’s film-making practices, assemblies, conversations, and the material published on L’Internationale Online – we will continue to update, revise and integrate the principles of liberation cinema. We understand these now as follows:

Liberation cinema is cinema made for and by militants and their organizations. It is an unfinished project until the end of the colonial regime.

Liberation cinema is independent from the identity or intention of the maker; its emancipatory power comes from the movement of the struggles in which it is implicated.

The political essence of liberation cinema lies outside the framework of cinema – in the material circumstances of colonial oppression, and their overcoming.

Liberation cinema is an autonomous space, internal to the struggle.

Liberation cinema has no genre or aesthetics; it has forms and processes fitted to specific tactical or strategic objectives.

The aim of liberation cinema is not merely to decolonize culture, but to destroy the material structures that colonize our lives.

Liberation cinema is committed to the afterlives of images – to their circulation, storage and reactivation for as long as they serve the purpose of decolonial struggle.