Territories of Circulation: Outside the Archive

• In Event: Cinematic Defiance: The Sayable and the Visible in Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s Archive

Abstract

Despite the erratic and unpredictable path of conservation and canons, the archive as a concept and institution can be organized according to a double movement between the logic of the market and the symbolic economy of memorialization. The Cuban cinematic archive likewise may be conceived in light of the intertwined force lines of the market and institutional memory. The arch of the oeuvre of Nicolás Guillén Landrián (e.g., Coffea Arábiga (1968), Inside Downtown (2001)) and the channels of circulation of Landrián’s filmic objects allow us to
explore and to extend a privileged point of entry into the inclusions and exclusions of censorship and of global capital. How do the archive’s physical deteriorations and preservation reflect institutional and market policy? How does the market reflect the relationship between the erosion of material dispositives and the erosion of the viewer’s symbolic receptive capacity? How do the archive and its objects contribute to the temporal and spatial weaves of historiography and canon?

Author

• Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Columbia University