Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance.
This film screening and discussion session spotlights the radical attention adopted by makers and viewers of Latin American revolutionary film. We will view two full-length films and short excerpts of Tercer Cine (“Third Cinema”), a movement born in the late 1960s that urged cinema to catalyze collective action through direct dialogue with audiences and interrogations on filmmakers and critics’ positions in the cultural economy. We will explore questions like: how can the attentional modes of viewership and direct action work for each other? How can creators balance survival with subversive action? How can processes of film-making and viewing incorporate principles of collective action?
La Fórmula Secreta (Rubén Gámez – México, 1965) is a surrealist experimental film that uses symbolic and poetic imagery to explore Mexican identity and its crisis in the 1960s. It centers on the metaphor of a dying man injected with Coca-Cola in an attempt to revive him — an act that instead unleashes a furious cascade of dreamlike images invoking ancestral, colonial, "Hispanic", and modern myths that estrange Mexican subjectivity. Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Cuba, 1968) follows Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual who chooses to remain in Cuba after the Revolution while his wife and friends emigrate to the United States. Through a fragmented narrative style that blends fiction with documentary footage, Sergio reflects on the island’s profound social and political changes between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Missile Crisis.
Tercer Cine was coined by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto “Hacia al Tercer Cine (Towards a Third Cinema),” who called for the “transformation from mere entertainment into an active means of dealienation” beyond Hollywood (First Cinema) and European auteur cinema (Second Cinema). Its message has resonated beyond the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America into global cinema today.
About the artist
Ana Begoña Armengod (Philadelphia, PA) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist born in Mazatlán Sinaloa. Her art encompasses a wide range of mediums including film, illustration, writing, sculpture, installation, and sound. Her work is tied with nature and its death, as well as the small details that get lost in the bigger picture. Focused on accentuating the overlooked and unimportant, she gives magnitude to human reactions, history, emotion, and the environment while questioning how these things push us to evolve.