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Following on from the previous day’s screening, a lecture by filmmaker Leandro Listorti explored the role of found footage in his practice alongside his work as an archivist.

This event took place online and is available here: https://vimeo.com/454501777

In this online event we presented Leandro Listorti’s The Endless Film (La película infinita), originally scheduled for the 2020 Essay Film Festival. Following the film, there was an online Q+A between Leandro Listorti and researcher Nicholas Freeman.

The Endless Film is an expansive multi-layered compilation film assembled in the archives of the Buenos Aires film museum where the filmmaker is employed. This cinematic experiment retrieves fragments of films that were unfinished or lost, investing new life into objects considered incomplete and invisible, were it not for their reappearance in this new artistic context. The film acts as a valuable film-historical document, showcasing the various thematic and aesthetic currents that Argentinian filmmakers have engaged with from the 1950s to celebrated directors of the so-called ‘New Argentine Cinema’. Archives, memories, traces and remains, these are of fundamental importance for understanding the past, present and future of a country whose records have been routinely buried, burnt and destroyed. In this way, The Endless Film offers a window to forgotten memories, and the work becomes an elegy for the ghosts of Argentina’s dictatorial past. At the same time, the film offers an insight into the materiality of filmmaking, subtly drawing our attention to aspects of production processes such as countdown timers and pen-marked film strips, while the soundtrack makes use of extracts of dialogue and other extraneous audible elements that emerge from behind the camera on a film set. The use of damaged film footage (tramlines, scratches, faded colours, etc.) incorporates new physical elements into the texture of Listorti’s ‘endless film’.