{"id":20804,"date":"2025-03-24T01:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-23T18:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/?p=20804"},"modified":"2025-03-24T07:41:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T01:11:57","slug":"cinema-as-inquiry-on-art-knowledge-and-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/cinema-as-inquiry-on-art-knowledge-and-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"El cine como indagaci\u00f3n: Sobre arte, conocimiento y justicia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cinema Beyond Representation: Rethinking Histories and Politics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For many viewers, cinema is a form of paid entertainment to relax or escape. In academic circles, cinema is mainly defined as a means of communication, representation, or an aesthetic object, focusing on the director, the stars, or mise-en-scene<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Yet, in contrast to these approaches, I propose another possibility: that cinema, as science, is a mode of inquiry capable of producing knowledge\u2014with significant consequences.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the seed for this idea had roots in frustration. In 2011, I was working on the documentary War for Guam<\/em> (2014), aired on over 500 U.S. public television stations. The film features rarely seen archival images, contemporary v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em> footage, and survivor testimonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It narrates how most Chamorros, the Indigenous people of Guam, remained loyal to the United States under a brutal Japanese occupation during World War II, only to endure further loss when the U.S. Navy seized much of their ancestral land upon reoccupying the island.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge was as follows: scholarly consensus posited that Chamorros did not resist naval political control until the 1970s, a period of mass movements in the United States. However, the new ways we related archival and other materials, especially given the relative lack of images or documents explicitly depicting Indigenous resistance, suggested that Chamorro contestation began much earlier, from the moment the Navy touched land on Guam in June 1898.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognizing that justice requires politics, artists aim to create knowledge that explicitly challenges dominant power relations.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a result, we arrived at a different conclusion than most historians. While the Chamorro struggle of the 1970s had connections to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and other political mobilizations, it was not an offshoot. Chamorro political history was autonomous and distinct.<\/strong> This knowledge allowed for a more nuanced understanding of how these earlier struggles informed present ones, opening new possibilities for contemporary Chamorro politics and cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Epistemic Potential of Visual Art: A Short History<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The notion of \u201ccinema as inquiry\u201d is not new, even if its history, implications, and contemporary relevance are mainly invisible. Scholars and artists have theorized and practiced cinema and the visual arts as a mode of inquiry for at least two centuries. Consider the work of photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830-1904), who deployed moving images to fill in gaps in knowledge about \u201canimal locomotion.\u201d In a series of photographs taken in 1877, he \u201cfroze\u201d each phase of a horse\u2019s movement to demonstrate that all four galloping horse’s hooves leave the ground simultaneously.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Photo by Wally Gobetz (CC BY-NC-ND).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During the twentieth century, visual artists moved away from Muybridge\u2019s positivist perspective yet continued to theorize about the capacity of art to produce new knowledge about the self and world. A notable example is Pablo Picasso\u2019s well-known Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon<\/em> (1907), a painting that most of his contemporaries condemned as \u201cmad or monstrous\u201d and that critics often describe as a \u201ctransition\u201d between realist and cubist styles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on the work of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Henri Matisse, as well as Iberian and African aesthetics, Picasso interrogated the relationships between form, light, and color. <\/strong>Moreover, although some of his conclusions remain politically contested, Picasso inquired into broader questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These included the limits of European realist representation, the ability of a two-dimensional medium to represent three-dimensional movement, the impact of women\u2019s growing autonomy, and the increased presence of African migrants, objects, and knowledge for European hegemony, particularly that of men. Picasso himself was explicit about his work’s goal and method: \u201cI never do a painting like a work of art. It is always research.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Montage, Inquiry, and the World: Cinema as a Mode of Knowledge Production<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Picasso\u2019s claim is consistent with how filmmakers have conceptualized cinema as a mode of inquiry for over a century. In the 1920s, director Sergei Eisenstein named filmmakers \u201cresearchers\u201d and defined \u201cmontage\u201d or editing as a practice beyond adding one shot to another.<\/strong> Instead, he conceptualized montage as a general artistic method across many art forms, which is best equipped to address the \u201cjuxtaposition of two facts, two phenomena, two objects,\u201d and \u201cactivate\u201d spectators to see from the director\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on Eisenstein, in the 1960s, French director Jean-Luc Godard argued that montage does more than relate objects or communicate the director\u2019s intentions to the audience.<\/strong> For Godard, montage is a method to achieve at least two core goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n