Visualizing a ‘missing people’ in Sousa Dias’ Still Life: The filmmaker as metallurgist

Abstract

Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, Patricia Pisters adopts the term ‘metallurgical’ to describe the filmmaking of contemporary directors of political cinema who exploit the unprecedented opportunities afforded by digital technology to recycle and remediate transnational visual archives. Similarly, in the light of Deleuze’s meditations on modern film in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989), Pisters identifies metallurgical filmmaking with the ‘forging’ of a supra-national ‘world memory’ and a liberated ‘people to come’. My interest in this article is to ponder the extent to which these concepts might be useful for analysing the intermedial documentaries of Portuguese filmmaker, Susana de Sousa Dias (1962–present). More specifically, I am interested in exploring how Sousa Dias’ work with archival photographs of political prisoners in her early film Still Life (2005) might suggest both an ‘interruption’ of a chronological national history and, at the same time, an appeal to the suppressed social memory of a ‘missing people’ from Portugal’s dictatorial past. To elucidate this premise, I propose that the mugshots function as symbolic counterpoints to the transcontinental ‘patriotic masses’ of regime propaganda with which they are intercut in the film. By extension, I also propose that they evoke the de-individuated memorial consciousness associated with a ‘world memory’.