A Wandering Archive: Super 8, Music and Temporality in Avanti popolo (Brazil, 2012)

Abstract

Avanti popolo, a film feature, uses Super 8 mm images supposedly shot by a young Brazilian who was disappeared by the military dictatorship in the 70s. Along with this footage, the film constructs a sonic archive through a radio program, records and CDs. This mass of sound, in relation to the images, points both to a “structure of feeling” typical of a generation and to its destabilization. If images and sounds recorded in obsolete technologies lead us to consider the materiality and survival of an archive, by moving from the private to the public sphere, from documentary to fiction, the archive of images and sounds does not constitute itself as a set of fixed elements, but it is produced in the transitory convergence of wandering materials. Thus, the tensions between the visual and sound materials make it possible to problematize the status and constitution of an archive based on dislocation and negotiation, both of meaning and sensations in relation to the past.