Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema convenes artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present and discuss unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. An initial event in Berlin in 2023 and a book published in 2024 gathered tentative and careful probes dedicated to singular projects reflecting the importance of primary materials before and beyond the film.

Latency prompts us to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema than under deficit-centred categories like failure, loss, or incompletion. It marks a sustained potentiality for things to change their condition, to affect us and put us in motion. During the London iteration of Film Undone, adaptations of previously presented and new contributions will map out a variety of approaches of detecting and restoring such potentiality.

The programme aims to open a space to consider cases from various political geographies and historical moments in relation to each other. In a joint roundtable, invited contributors and local respondents will discuss the spatiotemporal vectors of a latent cinema: Where do we encounter its traces and how do actualisations of unconcluded processes trouble our understanding of their pastness?

–Philip Widmann

Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema is curated by Philip Widmann, and features contributions from Alejandro Alvarado, Concha Barquero, George Clark, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Léa Morin, Bunga Siagian and Mathilde Rouxel. Organised in partnership by Open City Documentary Festival, Goethe-Institut London, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Barbican Cinema and ICA.

PROGRAMME 1:

BASTA. Films that don’t exist do exist.
by Léa Morin

Fri 6 December 20:50, ICA

In this performance-lecture, researcher and curator Léa Morin brings together an assemblage of absent images and marginalized cinematic narratives – the non-existent film Basta by Moroccan left-wing leader Mehdi Ben Barka, the Algerian Cinémathèque, Łódź Film School (or the ‘star sowers’ of Moroccan cinema), the missing films of Madeleine Beauséjour from Reunion Island, and manifestos for a post-independence decolonial cinema. From these interwoven fragments, Morin forms a narrative from which multiple questions emerge: How can we archive films that do not exist? What place can we find in our histories of cinema for breaths, desires, and wounds? How might we care for these damaged or absent works without erasing them or denying the struggles in which they were forged?

Through sharing movements and materials—including films, images, documents, and photographs—this is an attempt to trace historical contours and rethink our practices; to move toward the collective and link, associate, compose, and articulate, rather than divide.

Followed by a conversation with Philip Widmann and a presentation of the book Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema (Archive Books 2024).

PROGRAMME 2:

Sat 7 December, 11am – 6pm
Birkbeck Cinema

Film Undone continues at the Birkbeck Cinema with presentations from Bunga Siagian and George Clark, Mathilde Rouxel, Olexii Kuchanskyi and Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado, followed by a round table discussion.

Entrance is free but booking is required. Register here. 

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11am – 12pm:
Bunga Siagian and George Clark: Resurrecting Karmapala

Artists Bunga Siagian and George Clark will present material toward the rebirth of Karmapala and the legacy of Indonesian director Bachtiar Siagian (1923-2002). Bachtiar Siagian was due to make his ambitious film Karmapala when the anti-communist purges of 1965 made its production impossible. Their presentation will draw on script fragments and personal correspondences to address the dead through film in order to chart the possible afterlives of Karmapala from the way it has lived through the memory of film critic Krishna Sen to its unintentional resurrection in a 2002 Indonesian television series.

12pm – 1pm
Mathilde Rouxel: Multiple trajectories of memory: Joumana, an unfinished film project by Jocelyne Saab

Jocelyne Saab (1948–2019) left behind some fifteen uncompleted film projects, amongst which Joumana holds a particularly special place. Conceived at the turn of the 2000s, Joumana marked the first – and only –  time since the 1980s that Saab had planned to shoot a documentary in Lebanon. The film was to be centred on Saab’s former classmate, Joumana, who in 1989 was caught in an explosion directed against her husband and subsequently fell into a coma. When Saab recontacted her a few years later she found that Joumana was suffering from amnesia. Troubled by this discovery, Saab proposed to make a film which in its process could help bring back her memory. Through the film, Saab wanted to raise questions of political commitment and communal violence, memory and the writing of a collective history during the Lebanese civil war.

The film still resonates terribly today, revealing the complexity surrounding the discussion of the war that tore both the filmmaker’s and the lead character’s lives apart. 25 years on, 5 years after the filmmaker’s death, and in light of the succession of disasters facing Lebanon in the current moment, how can we (re)bring the archives of this film to life? Beginning with an exploration of the project’s remaining materials, Mathilde Rouxel will trace the possible trajectories of an archive of this unfinished film. She will also examine the specific context of such an archive, which has not yet been registered in an institution, and which to this day primarily inspires and interests those close to the subject or the filmmaker. What potential does this proximity open up for the reactivation of this project, and how can we ensure the survival of a film that never was?

2pm – 3pm
Olexii Kuchanskyi: Cinema That Thinks and kinotron, “the Cyclical Creative Organism”

“The mystery of the cinema hall,” a trance-like collective immersion of thinking and sensing driven by sequenced images, became of great interest to a group of Kyivian filmmakers in the post-Stalin era. This film movement, the Kyiv School of Popular Science Film (1960s–1970s), treated educational film as an opportunity to practically overcome the body-mind split by a “cinema that thinks”: a pedagogical process that would integrate involuntary bodily responses in the motion of images. Exploring the Kyiv School’s experimentations limited by Soviet authorities, this talk examines the movement’s subversive re-engagement with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s application of reflexology to cinema from the 1920s and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage-oriented gnoseology of “sensuous thinking.” By centering on the rejected project of institutional reorganisation, “kinotron,” it speculates about the course that a non-metropolitan socialist filmmaking could have taken, if not for the USSR’s colonial centralisation of moving image and knowledge production.

3pm – 4pm
Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado: Between the Scars and the Resistance: Fabulating About Ruiz Vergara’s Unmade Films

The censorship of the documentary Rocío was the beginning of a thwarted career. The Andalusian filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara never directed a film again. Rocío had been seized and judicially censored immediately after Spain’s transition to democracy for exposing one of the perpetrators of fascist crimes in the Civil War. The film has been banned from being shown in its entirety in Spain until today. Vergara died in 2011, leaving behind numerous scripts and sketches for films that he was never able to carry out. These films existed in the imagination and in desire, they speak of creative forces and dissidence. Recovering the Andalusian director’s unfinished films is a project of research, artistic reinterpretation and affection.

Filmmakers and researchers Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado invite the audience to learn about the different versions of Rocío, emphasising the results of the clash between censorship and the persistent resistance of its author, in order to explore the filmmaker’s unfinished filmography. Various evidence and traces (footage, documents, but also blanks) will allow us to fabulate about the potentiality of his unmade films. Vergara’s first film Otelo a presidente intended to disseminate the political project of the famous leader of the Carnation Revolution, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who had wanted to establish a participatory democracy in Portugal. Both failed projects, the political and the cinematographic, bring us back to a Southern Europe devoted to an extractive economic model based on tourism as a livelihood.

4.30 – 6pm
Roundtable: When and Where Is a Latent Cinema?

Alejandro Alvarado, Concha Barquero, George Clark, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Léa Morin, Mathilde Rouxel, and Philip Widmann in conversation with Erica Carter (King’s College)

PROGRAMME 3:

Sat 7 December, 7.30pm
Birkbeck Cinema

Rocío
Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1980, Spain, 69′, digital file, Spanish spoken with English subtitles
Entrance is free but booking is required. Book your place for the screening here

After Franco’s death, Fernando Ruiz Vergara returned from Portugal to Spain to direct Rocío, a critical film essay on the most multitudinous Catholic pilgrimage on the Iberian Peninsula, held in Almonte (Huelva). Immediately after Spain’s transition to democracy, Rocío was the first film to be censored for exposing one of the perpetrators of fascist crimes in the Civil War. The film has been banned from being shown in its entirety in Spain until today. In London, Rocío will be shown as a reconstruction of its uncensored version.

When the film was released with three censorship cuts after a long court case in 1985, the synopsis preserved the rebelliousness and richness of the film. These words do not speak about the past, their lucidity underlines the power of a cursed film: “Rocío is the first authentically Andalusian film to have been made and is therefore the revelation of a cinema that owes nothing to that which has hitherto been produced in ‘great and free’, peaceful and narrow Spain. But it is not a simple documentary. Nor a survey film. Nor a cold ethnological enquiry. It is the true soul, the feeling of a people that becomes aware. And when it comes together, freedom springs up, in its raging aspiration for truth.”

Introduced by Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado.

PROGRAMME 4:

Cinema Restored: Frauen in Berlin
Chetna Vora, 1982, GDR, 140′, Digital, German spoken with English subtitles

Thursday 30 January, 6pm
Barbican Cinema

Indian born filmmaker Chetna Vora, was studying at the Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg, and set out to create a film that was to serve as her diploma project. However, after refusing to cut her film down to 40 minutes, the only working copy was confiscated by the University and destroyed.

What remains is a secretly recorded VHS, creating an imperfect document of what the film would have been. The film’s raw and unfinished state adds an additional layer of poignancy and reflects an intimate engagement with the domestic lives of women in the GDR, a distinct moment in German history, before the fall of the Berlin wall.

Her ability to capture the quiet resilience and everyday lives of East German women offers a rare glimpse into a world rarely seen through such a nuanced and foreign perspective.

Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado are filmmakers, lecturers and researchers at the University of Málaga. For the last ten years they have been carrying out academic and cinematographic research on the work of the Andalusian filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara. This research resulted in the book La poscensura en el cine documental de la transición española (2016) and their short film Descartes (2021). They have just finished the feature film Caja de resistencia about the filmmaker’s unfinished projects.

Erica Carter is Professor of German and Film at King’s College London. Having researched and written extensively on German film history, she is currently working on questions of reparation and restitution in respect of African, especially Ghanaian and Sudanese moving image archives. Her current projects include collaborations with academic, archive and artistic partners in the UK, Sudan, Egypt and Germany on retrieving and recirculating the archive of Sudanese artist-filmmaker Hussein Shariffe.

George Clark is an artist, writer and curator whose projects explore non-aligned histories and geographies seeking to build new models of assembly, exhibition-making, and moving image production. Previous projects have focused on an unfinished Taiwanese film by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and ongoing work with two Vietnamese archives in London and Hanoi.

Olexii Kuchanskyi is an independent film curator and a PhD researcher at eikones—Centre for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel. Her research focuses on the history of Soviet media, with a particular emphasis on the relationships between cinema, the body, inter-regional inequalities, and the socialist modernization project. Her curatorial activity primarily concerns decentralizing, decolonial, and feminist moving image practices related to the (former) Soviet contexts. She has (co-)curated film programs and exhibitions for the Kyiv Biennial, Coalmine—Raum für Fotografie, e-flux Film & Screening Room, BAK—basis voor actuele kunst, among others.

Léa Morin is an independent curator and researcher active in several collectives, including the Bouanani Archives (Rabat), Talitha, an association engaged in the recirculation of alternative and experimental film and sound archives (Rennes), the editorial project Intilak, and as a member of the research department of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastián).

Mathilde Rouxel is a researcher and programmer based in France, specialising in the cinema of Arab countries. She was Jocelyne Saab’s assistant on the various projects she led during the last six years of her life, and has been researching Saab’s work since 2013. She is co-founder of the Jocelyne Saab Association, which was established in 2019.

Fernando Ruiz Vergara (1942–2011) devoted himself to political activism through film, screening uncensored films to Spanish audiences after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and establishing the Centro de Intervenção Cultural, which organised the Mostra Internacional de Cinema de Intervenção in 1976. Vergara returned to Spain to direct Rocío, the first film to be censored after Spain’s transition to democracy.

Jocelyne Saab (1948–2019) was a French-Lebanese journalist, director and artist. As a journalist and documentary filmmaker, she covered most of the conflicts in the Middle East between 1973 and 1982, before turning to fiction and contemporary art. She was one of the most prolific filmmakers of her generation.

Bachtiar Siagian (1923–2002) was an Indionesian film director and a member of the leftist cultural organisation Lekra (1950–1965). His cinematic realism was rooted in the social realities of the Third World. Most of his films were lost during the anti-communist purge of the authoritarian Orde Baru (New Order) regime.

Bunga Siagian is an artist, researcher, and curator. Her current research explores the political and cinematic commitments of Indonesian leftists during the decolonization of the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. She is a co-founder of BKP, a study agency of land that situates its practices at the nexus of the arts, community, and the legacy of colonialism.

Philip Widmann currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich. He has contributed film programmes to festivals, exhibitions, and symposia. His own film and video work has been shown in art spaces and film festivals internationally. In 2023, he initiated Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema, a collaborative project on unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, and films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. A book by the same title, edited by Widmann, was published by Archive Books in 2024.