Saturday December 6, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

Latin American Library Seminar Room (Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, 4th Floor)

Session Abstract

This panel engages the concept of “appropriated footage” as a critical framework for understanding how Latin American documentaries use archival and personal images to reconstruct silenced histories and challenge dominant narratives. The three films discussed here demonstrate how archival material—whether public or private, official or intimate—can be recontextualized, reinterpreted, and reclaimed to produce new meanings and political insights.

Antonio Gómez’s paper on El silencio es un cuerpo que cae (Agustina Comedi, 2017) examines how deeply personal home videos are reappropriated to reveal hidden dimensions of identity and political history. This act of cinematic reclamation challenges conventional memory-documentary practices and raises ethical questions about the use of archives.

Nils Longueira-Borrego’s analysis of El caso Padilla (Pavel Giroud, 2022) shows how newly released archival footage of a staged political confession exposes the mechanisms of repression in 1970s Cuba, while also engaging with contemporary political dynamics. The film underscores the ongoing relevance and ethical complexity of appropriated images in documentary filmmaking.

Moira Fradinger’s study of El juicio (Ulises de la Orden, 2023) explores how fragmented, once-inaccessible footage from Argentina’s military trials is reassembled to confront collective trauma and invite critical reflection on history and memory.

Together, the panel proposes appropriated footage as a productive concept through which to explore the ethical, political, and representational challenges faced by filmmakers who reuse archival images to rewrite history, resist censorship, and negotiate the legacy of repression in Latin America.

Presenters

• Moira Fradinger (Yale University), “Archival (in)accessiblity: El juicio (Ulises de la Orden, Argentina, 2023)”

El juicio is a documentary composed entirely of archival footage from Argentina’s 1985 civil trial of the military juntas, which judged crimes against humanity committed during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. This was a landmark event: the armed forces were tried by civilians, not foreign powers; it lasted 90 days and was filmed by state television (ATC), which recorded 530 hours on U-Matic cassettes. Yet the public only saw three silent minutes per day, with only the prosecutor’s final argument aired in full. This vast archive remained largely inaccessible. The public viewed just 270 minutes, and the film’s director was initially denied access by both ATC and the National General Archives. Accessibility only became possible thanks to the human rights organization Memoria Abierta and a Norwegian archive that preserved additional footage lost in Argentina. El juicio reconstructs 177 more minutes by combining materials from both sources. The archive’s inaccessibility was not only institutional—it was also rooted in the traumatic nature of the content. This paper analyzes how El juicio’s montage reopens the archive, confronting audiences not only with its material but also with its trauma. Unlike other documentaries that frame archival material with a new narrative, El juicio invites viewers to judge for themselves whether the human rights movement’s claims about a systematic plan of repression align with the footage. In doing so, it transforms the archive from an obscure repository into a space of memory, evidence, and confrontation with the past.

• Nils Longueira-Borrego (California State University, Fullerton), “(Re)staging confession: El caso Padilla (Pavel Giroud, Cuba, 2022)”

As the Cuban Revolution approached its second decade in power at the beginning of the 1970s, the government institutionalized public shaming spectacles and trials that, in a Stalinist fashion, aimed at eroding dissent and intellectuals’ resistance to the country’s increasingly repressive climate. In this paper, I analyze El caso Padilla (Pavel Giroud, 2022) and the newly-made public footage of the famous public confession of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who was forced to confess to counterrevolutionary activities in a staged public meeting in 1971. I engage with the notion of appropriated footage and the use of archival documentary images to expose the repressive mechanisms behind Padilla’s coerced confession. In the same manner, I examine the ethical concerns of using archival footage, the political potential of cinematic images, and how documentary practices and appropriated footage present a retrospective political message, underscoring the significance of El caso Padilla in the ongoing discourse on censorship, repression, and the preservation of cultural memory in Cuba.

• Antonio Gómez (Tulane University, chair and moderator), “(Re)claimed Archives: El silencio es un cuerpo que cae (Agustina Comedi, Argentina, 2017)”

This paper examines El silencio es un cuerpo que cae (Agustina Comedi, 2017) through the lens of appropriated footage and the personal archive. The film is built from a vast collection of home videos recorded by Comedi’s father, Jaime, a lawyer and former militant of the Vanguardia Comunista in Córdoba, Argentina. These intimate recordings—some filmed minutes before his untimely death when Comedi was just twelve—are recontextualized by the filmmaker to reconstruct not only her father’s life, but also the private, unspoken dimensions of his identity. Through a careful montage of visual fragments, voiceover, and interviews, El silencio es un cuerpo que cae recovers Jaime’s “other life,” known only to a few and kept hidden due to the homophobic and repressive climate of the time, including within the revolutionary left. Comedi’s use of inherited footage becomes an act of re-appropriation: a rewriting of personal and political memory through the very images that once served to conceal it. The film engages with, and subverts, the dominant tradition of Argentine documentary, where memory and first-person narrative have become saturated forms. Its restrained narration and embrace of ambiguity challenge the confessional mode, emphasizing instead the silences and gaps of the archive. In dialogue with other contemporary works that reinterpret family histories through home movies, Comedi’s film raises urgent questions about the ethics of representation and of archival use—about who inherits images, how they are reused, and what they reveal or protect in the rewriting of silenced pasts.

• Irene Depetris Chauvin (Universidad de Buenos Aires / CONICET), “La tierra mediada. Afectos y materialidades en prácticas artísticas vinculadas a la minería en Brasil”