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Music for a Missing Film

MFMF concerns memory. Its research questions explore experimental modes of reconstruction and restoration. MFMF’s conceptual issues mirror empirical questions. Practically: faced with a Venezuelan avant-garde film, El Huerco (1962), reduced to fragments of degraded celluloid, but whose surviving score retains and in part ‘preserves’ it, could a contemporary film artist ‘restore’ and/or commemorate the original? Conceptually: how, through an experiment in audio-visual composition, using the filmic ruins and preserved score, could its (El Huerco’s) cultural/political moment (see REF3a/3b) re-acquire elements of its lost texture?

Methodology derived, in part, from Zubillaga’s ethnographic training. Interviews and archival searches treated the lost film and its utopian aspirations as a politico-cultural ecology whose legacy was recordable while participants and witnesses survived. Another formative research component was Zubillaga’s desire to explore how the film essay could interrogate autobiographical and socio-cultural memory. That the score was composed by Zubillaga’s father, Luis (1928-1995), provided convergence. Given the lack of closure (qua Eco’s ‘Open Work’) in Zubillaga père’s music, MFMF sought a multiplicity of narratives, images, and voices; an unresolved ‘polyphonic’ account of El Huerco: a constellation presented as a ‘possible world’.

MFMF incorporates material from footage degraded beyond the extent commercial laboratories consider viable, signifying metonymically the overarching theme of loss/recuperation, with Zubillaga’s involvement in technical/artisanal restoration (at Film and Photo in Acton, West London) becoming part of MFMF’s response to its founding research questions. Footage from a RED camera using original El Huerco lenses (prominent in the imagery of MFMF), allied to multiple analogue techniques within the digital intermediate, make MFMF a practical and symbolic experiment with digital technology to re-enter the past; an operation interpretable, following Lyotard, as the ‘future anterior’.

Funding; LAFAV Awards 2008.

Premiere; Ann Arbor Film Festival (500 viewers).

Screenings; BAFICI (1400); São Paulo (750); Havana (500+)

DVD; BFI, LUX, ICA and bookstores worldwide.

Music for a Missing Film (MFMF) concerns memory. Its research questions explore experimental modes of reconstruction and restoration; its conceptual issues mirror empirical questions. Conceptually: how, through an experiment in audio-visual composition, using filmic ruins (El Huerco 1962) and preserved score, could its cultural/political moment re-acquire elements of its lost texture?

Applying methodology derived, in part, from Zubillaga’s ethnographic training, Interviews and archival searches treated the lost film and its utopian aspirations as a politico-cultural ecology whose legacy was recordable while participants and witnesses survived.

A formative research component was Zubillaga’s desire to explore how the film essay could interrogate autobiographical and socio-cultural memory.