Intermediality and Hispano-Argentine Experimental Film: Subverting Media, Transgressing Borders with Super 8

In 2010, MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) held a retrospective of 1960s and 70s Super 8 films by Argentine experimental filmmakers Claudio Caldini and Narcisa Hirsch, in what seemed an anachronistic move or a nostalgic look to a past technology. On the contrary, the rebirth of Super 8 proves critical to understanding the dissolution of the concept of medium brought on by an increasingly intermedial approach to the arts—a dissolution linked to the current status of experimental film as diasporic and post-national. Just as their predecessors in the 1960s, contemporary Argentine filmmakers living in Spain (such as Daniela Cugliandolo) are engaging with Super 8 in increasingly intermedial ways, creating radically hybrid films that blur the analog-digital divide and raise questions about memory, indexicality and transnationalism. By remediating Super 8 footage through digital editing, these young Hispano-Argentine filmmakers signal not film’s imminent death, but rather its (affective) afterlife, its extension into a new experimentalism. Additionally, the Internet has become a home in the diaspora for these filmmakers, a place where the local and global are bridged, where filmic memories might be archived, and where a new community of Argentine filmmakers, regardless of where they may live, can gather and reinterpret what those labels (“Argentine,” “filmmaker”) mean in an increasingly post-national, post-medium age.