Only a truncated and imaginary vision gathers a constellation of episodes in film, sociality, and the radical political imaginary of the late-60s and early-70s. The title refers to the opacity of the representations assembled – rather than provide clear documentation, these works favor the image reframed and the sideways glance; the dream, the mirage, the hallucination; the hors-champ haunting the screen. At the center of the event is an installation by Carmen Amengual, an investigation-in- progress into an unfinished history in the pursuit – both personal and political – of freedom through film. The project probes an archive left by the artist’s mother of her involvement with the Argentinian coalition to the first Third World Cinema Committee in Algiers, 1973, along with the friends’ plans to film a documentary of African decolonization, and their trip to the Algerian desert. The desert, looped and reframed, figures a historical glitch and the mirage of a dream deferred, and becomes the site of return of the undead stories and ideologies that haunt the inheritors of their unfinished business.

The second act is a screening of two films, Paul Sharits’ N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) and William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), that cast their cameras obliquely on the racial politics and civil rights struggles of the late-1960s in the United States.

Image: Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers / Fragmentos de Argel, super 8 to digital, 4:46 min, 2019.