Super-8 and Archive Material in the Mexican Cinema of the 1970s

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Image courtesy of CCCB

Access to lightweight cameras and inexpensive formats in the seventies transformed film production in Mexico. Alongside student, feminist and worker movements, militant cinema emerged as a self-managed collective practice that used the camera as a political tool. Filmmakers like Leobardo López Aretche, Óscar Menéndez and collectives such as Cine Mujer and the Cooperativa de Cine Marginal worked with archive materials, newsreels and Super 8 and 16mm recordings. The reuse of images and their dissemination outside commercial circuits—in factories, unions and universities—shaped a cinema of resistance that put forward new memories in the face of the official history.

This cinematic impulse emerged in a context of political radicalization and social reorganization in the wake of 1968. Influenced by the experiences of Latin America’s Third Cinema, the filmmakers came to the act of filming as a practice shaped both by material conditions and the political urgencies of the moment. Their work produced a constellation of experiences which, though transitory, completely transformed the relationship between image and politics and between individual and context in the Mexican cinema of the time.

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