Résumé
We organized this conversation on Oliver Ressler’s film Not Sinking, Swarming (2021) as an exercise in cross-reading the making of a climate protest, which took the form of a four-hour assembly in Madrid in October 2019, in relation to the film camera as a means to join the protest. In documentary, militant, and political film practices of the 20th century, we often follow an essayistic reflection on the camera as a tool to evidence protestors’ direct action and people’s resistance; we have also a history of cinema analyzing the image’s media infrastructures under conditions of war. I’m thinking of works like Harun Farocki’s film Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (1982), which is a continuous reflection on how images from the Vietnam War arrived through media infrastructures, connecting long distances, to become visible before our eyes. Farocki contemplates the relation between the battlefield in Vietnam, the resistance of the communist National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, and the camera’s complicity with the violence of war.