El silencio de otros: Moments of Truth.

Between Documentary Film-Making and Art.

Abstract

The Silence of Others is structured around three key points that combine: 1) a strong commitment to a highly creative and original aesthetic; 2) a political and ethical project of restitution and justice that, however, goes beyond the political (without denying it) to open up to a realm of the infrapolitical, or, we could say, to the abyssal encounter of its protagonists with existence and death through individual memory (the experience of the most intimate) and mourning (the experience of the inassimilable); and 3) an archival memory (historiography), which includes scenes drawn from historical archives and the act of bearing witness to horror (the public recounting of the experience of horror and tragedy) that aims to educate, inform, and give historical value to the experience of violence. These three nodes (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the historical) give rise in the documentary narrative to four different but related fields of reflection: politics, or the impulse toward action that governs and calculates; aesthetics, which concerns primarily the essence of the image, its strength, and its potency; the philosophy of law, or that which, following Jacques Derrida, seizes the very possibility of the experience of justice; and infrapolitics, which leads us to question existence and being, moving away from the constructions of thought about subjectivity. Jacques Rancière, a thinker of politics and aesthetics; Hito Steyerl, a thinker of the documentary image as a potential space for the emergence of “the” truth; Jacques Derrida, a thinker of justice, law, and the legal system; and Gareth Williams, along with other infra-political thinkers concerned with existence, establish and guide, with varying depths, this reflection on The Silence of Others, a 2018 documentary by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar that is responsibly driven by the incalculable, and thus infrapolitical, desire to bring the experience of justice to the fore, and what it holds of failure but also of existential hope.