The Militant Image

Scope

The militant image is Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray's expansive category for images and sounds produced through filmmaking practices dedicated to the liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century. Its range includes essay film, fiction, observational documentary, found-footage pamphlet, newsreel and agitational reworkings of colonial film. The category revisits but does not collapse into Third Cinema: it also recovers Octavio Getino's militant cinema as an internal category of Third Cinema and Edouard de Laurot's cinéma engagé (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, p. 1).

Its object is not the politically correct content of an isolated film. Eshun and Gray emphasize the organizations and practices that made film politically operative: production, exhibition, distribution, training, pedagogy, meetings, festivals, manifestos and translation. The militant image exists in these circuits and affiliations as much as on screen (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, pp. 1–2).

Ciné-geography

Ciné-geography is the mapping method adequate to that expanded object. It designates situated cinecultural practices and the transnational relations that connect them to urgent struggles elsewhere. Rather than place one movement at the center, it maps affinities, chance encounters, translations, shared pedagogy and political intensities across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America. The authors call this an interdisciplinary map of the conflictual and connective politics of anticolonial struggle and revolutionary decolonization (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, p. 2).

The method resists a succession narrative in which contemporary films inherit a stable mantle of Third Cinema. It returns translated manifestos to the volatile circumstances in which collectives repeatedly revised them, restoring the manifesto as a conditional intervention rather than an ossified doctrine (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, pp. 3–5).

Translation is part of the object rather than a transparent relay. Eshun and Gray show how English-language film studies often separated “Towards a Third Cinema” from its Argentine political setting and from later Spanish revisions. The text thereby became a fixed manifesto even though Solanas and Getino had presented it as one intervention in a changing practice (The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography, pp. 3–4). Ciné-geography asks which version travelled, through which language and institution, and what its new setting made visible or erased.

The film-event

Getino's “instrumentalisation” of cinema provides a decisive model. A militant screening was organized as a film-event inside a political event, with discussion intended to transform the presumed spectator into an active protagonist. That transformation was not guaranteed: Getino acknowledged that audiences could remain merely in front of a film rather than recognize themselves inside a political process (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, p. 5). Militancy here is an arrangement of participation, not an intrinsic property of footage.

The essay also traces prolepsis as a political aesthetic. De Laurot defined it as perceiving futurity within the present; cinema could make the desirable emerge through conflict with existing conditions and could present what will be as metaphorically already existent. Eshun and Gray place this beside collective production and revolutionary becoming, both understood as compositional processes (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, pp. 6–7).

A concrete cine-geography

The essay's map is deliberately plural. In Argentina, student screening groups projected The Hour of the Furnaces inside political meetings and built circuits of distribution, exhibition and discussion. On the US East Coast, de Laurot's Black Liberation and Newsreel's Black Panther films tested different militant forms. In France, SLON and the Medvedkine groups connected anti-imperialist film production to worker-run cinema and factory struggle. Across Algiers, Portugal and Mozambique, anticolonial war, revolution, training and national film institutions produced still other relations between cinema and the state (The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography, pp. 4–10). These are situated episodes, not interchangeable examples of one style.

The Mozambican case makes the archive problem especially concrete. The Instituto Nacional de Cinema trained filmmakers and built a collection intended to break dependence on foreign distribution. After socialist structures were dismantled, a 1991 fire partly destroyed its building and film archive; surviving works became difficult to access and circulated informally in poor copies (same essay, pp. 10–11). A militant image's damaged file is therefore evidence of lost institutions as well as a carrier that may reopen their unfinished history.

British relay: BAFC and Otolith

Eshun and Gray place the 1986 Third Cinema conference, Channel 4's workshop context, the Black Audio Film Collective and The Otolith Group's later retrospective research inside the contemporary return to militant cineculture (The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography, pp. 3–4). The relation is documented, but it does not make every BAFC or Otolith work a militant image by automatic inheritance.

The archive's The Ghosts of Songs opens the relay from the curators' side. Eshun and Anjalika Sagar explain that Handsworth Songs had overshadowed BAFC's wider work in slide-tape, film, video and installation; their exhibition and book were designed as an “initial inventory,” not a complete or neutral institutional archive (Eshun and Sagar, preface to The Ghosts of Songs, pp. 13–15). The preface explicitly credits BAFC's seven artists, David Adjaye's exhibition design, partner institutions, archival lenders and multiple contributors. It also identifies BAFC's impact on Otolith while refusing institutional succession. This credit structure is itself cine-geographic: recovery depends on a new network of curating, design, publication, exhibition and study.

Afterlives

Ciné-geography includes the militant image's degraded digital afterlife. With national film institutions dismantled or archives made inaccessible, militant films circulate as boxed sets, torrents and poor copies. Their compromised materiality indexes the loss of the social structures that once produced and distributed them, yet also permits images to surface outside the state and reactivate unfinished histories (Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Essays/The Militant Image; A Cine-Geography.pdf, pp. 11–12). The militant image is thus neither a dead period style nor a synonym for propaganda; it is a moving relation among form, organization, circulation and revolutionary capacity.

For archive navigation, continue from this page into BAFC's collective infrastructure, Otolith's curatorial study, sound-image speculation and the wider Archive Atlas. Those connections are documented routes through the local sources; they are not a claim that all four nodes share one politics, authorship or historical period.