I want to read Tartessös Dune (Josué G. Gómez, 2023), now part of a selection of Cuban cinema programmed by the INSTAR Film Festival in its fifth edition, as a film about the archive. Or, to be more precise, about its destruction. Although, in reality, Tartessös Dune is an expressive essay about cinema and about time, which -evoking Borges- is finally the substance of which this art and the archives are made. I will not ignore the challenge thrown to the viewers at the beginning of the film, where a sign warns that this film “has not been reconstructed by several archival copies, nor was it made in the silent film era”. As can be read in that precious simulacrum of a spoiled still, whose contents are signed by the filmmakers, the “only problem [with this work] is that it has been made by [them].”

This introductory gesture by Josué G. Gómez reveals his fascination (poetic, no doubt) for the materiality of the film archives in which he sculpts this film, his attraction for the plastic expressiveness and the mystery of those comatose celluloid films with which he models Tartessös Dune. That is to say: his devotion to cinema, to the magic of moving images. That expressiveness and that mystery gravitate on the evolution of the footage, invoking an arcane and fantastic time made with the remnants of the memories housed in those tapes.

Josué G. Gómez weaves Tartessös Dune with fragments of a few films discarded due to their high degree of decomposition, which he rescued from their definitive disappearance. These were produced between the late eighties and early nineties of the last century by amateurs of two film clubs in Caibarién: Lumière and Caribe. Caibarién is a municipality in the province of Villa Clara, located in the central region of Cuba, at a considerable distance from the capital; that circumstance often implies, among us, to be also distant from History. Possibly already very punished where they were badly preserved, the destiny of these tapes seemed to be the garbage. 

Josué G. Gómez delivers, from the outset, an aesthetic experience. The very traces of the physical deterioration of celluloid are used to compose the mystical surface of Tartessös Dune. Those marks -as if left by fire-, those tears, those flashes that blur the contours of the analog record, pass before our eyes as a sensual and plethoric play of plastic forms, sometimes with an expressionist violence inscribed in its own materiality. But, of course, every film that has become an archive is, with the passing of time, a black hole in history: it shows us its emptiness, its absences, its fragility... So those sensorial stains and glazes imprinted by factual deterioration on films are also inexorable indicators of the fading of a collective memory that can be seen but cannot be grasped.

What does it mean to throw away these films? Why throw away these witnesses of the past? What do these discarded films have to say about Caibarién? They pass in front of our eyes -wrapped in the leaden haze of those hapless celluloids, loaded with the enigma with which Josué G. Gonzalez makes them prosper - passages of the port of Caibarién, records of its streets, plans of dance activities, of military drills, of massive concentrations, some houses, walks, children, the coast, the sea... Do these flashing and ghostly visual passages allow us to discover, to know a little more that lost town of the island? Are these films only a proof of the institutional oblivion attributable to the same entity that produced them?      

These do not seem to be the concerns of Josué G. Gómez. Josué G. Gómez is an archaeologist amazed by the nature of the material, but less concerned about its content. He accompanies this precarious archive with recordings of the present, which he punctually embeds among the purified body of old celluloid fragments. One of these shots shows a space (seen as if it were a cabinet of wonders) full of old wall clocks; a man adjusts the time, winds them up, starts them up... In another, we carefully observe the inner mechanism of a tower clock. These images are extensions of a concern for time from outside time, that is, from History. The filmmaker intervenes in these worn-out films in an evocation, not of the punctual time marked by clocks, but of the time of memory, of dreams, of imagination, which is a more inextricable time and is, in short, the time of cinema.

The clocks of Tartessös Dune, like that compass that bursts into a splendid foreground -two objects loved by Borges, obsessed with time-, mark the route of the ship in which Josué G. Gómez navigates among the ruins of those abandoned films in his attempt to catch sight of Tartessos, that land that exists only in the cinema itself.

The previously discarded film material is not only accompanied by the aforementioned contemporary shots; it is also embraced by Rafael Ramírez's ambient compositions and sound collage -an element that contributes to elevate Tartessös Dune to another remote dimension of time. The rescued fragments are manipulated in the montage, with cuts on the shot, slowing down the image... 

Every archive -as Didi-Huberman stresses, in the wake of Benjamin- is a document of barbarism, and in particular those ruined celluloid segments do not cease to be -not even in this new life given to them by the film- documents of the specific barbarism that condemned them to the outdoors and to oblivion. 

Looking at the film retroactively, after discovering the marginal origin of the materials -after that experience of textures, shapes, sounds and moving images-, I cannot help but think of the cancerous oblivion suffered by a country that dispenses with its images. A country subjected to forgetfulness. This sensorial cinematographic exercise by Josué G. Gómez underlines, as Didi-Huberman himself pointed out in Arde la imagen, that if there is something unique about the archive, it is its lacuna, the indecipherable mystery it keeps about the past. Of course, that lacuna is, he said, “the result of deliberate or unconscious censorship, of destruction, of aggressions, of autos de fe”. So the ghostly semblance of the materials with which Tartessös Dune operates is a consequence of having carried with it “the ashes of everything that surrounded it and went up in flames”.

Josué G. Gómez, a member of the Archivistas Salvajes collective, a team of film archeologists devoted to rescuing amateur cinema (and not only) made in Cuba by amateurs and members of film clubs (one of the many institutions today petrified and condemned to a languid oblivion on this island), knows it well. 

Of course, Josué G. Gómez is a redeemer here. He invents the best solution to save these films. And that solution is the authentic nature of Tartessös Dune. He makes his images his own, subtly strips them of their link to the time in which they were produced, and extracts from them their essential filmic substance. He extracts from their archival impotence, from their documentary exhaustion, cinematographic art. He does not explore their testimonies, but rather erects with these materials a terra incognita. He shakes off his amnesia. They are re-harmonized under dreamlike sonorities. And we walk through them while watching the film with the astonishment of discovering Tartessos.