An Exorcistical Film: Archives, Sounds, and the Haunted Present in Gastón Solnicki´s Papirosen

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss and review Argentine-Jewish director Gastón Solnicki´s second feature Papirosen, a 70-minute film made of a plethora of found footage (the Solnicki family archive) and a vast, 200-hour footage shot and mounted throughout a decade. The labyrinthine constitution of trauma, its fundamental dislocation of space and time and the haunting complexion of its persistence are addressed archeologically by this author´s exploration of archival footage and sound distortion. Solnicki´s work, beyond the notion of “archive effect” is the work of a post-human -“medium-author”- who calls on cinema´s capacity to invoke the past and rearrange trauma, and claims that the time and sensorial experience of images is no other than contemporaneity.