AESTHETICAL DIVIDE: A STUDY ON SUSANA DE SOUSA DIAS’ 48

Abstract

48 (2009), directed by Susana de Sousa Dias is a documentary film that portrays, as still life, anthropometric photos from the PIDE’s archive. Divided between what we can see, traces of a living past, and what we can only hear, the present voices, the film displays the incommensurable space between what is the visible and what is the expressible in this specific medium. However, as an archive of present time, moving images bring back to life the past epochs, not only through old pictures (from archive, for example) but a past that is described, narrated, and imagined through verbal expression. This particular film places some questions concerning memory, archive and displacement - temporal and spatial displacement. From an inhuman point of view, that does not consider the origin of those photos, 48 remain in the present although its “memories” persist and resist in the same present, voices of an eternal past that can and should be revived. In reviving the dead past we are reinterpreting the present. But, what is the aesthetical value of a film made of pictures from the PIDE’s archive? The present analysis of 48 will focus on Gilles Deleuze and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca’s ideas on audiovisual archives.