Resumen de Retrospective future perfect: history, black holes and time warps in the films of Los Hijos and Luis López Carrasco
This article analyzes the “imperfect” cinema of the Madrid-based filmmaking collective Los Hijos and the individual work of one of their members, Luis López Carrasco. Focusing primarily on disrupted and disruptive temporalities, it argues that filmic materiality and its evolution are key factors in the political critique to which these pieces point. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller on aporia, the essay maintains that Los Hijos’ films (Los materiales [2009] and Árboles [2013]) weave complex passages between the traditional conceptual binary of physis and technē and in doing so complicate temporal paradigms of legacy, heritage and generation. These films, moreover, precisely because of their filmic literacy and political awareness disturb not only the “natural” but also the “national” and its representation. The performative quality of their work, its futurity, is incompatible with claims to national allegory. In the same vein, the question of collective filmmaking and the individual subjectivities of the filmmakers complicate, as the article suggests, the traditional concepts of authorship and of the cineaste. The article appropriates the title of one of Hillis Miller's late books, to propose that the motif of the black hole of astrophysics – that connects, absorbs, and dilates time –is suggestively reproduced in the literal appearance of black holes in the surface of the celluloid of López Carrasco's film El futuro (2013).
