The pixelated afterlife of Nicolás Guillén Landrián: Migratory forms

Through migratory, traveling, and transnational understandings of the evolution of cultural objects and canon formation, the following article explores the Cuban national film archive and its conceptual and material afterlives in the digital sphere, with the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián as a case study. Located within a "third cinema" canon of oppositional and liberationist filmmaking, Guillén Landrián's work is primarily associated with the Cuban Film Institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or ICAIC) and the 35mm celluloid film that principally characterized ICAIC feature-length and newsreel production. This article examines Guillén Landrián's Inside Downtown (2001), the only video in his oeuvre, produced while in exile in Miami. I demonstrate how the digital circulation of Inside Downtown, alongside Guillén Landrián's other works, creates new social and aesthetic meaning, subjectification, and systems of value.