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In his trilogy, comprising La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004) and Liverpool (2008), Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso employs a distinctive narrative motif, namely the journey of solitary individuals through desolated landscapes in rural Argentina. From a comparative view, the key to understanding these introverted trajectories is to consider Alonso’s construction of narrative space around the misery of a stark void, namely the absence of home. For Alonso, home is not a peaceful destination, connoting the intimacy of a family, serenity or simply a place where one is allowed to dream in peace (Bachelard). The absence of home becomes the blind spot of these journeys: home turns out to be a broken horizon. In this essay I will mainly focus on the film Los Muertos and the way in which it radicalizes narrative space through the combination of cinematic silence (absence of words and dialogues) and cinematic slowness (static long-takes) while formulating a void which coincides with the protagonist’s homelessness. Moreover, this essay tries to consider how Alonso’s radical cinematic realism problematizes the concept of authenticity in its modern formation, and also in the context of Rancière’s notion of documentary fiction and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

This article examines Bernard Stiegler’s notions of cinematic consciousness and tertiary memory, developed in his philosophy of time and technology, in relation to the essay film’s aesthetic and storytelling features. I begin by illustrating Stiegler’s ideas in relation to cinema, consciousness, memory and technology; making use of the recent and widely acclaimed TV series reboot Westworld, I employ it as an allegory of the functionality of cinema as mnemotechnology. Furthermore, considering how the essay film questions cinema’s industrialization effect through Stiegler’s theorization of cinema qua tertiary memory, I look at the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (1999) to argue how the essay film is a radical practice that stages thought in order to de-synchronize the consciousness of cinema.

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