Abstract | Going beyond a critical review of Francesco Taboada's filmic approach to the Mexican Revolution, this article explores its political aesthetics for both reconstructing historical memory and challenging national state and media memorializing discourses of the Revolution. A nostalogic approach (in a Blochian sense) to historical memory, Taboada's search for surviving stories resonates with past and present contestations of Mexican modernities, rekindling subalternist narratives of insurgency and political malaise that resonate with current national territorial and cultural disputes with a deeply rooted utopian flavor. Taboada's films theorize a visual multiperspectivism and non-synchronicity born of a nostalgia more in synch with Ernst Bloch's cognitively dynamic sense of this term – a memorializing process whose utopian vitality is always present, always shaping the elusive present and rewriting a presumably already narrated past.
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