Between light, metal and silver, Filme Pin turns a collection of solidarity pins into an archive at another scale, spectres of exile and international struggle against Portugal’s fascist and colonial regime.
A prominent member of the Portuguese Communist Party, who was part of the resistance against the dictatorship (and took part in the famous escape from Peniche in 1960), passed away recently, leaving behind a vast collection of pins relating to the various movements of the Socialist International. The collection is presented to us by his granddaughter, who knows little or nothing about these objects and the organisations they represent. But her lack of knowledge in no way diminishes her fascination. The simplicity of Filme Pin is absolute: a dark background, a hand, each pin filmed one at a time on 16mm film, a voiceover. And, in this simplicity, it reveals itself as a play on meanings (consonance and dissonance between sound and image, between background and form, between front and back) which, through editing, uncovers the musicality of gestures. Between an ode to communist iconography and an iconoclastic exercise (decontextualisation, pictorial dazzle), the camera in Filme Pin merges with the hand, touching and manipulating its materials. Hence, that eye-ring signals the formal strategy of this haptic film. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
