The coding of aesthetic and thematic discourse in a cinematic mnemonic: The case of Ama Lur (1968)

Abstract

The deployment of film for purposes of propaganda is well documented, but the makers of the Basque documentary Ama Lur (Motherland) (1968) committed themselves to far greater experimentation with film language and aesthetics when they attempted to construct Ama Lur as a collage of Basque identity that would impact upon its audience as a mnemonic, a device to aid memory that relies on visual, kinesthetic or auditory associations between more easily remembered constructs. This article contextualizes the making of Ama Lur (the first full-length feature made in the Basque Country since the Spanish Civil War) in the turbulent and increasingly violent decade of the 1960s as it was lived in the Basque Country during the dictatorship of General Franco. Against a backdrop of the emergence of ETA, the makers of Ama Lur sought to both document and make newly relevant a notion of extant and vibrant Basque nationhood. With reference to the theories of time put forward by Henri Bergson, this analysis of Ama Lur seeks to explain its functioning in the service of an oppressed but nevertheless evolving Basque culture and identity.