Existing in the aftermath

The article proposes to shift the description of the temporal form of Diaz’s films away from slowness and durational extremity to one that highlights their recursive and historiographic characteristics. Time in Diaz’s films takes the form of the temporality of the return and the aftermath, the time of society still in ruins, still unfree, still ruled by the regime of annihilation after national independence. The philosophical question his films pose is how can we become free? How do we begin to move towards a future, even in this temporal loop and this aftermath? His seemingly anachronistic claiming of the responsibility of the artist as national cultural worker and intelligentsia returns us to, and at the same time extends, the question of vanguardist arts praxis that had been posed with great urgency during the anti-colonial struggles of third world nations-to-be in the last century: What is the role of cinema and the artist in revolutionary times? And now, in this time of the aftermath, what is the role and responsibility of the artist and of cinema? The article reflects on these questions through a close reading of the films A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery and From What Is Before.