100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas
2023 · 18m · USA
Directed by Nicole Antebi
Genres: animation, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
A partially animated topographical film essay about El Paso/Juárez told through postcards of the region from the late 19th century through the early 1970s, tracing the moment when a fluid border became a militarized one.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A postcard-as-primary-source essay film about border militarization sounds like the kind of earnest institutional critique that usually bores me to tears, but Antebi's partial animation gambit actually *resists* the urge to explain itself—it withholds, it obscures, it makes you sit in the discomfort of what you can't quite see, which is obviously the point.
This is a film deeply aware of its lineage—the essay film tradition, the structural formalism of animation studies, the archival turn in documentary—and rather than genuflect to those precedents, Antebi uses them in conversation with each other, the postcards becoming a rigorously composed meditation on how borders are naturalized through image and erasure.
The decision to animate *only partially*—to leave portions of the historical postcards untouched while introducing movement into others—is the entire film, and it's devastating: you're constantly aware of what's being revealed versus what's being obscured, which forces you to reckon with the archival image itself as an act of documentation and concealment.
Reviews
In my work I have returned to the postcard as an object, an indexical document—that is almost always out of sync or time or tone with the moment at hand, as well, a type of open letter.