Ragged Cinema: Twelve theses on the making of Comrades together-apart / Camarades junts-i-a-banda (Araüna Baró and Archibald, Catalonia/Scotland, 2021)

Comrades together-apart / Camarades junts-i-a-banda (Araüna Baró and Archibald, Catalonia/Scotland, 2021) is a short film essay made by two academics at distance, one based in Catalonia, one in Scotland, which is in dialogue with a written text. Our film takes inspiration from Karen Barad’s notion of ‘cutting together-apart’, in addition to the work of theorists such as Isabelle Garo, Walter Benjamin, Octavio Getino, Hito Steyerl and Fred Moten. We have developed this work under the name ‘Ragged Cinema’ after Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Our aim was to identify with the working-class, socialist outlook of Tressell’s classic novel. However, in keeping with the fluid, intersectional approach underpinning our thinking, we also re-appropriate the usage of rags as a term associated with women’s menstruation and mental status. The name also flags the ‘ragged’, rough-around-the-edges nature of our work, which is in the poor cinema tradition. Comrades together-apart / Camarades junts-i-a-banda is a short history of a moment during the Covid-19 pandemic when lockdown forced us to stay within our respective borders and to develop a dialogical approach to constructing film and thought together online. Although there is a long tradition of working at a distance, lockdown foregrounded how academics and activists might utilise digital technology to work creatively together at distance. In this context, Barad’s thinking develops new resonance for how we might live, and how we might work: together-apart, geographically, aesthetically and politically