Archival footage has long been used in documentaries as illustration, but the most powerful use of such footage subjects it to what the Situationists called détournement: re-contextualizing the moving image to undo the message it was originally meant to convey.

Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias has been using the images photographed and filmed by the Salazar dictatorship, which lasted nearly half a century, from 1926 to 1974, to provide a history of those years. In Still Life, she juxtaposes official propaganda and footage from everyday life to illuminate the control that authoritarian regime exerts over every facet of human existence. 48 displays the photos of imprisoned dissidents taken by the state police to create a vivid sense of oppression at work directly on the body and mind of its subjects.

De Sousa Dias’ films demand that we look closely at the workings of authority by taking the images it creates to celebrate and document its own might and revealing both the violence behind, and the limits of, that authority. — Brittany Gravely