PANEL 13 - ARCHIVING AND REMIXES: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND CASE STUDIES
My Session Status
CHAIR: Andrew Burke
The Archives in Eastern Europe through the Lens of Archival Films. A Romanian Case Study.
The situation of the audio-visual archives across the former Eastern bloc countries varies greatly: from an extensively digitised and accessible audio-visual archive in Estonia to a barely visible collection and limited access of the audio-visual archives in Romania. In this paper, I argue that a focus on the Romanian case offers a lens through which we can understand better the changing role of the archives in post-communist societies. Scholars (Adina Brădeanu) and filmmakers (Alexandru Solomon, Radu Jude) deplore the conditions of the audio-visual archives in Romania. Solomon argues that the current conditions of the archives are not only the result of limited financial support but also a general lack of institutional interest in the material traces of the past, a legacy of anticommunism (2016: 168). The collection, preservation and circulation of archival audio-visual materials mostly depends on the work of researchers-curators such as Adina Brădeanu, who together with the One World Romania film festival, started a project of digitisation of the materials of the former “Alexandru Sahia” Documentary Studio 1 or on the private initiative of ordinary citizens such as Cezar Petrescu, who digitised a collection of glass plates from the early 1930s to the end of the 1940s made by professional photographer Costică Acsinte. I argue that the practice of re-using archival materials in documentary and fiction films can serve a similar function. By focusing on Radu Jude’s archival documentaries, I show how “filmmaking as an archival intervention” (Brunow 2015) can be seen as a response to the changing perceptions on the role of these institutions from “guardians of secrets” (under communism) to “access providers”. I propose that the recent proliferation of Romanian historical fiction and documentaries that re-use archival materials represent not only a mode of engaging with the archives but also a reflection on the archiving practices in specific socio-historical contexts.
The Past and Future of Archival Remixing in Hungary – The Case of the Béla Balázs Studio
"The state-funded Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) thrived during Hungary’s (socialist) Kádár era (1956-1989). While established as an official training facility for aspiring filmmakers, the studio soon became a site that promoted and supported experimental filmmaking, most notably, the practice of remixing existing footage (historical, amateur, film footage). Drawing on Catherine Russell’s “archiveology” (a practice of reusing archival footage as a cinematic language), this paper situates the studio’s use of archives in documentary remix within a particular counter-cultural impulse that was in some ways supported by the state. These collaborative practices would challenge artistic and political restrictions and illuminate the possibilities and limitations of filmic expression in a socialist regime. Today, the BBS films constitute an archive that animates crucial tensions between past and present, the concealed and the exposed, truth and fiction, political ideologies, and dimensions of power. Thus this paper considers the implications of the studio’s collaborative remixing practice both in relation to a history of archival footage reused in documentaries as well as the studio’s present (lack of) preservation. Navigating between, and across, the studio’s past and future helps us to illuminate the innovative and experimental uses of the archive on screen and the afterlife of such practices off screen. Examining the studio’ practice and current archiving provides a critically-neglected means of understanding the role of the archive in the creation of cinematic languages and at the same time, the role of films in the creation of (future) archives."
Remembering [for] the future: artificial consciousness and archival anamnesis
In his well-known late work on archives, Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida inquires into the novel problematic that could arise between the electronic form of immediacy in the archiving function of email and the transferential space of psychoanalysis. This works marks a profound shift to contemporary internet culture in Derrida’s hauntological thought and the archiving process, that first began with questioning of the pharmakon nature of writing. A central theme throughout his work is also that of anamnesis: the process of remembering knowledge. Following the recent work of cultural anthropologist Roger Bartra’s ideas regarding “artificial consciousness and machinic intelligence”, we will explore how the evolution and possible future of the archiving process could inherently become linked with the production of subjectivity and the process of individuation (Simondon) while seeking to draw out the possibilities and concerns for any future vernacular archiving which functions through artificial intelligence whereby the human no longer makes use of an aide-memoire or memory support but rather becomes the very memory support for an artificial intelligence system and its artificial consciousness. How do our contemporary archival or technologically extended memory supports comprise a different form of temporal immediacy that we will have to contend with and take into account in thinking any future relation between artificial intelligence and the very production and practices of individuation within a post-internet culture?
Artists’ Uses of Human Rights Archives and NGOs’ Custodial Authority and Responsibilities: Ethnographic Notes from Israel/Palestine
Since the late 1980s, dozens of artistic texts—in such mediums as installation art, dance, documentary and fiction cinema, literature, and more—rely on Palestinian witness- testimonies collected and gathered by Israeli NGOs documenting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and its violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Whether created by artists from Israel/Palestine or elsewhere, most of these texts go unnoticed beyond certain artistic and activist circles, and few reach such echelons as an Academy Award nomination (for the documentary 5 Broken Cameras). Over the last decade, there have been incidents in which Israeli right-wing crowds mobbed cultural events featuring these texts, and politicians routinely take measures to limit state funding and public platforms for artistic depictions critical of the occupation (one such instance made headline just as I finalize this abstract – see footnote 1. 1 For a lengthier ethnographic anecdote, see footnote 2). 2 For both NGOs and artists, their collaborations are prestigious affirmations of socio- political astuteness. NGOs would not allow use of these testimony materials if the witnesses did not sign a Power of Attorney form. Yet, the artistic adaptation and subsequent circulation of these texts leaves unarticulated the custodial dimensions of these small yet importantly telling dynamics of human rights, NGOs, art, and mediation. Based on my extensive fieldwork research about these NGOs, I concur that they are authoritative, bureaucratic organizations with significant impact as reservoirs of documentation of history. Still, NGOs mostly act without explicit awareness and policy regarding the diverse complexities of their archival functions. Nor, do these organizations have the means—staff, material and technological resources, expertise—to embrace and develop their archival functions.This presentation builds on discussions about dynamics of archiving, human rights and/or NGOs and activism, carried by such scholars and archivists as Terry Cook, Cassie Findley, Kirsten Weld, and Michelle Caswell. Using participant observation fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, I examine what are NGOs’ responsibilities in disseminating these data and in further chronicling its dissipation and assessing its impact. I as both perceived by NGO staff and reflected through organizational theory, and as I critically assess these colonial dynamics of custodianship and representation.
