PANEL 19 - ARCHIVES AS IMAGES
My Session Status
CHAIR: Milan Hain
Archives that Converse: The Case of Cem Kaya
The proposed paper will examine the documentary essays by Cem Kaya. Cem Kaya is a German documentary director of Turkish origin.
He has directed 3 essay documentaries Arabeks (2010), Remake, Remix, Rip-off : About Copy Culture & Turkish Pop Cinema (2014) and Love, Deutschmarks and Death (2022). All three films deal with Turkish popular culture either in Turkey or in Germany. He uses archival footage from his own personal archive, which consists of
2000 film tapes (VHS and Beta) and an archive of audiocassettes and vinyl (not counted). He also researches institutional archival footage (for example German national television’s archives) and other private archives, including home videos. His essay documentaries are blend of documents and fiction, particular fiction excerpts from Yeşil Çam’s fiction films, which was the golden film era of Turkish cinema in the 60’s and 70’s. He does not claim that he reconstructs a historical past era but he builds up films out of a combination of history and fiction through memory.
He claims that the use of archival footage in his films works on multiple levels, as a proof, a counterpoint, a comedic element e.t.c.. His archival footage research works in an accumulative way and his own shot footage becomes an archive, since all his 3
films are related with Turkey or Turkish immigrants in Germany. For him the most exciting aspect in the use of archival footage is when the archives talk to each other, for example when footage from an old documentary relates with the appropriate piece from a fiction film and a newspaper clip that converse with each other. Progressively from film to film one can observe an effort to avoid as much as possible talking heads with a final aim to construct films from archival footage only.
Traumatic Memories on the Desktop: Videographic Examination of Holocaust Footage
The aftermath of the Second World War brought several newsreels, documentaries, and essay films that attempted to deal with the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. A particularly resonating response to the trauma was presented by a Czechoslovak film Daleká cesta (Distant Journey; Alfréd Radok, 1948), based on the director’s experience of the Terezín Ghetto. Among other things, the film employs the “trick montage,” an editing technique that interlaces storyline moments with clips from period newsreels and propaganda documentaries within a single film shot. This approach demonstrates that neither “documentary” nor “fictional” images of Holocaust atrocities exist in isolation and may constitute an archive only as long as they are compared and juxtaposed.
However, what happens to the trick montage within the online landscape? Does it maintain its subversive power when it appears in the desktop interface filled with multiple frames and pop-up windows? Does Radok’s relational vision of Holocaust memory become compromised, or is there a way to actualise its potential for contemporary visual regimes?
The paper aims to present and contextualise a videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop (Jiří Anger and Jiří Žák) that addresses these questions. By isolating the trick montage sequences from the original film and projecting them into various software interfaces, the essay examines new ways in which the relational mode of seeing can contest the audiovisual memory of the Holocaust without drowning in the sea of interchangeable content. Further, the paper shall testify to the potential of videographic scholarship, a discipline bridging the gaps between film studies, digital humanities, and artistic research, to reflect on how we encounter traumatic archival images in the online space."
Migration Photography: Archives, Collection, Use, Role in Migration studies. Reflections of a Sociologist from the Field Research.
The main purpose of the submitted paper is to present reflections on two fundamental issues: a) on the application of migration photography in the study of migration processes and in the processes of creating knowledge about migration and migration phenomena, and b) on the availability of archival photographs and its role in the study of migration processes (or, more broadly, in social research). Migration photography, which aim is to record fragments of immigrant social reality and the changes taking place within it, has been developing since the end of the 19th century and nowadays is a part of the canon of social, ethnographic, documentary and artistic photography. Collections of this type of photography can be found in various museums, archives, ethnic institutions (individual immigration groups and diasporas) and in private collections. During the speech, I will discuss the basic issues related to determining the theoretical and analytical potential of data contained in migration photography for the study of migration phenomena and processes, as well as my own research experience on the collection and use of this type of material as part of the project “Migration Photography and Its Role in the Research on Migration Processes. Studies in Visual Sociology and History”( carried out in Europe and the USA). During my speech, I would like to discuss the following issues: ways of accessing collections of migration photography, its availability, ways of storing it, and finally, changes in its function and role for research. At the same time, I consider this presentation as an attempt to show the role of specific archival materials not only in science (history and sociology) but also in art, and as an attempt to pay special attention to the processes of archiving photographic materials.
Woven Memories: Mourning, Photography and Victorian Hair Work
Photography has long been associated with death, both through the tradition of postmortem and mourning photographs in the Victorian era, and through metaphorical positioning by scholars including Barthes (1981), Benjamin (2008), and Sontag (1977). Another Victorian mourning tradition was hair work—the art of creating accoutrements from human hair as a practice of remembrance. This work has been theorized in terms of its function as secular relics (Lutz, 2011; 2015), and its ability to index the lost body as “the literal body reworked” (Sheumaker, 2011).
Sharing a perchance for indexical readings, photography and hair work intersected in the Victorian era in hybrid objects that Batchen (2004, 2010) has theorized as relying on this indexicality to effectively archive the dead. Yet this reading relies on the static, archival status of the past object, and little attention has been paid to how these everyday objects functioned as daily talismans, and everyday objects that were worn, touched, and caressed. Through a case study of three hybrid objects, my paper, Bodies Against Bodies: Mourning, Photography and Hair Work, suggests that these objects can only be understood in terms of their animation by present and past bodies. I offer an alternative pathway to understanding their function and meaning through a mixed-methodology that draws on Carey’s ritual model of communication (2009), Gell’s studies of technical systems in art making (2006 [1992]), and Belting’s extensive work on the body as media (2012). Performance allows the contemporary viewer to understand these objects, now separated from the bodies they once indexed, as performed memory. In this reading, the body of the maker and the body of the remembered intertwine as coauthors in the performance of memory, reuniting individuals across time and space in an impossible act of magic.