CHAIR: Llewella Chapman

Alexander Greenhough

Adapting Jane Eyre: Digital Archives and Videographic Criticism

This paper explores online video platforms such as YouTube and the Internet Archive as digital archives, with my own videographic adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a case study.
I first presented this twelve-minute video-work at the Theory & Practice of the Video-Essay conference at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in September 2022.
My adaptation is composed of five screen versions of the novel, from 1934 to 1971, made for both theatrical exhibition and television broadcast. Jane Eyre presents key scenes (such as Jane’s initial encounter with Rochester and the revelation of Bertha’s imprisonment in Thornfield Hall) across and through different moving image iterations. All the material is sourced from video archives online. It thus has variable and varied visual “qualities.” Jane Eyre appears as what Hito Steyerl approvingly terms “the poor image.” She writes that its “quality is bad, its resolution substandard,” and that it “tends toward abstraction.” She writes that the poor image is a “copy in motion,” and arguably my version of Jane Eyre engages with the archive-as-copy (or copies), too.
This paper addresses the affordances of online archival research for creative practice, analyzing the potential of the digital archive as a space for videographic criticism.

Yen-Lin Kong

Beyond the frame and between the lines: Narrating femininity and history in the visual and textual archives of Wu Sijing

This research project examines the multivalent relationship between vernacular photography, autobiography, and the construction of Singapore’s historiography through studying the fascinating intellectual life of Wu Sijing (b.1934), a female Chinese author and photographer. In the final decades of her life, Sijing donated over 300 personal artefacts and memorabilia to Singapore’s national collection, constituting the largest folk life collection by a single civilian in the state-run archives. Largely an autodidact from a humble working class family, Sijing came to full force as a writer in the 1990s to 2000s, contributing numerous columns recollecting her memories of wartime and post-war Singapore in the Chinese broadsheets. She later published four anthologies compiling all her essays, two of which were translated to English. Interweaved within is a rich corpus of over hundred photographs contributed by her in the National Museum of Singapore’s collections. Of particula interest to this research is also Sijing’s creative and conjugal partnership with her husband Huang Dali, and the literary lineage embodied by their son, Hooe Wai, an architect, illustrator and accomplished author in his own right.
I shall examine strategies in which she, in tandem with her family, deftly co-created and constructed a highly calculated public narrative and persona of her through a combination of literary writings, imagery and archival content. Read side by side, image and text collectively present an intricateportrait of personal memory, feminine identity and domestic life against a frenetic societal backdrop marked by sweeping political and economic transformations, lending rich insights into memories and experiences of women in Singapore’s nation building era.
This multi-disciplinary study also explores the challenges and contestations amateur photography and literature pose to mainstream ‘canons’ of knowledge, by unpacking the constructed nature of what constitutes historical evidence, and by extension, how are personal archives constituted and interpreted by institutions.

Melanie Bell

The Voice of Work: Feminist Archiving and Film Histories

The absence from official archives of women’s labour in film production is well-documented. For a long time, work performed by women in production roles (as wardrobe assistants, foley artists, production secretaries and continuity girls) was designated ‘unskilled’ in dominant industry and critical discourses. Male commentators of the 1930s for example denigrated the female-dominated role of negative cutting as merely ‘routine stuff, done by girls with no pride or interest in their jobs’ (cited in Bell, 2021). As film historian Sue Harper noted, ‘the importance of [production] secretaries were so minimal that few people thought to document them’, despite them being ‘at all times, the grease which oiled the studio machine’ (2000: 4). Women’s contribution has thus been simultaneously central to film production and marginal in the historical record. Scholars interested in recovering women’s film labour have turned to other sources, expanding the historical archive to include scrapbooks (Hastie, 2007), fan magazine gossip (Majumdar, 2015) and other forms of ephemera in their imaginative rewritings of history.
Most of these studies have drawn on written sources but what are the possibilities and challenges for film history of using women’s spoken accounts of their work in film production? This paper presents some reflections on my recent experience curating a feminist archive of women’s oral histories of work in film and television production.
Positioning the archive as a feminist gesture of resistance to gaps and silences in existing archives and film histories, this paper explores how women’s memories, voices and life narratives shed new light on media production histories of mid-late 20 th C Britain. Ultimately, the paper argues for a praxis of listening, and caring for women’s testimony, to further develop feminist rewritings of film history.