PANEL 25 - MIXED ARCHIVE REFLECTIONS
My Session Status
Full Online Panel. Access available in room SH-3560 or via your computer: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/81959446427
CHAIR: Valérie Schafer
Frozen Time: The Russian State Film and Photo Archive
In February 1926 the Council of People’s Commissars, the highest government body of the Soviet Union, issued a decree establishing the state entity which would later become The Russian State Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD) — the largest collection of non-fiction photo and film materials in the country. As of today RGAKFD houses over one million of photo documents and over 250,000 film units, listing some 45,000 unique film titles in its catalogues. The organization has become the object of perpetual pilgrimage for both film practitioners and scholars. However, while the former are offered a rather smoothly running mechanism of archival material screening and acquisition, the latter often find themselves caught in the bureaucratic conundrum more typical of the late Soviet years than of the 21st century.The proposed presentation will be divided into two parts: the first will discuss the daily operating basis of the archive’s film division; the second will address my unique experiences as a program curator for Women and the Silent Screen XI conference who had to navigate RGAFKD to digitize extremely rare works by Soviet women documentarians for the conference special program “Founding Mothers: Women Filmmakers of Early Soviet Documentary.”
As we may remember. The future of remembering from the perspective of documentary archives
Can we already discern the structures of future memory cultures? From this fundamental question, I will examine the mediated forms of current memory culture, with a particular focus on documentary films. Digital technologies are currently leading to significant changes in our knowledge culture, which will inevitably impact the shaping of memory cultures and the structures of media memory in the near future. These changes manifest in two opposing processes: on the one hand, in the archival situation, characterized by non-accessibility, poor archiving, or even the physical decay of documentary material (such as analog video), and on the other hand, attempts at digital preservation or even reconstitution of archives through various media transformation processes - particularly re-mediatizations, which are shaped by new forms of media expression (i-docs, VR/AR-technologies etc.). The latter is not only a challenge for media historiography, but opens up new possibilities for the memory work of GLAM and memorial sites. In this contribution, I will explore the tension between disappearing archive material, using the example of the archival situation of German documentary films, and selected new digital forms of re-mediatization, focusing on themes such as the Holocaust and the Nazi era.
Activating the Eros Collection from a Feminist Perspective
This paper aims to create new understanding of the current policies and practices governing access, acquisition, and care of The Eros Collection at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and the varying publics who presently make use of the Collection, to better understand and activate the feminist potential of this hidden and neglected resource. Donated to the University over twenty years ago by the Eros Association (formerly the Eros Foundation), a national lobby group for the Australian sex industry based in Canberra, the Collection is the largest in Australia of rare periodicals, audiovisual items, correspondence, and ephemera produced by the sex industry. Housed within the Library “special collections”, the Collection is publicly owned but currently (in part due to reputational risk concerns) under-promoted, difficult to access, and under-utilised. In spite of what we believe is its clear cultural and feminist significance, very little has been published about The Eros Collection, with the exception of a single article that provides an overview of Collection categories, varying maintenance challenges, and the ‘typical’ users who access materials (Brittain 2002). Focussing largely on the Collection’s audiovisual components, for this essay we seek to update and further Brittain’s research and to bring a feminist perspective to questions such as: who accesses these materials and how does the University understand its responsibilities to maintain, safeguard, and promote them? What is the extent of community engagement and how can it be better facilitated? How are tensions between different remits and users managed (including ourselves as “users” as we seek to access materials in our teaching), and how might the Collection put pressure on notions of university “special collections”? What are our responsibilities as feminist researchers seeking to support this Collection, how might we address any attendant ethical issues, and what is our own affect in researching these contents (which, as Williams tells us, comprise one of the “body genres”)?
Vue brisée / Broken View: Congo and the Magic Lantern
Vue brisée [Broken View] is a collage film for which I used photographic magic lantern slides made around catholic mission posts in colonial Congo between the 1890s and the 1940s. They were projected in parishes throughout Belgium to showcase the good works of the church and procure funding for the missions. Though intended for the public sphere, these propaganda images carry the ghosts of private lives. Codes from private and public uses of photography intersect. How did these projections of the private inform the public image of the colony throughout the colonial period and now, well after, as in for example super 8 films made by colonials of the next decades and tourist’s diapositives of Africa after that? Throughout the film I involve what little fragments I have of my own family’s colonial history. The entanglement of the private and public sphere becomes a formal device. The film is an essay, an atlas of sorts or an album where fragments of images and language “exchange their reciprocal lacunae” (Didi- Huberman), bringing together heterogenous elements “in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together. (Dillon)”
(online screener of Broken View: https://vimeo.com/758395095/e91b7903b1)