CHAIR: Roel Vande Winkel

Marie Krämer

(Re-)Writing Film History in the Exhibition Space: The Case of Musée Méliès

The founding of the Cinémathèque française (CF) as a film archive and museum is closely linked to the rediscovery of Georges Méliès and his lost films. Henri Langlois, one of the CF’s founding directors, personally collected drawings, photographs and other objects related to the life and work of Méliès. These archives have been made available for the production of films such as THE GREAT MÉLIÈS (1952), HUGO (2010), THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE (2011) and THE MÉLIÈS MYSTERY (2021). Together with the Méliès archives of the Centre national du cinéma et de l‘image animée (CNC), which includes a collection assembled and formerly owned by Méliès’ family, they are also showcased in the CF’s new permanent exhibition, the “Musée Méliès” (2021-).
With a particular focus on this exhibition, I examine how the CF uses archives of Georges Méliès to (re)write not only the history of French cinema, but also its own. A scenographic and discursive analysis of the exhibits on display, their mise-en-scène and mediation, and the accompanying exhibition catalogues form the basis for a discussion of the intra- (Paris vs. Lyon) and transnational (France vs. USA), as well as institutional (CF/CNC) and non-institutional (Les Amis de Georges Méliès) memory dynamics at play. Drawing on Susannah Radstone’s work on nostalgia, memory and “the sexual politics of time“ (2007) and Geneviève Sellier’s work on the New Wave—which has been the focus of many previous exhibition and publication projects at the CF—I also situate the case within larger debates about cultural memory and memory politics. Is the Musée Méliès just the product of a crisis-weary longing for times when cinema emerged, flourished and was not yet in decline? Or are we dealing with a case of more problematic, restorative nostalgia for times when film history was still mainly centred on male artistic geniuses?

Amrita Biswas

Archival and Anecdotal Evidences: Curatorial Fan Practices of Knowledge Production

Curating archival images with anecdotes about Uttam Kumar, fans position their intimacy to the star, who worked predominantly in Bengali-language cinema, in the Facebook group Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen- The Golden Pair. In this paper, I analyse the social media fan group on Kumar to understand fan practices that generate historical knowledge through the contextualization and circulation of archival photographs with anecdotes about the star. In the group, fans carefully juxtapose photos and anecdotes that have been extracted from magazines, memoirs and newspapers within their personal collections. Mining these data, they mobilize Facebook as a discursive platform for attributing new meanings to the star figure. Underscoring the element of banality that configures stardom, the anecdotes pertain to mundane acts and gestures that inscribed the everyday life of the star. On the other end of the spectrum, the curated social media posts also share historical knowledge about the biography of the person that constituted the star, thereby ascribing to him a significant cultural currency.
As this paper argues, the fan group seeks to foster a participatory culture of historical knowledge production (Keidl, 2021). The imaginary of building such a space is, however, punctured by acts of gatekeeping where fans render specific forms of knowledge invalid by positing their greater intimate knowledge about Kumar. A claim to intimacy, through sharing authentic anecdotes that have been sourced from film magazines and books, is thus mobilized as a rhetorical strategy to police historical narratives and discourses about the star. Introducing notions of legitimacy, fans engage in boundary-policing to render counter-discourses to Kumar’s star persona invalid, thereby manifesting epistemological anxieties. Mapping a specific fan practice, this paper therefore utilizes archival and anecdotal evidence to study the curatorial mode through which fans both gatekeep and construct knowledge.

Philipp Dominik Keidl

Heritage and Hate: Archival Materials in Alternative Influence Networks

Historical ephemera, merchandise, photographs, and moving images: the videos by the fan collective The Fandom Menace feature a wide variety of objects and documents from private and institutional archival collections. Founded as an “alternative” information channel to established news outlets, The Fandom Menace uses archival materials to support their construction of historical narratives about “oppressive left ideologies” and the subsequent “repression” of conservative values and society structures. The vloggers combine fan rhetoric with the practices of brand influencers and media franchises to disseminate their politics to the nearly 4 million subscribers of their YouTube channel. As such, The Fandom Menace follows a long tradition of fans engaging with history-making and archiving (Keidl and Waysdorf, 2022), albeit with distinct emphases and objectives: Rather than to engage with the history of fictional texts, they focus on the construction of conspiracy theories about the inner workings of the entertainment industry and its impact on society and its values in the past and present.
Taking The Fandom Menace as a case study, this paper analyses the “reuse, misuse, and abuse” (Baron, 2021) of archival materials in videos produced by fan-run “alternative influence networks” (Lewis, 2018). The paper argues that The Fandom Menace relies on archival materials to increase their influence and revenues, as well as to advance the radicalization of their subscribers. Within this context, archival goals shift from the expansion of comprehensive collections to the repeated circulation of few singular documents, images and objects that serve the political and ideological purposes of the fan collective. By promoting select archival materials as “definite evidence”, The Fandom Menace is not aiming to democratize archival structures or to enable different perspectives and meanings. Instead, each video functions as a blueprint to produce additional works that strengthen the dominant narratives in which patriarchal (film and media) heritage becomes the heritage for all members of society.