Full online panel, accessible in room SH-3340 or via your computer: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/9515655240?pwd=djM5dnFTUE4zNXBlYkxsTmhNdEJPdz09#success 

CHAIR: Talitha Ferraz 

Guilherme Carréra

When There is No archive Left: the Fire at the National Museum

Located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the National Museum suffered a fire that put an end to nearly 90% of its collection on September 2, 2018. But then how can one deal with a museum with no archive? Since that episode, artists seem to have been trying to come to terms with it precisely by creating an imagetic archive of the tragedy. Examples are the feature film Subterrânea (Pedro Urano, 2020), the video art The Clopen Door (Thiago Rocha Pitta, 2020) and Kanau'kyba (Gustavo Caboco, 2021), to name but a few. In a Benjaminian approach to History, Brazilian researcher Giselle Beiguelman reflects on the image of the museum in flames in one of the essays published in her book Memory of Amnesia: Politics of Oblivion. She argues that “the fire at the National Museum reveals a lot about how we deal with our heritage in Brazil” (2019, p.217). Following on her seminal contribuition to the field, this paper seeks to discuss the strategies employed by the above mentioned artists as a way of reflecting on how Brazil seems unable to take good care of its museums and why that. Worth to mention, apart from the National Museum, other Brazilian cultural institutions, such as the Brazilian Cinematheque, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Image and Sound, were also targets of fire.

Tomyo Costa Ito

Analogy and Anachrony in the Archives of Irradiés (2020), by Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh's best-known films address the genocide in Cambodia, perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime, between 1975 and 1979. Among them are S-21, la machine de mort Khmère Rouge (2002), Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer (2011), and L'image manquante (2013). However, in Irradiés (2020), one of his latest films, the filmmaker goes beyond the context of his country, establishing a visual and sound dialogue between archival footage from different contexts of wars and genocides of the 20th century, which include the contexts of the Pol Pot regime, the First and Second World Wars, the atomic bomb in Japan, among other, marked by authoritarianism. The reassembly of these images is done by a construction of thematic collections of analogous images, but from different historical contexts, which maintain a similarity through horror: the images of deportation, the extermination centers, the dehumanization of bodies. These collections are presented in a particular format with the screen divided into three frames. Panh plays with variations. The film presents the same synchronous scene in all three frames. Or, it produces a slight asynchrony between the same images. Or, still, he inserts a distinct image in one or two frames, creating connections that appear simultaneously on the screen. These procedures are characterized by repetition, but they do not constitute a homogenization of the iconography of wars and genocides. On the contrary, the repetition of analogous images intensifies the particular mise-en-scène of each shot, modifying the order of the elements on scene, shifting the hierarchies between different historical events, producing other temporalities and new meanings. We conduct an analysis of the film's procedures to reflect on how the use of anachrony and analogy in Irradiés points to alternative historiographies of the wars and genocides of the 20th century?"

William Buxton

Editing Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications: Reflections on the Role Played by my Archival Research

I have recently edited – and written an introduction for – a new version of Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications that was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. The book (originally published in 1950) was based on the Beit Lectures that Innis had delivered at Oxford University in 1948. A revised version, edited by Innis’s widow, Mary Quayle Innis, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1972. The book is considered by many to be the first major work on the history of communication. Yet because so little is known about the circumstances related to its production, interpretations of it have largely failed to accurately reveal what the book is about. By drawing upon archival sources, I believe I have been able to shed considerable light on the meaning and significance of the text. Commentators have long claimed that those attending his Beit lectures were surprised that Innis did not directly address British Empire History in his lectures but chose to examine empire and communications instead. Yet the host who invited him, Sir Keith Hancock, had previously reviewed one Innis’s Political Economy and Modern State and was favorably impressed by its chapters dealing with communications. Innis’s archival papers also reveal that he had viewed the Beit lectures as part of a cluster of presentations that he made in Britain in 1948. This explains why Empire had so little to say about the modern era; it was covered at length in the other talks (Later published) that he gave. Finally, making use of Mary Quayle’s diary, I was able to better understand why and how he came to rely on particular published sources.