PANEL 11 - LANDSCAPES AND ARCHITECTURES OF MEMORY
My Session Status
CHAIR: Melanie Bell
Hossein Tavazonizadeh (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84658429475)
Cinema, Architecture, and Audiovisual Archives: Iranian Popular Cinema (1960-2000) and the Memory of Pre-revolutionary Architecture
Given the drastic reconstruction of Tehran, before and after the 1979 revolution, the architectural look and the structure of the city have been altered significantly. What remains of the pre- revolutionary vernacular and early modern structures, over and above the seriously damaged, semi-destroyed, and abandoned buildings, is a highlighted (nostalgic) memory of this architecture, embodied in artistic representations, especially cinema. These buildings are similar in having a key role in the ways collective memory and consequently the production of various forms of social and cultural identity are institutionalised in Iran. In this sense, they should be seen as key materials employed in the ideological battles over the past and national identity in contemporary Iran. Here, I am particularly concerned with the way the pre-1979 architecture is remembered among the generation born after the mass reconstruction of Tehran, and how the past is brought to the present through employing such structures as sites of memory. Since the 1990s, the spread of the Internet throughout the country opened a new avenue to receive unsupervised cultural productions in Iran, including the banned pre-revolutionary movies. Comparing some of the highest-grossing productions of Iranian cinema before and after the revolution, as an underprivileged area of investigation, I explore the emotions that are invested in the image of pre-revolutionary architecture. Studying the role of cinema in shaping the collective imagination of the past, my main concern is to track media of cultural memory by regarding my targeted architecture as a memory cue, as Astrid Erll puts it. I consider the most popular productions of this cinema between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s as part of what Dagmar Brunow calls audiovisual memory/archive. In this vein, I will focus on the cinematic representations as circulating archives that may generate a prosthetic memory, as Alison Landsberg coined it.
Digital Archive as a Crossing Point of Personal and Collective Memory: A Case Study of Landscapes of Injustice Archive
This presentation explores how individual and collective memories were reconciled in an archive through the examination of the creation process and utilization of the Landscapes of Injustice Archive, a digital archive on the wartime dispossession of Japanese Canadians. In sociological collective memory studies, as John Bodnar has pointed out, it has been believed that official memory, which is disseminated by official authorities, competes with vernacular memories based on individual interests in public places of memory such as monuments and ceremonies. However, digital sites of memory, including digital archives, have the potential to change such dichotomies. The Landscapes of Injustice project regards the dispossession of Japanese- Canadian property as a national-scale problem of government injustice against racial minorities. They created a digital archive as a source of information for all the Canadian public to examine the facts of dispossession and thereby raise awareness of social justice. The National Association of Japanese Canadians demanded that the Japanese Canadian voices be fully represented in the Landscapes of Injustice Archive. In response to this request, the creators encoded the over 27,000 Japanese names on the digitized collections and distributed case file copies to Japanese Canadians. As a result, the completed archive has come to serve as a medium of Japanese Canadian family memories, which younger Japanese Canadians are seeking to know. The rich metadata on Japanese Canadian Names and search menu, which the archiving team has developed in the light of realization of social justice, has bolstered Japanese Canadians’ recollection of family memories. This case study suggests that the digital history archive functions both as a medium of official memory as well as private memories. The results challenge the conventional view supported by historical sociologists that personal and official memory compete in the public places of memory.
Archival Reflections and Revelations: Excavating the Forgotten Memories of the Women & Film Festival (1973)
The Women & Film Festival held in Toronto in 1973 is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2023; however, it remains an overlooked event in Canadian film history. Touring across 14 Canadian cities, this ground-breaking festival displayed the rich feminist culture of the 1970s and the involvement of women in Toronto’s film community. Texts, audio-visual, and artifacts documenting the festival were gathered in an archive, which contained a never-before-seen recording of Agnès Varda addressing a crowd about her recent film Le Bonheur (1965). The footage reveals Varda's spontaneous energy, the timely conversations on art, feminism, and motherhood, and the lively environment of the festival. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Women & Film Festival in 2023, I will conduct research as a TIFF Lyons Scholarship recipient in April by surveying the documentation related to the festival and gathering the dispersed material in a dedicated collection at the TIFF Film Reference Library. The objective is to excavate the interconnected feminist histories of the two festivals while celebrating the legacy and impact of the Women & Film Festival in Canadian film history. For the IAMHIST Conference on “Future [of] Archives,” I propose a paper reflecting on the experience of digitizing and remediating the archival material to uncover layers of forgotten histories and memories related to the Women & Film Festival. Using the Varda recording as an entry point, this presentation emphasizes the importance of gathering oral histories and audio- visual records to reveal the crucial role that women’s media activism played in cinema and in feminist histories. Often contained in personal archives, these stories continue to remain at risk of obsolescence and loss. By reimagining the audio-visual archive as a space of presence, potentiality, and network, it can become a framework in which new feminist archives are generated.
Merging Materiality and Memory: An Oral History Approach to Videogame History
Scholars from across disciplinary boundaries have attempted to crack the code of videogame history and preservation for the last decade. Particularly, the question of gameplay preservation and the personal experiences of players still eludes games scholars and historians alike. While video recordings of play sessions for preservation purposes is an established method (Nylund 2015, Glas & al. 2017), oral history is underutilized in the fields videogame history and preservation and much of what is currently done focuses on game creators, industry pioneers, and videogaming canons. Nevertheless, recent work on using let’s play recordings for preservation purposes by Glas amp; al. (2017) and the National Videogame Archives’ Animal Crossing Diaries (n.d.a) have set the stage for the development of new strategies for videogame preservation. As such, this project draws from these initiatives and proposes an approach to gameplay preservation that takes player experiences in consideration and combines let’s play recordings and oral history methodology. The proposed method for an oral history of play would select participants who have played the game being researched in the past and divide interviews into three parts. The first section of the interview would gather contextual information on participants and their relationship with the game. Its second part would take advantage of the still accessible, yet rapidly degrading materiality of videogames (see Newman 2012) by having participants play said game on a contemporary platform and comment on their experience as they play. The final part of the interview would investigate the memories triggered by the play session and how this experience differed from when participants originally played the game. Such an approach combining tangible heritage and player memory has the potential to create oral history collections that would enhance existing archival collections centered on or relating to videogames and therefore be useful to present and future scholars of videogame history.