DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2385

 

Introduction

As a film editor working primarily in broadcast documentaries, I have often wondered why more raw rushes are not preserved in audio-visual archives. Especially when it comes to news or documentary footage of historically significant events, rushes have a value beyond what a filmmaker or news editor deems significant at the time, and new insights can be gleaned from renewed scrutiny of audio-visual details that may at first have been considered irrelevant or even undesirable. To explore this idea, I am concentrating on news coverage of the siege of eastern Mostar, in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, between May 1993 and March 1994. Specifically, I examine the burst of media attention in the days around the arrival of the first UN aid convoy on 21 August 1993. Comparing some of the edited accounts of that time with some of the surviving raw footage, I argue for the value of preserving and archiving raw footage of such events, even if the footage may initially appear irrelevant or trivial. It is my contention that the experience of rushes in the archive is qualitatively different from the experience of edited films and reports, in the sense that they often contain unintended images that have the potential to shock in their incongruity, to reveal something of the biases and aims of the filmmakers, and to convey a sense of the “presence” of a past event beyond the experience of an edited account, which is more stringently mediated through the editorial and narrative control of the filmmaker.

The siege of eastern Mostar in 1993-94 was noteworthy in the context of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina both for its close and highly destructive urban combat, and because the main hostilities were between the HVO (the Bosnian Croat militia) and the ARBiH (the Bosnian government’s army, dominated by Bosniaks), but did not involve the VRS (the Bosnian Serb militia).[1]  The conflict between the HVO and the ARBiH at the time is to be understood in the context of the Vance-Owen Plan of 1993, which proposed the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic-majority cantons, effectively rewarding ethnic cleansing. According to this plan, the canton containing Mostar would be majority Croat, so the HVO felt justified to assert their authority over all of it, which was resisted by the Bosniaks of Mostar, who were largely concentrated in the east of the city.[2]

At the time of the siege, from the middle of 1993 to early 1994, I worked as editor and second cameraman for the video unit of the Press and Information department of UNPROFOR, the UN peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. One set of rushes from Mostar on 21 August 1993 was shot by a colleague of mine at the time. This was preserved in the “UNTV collection” in the Imperial War Museum, London, and is one of my main sources.  As part of my wider academic research into the audio-visual record of the siege of Mostar, I have also recently visited Mostar, and interviews with a number of survivors of the siege have informed my insight into the context.[3]

Commercial news archives and their exclusions

According to a well-worn maxim, “journalism is the first rough draft of history”.[4] While this is usually applied to written journalism, the emphasis on the construction of history as a narrative – the draft – is not incidental, and applies to news in all its forms, including television news journalism.  In my work as a film editor (like most editors, I have found that, in practice, editing is primarily focused on narrative), I have often made use of archival footage to illustrate or evoke historical scenes, and have noted how much broadcast production relies on commercial news archives (AP and Getty Images are currently dominant among these), rather than film museums or repository archives (such as the BFI or the British Library) to source this material.[5] The great majority of entries in these commercial archives consist of edited films or news features (often referred to as “stories”). Listings of raw rushes are rare.

Commercial news archives are not actually archives in the strict definition of the word, which, etymologically, is associated with official record-keeping of the state.[6]  Indeed, according to Michel Foucault the archive is not a “library” or a physical collection of things, but it is first and foremost a system of enunciation.[7]  Under this logic, commercial news archives would have to be characterised as “collections”, even if most of them describe themselves as “archives”.[8]  For the sake of simplicity, I will stick to this self-designation and refer to them as “archives” as well, with the understanding that the criteria that regulate their contents are part of this designation.

Like me, the media archaeologist Trond Lundemo is interested in the question what gets excluded from the archive beyond the formal requirements that regulate the archive. He points out that archiving is not about storage but about selection and that all exclusions create “gaps and lacunae in the preservation of the past”, which means that they are, by their very nature, political exclusions.[9] In privately owned and managed archives of (photographic) moving images, many decisions of exclusion are driven by corporate, commercial criteria that are subject to the logic and contingencies of the marketplace. For example, the majority of archived analogue items in these archives tend not to be digitised: the archives generally work according to what Wolfgang Ernst calls a model of “digitization on demand”, only reacting to current needs.[10] To make matters more complicated, these archives themselves can be traded as capital investments, and often are. Thus, they may fall under different commercial, and therefore archival regimes at different times in their history.[11]

Matthew Butson of Getty Images’ Hulton Archive, confirmed in a conversation about digital conservation that the investment of digitisation is only made for at most 5-10% of a collection, focusing on images that are predicted to generate an income from licenses.[12]  In my own experience it is often the first client requesting an as-yet undigitised entry who pays for the digitisation.[13]

The question of archival exclusion shifts from one of regulatory exclusion to one driven by storage and access: analogue sources are more difficult to access, and run a higher risk of becoming obsolete or falling into disrepair.[14] This raises the question of the political implications of such exclusion. Implicitly, the default mode of audio-visual media is attrition, but obsolescence is ideological, in that it submits to a technological teleology in which sequence is interpreted as progress: newer technology is always somehow considered to be “better”. In addition, the marketisation of the archive is an ideological disposition in itself, favouring a capitalist model of image preservation. In this model, history itself is not seen as a shared cultural heritage, or a kind of commons, but as the raw material for commodification, according to which historical artefacts become objects of economic exchange. 

Finally, the strong tendency to preserve only finished films means that the editing room itself is a significant site of archival exclusion, where the criteria of selection are driven by considerations of editorial policy (and bias), narrative convention and the filmic grammar of montage, rather than the legal-political considerations of the state archive, or the preservationist tendencies of the historical archive.

The feedback loop of historical footage

The question then arises: what do these exclusions of historical footage – on commercial as well as filmic, narrative and editorial grounds – do to our view of history? Or perhaps more pertinently, what do they do to our collective memory of that history? We all know the phenomenon of the Second World War being “remembered” in black and white by subsequent generations, given that their knowledge of the time was mediated through black-and-white newsreel footage.[15] There is of course an ongoing debate about the relations between history and memory, and in the 1980s Pierre Nora introduced the idea that collective memory can be externalised in places, buildings and objects, in what he called “lieux de mémoire”, or “places of memory”. As a result, we can speak of moving images as mnemonic artefacts: “symbolically mediated” memories that have the power to re-implant themselves in their viewers as a type of personal memory, even if their experience was a mediated one.[16] Consequently, historical events can be vividly “remembered” by people too young to have lived through them.[17] Such symbolically mediated collective memories of historical events are a staple of what Aleida Assmann calls “national memory” or “myth”, which are crucial in the formation of national identifications.[18]

The memories contained in audio-visual archives are haunted by multiple gaps and absences, however. Filmic images, as Mary Ann Doane notes, are already doubly haunted: any photographic image, as index, is haunted by the absence of the referent that left its imprint on the photosensitive surface; moving photographic images are also haunted by the lost time between individual frames (necessary to create the illusion of temporal continuity), a haunting that is echoed by the cut, which represents the lost time between shots.[19] To this double haunting I propose to add a third: every cut in an edited film is haunted by lost footage, rushes that were shot but did not make the final edit. Consequently, those rushes are much less likely to have been archived or preserved, and may be neglected, or often lost altogether.

The perception of history as mediated by documentary film is haunted by such neglected or lost footage. Philip Rosen points out the parallels between historiography and the practice of documentary film, in which the “sequenciation” of indexical remnants of the past (rushes) produces a coherent narrative, just as historiography extrapolates narratives from surviving historical remnants or documents, which involves an inevitable filling in of missing parts.[20] Documentary films, insofar as they are placed into various archives, in turn become “documents” for future historiography and documentary filmmaking. This reveals the outline of a feedback loop: the first edit eliminates all the rushes that did not make the first cut and is placed in the archive as a cut film; this film may then be the source for another film, which may only select the most salient or sensational footage from the first edit, and is then placed in the archive as a more recent cut film, which may then be the source for a third film, etc. This tends to produce a diminishing pool of historical images, edited down and re-mediated with each cycle, so the gaps between the images increases while any surviving rushes are increasingly likely to disappear with the attrition of time.

This chimes with the use of archival images from commercial archives in practice according to Phil Clark, who works as film researcher in the broadcast industry.[21] He calls it a “self-fulfilling prophesy”: “well-known” images of a historical event (the ones that have appeared in many films) are more likely to be easily available from the archives (i.e. already digitised in current format), and are more likely to be recommended by the archives’ in-house “researchers” (often in effect sales agents), whose job it is to sell the largest amount of licenses in the shortest amount of time. These recommendations are often accepted by time-starved film researchers with tight deadlines, and the same images are therefore more likely to re-appear in new films covering the same event.[22] A similar feedback loop was described to me by Butson of Getty Images, with the difference that he attributed it to the interaction between search algorithms and the relative laziness of clients: images that have been sold more often get a higher ranking in the algorithm, and therefore appear higher up in searches sorted on “relevance” or “popularity”. At the same time, clients rarely stray past the first six pages of search results, reinforcing the popularity of the highly ranked images.[23] Hence one can speak of a “feedback loop of historical footage”.

The diminishing pool of “iconic” images, that condense complex historical events to easily narrated, and memorable form, are highly instrumental in those collective, symbolically mediated memories that form the basis of political and national identifications.[24] The editing room as a site of archival exclusion puts narrative at the heart of the formation of such identifications, and of the political exclusions that they entail: hence the exclusion of rushes from the archive may reflect something of the exclusion of ambiguity in the historical narratives that help to shape national identity.

Memories of conflict play an especially important role in the formation of such identifications, and play a role in the potential for renewed conflict. The potential of contested histories to reignite conflict is distressingly illustrated by the current threats to the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which were sparked by the Bosnian Serb leadership’s rejection of a law that would ban the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.[25]

At the same time, the feedback loop of historical footage tends to strip images of their ambiguity, or what Dai Vaughan calls images’ capacity to “exceed their contribution to any given meaning […] in the generation of new meanings oblique, peripheral, or even antagonistic to the text as understood”.[26]  Vaughan’s primary concern is with the preservation of ambiguity in his edited documentary films, and he describes succinctly how the meaning of images is never exhausted.  However, this does not apply equally to all footage: both Pasolini and Doane draw attention to the contingency of the “long take”, which resists being fixed in its meaning, and, of course, raw rushes always consist of longer takes than the films that are edited from them.[27]

Speaking about what is lost with the loss of rushes means speaking about absence, and becomes inevitably speculative. In his discussion of four rare photographs of Auschwitz, taken from within one of the crematoria during its time of operation in 1944, Georges Didi-Huberman proposes an almost psychoanalytic approach to photographic images: “should we not treat the impurities, the lacunae of the image, as we have to treat the silences of speech, which is to unravel them, to struggle with them?”[28] In this proposal he is clearly inspired by the method within trauma studies that treats the silences in witness testimony as significant symptoms of the trauma that cannot be articulated.^[29] What is significant for my purposes is that Didi-Huberman appears to suggest we might treat photographic images themselves as symptoms, as lacunary traces of a greater context, some of which may still be inferred from them.

Arguably this is exactly what is practiced by the more recent, overlapping methods of architectural forensics, data forensics and image forensics. For example, the project Black Friday by Forensic Architecture (FA) displays an exemplary attentiveness to the gaps between moving images: fragmentary moving image phone recordings of Israeli airstrikes on Rafah in the Gaza Strip on the last day of the 2014 Gaza war are placed within a 3D model of the urban environment, and along a timeline of the “real time” of events in order to extrapolate exactly when and where the explosions took place.[30] This allowed FA to reconstruct the wider context of the bombings both spatially (outside of the frame of the recordings) and temporally (between the individual takes of the recordings).

In my wider research into moving images that document the siege of Mostar in 1993-94, I have been struck by how unevenly any documentation is distributed along the 10 months of the siege: months went by with virtually no image production at all, while occasionally the “media spotlight” fell on Mostar, and dozens of hours of footage would be produced within a relatively short period of time, mostly by journalists of international news broadcasters.  From those dozens of hours, usually only minutes can be found in the archives as news features or news agency satellite feeds.  Unusually, however, I have been able to locate some of the raw rushes from the intense media attention that surrounded the first humanitarian convoy to arrive in the enclave of eastern Mostar on 21 August 1993.  To “struggle with the gaps” in the historical record of this siege, I examined those rushes in relation to the edited news features made around the same event, on the wager that an instance in which rushes are not lost, and made accessible to research, may be able to approximate what effects an actual loss would imply in other instances. In other words, what is at stake in this study is the idea that unexpected elements within these rushes may reveal some of the kinds of historical insights we might have lost with other rushes that ended up on the cutting room floor in the process of narrativising the conflict.

The Mostar siege in the archives

For the purposes of this article, I am concentrating on international news coverage of the Mostar siege in the days around 21 August 1993. The news “ecology” at that time and place was of course determined by the state of technology, and the contemporary practices of the “news industry”. In the 1990s, this meant that “field reports” were generally shot on fairly bulky, shoulder-mounted cameras recording to Betacam SP analogue Standard Definition tape.[31] These field reports would often be sent to international broadcasters via satellite. Because high-bandwidth satellite links were expensive, they would be edited down before being offered for sale via the satellite network. From searches in the catalogues of the news archives, it is clear that such “satellite packages” are often the form in which these materials were archived, especially by the news agencies.

Due to the military encirclement of East Mostar, no international news crews managed to gain access to the enclave for the first three months of the siege, and there was little to no reporting on the situation. When the UN negotiated access for its first convoy for months, on 21 August 1993, it arrived with a small consignment of medical aid, and with a number of international news crews in tow. Rather remarkably, barely a day earlier, a CNN crew had arrived on foot and horseback, via an arduous, three-day trek over the mountains from Sarajevo.[32] A few days later, the BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen arrived with a crew via the same route. Late on 25 August a second UN convoy arrived, this time with a number of trucks filled with food aid, and again, several news crews in tow. This convoy was blockaded in by the local population, and was only able to leave a few days later when a semi-permanent UN office was established.[33]

Due to these convoys, the international media spotlight was briefly on the situation in Mostar, roughly in the period between 19 and 31 August 1993, and a large amount of news reports were produced. A search for “Mostar” between 19 and 31 August 1993 in various news archives yielded a relatively large number of items, the great majority of which were “offline”, meaning they had not yet been digitised from their analogue sources. For example, Getty Images listed seventy-four items, consisting of eighteen duplicates, eighteen (discrete) items originally from the ITN archives, twenty from BBC archives and eighteen from NBC News archives.[34] Only 5 items (all from ITN) were digitised and online, none of which contained footage of the actual Mostar enclave, but mostly from the nearby UN base in Međugorje.[35] The CNN Collection listed three items, all offline, but a request over the phone threw up two additional edited items, and nine reels of raw rushes, one of which was a duplicate.[36]

In addition to the news cameras present, the two UN convoys were documented by a camera from the Press and Information department of UNPROFOR.[37] Six reels of the UN rushes (two from the first convoy, four from the second convoy) and two edited items (a 10-minute video structured as a press release, using rushes from both convoys, and a feature entitled “Sisters of Mostar”, which was edited a year later from the second convoy rushes) are preserved in the UNTV collection in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London.[38] In the UN rushes of the first convoy on 21 August 1993, at least four other cameras can be discerned: the CNN crew, a TVE (Spanish TV) crew, a Spanish army cameraman and one unidentified crew.[39] A brief, impromptu interview in the street with the UNPROFOR spokesman, Cedric Thornberry, is covered by at least three cameras.[40]

Comparing rushes with edited reports

The interdependence of news organisations and NGOs, and the tendency of the news media to produce events, tend to have the effect that news crews travel in packs, and certain news events can turn into a “media circus”.[41] The sudden accessibility of East Mostar, and the drama of the severe siege it was living through, created a version of a media circus in East Mostar in late August 1993. The contrast with the almost complete lack of audio-visual material from the preceding three months is arresting. The slow aspects of the violence of a siege do not lend themselves to news reporting in the way sudden, spectacularly violent events do, so sieges are often represented through specific events, like the arrival of a humanitarian aid convoy. The effect of this concentration of media visibility is that the majority of the images coming out in the various news reports look very similar, not only because they are largely shot in the same location at the same time, but also because they follow similar conventions in the format of news features that were current at the time.

Familiar features from all the news coverage include traveling shots through no-man’s land into the enclave, cutaway shots of ruined buildings and devastation, aid being unloaded and packed into storage, wounded people in the make-shift hospital, a short interview with a UN or NGO representative (more rarely with a local representative), and local residents crowding around the UN and aid vehicles in the street. From interviews I conducted with survivors of the siege, it became clear how many of those images are coloured by the fact that they are produced in the midst of the media circus. For example, at most times during the siege, it was extremely dangerous to be out on the streets, and residents of east Mostar would only come out of the cellars in well-sheltered areas, running past any exposed areas, even spacing themselves out by 30m so that not more than one person would be injured or killed by a single grenade.[42] The fact that the convoy itself was in town meant that the HVO (the Croatian militia besieging eastern Mostar) would largely be holding fire, producing a welcome break for the population, and creating, certainly for the children, something of a carnival atmosphere. In this case, the familiar question about the influence of the presence of the camera on the pro-filmic becomes a question not so much about the presence of a single camera (although in some shots this plays a role as well), but more about the presence of the entire media circus accompanying the convoy, that radically changed the street view of the enclave. The exception is one BBC report from Jeremy Bowen, which was shot when he arrived in the days between the two convoys: his report shows more empty street views, even while the narration states that the streets are calmer than usual, given a “lull” in fighting between the two convoys.[43]

A general focus on children among the wounded in the hospital reveals a preoccupation with the humanitarian aspects of the story. This falls largely within the framing, widespread in the coverage of the conflict in Bosnia, of the local population as “victims” and the UN and NGO officials as “saviours”, even though in Mostar the local population managed to keep up a significant level of organisation against tremendous odds.[44] One effect of this kind of framing is to downplay the agency of the combatants as political actors, distinguishing only, or at least primarily, between perpetrators and victims.

Two short edited reports from CNN reporter Brent Sadler provide a case in point, when viewed against the rushes that were used to cut them. The reports are dated 21 and 22 August 1993, and most of the material was shot on 21 August, the day of the first convoy. The first report, titled “MOSTAR AID”, focuses on the delivery of medical aid to the makeshift hospital in the enclave, cut out of chronological order for narrative purposes.[45] The only interview is with Cedric Thornberry, and the report includes a scene of Thornberry visiting the hospital. The second report is titled “MOSTAR MUSLIMS” and also contains shots of the hospital, without UN officials this time but with a brief interview with “Dr Mujic”.[46] It starts with shots of the mountain trail which the CNN crew used to enter the enclave, and contains several shots of devastated buildings, street views and a bridge in Mostar, all empty of people. It ends on a piece to camera by Brent Sadler from Sarajevo.

The untransmitted CNN rushes contain a number of elements that would not have fitted into the narrative focus of the two edited reports, and presumably were left out for that reason. There are many shots of the physical destruction near the front line (some of which were used in the second CNN report and in a BBC report of 23 August), some of them containing soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothes.[47] There are actual front-line shots, traveling along a path cut through the inside of an apartment block, peeking through look-out points at front-line positions, and showing soldiers pointing their rifles through openings between sandbags. There are a few brief interviews with soldiers and with two men in civilian clothing; the questions are posed through an interpreter but the answers (in BHS) are not translated back.[48] The answers focus on the hardships of life under siege, but the soldier also reveals a certain confidence, saying they are not short of weapons and ammunition, and the fighters are highly motivated, eager to rid the city of “those extremists” as soon as possible. There are also multiple takes of a piece to camera by Sadler in front of the burned-out shell of Tito’s villa on the Neretva River, in which he comments on the relentlessness of the fighting (“No mercy is expected, none given. Life hangs on a thread”).[49] To my knowledge, this was never used in a news report. It appears that the CNN crew gathered enough material for a “military story” about the fighting on the urban front line of Mostar, but that this approach was abandoned in favour of stories that were focused on humanitarian issues (the aid convoy, the hospital).

The BBC report from 23 August, which makes use of some of this CNN footage, briefly mentions political aims in the last 20 seconds of the report, but not in a way that all of the residents of East Mostar would recognise.[50] The commentary suggests an equivalence of ethno-nationalistic aims (“the Croats insist Mostar is the capital of their self-declared Bosnian Croat state; the Muslims are battling to claim it as part of their rump-Muslim state”), which ignores the fact that the Sarajevo government had at least the stated aim to be the government of all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, regardless of their sectarian affiliation, and not just of a “Muslim state”.[51] Interestingly, of the ex-fighters I’ve spoken to in Mostar over the course of my research, the majority described themselves as “anti-fascist” fighters, pitted against the “fascist” Croatian HVO, many of whose members openly celebrated the Ustashe, the Croatian fascists allied with the Axis powers in the second world war.[52] The Titoist Partisan past was, and is, openly celebrated by these “anti-fascist” fighters, and still today the division in Mostar appears not necessarily as an opposition between Bosniaks and Croats (notably some Serbs and Croats joined in the defence of the East Mostar enclave), but equally as an opposition between those who reject the Partisan past (and often celebrate the Ustashe), and those who celebrate it.[53]

Western journalistic representations of the Bosnian conflict typically fall into two types: the “Balkan discourse”, sometimes also called the “ancient hatreds thesis”, that views the conflict as an “ethnic conflict” based on deep historical, even “tribal” hatreds; and a “genocide discourse” that characterises Bosniaks (and sometimes Croats) as victims of Serb genocide, with implicit reference to the Holocaust.[54] The “Balkan discourse” is considered by many scholars to be based on a “Balkanist” stereotype that views the region as endemically riven by irrational, ethnic passions and conflicts.[55] The reports discussed here appear to mix elements of both these discourses: their insistence to use ethnic identifiers falls into the “Balkan discourse”, while the apparent focus of Bosniak citizens as the victims of violent ethnic cleansing aligns them with the “genocide discourse” (which, in my experience, is the view that most journalists subscribed to on a personal level). What both of these discourses tend to elide, however, is a clear representation of the political aims of the combatants, which could be divided between an ethno-nationalist conception of citizenship and belonging (represented by the Serb and most Croat militias and political leadership) and a civic one (largely represented by the Bosnian Army and government, certainly in east Mostar).[56]

The focus on the humanitarian angle also speaks to a time in the 1990s when “humanitarian intervention” as an idea was actively discussed, and even promoted in the international arena. Robert Meister has characterised this as an era of Human Rights Discourse, in which violence in itself is considered evil (and not a potentially legitimate means to a political end), and therefore something to be prevented in all circumstances.[57] After the end of the Cold War, rather than as an aim to fight for, human rights are seen as needing protection from violation, which has the effect of maintaining the status quo and ultimately justifies a purely utilitarian policy that pursues the “least of all possible evils”.[58] In the context of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the international focus on the “tragic” humanitarian aspects of the conflict, said to be based on hatreds that were “centuries old”, served the political purpose of emphasising the futility of any further intervention.[59] In May 1993, the Clinton State Department went so far as to urgently request evidence of Bosniak atrocities in order to confer equal blame for atrocities on all sides.[60] Not only did the deflection from the “genocide discourse” prevent international obligations to intervene under the Genocide Convention, but the refusal to engage with actual political aims also prevented any political pressure to take sides in the conflict, which may equally have been a cause for more active intervention.

The portrayal of humanitarian agents as “saviours” echoes the classic cinematic trope of the “white saviour” in which a white protagonist is the necessary agent of rescue or resistance for a group of deserving but incapable non-whites.[61] Catherine Baker shows that the racialisation of the conflict in Bosnia throws up multiple contradictions: not only were many peacekeepers non-white while Bosnians are almost exclusively white, but also the main vector of “othering” in the Western Balkans runs between a (north-western) Europe and a (south-eastern) Balkans, in which each group tends to view themselves as the last “antemurale” bulwark of modern Europe against a chaotic, oriental and pre-modern Balkans.[62] This configuration is described by Milica Bakić-Hayden as “nesting orientalisms”.[63] But as Baker points out, this shifting placement of people at a distance from Europe and modernity is also a racialising measurement, which places “saviour” narratives in the news reporting on humanitarian missions in Bosnia within the “white saviour” trope.[64]

There is a final element that appears in both sets of rushes that definitely would never have made it into any edited account, but which I believe deepens our understanding of the nature of the international involvement in the Bosnian conflict in retrospect. In both sets of rushes there are moments when the crew, the makers of the rushes, are joking and joshing around with the camera. At the beginning of the first CNN rushes tape, evidently on the way to the Mostar enclave, we see reporter Brent Sadler standing on top of CNN’s light-armoured vehicle by a fruit tree in a field, doing a mock piece to camera “I’m in Bosnia picking plums, the Croats are over there, the Serbs are over there, and who’s over there… oh yeah the Muslims are over there”.[65] In the UNTV reels from 21 August, two of my ex-colleagues from the UNPROFOR P&I department occasionally lean into the camera to make a quip with the punchline “psy-ops is looking out for you”.[66] At the end of the second reel, in the aircraft back to base, one of them holds up a note to the camera with a cryptic message which he proceeds to stuff into his mouth.[67]

In the experience of viewing these rushes, the incongruity and apparent lack of seriousness of these passages come as something of a shock.[68] They were clearly not meant to be published or seen by anyone “outside the office”, and resemble “home movies” in the sense that they were made for private consumption, and their preservation might even be an embarrassment to their makers.[69] But it is precisely their private character that reveals something valuable about the privilege, even hubris, of those in the position to produce these images. From my personal experience I know that the pressures and risks in these situations can be considerable, and are relieved in a variety of ways. This can take the form of gallows humour, or incongruous light-heartedness, along with substance abuse and a certain amount of macho posturing.[70]  At the same time, there is the well-known phenomenon of “adrenaline addiction” among war correspondents, and sometimes aid workers. It is worth keeping in mind that these are people who chose to come to a conflict situation, and have the privilege of generally being able to leave as well. The privileges associated with the roles of these outside observers (or even “saviours”) at a time of conflict can in some cases contribute to the abuses that have been well-documented in peacekeeping operations.[71]

The idea of a “shock” is prominent in Benjaminian conceptions of photography and history. Benjamin’s idea of shock is primarily linked with the “assaults upon the subject associated with urban life and modern technologies”, to the point that Benjamin would claim that “in a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle”.[72] For Catherine Russell, this places shock within the realm of montage, as one of the techniques that interrupt “the ‘flow’ of images on which conventional historicism relies”.[73] But montage is also a technique of narrativisation, and for Doane, shock represents the threat of the illegible, the unassimilable, and in that sense is aligned with the contingent.[74]  Contingency is exactly the mark of the long take, and of raw rushes: the longer the camera runs, the greater the threat of something that interrupts narrative intention and cohesion. The shock of incongruity in the CNN and UNTV rushes therefore, is precisely aligned with their status as rushes, but this shock is also what interrupts the “flow” of the conventional audio-visual narrative of the Bosnian conflict.

Conclusions

The insights gleaned from the raw rushes in this case is an indication of the value, in historiographical terms, of the preservation of rushes of any conflict situation. First of all, the rushes allowed me to establish the presence of other cameras and crews, which opens up other avenues of research to pursue, and which is a clear indication of the highly mediated and performative nature of the event depicted in this footage. Secondly, the relative neglect of the front-line rushes in favour of a focus on the humanitarian relief story sets up the international aid workers as “saviours”, and the local population as “victims” with little or no political agency, and leaves aside the question of the political aims the respective antagonists were fighting for. This speaks to an era in which Human Rights are only to be protected from violation, which ultimately favours the status quo, and which is powerless to address “facts on the ground” that have already been created. Finally, the incongruity of the “private rushes” included in the footage provide an unexpected insight into the pressures and the privileges the producers of these images were working under.

As my analysis has shown, the rushes captured during the siege of Mostar can be read to generate meanings “oblique, peripheral or even antagonistic to the text as understood”.[75] In my view, along with other “overlooked” elements within the rushes, they have the potential to evoke what the historian Eelco Runia has called “presence”, described as “the unrepresented ways in which the past is present in the present”.[76] Runia locates this in metonymy: in the overlooked, taken-for-granted figures of speech that form a “presence in absence”.[77] There appears to be a particular affinity between this formulation of “presence” and the potentialities of the overlooked, taken-for-granted elements in rushes that would normally be left on the cutting room floor.

It must be said that this analysis is specific for the technological and institutional circumstances of the 1990s. As Fossati notes, audio-visual media are in continuous transformation, and at any time the media landscape consists of hybrid technologies.[78] At the same time, the exponential rise in the production and distribution of moving images via camera phones and social media platforms has drastically changed our media ecology, producing vast, semi-structured online “collections” of moving images, in which largely random factors decide inclusion and exclusion, and which are all but impossible for humans to search comprehensively.[79] If these can be called archives at all, they are a different type of archive than the commercial news archives I have described above, similarly hidden behind corporate firewalls, but largely opaque even to the corporations that own them, and run them by algorithm. The analysis of inclusion and exclusion, of presence and absence in these “archives” will be an urgent and fascinating subject for further study.

 

Notes

[1]. “Bosniak” is the designation that was officially adopted in by the Bosnian parliament in 1994 to refer to Muslim Bosnians who were usually referred to as “Muslims” in the news media.

[2]. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, Rev. and updated ed (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997), 297. Silber and Little, among others, blame the Vance-Owen plan for encouraging the conflict between Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, as it appeared to reward ethnic cleansing and land-grabs by ethno-nationalist militias.  This plan was partly reversed by the Washington Agreement of March 1994, in which the Bosnian Croat militias (under pressure from Croatia and the US) agreed to join the Bosnian government in a federal entity.

[3]. Orhan, Ševko, Eldin, Nedžad and Sead were soldiers in the ARBiH at the time, Dženana, Amar, Amila, Jasmin, Zlatko and Senada were civilians. They were interviewed between November 2017 and July 2019. I refer to my interlocutors in Mostar only by first name.

[4]. This quote is usually attributed to the American journalist Philip Graham, but variations on it were used earlier by others.

[5]. In searches within the context of my academic research I have found that much material that is available in these news archives is either absent or all but impossible to find in deposit archives. For example, in my search for moving images of Mostar in 1993 and 1994, the British Library index yielded no results, and the BFI’s “BBC Programme Index” yielded only one documentary, while a search for “Mostar” in Getty Images (which handles the commercial BBC archive) yielded 20 BBC items between 19 and 30 August alone.

[6]. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 9-10. As Derrida points out, the etymology of archive points us to the arkheion, the house of superior magistrates (archons) in Greek antiquity, where official documents are kept under the guardianship of these archons, who are accorded the hermeneutic right and competence to interpret those documents.

[7]. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 145–46.

[8]. The exception is the CNN Collection.

[9]. Trond Lundemo, “Archives and Technological Selection”, Cinémas 24, no. 2–3 (2014): 17–18. For Lundemo, this is primarily a technological question, pointing out how analogue information gets lost by compression in the transfer of audio-visual information from analogue to digital formats.

[10]. Wolfgang Ernst, “Digital Memory and the Archive”, Electronic Mediations vol 39 (Minneapolis, MN, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 81.

[11]. The Reuters archive was bought and sold multiple times among ITNSource, Pathé, and Getty Images. Adding to the complexity, archives can “handle” collections or other archives without owning them (Getty handles BBC, ITN and NBC collections but doesn’t own the footage), and single items can contain material that has to be licenced through third parties. A truly comprehensive study of the various pressures and real-life practices in moving image archives would have to be large-scale, and is well beyond the scope of this study.

[12]. Matthew Butson, Vice-President of the Getty Images Hulton Archive, in an interview at the Hulton Archive in London about its preservation and digitisation policies, on 7 December 2021.

[13]. In my searches for news footage from the conflicts in Cyprus (1974) and in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-95), in the archives of AP, ITNSource and Getty Images, the great majority of entries would be analogue only. When requesting screeners from ITNSource for news items from Cyprus, I was asked to pay for transfers from 16mm film. The items I paid for later showed up in digital form in the searchable interface of the archive.

[14]. Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009): 13–17. Fossati argues that audio-visual media are in a state of continuous transformation, so the work of film preservation and restoration is also continuous.

[15]. This may well change for future generations with the current vogue for colourising black-and-white archive footage by Peter Jackson, among others, perhaps most notably in David Shulman’s Auschwitz Untold, which contains colourised footage of WW2 concentration camps.

[16]. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996): 2–3.; Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016): 21.; Aleida Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory”, Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 55–56. Assmann’s “Transformations between History and Memory” also provides a useful overview of the relations between memory and history.

[17]. Eyal Sivan, Izkor: Slaves of Memory, Documentary (FR3, IMA Productions, Rhea Films, 1995). A striking example of this is provided in Sivan’s film Izkor, in which Israeli schoolchildren of North African Jewish descent explain to the filmmaker their memories of the Holocaust.

[18]. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 22–28.

[19]. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002): 94, 172, 216.

[20]. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 115. The relation between historiography and narrative is highly contested and much commented on, but this falls outside the scope of this article.

[21]. Unfortunately, the same term in an academic context suggests a scholar researching film. However, Phil Clark has about 30 years of experience as a “film researcher” for the BBC and for independent television documentary productions.

[22]. Based on an online interview I conducted with Phil Clark on 19 August 2020.

[23]. In an interview conducted on 7 December 2021.

[24]. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 22–28.

[25]. Lamija Grebo, “Bosnian Serb Decree Rejecting Genocide Denial Law Sparks Uncertainty”, Balkan Insight, 13 October 2021, https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/13/bosnian-serb-decree-rejecting-genocide-denial-law-sparks-uncertainty/; Srecko Latal, “Radical Rhetoric in Bosnia Revives Fears of New Conflict”, Balkan Insight, 5 October 2021, https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/05/radical-rhetoric-in-bosnia-revives-fears-of-new-conflict/. Remarkably, what has been described as the “Mostarisation” of Bosnia-Herzegovina refers to the fact that the strict allocation of local government positions along ethnic lines in Mostar has paralysed its municipal politics for many years.

[26]. Dai Vaughan, For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 80.

[27]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 104–5; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take”, October 13 (1980): 5–6, https://doi.org/10.2307/3397696.

[28] Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003): 124.

[29]. This broad field of study is beyond the scope of this article, but significant contributions were made by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and Paul Antze among others.

[30]. Forensic Architecture, The Bombing Of Rafah: Black Friday, forensic-architecture.org, 2015, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah .

[31]. What is known as Standard Definition (SD) was the standardised resolution for video and television, which was 480×640 pixels in countries using the NTSC standard, and 576×768 pixels in countries using PAL or SECAM standards.

[32]. Because this connection existed there is still some contention as to whether the siege of Mostar was a real siege. My position is that for regular residents of Mostar this certainly amounted to a siege (after all, Sarajevo was also tenuously connected to the outside world with a tunnel under the airport).

[33]. In a calculated and well-coordinated action, a large group of mostly women and children surrounded the vehicles of the UN convoy, demanding a permanent presence of the UN in the enclave. Part of the understanding was that such presence would diminish the threat of random mortar attacks, and there was widespread sympathy in the UN for their position.

[34]. As mentioned above, Getty “handles” but doesn’t own the BBC, ITN and NBC material.

[35]. One of the online items was mislabelled: its description starts “CMS Serbian militia leader intvwd” whereas “Adnan” is a Muslim name and indeed the voice-over quotes him saying that he “lost 100 men for every meter lost to the Serbs”, so he clearly belonged to the ARBiH. Mislabelling is not uncommon in commercial archives: often descriptions are second or third-hand, and based on rough log notes from the field.

[36]. I requested and indeed received especially digitised screeners, but to the best of my knowledge those were not made available via the CNN online search function. This is another example of the “digitisation on demand” model of most news archives.

[37]. The camera in the first convoy was operated by Simo Vaatainen (who was not a professional cameraman), and the one in the second convoy by Will Stebbins. I edited the 10-minute video press release at the end of August 1993 with Stebbins.

[38]. The video unit of P&I was significantly restructured and expanded to become its own department as “UNTV” after I left early in 1994. Of the dozens of reels of rushes we shot in the time before the expansion, only a handful survived in the collection at the IWM, illustrating how easily rushes from a conflict situation can get lost.

[39]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01, United Nations 1993.

[40]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01; Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904, CNN Collection 1993.

[41]. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: Disorientation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008): 116.

[42]. From interviews with Orhan and Ševko, and also from conversations with Jimmi James.

[43]. Jeremy Bowen, War Stories, Reissue edition (Simon & Schuster UK, 2014): 180–84; Jeremy Bowen, Feature on Mostar for BBC News 6pm, 27 August 1993; Eamonn Matthews and Jeremy Bowen, Unfinished Business, 1993, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkS8YlASVzk . Bowen would return less than a month later with a BBC documentary crew, staying for about two weeks, during which time many of the “usual conditions” in the enclave had resumed. As a result, the conditions depicted in this documentary, titled Unfinished Business, are closer to the conditions experienced throughout the siege by the population of east Mostar, and the film is still highly regarded locally.

[44]. Bowen is again the exception by including a brief scene of the centralised kitchen, and mentioning the impressive level of organisation in the enclave.

[45]. Brent Sadler, MOSTAR AID CNN Edited Report, CNN 1993. The medicines were unloaded at the end of the day, but this is shown at the beginning of the report to establish the humanitarian purpose of the convoy.

[46]. Brent Sadler, MOSTAR MUSLIMS CNN Edited Report, CNN 1993. The hospital shots and the interview with Dr Mujic are not in the CNN rushes I have, and are probably from two reels that I believe to be missing from what I received: the tape numbers of the rushes start from FC7901; after the arrival of the crew in east Mostar (at the end of tape FC7902), the number FC7903 is skipped and tape FC7904 starts with a shot right on the frontline. In addition, FC7904 ends just before the moment the medical aid is unloaded by the hospital, an event that is included in the MOSTAR AID report. There is a tape FC7905, dated 8/21/1993, but this must be mislabelled: it depicts the evacuation of wounded children that happened after 25 August. It is not clear if the original reels still exist.

[47]. Carole Walker, Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070. 23 August 1993, BBC Broadcast Archives.

[48]. ‘BHS’ stands for Bosanska-Hrvatska-Srpska, and is the current politically neutral designation of the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian.

[49]. Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904. A “piece to camera” is a technical term for a statement by the reporter addressed directly to the viewer.

[50]. Walker, Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070.

[51]. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 208.

[52]. In 2019 I collaborated with Jimmi James and Smajo Bešo on a small online survey of current and former Mostar residents based on samples of untransmitted rushes posted by James. In the 44 responses, the term “Croat” was mentioned five times, the term “fascist” four times, and “Ustashe” three times. “Tito” and “Yugoslavia” were invoked twice each, while “Bosniak” and “Muslim” were mentioned only once each. I cited the results of this survey as part of a presentation of my research at the conference Why Remember? in Sarajevo on 9 July 2019, but otherwise they have not been published.

[53]. In February 2018, I attended the commemoration of Partisan fighters who fell during the liberation of Mostar from fascism in the Second World War, at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in West Mostar. It was attended by a large crowd of people, replete with Yugoslav-era flags. The event was organised by the Association of Anti-Fascist Heroes and Martyrs, a Tito-era veterans association which continues its activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Partisan Memorial Cemetery, even though it has the status of a national monument, is regularly vandalised with graffiti of swastikas and Ustashe symbols and slogans.

[54]. Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018): 128, https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526126610.; V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Gagnon attributes the ubiquity of the “ancient hatred thesis” mainly to the influence of Robert Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghosts.

[55]. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[56]. Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020): 64.

[57]. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011): 7–8.

[58]. cf. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011).

[59]. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (William Collins, 2021), 306. On the issue of false equivalence, see also Helen Walasek et al., Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2016): 6–7.

[60]. Power, A Problem from Hell, 307–8.

[61]. Matthew W. Hughey, “The White Savior Film and Reviewers’ Reception”. Symbolic Interaction 33, no. 3 (2010): 475–96. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dances with Wolves (1990) are notorious examples, but Avatar (2009) also falls squarely into the genre, showing that “non-white” can cover a wide range of Others.

[62]. Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region, 127–32, 146. Baker shows how local objections to the presence of non-white peacekeepers was often tinged with racism.

[63]. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31, https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399.

[64]. Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region, 129.

[65]. Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7901, 1993.

[66]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01.

[67]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/02, 1993.

[68]. I certainly was reminded with a shock that the “psy-ops” punchline was indeed a running gag among some of my colleagues, along with an only half-joking wager on who in the office was the CIA operative.

[69]. I requested and received the CNN rushes as “screeners”, which implies that in principle the footage is available to be licenced for use in a documentary film production. I requested and received copies of the UNTV footage from the IWM archive specifically for academic research.

[70]. Bowen, War Stories, 183. Tellingly, Bowen describes CNN cameraman Mark Biello as “a nice guy, a big drinker who called himself Mad Dog and did everything he could to become a journalistic legend”.

[71]. For an overview see Ragnhild Nordås and Siri C. A. Rustad, ‘Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Understanding Variation’, International Interactions 39, no. 4 (1 September 2013): 511–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2013.805128. Some allegations of sexual abuse by UN soldiers in Mostar were related to me during my interviews, but as far as I am aware, no formal accusations have been made against the Spanish Battalion that was operational there at the time. Other forms of the abuse of power by UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti are powerfully documented in the film It Stays With You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti, by Cahal McLaughlin and Siobhán Wills.

[72]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 13.; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New ed. (London: Fontana, 1992), 175.

[73]. Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Camera Obscura Books (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 28.

[74]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 14.

[75]. Vaughan, For Documentary, 80.

[76]. Eelco Runia, “Presence”, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 1.

[77]. Runia, 20.

[78]. Fossati, From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition, 19–20.

[79]. Lundemo, “Archives and Technological Selection”, 22.

 

Bibliography 

Assmann, Aleida. Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016.

———. “Transformations between History and Memory”. Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 49–72.

Baker, Catherine. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526126610.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”. Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New ed. London: Fontana, 1992.

Bowen, Jeremy. War Stories. Reissue edition. Simon & Schuster UK, 2014.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Electronic Mediations; v. 39. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2002.

Gagnon, V. P. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Grebo, Lamija. “Bosnian Serb Decree Rejecting Genocide Denial Law Sparks Uncertainty”. Balkan Insight, 13 October 2021. https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/13/bosnian-serb-decree-rejecting-genocide-denial-law-sparks-uncertainty/.

Hughey, Matthew W. “The White Savior Film and Reviewers’ Reception”. Symbolic Interaction 33, no. 3 (2010): 475–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2010.33.3.475.

Latal, Srecko. “Radical Rhetoric in Bosnia Revives Fears of New Conflict”. Balkan Insight, 5 October 2021. https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/05/radical-rhetoric-in-bosnia-revives-fears-of-new-conflict/.

Li, Darryl. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.

Lundemo, Trond. “Archives and Technological Selection”. Cinémas 24, no. 2–3 (2014): 17–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025147ar.

Meister, Robert. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Nordås, Ragnhild, and Siri   C. A. Rustad. “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Understanding Variation”. International Interactions 39, no. 4 (1 September 2013): 511–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2013.805128.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Observations on the Long Take”. October 13 (1980): 3. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397696.

Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Glasgow: William-Collins, 2021.

Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Runia, Eelco. “Presence”. History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–29.

Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Camera Obscura Book. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Silber, Laura, and Allan Little. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. Rev. and Updated ed. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time: Disorientation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

Walasek, Helen, contributions by Richard Carlton, Amra Hadžimuhamedović, Valery Perry, and Tina Wik. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. New York and London: Routledge, 2016.

Weizman, Eyal. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. London: Verso, 2011.

 

Filmography

Bowen, Jeremy. Feature on Mostar for BBC News 6pm_ ANBH739R, 27 August 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives

Bowen, Jeremy and Matthews, Eamonn. Unfinished Business, 4 November 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkS8YlASVzk

Forensic Architecture. The Bombing of Rafah: Black Friday. forensic-architecture.org, 2015. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah.

Getty Images. 74 Mostar Videos and HD Footage, web impression, accessed 10 December 2021. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/videos/mostar?assettype=film&begindate=1993-08-19&enddate=1993-08-30&offlinecontent=include&phrase=mostar&recency=daterange&sort=best&license=rf,rr

McLaughlin, Cahal and Wills, Siobhán. It Stays With You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti, 2018. https://vimeo.com/409176307

Sadler, Brent. MOSTAR AID CNN Edited Report 90573913, CNN Collection 1993.

———. MOSTAR MUSLIMS CNN Edited Report 90574044, CNN Collection 1993.

Sadler, Brent, and Biello, Mark. MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7901, CNN Collection 1993.

———. MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904, CNN Collection 1993.

Sivan, Eyal. Izkor: Slaves of Memory. Documentary. FR3, IMA Productions, Rhea Films, 1995.

United Nations. MOSTAR Rushes IWM UNT 933/01, United Nations 1993.

———. MOSTAR Rushes IWM UNT 933/02, United Nations 1993.

Walker, Carole. Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070, 23 August 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives.

 

Author Biography

Lennaart van Oldenborgh is a practice-based PhD candidate in the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies department at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 1993-94 he worked for the UN mission in the former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR), before settling in London in 1997, where he established himself as a documentary film editor. He edited the 2018 BAFTA winning documentary Basquiat: Rage to Riches for BBC Studios. He co-directed the feature-length documentary film Bitter Lemons with Adnan Hadzi, about the post-conflict situation in Cyprus, which premiered at the Solothurn Film Festival in 2014, and published Performing the Real, in The State of the Real (2007, I.B. Taurus). From 2017 to 2019 he taught film theory and tactical media as Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2384

*This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour*

 

“What does flesh become?”

—Thomas Waugh, from The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writing on Queer Cinema

The spectre of Barbara Hammer haunts this paper. As I watch and re-watch Nitrate Kisses (1992), I take notes cloaked by her recent death in 2019. I watch for the queers, like myself, who mourned her death as voyeurs of her work, and I find myself replaying the same scenes in Nitrate Kisses over and over. Here is one of them: two bodies move on screen, grainy and out-of-focus, filmed on black-and-white 16mm film. Limbs rise, entangle. Arms, legs, fingers, and lips move fluidly. At times it is impossible to identify what body parts the camera lingers on, angling curiously, unobtrusively, around the twisting figures on the carpet. Skin is magnified and expands to fill entire shots. Pores become something whole. Shadows from the window blinds rib the two bodies with bars of darkness. Sunlight glistens on saliva and wet hands.

Nitrate Kisses unfolds in three phases. Each phase features a queer couple having sex aligned with voice-over interviews and archival materials (photographs, letters, and other ephemera) detailing a particular historical trauma. Phase I sees an elderly lesbian couple having slow, gentle sex on a sunlight-dappled carpet; the movement of their bodies is interspersed with photographs of an unidentified building in ruins and lesbian pulp fiction book covers. This phase highlights the general erasure of lesbian relationships from the sanitised, hegemonic historical record. Phase II of the film shows two gay men having playful, spirited sex while the voice-over features interviews with different gay men outlining the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code on gay male life. Later in the phase, men share personal stories of loss experienced during the AIDS crisis. Phase III features two young, punk women (leather dykes) engaging in BDSM sex, as voice-over narratives and photographs piece together the stories of queer women who were purposefully disappeared from greater historical narratives of life experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. In each phase, archival materials frame the erotic encounters, providing a means of sensing, feeling and witnessing pain.

Observing the sex scenes in Hammer’s experimental documentary compels me to argue that queer sex can become an archival practice of both remembering and processing violence and death. Indeed, the limits of our corporeal boundaries can be tested and re-drawn through the various acts of queer sex in Nitrate Kisses, reconfiguring past traumas and pain for queer people. Hammer must employ the erotic body as an archive because she is working in the absence of conventional archives to transmit knowledge about queer loss, trauma, and death across generations.[1] I argue that Nitrate Kisses thus employs the erotic body to achieve three main objectives: (1) to reinscribe the past in the present, specifically within and upon the flesh of her performers; (2) to make visible lesbians and gay men previously disappeared from the historical record via mass death and purposeful archival erasure; and (3) to bring queer apparitions – ghostly figures, figures representative of the past – to bear upon present-day bodies via physical touch. In this sense, Hammer presents a deeply embodied, sensorial archival practice or remembering and subverting historical trauma and loss. Each of Hammer’s objectives is tied to her overarching directorial ambition to re-imagine and construct an archive in which pleasure and pain exist on a continuum connecting past and present. Each phase of sex in the film develops from bodies moving intimately with historical loss and trauma – as if trauma itself were an entity. Ghostly sex indeed.

While sex in Hammer’s film is not an antidote to queer death and cannot make up loss of life, I argue that the scenes of queer sex in Hammer’s film break open generative spaces in which the physical body mediates historical traumas, introducing new forms of desire and a unique kind of queer futurity. Hammer deploys the body mid-intercourse as a canvas to project the most affecting depths of suffering, transmutated through physical touch and expression of pleasure. The body in Nitrate Kisses becomes a cypher for past historical pain. Sex becomes a method of remembering historical injustices and making them visible for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. In Nitrate Kisses, the body is not a stable object, perhaps not even a “body” at all; rather, it becomes representative of a “figure for relations between bodies past and present.”[2]

In my analysis of queer bodies and sex in Nitrate Kisses, I engage historian Elizabeth Freeman’s methodological erotohistoriography, which understands the body as a tool to write the “lost” or the past into the present. For Freeman, erotic pleasure is a means of understanding and knowing – a form of “historical consciousness intimately involved with corporeal sensations.”[3] In Nitrate Kisses, the past is inscribed upon the moving bodies as they have sex. Thus, paradoxically, death is inscribed or imprinted upon the living in the moment of copulation, and upon and through their pleasure.

My analysis of trauma as unfolding and transforming through the act of sex is critical because it reads queer sex directly against narratives depicting queer desire ending in death. As Heather Love maintains, “the history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of sexual and gender deviants.”[4] The depiction of lesbian love as tragic, isolated, and concluding in death is widely reflected in historical cinematic representations of lesbian life. Such notorious films include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which concludes with an attempted suicide on part of a queerly coded schoolgirl, and The Children’s Hour (1961), in which a similarly coded protagonist hangs herself. In this essay, I use a framework of erotics which positions the pleasuring/pleasured queer body against its antithesis: the murdered, tortured or vanished queer body. Mid “procreation” or “reproduction,” the bodies in Nitrate Kisses promise a kind of queer futurity – if not biological or genetic, a powerfully symbolic form of futurity. According to my method of analysis, then, mass queer historical death or erasure is neither overlooked nor shied away from, nor does it play a starring role in consuming the bodies at the heart of this research.

I will begin by briefly summarising sex and the body as both relate to the tradition of queer-feminist experimental film before reviewing the theorisation of queer historicity, trauma, and the body. I then complete a three-part analysis of each phase of Nitrate Kisses, examining how traumatic memory is inscribed upon and through the bodies having sex and how accompanying pain is re-worked by the physical, sexual body, giving way to new forms of queer desire and pleasure and invoking a queer-feminist archival practice. Lastly, I open my analysis up more broadly to consider how erotic physical touch and the body’s materiality engender differing forms of experiential, embodied archival knowledge. 

The Influence of Queer-feminist Experimental Film

Hammer’s oeuvre stems from a lineage of feminist experimental cinema ushered in by the sexual revolution in the early 1960s, and includes films produced by Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman, to name only a couple of notable directors. Linda Williams aptly defines feminist and lesbian films produced during this porno-chic era as “hard-core art.”[5] Williams’ analysis of these films reveals their slippery positioning between pornographic cinema and avant-garde artistic film. Representations of the erotic female body thus dominated feminist experimental film, much to the chagrin of the second-wave feminist anti-pornography movement, vigilantly spurred on by lesbian feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.[6] But for Hammer and her sex-positive corollaries, the explicit female body was clay, “palpable, malleable…the raw material” of their films.[7] As Ara Osterweil argues, experimental cinema constructed flesh as “an endlessly variable substance that could come unbound…through shattering encounters with desire, sex, pain, birth and death”.[8] Graphic sexual depictions of the female body were the “primary artistic tool[s]” of feminist auteurs.[9] Their bodies were political weapons,  “battleground[s]” where, as Waugh explains, queer bodies “squeez[ed] every drop of pleasure and pain” from structures of censorship and control.[10] We see this reconceptualisation of the body and of flesh in Nitrate Kisses, introducing and expanding possibilities for not only what a body is, but what it can do.

Theorizing Queer Historicity, Trauma, and the Body

“For groups constituted by historical injury,” argues Heather Love, “the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.”[11] For Love, looking backwards into the past is necessary to guarantee the future survival of queer women. Queer history, she asserts, centres around a “politics of the past” – the shared, embodied myths and feelings that Love argues are constructed via the long-term effects of past traumas and homophobia: suffering, escapism, regret, shame, melancholia, and failure.[12] The lesbian in history, Love argues, is always turning back to the past, nostalgic, mired in unresolved loss, grief, and mourning and obsessed with “wounded attachments.”[13] Similarly, Ann Cvetkovich understands the perceived queer attachment to trauma as an “archive of feelings,” driven by an urgent compulsion to “never forget” the pain and loss of the past.[14] But unlike Love and Cvetkovich, Freeman approaches queer historicity not through a focus on loss, injury, separation, displacements or “negative and negating forms of bodily experience” (what she terms as “queer melancholia theory”), but rather a focus on queer pleasure as “encountering, witnessing, and transforming history.”[15] Contrasting Love and Cvetkovich’s preoccupation with trauma, Freeman’s erotohistoriography is:

        …distinct from the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times. Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid. And it uses the body as a tool to erect, figure, or perform that encounter.[16]

For Freeman, the body may pleasure “itself with the past,” figuring a much different relationship between history and the queer body than imagined by Love or Cvetkovich.[17] In this relationship, history pleasures the body rather than troubling it. While Hammer seizes Love’s challenge for queers to engage the past without suffering bodily or psychic destruction, she does so following Freeman’s edicts. I intervene here to propose that Hammer’s work synthesises these two contrasting theoretical schools of thought. She acknowledges the necessity for queers to turn to the past, to honour the urge to “never forget,” but she is wary of becoming mired in loss and pain. In Nitrate Kisses, Hammer overlays the present with the past – suffusing her bodies with pastness, with the trauma of her performers’ queer ancestors – but the act of sex, the eroticism of their bodies, works the pain, the pastness, the loss and trauma.

What Flesh (and Sex) Become

I turn here to Phase I of Nitrate Kisses, which explores how lesbian existence is largely rendered invisible throughout history. Phase I pinpoints certain, sharp moments of grief: an unnamed, unseen narrator tells the story of American author Willa Cather, whose memorial scholars visit from around the world while routinely failing to mention her lesbianism in their research. Another anonymous speaker discloses the burden of invisibility, who describes the closeted lifestyle of Cather and her partner: “they developed an attitude of extreme discretion, and before her death they burned all of [their] letters.” Scenes of abandoned homes and empty fields play slowly, then begin to speed up frenetically. Another anonymous speaker cuts in: “lesbians disappear first of all because we are women, women disappear,” she says. “They disappear because they are deviant, because it’s still shameful.” These statements, and the weight of the pain expressed in them, bleed over and through the bodies of two women embracing on a bed. The viewer watches an intimate, slow sex scene unfold. Other painful narratives are confessed as the physical intimacy between the two women progresses: stories of violent raids on lesbian pubs by gangs of policemen, of the difficulty of coming into lesbian consciousness, and descriptions of lesbian women losing gay male friends during the AIDS crisis. While we are not privy to the faces or even names of the speakers, including the blurred-out, pixelated faces of women dancing together at lesbian socials that play intermittently, we are given lingering, intense shots of a woman’s face contorted in pleasure as she receives cunnilingus. The pain and grief of the speakers, in this sense, is transposed onto and through the woman receiving pleasure – indeed it becomes her pleasure.

At the same time as we hear a speaker recollect being called a “dirty lesbian” and “dyke,” we see the women having sex smile and laugh. The erased life existences of queer women emerge, channelled into an intersubjective, liminal space broken open by sexual contact, constructed by both pleasure and the pain of recollection. Those made invisible become, I argue, the most visible as they burgeon uncontrollably from the two women’s bodies as grins, moans, laughter, and other expressions of physical pleasure. Here we can consider Nick Davis’ conceptualisation of desire and pleasure as mutable, “passing through and forcing changes within subjects rather than belonging to them as static [and] innate.”[18] Davis, theorising a Deleuzian model of queer cinema, argues that desire and pleasure do not “settle into any one arrangement but concern flows and frictions across and within them all.”[19] We can apply Davis’ ideas to Phase I of Nitrate Kisses. We see desire and pleasure work expansively, in nebulous, fluid, and interconnected ways between the two women’s bodies as both forces are sutured to past traumas. The desire and pleasure of the two women play, as queer theorist Margrit Shildrick states, “across points of connection between disparate surfaces or entities.”[20] In the case of Nitrate Kisses, these points of connection are made between the grieving bodies of the ghostly narrators reliving painful memories and the pleasured/pleasuring bodies of the two women having sex.

Similarly, in Phase II of Nitrate Kisses, the institutionalisation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1933 and the AIDS crisis beginning in the 1980s are featured as two historical events whose accompanying cultural memories steeped in pain and trauma are productively worked through the act of a gay male couple having sex. Here, the AIDS crisis is explored or portrayed as an equally destructive force of queer eradication akin to the metaphorical extinction of gay men from cinema via the Code. As in Phase I of the film, voice-over narratives in Phase II are shared by nameless, anonymous speakers as the couple continues to have sex – except in this case, the narratives depict losses attributed to the AIDS epidemic. One speaker explains how he and a partner lost fourteen close friends in a single year. “It was relentless,” he says.

While the AIDS crisis section of Phase II directly mirrors the structure of Phase I, Hammer’s exploration of the Code’s incapacitating effect on queer bodies is stylistically different. As one of the men poises, about to enter his partner, a textual scroll-up of the Code is superimposed across the couple, beginning with Section II, “SEX.” The Code continues to scroll over the bodies having sex, who are ironically engaging in the very acts prohibited by the Code, including what the Code terms “illicit sex,” “scenes of passion,” “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces,” and the most marked delineation of Section II of the Code, the fourth component, which states: “sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.”

The Code led to the production of films that centred around queer death as the pinnacle tension – Rebecca (1940) is a strong example, in which a queerly coded protagonist, Mrs. Danvers, meets an untimely death at the film’s conclusion.[21] We might read this as a suggestion that queerness could not acceptably be presented as a liveable experience – it had to be put to death, so to speak. Ultimately, the Code reflected the powerful arm of the Catholic church during the 1930s.[22] The Code attempted to reach into the bedrooms of Americans by officially controlling and censoring on-screen sex.

In contrast to Phase I, the prohibition of queer existence is physically imprinted upon and through the flesh of the two gay men having sex as the body becomes a site of inscription for pain. Here, we can build on Osterweil’s thesis on flesh in experimental film as an “endlessly variable substance” by invoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of flesh – what Laura Mulvey and Martine Beugnet interpret to be a form of “embodied consciousness.”[23] As the men frolic on the bed, their flesh, scrolled over with the words of the Code, becomes imbued with embodied consciousness. Their moving limbs become animated, enlivened with a specific purpose – to rebel against the Code: sex-as-rebellion, perversion-as-rebellion. Shots from the silent film Lot in Sodom (1933) are also interspersed with these sex scenes, which further subverts the deeply “moral” nature of the Code. Nothing short of Christian propaganda, Lot in Sodom conveyed the punishment of, among other various other sins, homosexuality. Because the male actors featured in the film were dressed in garish costumes, were heavily made-up, and their physical movements exaggerated, the effect is campy and queer. As one of the men giving a voice-over interview in Nitrate Kisses ironically explains: “you are supposed to learn a lesson in the telling of a moral tale, but … the telling of the lesson … becomes very seductive.”

The bodies of queer men in Phase II can thus be read along a continuum: the same bodies in Lot in Sodom that signify eventual queer death and intended to instil fear and disgust in male viewers could have provoked feelings of attraction or arousal in others. Desire and sexuality seem to “decompose and recompose according to different encounters.”[24] Both desire and sexuality are evoked not only through the couple having sex in Hammer’s film but also for the actors in Lot in Sodom and their supposedly condemned viewers. Desire and pleasure are thus presented in Phase II as polymorphous, metamorphosing as “conjoining and detaching particles, series and peaks, virtualities and intensities of desire.”[25] As the couple’s flesh moves in an embodied consciousness, their flesh marked by the eradicating words of the Code, desire and pleasure unfold in what Shildrick terms a “fluid indeterminacy.”[26] Connections are continuously drawn between the couple having sex according to what Davis asserts are “highly eroticized unions, breakdowns, hostilities, reunions, ecstasies, surfeits, and losses.”[27]

Phase III of Nitrate Kisses is markedly different from Phase I and II because, while the structure of this phase is similar to the first two, the lesbian couple filmed having sex are two leather dykes engaging in BDSM sexual play. This scene is interrupted by shots of concentration camp ruins, broken windows, gravestones and bunkers, and details the experiences of lesbian women under the Third Reich. Playing over the sex scene and shots of architectural deterioration is a song by queer German singer Claire Waldo, whose mechanical, forceful chorus repeats, “Oh, don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why, I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die.” The practice of BDSM embraces pain as a form of sexual and erotic pleasure. As Timo Airaksinen explains, when BDSM practitioners welcome and indeed urge on feelings of pain and enact gestures of “violence,” the very meanings of pain and violence are reconfigured, altering their ability to wound.[28]

BDSM sex presents us with the most cohesive, integrated representation of pain and pleasure in Nitrate Kisses – violence transmutated into pure desire and sexual bliss felt on part of the leather dykes. Phase III explores what might be considered a “sex-violence-body nexus.”[29] BDSM practices here interrogate the idea of wounding-as-pleasure, focusing on an “erotics of wounding”[30] and injury deeply invested in consensual, enthusiastic participation.

In this section of the film, shots of mass graves, the narrative of a woman speaking about recognising a fellow lesbian while held in Ravensbrück, rows of empty chairs, Waldo’s cryptic lyrics and the ever-present ruins are read into the pain harnessed and deployed as power and pleasure in the BDSM sexual practices between the leather dykes. Thus, the “wounds” or injuries that the women inflict upon each other may best be understood as a process – part of the process of attempting to transform historical pain and trauma through sex. To wound in this case might be considered something sacred, rather than horrific, a transformative ritual of sorts.[31] Thus, through the practices of BDSM, the two leather dykes “mobilize erotic pleasure in… events normally experienced as tragic, violent and traumatic.”[32] This ability to wield pain effectively leads to a “multiplication of potentialities of the female body” in its capacity to experience and express pleasure and desire.[33]

Instead of disconnecting or distancing themselves from the past, the queer bodies in Phase III of Nitrate Kisses refuse psychic destruction and instead caress it knowingly. Hélène Cixous remarks on the fear of recalling painful memories, stating, “we are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: We are terribly afraid of looking at it…and at the same time we are perhaps the only one person capable of looking at it.”[34] Perhaps the only way to bear witness to such traumatic historical truth without succumbing to it – perhaps the most strategic way to examine the wound – is to mediate pain with pleasure, to make from pain, or make pain itself, something beautiful and sublime. We may be able to watch trauma unfold on and through the performers’ bodies without wounding ourselves so deeply in the process. And we may be more aptly primed to receive the images and statements from voice-over interviews that allow us to apprehend a much broader, encompassing scope of pain.

Archival Materiality and Physical Touch

In each of the three phases of Nitrate Kisses a singular hand guides the viewer from scene to scene, calling attention to particular, fine details: a hand slowly twisting the knob on a dilapidated door to admit the viewer into the darkness of an abandoned house; a hand tracing a woman’s silhouette on a photograph; a hand feeling the grooved words engraved on a tombstone; a wet hand fucking; a hand pointing to a 1909 bill established in Germany that officially criminalised lesbianism.[35] This is a spectral hand, upon first appearance seemingly disembodied and free-floating, associated with no particular voice or entity in the film, and it seems to extend outwards from the viewer’s own body, positioning the viewer as holding the camera, entering into ruins, remembering, or having sex.

The hand is possessed by the materiality of the archival objects it encounters – the physical sensations produced by touching and interacting with these objects. To look is not enough. The hand, the archivist’s body, must get closer. As Alexandra Juhasz explains, feminist film demonstrates a need for the past, for history, to be “alive, instructive, interactive.”[36] We might conceive of the involved hand as symbolically refuting the traditional objective relationship normally constructed between documentary subjects and filmmakers. We might also think of Hammer’s involved hand as contesting the classic “separation between artist and art object.”[37]

Hammer’s embodied participation in the film means that her use of the camera also actively works against the “filmmaker-as-fly-on-the-wall-theory” often deployed in documentary film.[38] Instead, as Osterweil explains, Hammer approaches her subjects with great intimacy, merging “emotional transparency with corporeal closeness.”[39] As Hammer wonders,  “the problem for me is how to take the camera to bed without objectifying the erotic experience, how to make the camera a sexual additive.”[40] Thus, even in shots where Hammer’s hand is not featured interacting with archival objects, the viewer is aware of her holding the camera – filming becomes a tactile and visceral act. Hammer uses the camera as an extension of her own physicality, as if another participatory body in the sex scenes.

Anna Cooper Albright asks: “how is one touched by history?”[41] I ask: how might one touch history? For Hammer, “making up” lost history is a material, embodied and physical archival process. The body and its capacity for physical touch (here exemplified by the ever-inquisitive, probing finger and embodied camera) convey a means of generating and processing knowledge through “bodiedness.” The body, in this case, is a “site of consciousness and cognition … involv[ed] in the recovery and reenactment of memory.”[42] It is physical touch – the touch of a finger on a photograph, for example – that becomes a conduit for accessing archival knowledge, and for unlocking what exists below the photograph, what cannot be felt merely by looking. Physical touch is critical to Hammer’s archival project because, as Ivo Van Hove claims, “the body makes us remember.”[43] Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland argue that knowledge can be accessed or even generated via bodily physical states and actions. Visceral physical interaction may therefore generate historical knowledge. Perhaps put most bluntly by Freeman, archival materiality and the necessity of physical touch reveal that “history is a hole to penetrate, but not with the usual instruments. That Sapphic finger.”[44] Indeed, erotohistoriography espouses that mere physical contact with historical materials may provoke pleasurable bodily responses “that are themselves a form of understanding.”[45] I point here to Julie R. Enszer’s investigation of lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt’s personal materials stored at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Harvard University). Enszer describes finding, much to her surprise, Pratt’s vibrator:

After carefully folding and rewrapping the batik outfit, I unfurl the acid-free paper that wraps Minnie Bruce Pratt’s vibrator. It is light. Lighter than any vibrator I have ever held. I realize there are no batteries in it. It is big. Bigger than any vibrator I have ever owned. It is cream. It is plastic. It is ridged. Idly, I unscrew the base, where the batteries belong. I gently run my hands along the hard plastic. I want to smell it. I look around. No one is looking at me here in the archives. No one seems to care that I have found this intimate    object of pleasure.[46]

Enszer emphasises the significance of corporeal pleasure as a fundamental component of lesbian-feminist epistemology. We can read the pleasure conjured by the physical touch of archival materials as a significant element of practice for Hammer’s lesbian-feminist archival methodology. For Hammer, lesbian sexuality is a means of feeling through and understanding the past experiences of queers before her. The touch of the finger to a photograph, or to engraved words on a tombstone, demonstrates a tactile exchange between the physical body and material objects. In this case, the literal finger representing the archivist becomes a boundary or conduit through which historical knowledge transmits by osmosis. Physical interaction with archival materials, as demonstrated by Enszer, precipitates a change within the body of the probing researcher or archivist. Enszer is surprised by the weight of Pratt’s vibrator, its ridged sides. Her experience is far from voyeuristic; rather, holding Pratt’s vibrator plunges Enszer immediately into Pratt’s psychic territory. In this sense, pleasure-as-knowledge aroused by physical touch in the archive is a transformative force.

We might relate Enszer’s experience in the Schlesinger Library to Hammer’s “Sapphic finger.” Enszer draws continuous parallels between her own life experiences and Pratt’s. Various physical aspects of the vibrator trigger Enszer’s memories of her experiences with a vibrator. In Nitrate Kisses, the hand touching various artefacts – whether it be the photographs, text, or objects – seems to touch past, touch beyond, the bare surface it encounters, puncturing into the pastness of the artifacts themselves. Here I am reminded of Freeman’s metaphor of history as a “hole to penetrate.” At one point in Phase III, for instance, Hammer’s finger (or metaphorically, our hand as archivist/viewer) seems to point at a photograph of Willa Cather dressed and passing successfully as a man. But rather than merely point to Cather, I interpret the finger as trailing gently over Cather’s heart. The finger does not carry out a cold, informative act of pointing-as-exposure (“see that this body is Willa Cather dressed as a man”); instead, it seems to strain for a connection to Cather available only through intimate physical touch with Cather’s body via the medium of the photograph.

Physical touch as exemplified by Enszer and Hammer gestures to what Lucus Hilderbrand terms “cross-temporal queer contact.”[47] This contact can be understood as the multitude of connections between present and past queer people that expose “recurring desires in the past and … fantasies of queer pasts, communities and even asynchronies and anachronisms across generations and eras.”[48] Such cross-historical touch indicates, as Freeman argues, a “queer becoming-collective-across time.”[49] This is a kind of becoming that does not adhere to temporal, spatial, or physical boundaries. As Freeman explains, some bodies register “on their very surface the co-presence of several historically contingent events, social movements and/or collective pleasures.”[50] The bodies featured in Hammer’s films are conflations of queer experiences and identities. Queerness, specifically lesbian sexuality, can be understood as unfolding in an interconnected, intersubjective process. Hammer’s physical touch as archivist/filmmaker reaches through to Willa Cather’s 1930’s stoic, repressed butchness, and that same archival queer desire intertwines with Enszer’s meticulous, surprising study of Pratt’s vibrator, held in the palm of her hand, years later. In this sense, the “disembodied” Sapphic finger introduces not only physical touch but paradoxically, a fluid apparitional touch to Nitrate Kisses – a touch that seems to connect moments in queer history, striving to create “new types of collective experience.”[51] It serves as the site for political action: at one moment Hammer/the viewer is connected to Cather, at another moment they may be connected, in some psychic way, to lesbians tortured during the Holocaust by, as exemplified in another part of Phase III, the hand touching a German bill or reference book defining the term “lesbian.” The Sapphic finger (Hammer’s ever-present hand) is uncanny, seeming to intrude upon scenes without warning, a manifestation of the viewer’s own desire to reach out and touch Cather, the graves, the pain of others. It feels for us, energetically operating according to its own force of life.

Bodily Decay and Filmic Ephemerality

The materiality of the body in Nitrate Kisses marks it as “an ephemeral field site.”[52] The body, of course, persists only as long as a human life span, if it does not first fall peril to one of the forms of death – symbolic or otherwise – detailed in any of the three phases of Hammer’s film (erasure of historical existence, a biological epidemic such as AIDS, or genocide, in the case of the Holocaust). In drawing attention to the ephemeral, material nature of the body, Hammer reminds us that film, particularly nitrate film, is also subject to inevitable decay through the process of nitrate acetate degradation.[53] Nitrate, like the delicate biochemistry of the human body, has a highly unstable chemical composition. Just as the body ages and deteriorates, so too does film. Gerda Cammaer explains that only twenty percent of the films produced in the 1920s still exist. We are reminded that, like the lost films, queer bodies are lost, rendered invisible, and may slip into gaps in history. The bodies of Holocaust survivors or loved ones of AIDS victims, and their narratives, like nitrate film, are hurtling towards full disappearance. In this sense, Hammer’s repetitive, sustained shots of ruins, scraps of photographs, and even voice-overs given in overlapping, chaotic fragments become ominous. They point to what has been left of queer life when the historical record is sanitised, and reflect the narratives of the silenced, those made absent who are not privy to the luxury of “traditional, seamless, narrativized historiography.”[54] Perhaps the title of the film, then, gestures to the fleeting, queer “kisses” – highly unstable in and of themselves, true kisses of nitrate – made across time, made between the archivist and the deceased, between historical bodies and the ever probing Sapphic Finger. 

Conclusion: “it is necessary to be touched” 

Nitrate Kisses facilitates a “polymorphous desire to touch and open up.”[55] That is, physical touch in the film becomes conflated with other bodily senses, including vision and sight. Hammer explains:

When I had my experience coming out in 1970, I touched a woman’s body for the first time when we made love. All the corpuscles on my skin were highly charged by touching a body similar to my own. I think that my sense of sight is connected to my sense of touch.[56]

 I think here of the Code scrolled over the intertwined, writhing bodies of the gay men or the deep, throaty voiced refrain of Claire Waldo’s “I tell you we must die” echoing out and over the leather dykes as they strike each other. Like Hammer’s polymorphous, archival touch, Williams explains that sex no longer “takes place at a single moment in a single event,” rather it may unfold across different temporalities and bodies.[57] The different forms of pleasure, desire, and sex that ripple through Nitrate Kisses elucidate the contrasting modes or practices of survival adopted by queer people in the face of death or erasure. Touch, though, is dangerous, or perhaps, what prompts touch is dangerous. The sex scenes in Hammer’s film, toeing the line of pornographic cinema, are driven by tension, a fear even, that “we may be ineluctably drawn to touch [the] images, to touch ourselves, or to touch others.”[58] But as Hammer asserts conclusively, “it is necessary to be touched.”[59] Physical touch and sex in Nitrate Kisses does not undo the past loss of queer life. Yet, sex, eroticism and physical touch, framed in Nitrate Kisses through the use of archival materials, are able to grow a cross-temporal queer figure capable of surviving into the future. It is through Hammer’s subversive archival practices that the bodies in Nitrate Kisses – the elderly lesbian couple, the gay male couple, and the leather dykes – stand as incarnations of this figure of queer futurity, something or someone that secures queer survival by combatting loss, trauma, and pain with pleasure.

Notes

[1] Alana Kumbier, Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014) 3.

[2] Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) 116.

[3] Freeman, Time Binds, 96.

[4] Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) 1.

[5] Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) 259.

[6] Chuck Kleinhans, “Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History” in Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) 168.

[7] Thomas Waugh, The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) 239.

[8] Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-garde Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) 14.

[9] Ara Osterweil and David Baumfleck, “Emergent Bodies: Human, All Too Human, Post Human” in The Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens, ed. by T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez, and Joseph Starr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009) 190.

[10] Waugh, The Fruit Machine, 144.

[11] Love, Feeling Backward, 1.

[12] Love, Feeling Backward, 21.

[13] Love, Feeling Backward, 42.

[14] Ann Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 110. September 6th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-107.

[15] Freeman, Time Binds, 58.

[16] Freeman, Time Binds, 96.

[17] Freeman, Time Binds, 56.

[18] Nick Davis, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 190.

[19] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 25.

[20] Margrit Shildrick, “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 127.

[21] Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) 36.

[22] Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) 84.

[23] Laura Mulvey and Martine Beugnet, “Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective” in Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015) 190.

[24] Teresa Rizzo, Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction (London: Continuum, 2012) 52.

[25] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 17. 

[26] Shildrick, “Prosthetic Performativity,” 121.

[27] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 12.

[28] Timo Airaksinen “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM” SAGE 8, no. 2 (2018): 1. September 9th 2021, DOI;215824401877173.

[29] Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn, Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 2.

[30] Burr and Hearn, Sex, Violence and the Body, 2

[31] Greg Youmans, “Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer’s Films of the 1970s,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 27 no. 3 (2012): 105. September 7th 2021. DOI:10.1215/02705346-1727473.

[32] Anthony McCosker, “Transformations of Pain: Erotic Encounters with Crash,” in Sex,Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, ed. by Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 104.

[33] Chrysanthi Nigianni, “Butterfly Kiss: The Contagious Kiss of Becoming-Lesbian,” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 169.

[34] Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (London: Routledge, 2005) 29.

[35] Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) 200.

[36] Alexandra Juhasz, “Bad Girls Come and Go, but a Lying Girl Can Never Be Fenced in” in Feminism and Documentary, ed. by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 96.

[37] Osterweil and Baumfleck, “Emergent Bodies,” 241.

[38] Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 13.

[39] Ara Osterweil, “A Body Is Not a Metaphor: Barbara Hammer’s X-Ray Vision,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2010): 193. September 16th 2021,  DOI:10.1080/10894160903196533.

[40] Jacquelyn Zita, “The Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter­currencies of a Lesbian Iconography” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media no. 24 (1981): 15. September 7th 2021. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC24-25folder/BarbaraHammerZita.html

[41] Anna Cooper Albright, “Touching History” in Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed. by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 73.

[42] Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory.(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 6.

[43] Ivo Van Hove, “The Body Makes You Remember” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed.by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 72.

[44] Freeman, Time Binds, 109.

[45] Freeman, Time Binds, 105.

[46] Julie Enszer, “Feverishly Lesbian-Feminist: Archival Objects and Queer Desires” in Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, ed. by Amy Stone and Jamie Cantrell (Paw Prints, 2016) 166.

[47] Lucas Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s and Couch’s Queer Sound Tracks,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28, no. 2 (2013): 45. September 9th  2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-2209916.

[48] Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync,” 1.

[49] Freeman, Time Binds, 123.

[50] Freeman, Time Binds, 123.

[51] Osterweil, “A Body is Not a Metaphor,” 190.

[52] Tomie Hahn, “Stalking Embodied Knowledge—Then What?” in Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed. by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 34.

[53] Gerda Cammaer, “Canadian Cinema, Ephemeral Cinema” in Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, ed. by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) 289.

[54] Diane Waldman and Janet Walker. Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 21.

[55] Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync,” 53.

[56] John David Rhodes, “This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer,” Film Criticism 39, no.1(2015): 115.

[57] Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “frenzy of the Visible”(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) 262.

[58] Kelly Dennis, Art/porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg, 2009) 3.

[59] Rhodes, “This Was Not Cinema,” 120.

 

Bibliography

Airaksinen, Timo. “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM.” Sexualities, no. 2 (2018). 1-9. September 9th 2021, DOI;215824401877173. doi:10.1177/2158244018771730.

Albright, Anna C. “Touching History.” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 73-74. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Bissell, Bill, and Linda Haviland. Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Burr, Vivien, and Jeff Hearn. Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Cammaer, Gerda. “Canadian Cinema, Ephemeral Cinema.” In Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, edited by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, 284-93. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.

Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 2005.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 107-47. September 6th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-107.

Davis, Nick. The Desiring-image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Dennis, Kelly. Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Enszer, Julie. “Feverishly Lesbian-Feminist: Archival Objects and Queer Desires.” In Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy Stone and Jamie Cantrell, 149-70. Paw Prints, 2016.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hahn, Tomie. “Stalking Embodied Knowledge – Then What?” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 28-34. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s and Couch’s Queer Sound Tracks.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28, no. 2 (2013): 45-75. September 9th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-2209916.

Hove, Ivo Van. “The Body Makes You Remember.” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 72. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Juhasz, Alexandra. “Bad Girls Come and Go, but a Lying Girl Can Never Be Fenced in.” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 95-110. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History.” In Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz, 167-86. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Krzywinska, Tanya. Sex and the Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Kumbier, Alana. Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McCosker, Anthony. “Transformations of Pain: Erotic Encounters with Crash.” In Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, edited by Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn, 10. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Mulvey, Laura, and Martine Beugnet. “Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective.” In Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, 190-202. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

Nigianni, Chrysanthi. “Butterfly Kiss: The Contagious Kiss of Becoming-Lesbian.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, 168-78. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Osterweil, Ara, and David Baumflek. “Emergent Bodies: Human, All Too Human, Post Human.” In The Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens, edited by T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez, and Joseph Starr, 240-58. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009.

Osterweil, Ara. “A Body Is Not a Metaphor: Barbara Hammer’s X-Ray Vision.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2010): 185-200. September 16th 2021,  DOI:10.1080/10894160903196533.

Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-garde Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Rich, B. R. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Rizzo, Teresa. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. London: Continuum, 2012.

Rhodes, John David. “This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer.” Film Criticism 39, no. 1 (2015): 115-58.

Shildrick, Margrit. “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, 116-28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Waugh, Thomas. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Waldman, Diane and Janet Walker. Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Youmans, Greg. “Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer’s Films of the 1970s.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 27, no. 3 (2012): 101-35. September 7th 2021. doi:10.1215/02705346-1727473.

Zita, Jacquelyn. “The Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter­Currencies of a Lesbian Iconography.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 24 (1981): 2-18. September 7th 2021. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC24-25folder/BarbaraHammerZita.html

Filmography

Barbara Hammer, Nitrate Kisses, directed by Barbara Hammer (1990; New York City, USA: 1992), film (DVD).

Lot in Sodom, directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1993; USA: 1993), film.

Mädchen in Uniform, directed by Leontine Sagan (1931; Germany: 1931), film

The Children’s Hour, directed by William Wyler (1961; USA: 1961), film.

Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1940; USA: 1940), film.

 

Author Biography

Rachel Lallouz is a PhD student, editor, and creative writer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Her primary areas of research include queer theory and contemporary art, autobiography, and queer-feminist medical humanities. Her research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2381

 

“Welcome to the exercise show!” a boy’s voice announces, his palm covering the phone camera lens. “Today you’ll be seeing our coaches…let’s start!” He lowers his hand to reveal two white, healthy-looking six-year-olds in school clothes. They look at each other and giggle. “Ten jumping jacks!” says the off-camera voice. The kids count together as they bounce up and down in syncopation, arms flailing. “Five push-ups!” The children move to the floor, moving to an exercise that resembles frog jumps. When they have finished the set, they turn towards each other, grinning widely, pleased with their accomplishment.

This video of the younger children at a family gathering was taken on my sister’s phone by her elder child. None of the adults in the home were aware of the recording until later that evening, when she discovered it on her phone. From there it was sent to me and other relatives. I then forwarded it to a friend in Barbados, who participates in an online fitness group with her friends, a group of middle-aged Black women of the African diaspora, spread out across the globe. She then passed the video on to them. A minute’s worth of living room child’s play had made it to several continents in less than a day, moving across geographies, generations, cultures, and racial identities.

What kind of video is this? It is not purely what we have come to think of as the home movie, in which only “invested spectators”– those who care about the children involved in its production – have a stake or interest in watching, preserving, or circulating the text.[1] Viewers beyond the family saw it even before some of the children’s parents. And despite its resemblance to online video memes (in both length and content), it is not exactly what is typically thought of as social media either, because it was circulated through direct, private messaging rather than through online social networks (such as Facebook or Instagram) or discovered by viewers through video search outcomes (as we would expect from video sharing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo). What, then, if it were to be posted on an online sharing platform and happened to go viral and earn profit for the person who posted it? The actual and potential lifecycle of this particular video points to a myriad of questions about for whom this video holds meaning. It matters who holds power over how that video might be appropriated, manipulated, monetised, or preserved. Its particular production and circulation path troubles existing categories of non-professional media, as does the content.

Archives of personal, family, or community media have always been rich and complex sites of analysis, albeit relatively closed ones. However, when we now upload personal media to video sharing platforms we subject them not only to new economies of scale, but of meaning and audience as well.[2] One’s personal media, once posted online, has the potential to reach millions of strangers, whose responses and interpretations will most certainly differ, reflecting new meaning back onto the text through comments and how, when, and to whom it is circulated. This is compounded by the fact that it is almost impossible to possess or destroy a home movie once it is uploaded to an online platform. Someone may choose to remove the video, but that does not protect against prior downloads or the likely possibility that the file will remain on the platform’s server. It is in these ways that the video text and its interpretation become quite literally out of the hands of the makers and subjects. Is the category of the home movie even useful in discussing the production and circulation of digital self-made media?

The capacities and uses of digital recording technologies and online file sharing platforms have complicated the status of the category of home movies and necessitate a revision to the analytical frameworks that several scholars have offered in the past. We are therefore compelled to confront a lacuna in the field of Cinema and Media Studies, a gap in language and theory for media that troubles the line between familiar amateur or nonprofessional forms, and what is commonly considered to be social media production. This essay puts home movie scholarship from the field of Cinema and Media Studies into conversation with digital media studies to examine the cataclysmic encounter between personal and social media production, circulation, and archival practice, in order to explore what might be revealed about the machinations of capitalist and datalogical forces regarding what gets produced, what gets circulated, what gets preserved, and why.

While the ubiquity of mobile media has enabled self-produced videos to become a fixture of popular culture, the prolific use of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok now requires us to take stock of how systems of producing, organising, and circulating this media are impacted by corporate profit motives, backend functionalities of the sites, and the inherent social bias embedded in them due to their existence within technosocial artifacts of racial capitalism.[3]

This essay questions what is valuable from the study of home movies that might help us to elucidate changes in self-made media making, and where are we pushed to find new taxonomies for understanding contemporary practices and their import.

A Brief Overview of the (Fragile) Category of Home Movies

Home movies have historically shared common characteristics and aesthetics over many decades, and across media technologies. The common home movie conventions have become recognisable – from the shaky handheld camera, lack of professional lighting or sound, and grainy or pixelated footage, film stock or tape quality[4] to the tacit acknowledgement from the subject(s) that they are aware of the camera.[5] The home movie look has been relentlessly reproduced because of its familiarity as a form. Its formal characteristics have even become shorthand in many narrative and documentary films and television shows to signify realism, historical evidence, nostalgia, or a behind-the-scenes vantage point. Several video editing software programs now include “home movie” filters to give footage the look of small gauge film stock. Home movie clips, even the apocryphal ones created for narrative fiction programs, provide an intimacy through suggested access to more private moments – a backstage or backstory for the characters. Filmmaker and scholar Michelle Citron suggests that home movies construct “necessary fictions” used to shape specific narratives, rather than serving simply as recorded evidence of the particular dynamics or details of a family’s past.[6] The common use of home movies as quotations in fictional and documentary texts therefore underscores the paradox of the home movie genre itself; while they are used by makers and audiences as a way of presumably indexing the real, home movies only deepen or complicate stories that are being told.

Home movies, as a category, have had a niche role in the last several decades of cinema and media scholarship. The widespread access to imaging technologies after World War II encouraged many scholars to begin to consider the home movie to be as worthy of study as broadcast or commercial media.[7] Visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen’s 1986 book Snapshot Versions of Life continues to provide a particularly useful framework for understanding the conventions and communicative purpose of homemade media, specifically, for its introduction of the concept of the home mode of media production.[8] Beginning with the premise that the home is not just a geographic but a conceptual space that is continually remade and reaffirmed through symbolic mediation, Chalfen describes the ways in which home is imagined through homemade media production while distinguishing personal and private features of home mode communication from mass modes of communication.

The category of the home mode draws boundaries around an autonomous field of practice in which amateur representations of domestic life and other things known to the invested spectator are produced to be (re)viewed by those within a delimited sphere that excludes strangers and mass audiences. Chalfen argues that the home mode must be studied distinctly from the professional formal codes, commercial system of exchange, and public context of typical image production. He argues that home movies, like family photo albums and other cultural artifacts, are produced in the home mode and therefore possess clearly defined conventions for the types of images produced, the circumstances under which they are made, and the kind of people and events that can be represented. In this way, the home mode is a means to symbolically unite the community through a visual network of social relationships. Home mode artifacts hold an important cultural function in the retention of details of people, places and events.

In the pre-digital time of Chalfen’s writing, he noted that home mode media had autobiographical functions – to represent the events of one’s own life, and to observe one’s image in action, as well as rites of passage and seeing one’s place in relation to others in the family. These functions have been used by families as performances of membership, identity and lifestyle, and they have enabled individuals to produce and circulate their own images, measure them against other images, and negotiate their place in a mediated culture.[9] As a result, and perhaps most vital to our definition of the home movie form for the purposes of this article, viewers who were not already connected to the diegetic world of the home movie were therefore less able to draw on its contextual, intertextual, and indexical references. The symbolic world at the time of Chalfen’s writing of the late 1980s was a relatively closed one. In other words, if you did not know or care about anyone in a given home movie, you would be less likely to care or want to watch it. If you have ever been asked to sit through another family’s home movies, you have likely already discovered the truth in the claim.

We can utilise the concept of the home mode to account for contemporary media making practices because it is not simply a technological device deployed in a private setting (the family) but an active mode of media production representing everyday life: “a liminal space in which practitioners may explore and negotiate the competing demands of their public, communal and private personal identities.”[10] The home mode provides a flexible lens with which to examine home movie production practice across time and technologies, and is therefore useful to us in our studies of contemporary online digital media in both formal characteristics and semiotics. In addition to the continuing impact of the specificities of the media that is used for recording and playback, the home mode is shaped by technological and economic structures.

Invoking Chalfen’s original description of the home mode, film scholar James Moran, who was writing in the context of analogue video of the 1990s, reminds us that rather than existing solely at the service of a nuclear family, the home mode works to construct an image of home as a “cognitive and affective foundation [for] situating ourselves in the world.”[11] It also temporally situates, family members as it serves as material evidence of generational continuity – of one’s connections to others, groups, rituals, and traditions. The act of video recording itself becomes an active tie that binds. Moran argues that the home mode has become more elastic to accommodate the shifts in familial constitution and dynamics, while families have continued to use the home mode to articulate and make visible their relationship.[12]

Using the symbolic work of home movie texts, other cinema and media scholars and practitioners have provided ways to think of home movie production and preservation as a site of ideological (re)production. As Patricia Zimmerman argues in her ground-breaking 1995 book Reel Families, home movie making practices, and their resulting image memories, serve an ideological function beyond the family dynamic. Writing at a time when VHS recording technologies made home movie recording, transfer and duplication more widespread, her historical study of nonprofessional film from 1897 until the mid-1990s considers the ways in which amateur film is “not simply an inert designation of inferior film practice and ideology but rather is a historical process of social control over representation.”[13] Zimmerman observes that ideology flowed through the home movie maker, often a family patriarch, who had the resources to buy a camera and process films, frequently relying on instruction manuals that encouraged particular norms of representation. The home movie obscured class, as well as other kinds of social differences, while promoting the (white, middle-class) nuclear family as the place of leisure and the centre of all meaningful activity. In these ways, she argues, home movies encouraged a retreat from social and political participation as well as family truths. Personal archives of home movies, therefore, can be seen as potent sites of a localised struggle over meaning, which is one reason why utilising home movies in personal documentary and experimental films has been such a compelling technique.[14]

Just as home movies in the personal sphere, through their organisation and use, have been part of an exercise of power, home movies have also historically been used in the production of and resistance to state and imperial power. Scholars such as Veena Hariharron and Julia Nordegraaf and Elvira Louw have illustrated how colonial archives of movies of everyday life of white settlers and bureaucrats were used to exert power by fortifying the colonial logics of domination and subordination and colonial ways of seeing the colonised other.[15] Just as many independent professional filmmakers have reworked their personal home movies to make interventions into family representation, many others have also used home movies to resist dominant state narratives.[16] And, with the ubiquity of digital, online video, anyone with an internet connection, a smartphone camera, and the appropriate software can edit videos to remix their personal media collection with available professional media. As YouTube proliferates with fanvids and remixes, critiquing state power has become common social media fare.[17]

Expanding the home mode; challenging the archive

The audience for home movies prior to online video sharing platforms was typically limited to private viewings by technology, too, as sharing movies was not possible without duplicating the footage and securing technologies for playback. For these reasons, home movies were rarely seen by others outside of the family or community depicted. With the introduction of consumer video in the late 1970s, however, amateur recording and reproduction devices proliferated, making home movie production more portable, less expensive, and simpler to use, widening the scope of who and what could be recorded and shared. Even so, with rare exceptions, home movie circulation was still limited to existing personal networks.

Recognising the value of home mode media as a site of communication and meaning-production, there have been efforts on the part of several institutions, scholars, and organisations to collect “orphan” and “found” films, discern their provenance, screen, and catalogue them, as well as to collect the home movies of marginalised makers and make them available to researchers, artists, historians, genealogists, and community residents. There is an existing foundation of resources and networks that have been active in finding, organising, screening, archiving, contextualising, and circulating analogue media that might have otherwise found itself in a landfill or passed from attic to yard sale and back again.[18]  This includes the work of the Center for Home Movies, which has long organised public and community-based screenings of personal and “found” home movies, Rick Prelinger’s gargantuan efforts to upload and make available found, donated, and open-source audio-visual media files through Archive.org, the traveling Found Footage Film Festival, and the archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Prominent among the many community history projects that exist is film scholar Jacqueline Stewart’s South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP) which was launched in 2005 as “an archival and research initiative to collect, preserve and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side” to correct the “notable absence of home movies (especially from minorities) in the canon of film scholarship.”[19] Increased public availability of home movies provides access to individual and family self-representations; at the same time, it also makes possible the use of home movies as a vital access point for academic approaches that trace the home movie’s journey from official history to the more variegated and multiple practices of individual and collective memory.[20]

As Jasmyn Castro argues in relation to the home movies of Black families and communities, while they were initially recorded for the intention of private viewing, they ultimately “operate outside of the representational norms of mainstream theatrical media and thereby [are] able to transcend its limitations.”[21] In doing so, they “redefine mis-and-underrepresented Black communities; they provide an intimate moving image record that complements and counters the often-negative imagery in the media” while providing a resource for “re-examining and understanding the African American experience.”[22] The home media archive therefore works in contradistinction to commercial film of the same era of their production, what Castro calls the “microhistories that challenge the parameters of broader histories and film canons.”[23] Yet, as much as home movies have the potential to present “plural pasts” that challenge dominant representations, Crystal Mun-Hye Baik warns us not to see them solely as an “oppositional schematic of power,” but rather as full of contradictions that reflect the complexity of everyday life, a place to “track the discursive tensions” that emerge from the pairing of the everyday with a yearning for visibility.[24]

Baik urges us to consider the ways in which archives of historical home movies – whether they are in a family attic or a museum – are always remediated, generating new inscriptions of meaning through the act of curatorial decisions. As Stewart explains of her work with the SSHMP, the act of constructing a catalogue requires the archivist to contend with “overwhelming detail.” Specific taxonomies and metadata are most useful when the archivist has additional context through oral histories and active participation with those who have connections to the texts.[25] In the archivist’s struggle to organise and make these home movie collections legible to the public, we are reminded the extent to which the arrangement and categorisation of any given archive and its parent organisation shapes the meaning surrounding its artifacts.[26]

These scholars gesture here not just to the incredible labour of home movie archiving and the process of remediating, but also to the process of signification and resignification that occurs along the way. The meaning that is inscribed through the cataloguing, screening, and circulation of home movies, hits high velocity with file sharing technology. Recent online video sharing platforms such as YouTube, and other file sharing applications have catapulted home mode media originally produced in the domestic sphere into the public realm. As a result, a vast and expanding international archive of home movies has begun to further complicate boundaries of public and private while demanding attention to its ongoing significance across geographies, families, cultures, time, and technological platforms.[27] There are the obvious transformations, such as the ubiquity of high-definition cameras, online digital storage, and the ability to instantly share media to an unlimited audience across tremendous distances, and these changes have certainly shaped what is produced and shared. But I seek to draw attention to the less visible machinations of online media platforms and the ways they disrupt the concept of the home mode. Wider circulation adds complexity to the increased intermingling of amateur and commercial production[28] while it amplifies an already common “amateur vernacular.”[29] A combination of regulatory, technological, monetary, and social forces have come to bear on content and circulation. In what follows I point to several important shifts, aiming to bring digital media research to bear on our discussion.

Platforms as Archive and Curator

Prior to the ubiquity of mobile media and file sharing platforms, most home movie collections had been stored, maintained, or discarded by someone with a close (typically familial) connection to the people depicted. Artifacts of the domestic sphere and community life that typically wound up as part of the detritus and heirlooms of estates, their full context was unlikely to be understood by outsiders well enough for archival or even screening purposes.[30] Even most of the home movies that found their way into museum or library archives had very few people involved interacting with them.  Home movies were also, by-and-large, not monetised – with the notable exceptions of Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV in Japan (1986 debut), the long-running hit television program and franchise America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989 debut), and other international spinoffs which solicited viewers to submit videotaped clips of home movies for possible broadcast and prize money.

I am using the term “archive” as a term for sites for file storage, organisation, and narrativisation as opposed to a “collection,” which refers more to accumulation and private meaning to the collector, than use.[31] Referring to online video sharing platforms as archives is a complicated issue, as online file sharing platforms to date have not defined themselves as such. If anything, the disappearance or difficulty of finding videos online is more of a defining feature than any kind of reliable preservation and organisation system. However, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have become ad hoc and default archives for many home mode movies, as many people have posted there in order to share widely within and beyond their networks. In doing so, they have, perhaps inadvertently, submitted their content (and rights to it) to the platform, in perpetuity. Yet while many users rely on platforms to host their videos, the actualities of how, where, and when the content is viewed and circulated are in part impacted by the laws and regulations (in most cases, the lack of regulations) that govern the platforms.

Conversely, some individuals, organisations, and institutions may intentionally use these platforms as an archive for their media, without necessarily knowing (or understanding) the terms and conditions that will shape the video’s half-life. In other words, while these platforms may appear to function as archives for long-term storage and access, the actual functionality and fickleness of the systems in play betrays that potential. If we do accept these platforms as de facto archives, we must ask: who or what, then, is the archon, organising and systematising the files? We know that what can be seen by an individual user at any given time is a product of what search terms they have used, along with the meta-data and algorithms that shape what is viewable to them. That is very different from a grandparent making decisions about whether to transfer and duplicate the family’s VHS home movies for the family or a community collecting the home movies they have gathered from others to develop a local archive for future historiography and identity formation.

The organisational logic of contemporary user-produced file sharing platforms is structured around optimising reach, and ultimately profit. Meta-data (the information users enter about their videos, including hashtags) and algorithms (embedded formulas that determine which videos play when and for whom) structure the user experience. Home mode media, then, is subject to the logics of the platform to determine its audience, and in turn, the audience to determine its lifecycle. As a result, videos are distributed and decontextualised from the family or home mode context and re-contextualised within streams of content chosen by the platform. For example, imagine a video of a person making a wedding toast. The toast was then posted on YouTube and watched by not only the attendees and people who could not make it to the event, but by others to whom the video was suggested when they typed in search terms that matched the keyword tags. Search words like “weddings” or “toasts;” might call up this specific video, but even some seemingly minute detail or subjective reading such as “bridesmaid in ugly dress” or “funny speeches.” Even suggestions of broadcast clips such as “Wedding Toast – Saturday Night Live” or infotainment from topic-related organisations such as the public speaking club Toastmasters offering “Toastmasters Wedding Toast Tips” might come up. Whatever meaning the invested spectators of the initial wedding event might attribute to the subsequent video is situated in intertextual flows of meaning, by the algorithms that guide associations between videos. While the complexity of search terms and results also impacts the archives of home movies in general, what I aim to draw attention to here is how results found through online for-profit video sharing platforms organise home movies according to monetary logics – what is most liked, shared, commented on and therefore, monetisable. Video content is bound up in advertising revenue, and the profit-oriented structures of the site. Viewers are directed towards content that has proven itself successful according to these governing principles.

Platforms have Politics

As scholars of media and technology such as Tarleton Gillespie, Sofia Ujuoma Noble and Ruha Benjamin have all argued, online platforms are not neutral.[32] They have existing politics that determine development and coding systems and the ways they are taken up by users often reflects and reinscribes social biases. Moreover, depending on their governing and regulatory structures, such as what counts as “offensive” or the flagging or blocking of copyrighted content, media sharing platforms will impose particular norms upon the videos that they host. At this very basic level, the invisible structures on the platform are already shaping what we do and do not see of other users’ videos. On YouTube, community (also read as corporate-mandated) guidelines are literally presented as “common sense principles.”[33] It is assumed that users will have an intuitive sense of what to post or not to post. And yet, that videos that circulate do so is because of their successful harnessing of algorithms and manoeuvring within a (digital) attention economy rather than due to their inherent social value. Evaluative structures, such as the “likes”, “hearts”, and “shares” found on many platforms, are known to boost attention, and further ensure the spreadability of the video.[34] Video recommendations on YouTube, much like the automatic replenishing of videos on TikTok, are based on browsing history and the keywords and metadata attached to videos one has watched previously. When we treat platforms as neutral systems, and as de facto video archives, we fail to see how our encounters with these systems are shaped by their systems at every level.

Algorithms are designed to keep you watching.[35] This is because a user’s time online produces capital, for the person who posted, as well as for advertisers, and investors through digital labour that may be experienced by users as pleasure or even fandom.[36] The social capital of “likes” and “shares” is rewarded with monetary capital to the content creator, which is tied up in profit generated by the platform through its corporate relationships, and increasingly, directly to content producers as they acquire “influencer” status (meaning that they have large followings to their social media accounts that they leverage to persuade people to buy or use products and services).[37] Capital is produced even when online file sharing platforms are not the vehicles of circulation. The circulation of the video of the children playing discussed at the start of this article, sent via an enriched online messaging platform, is an example of this. Circulation of the video was fully reliant on the makers and viewers having access to the technologies, broadband infrastructure (WiFi with the necessary speed), and storage capacity to record and/or share the video. Each share represents an investment and reliance on those systems that, while not immediately recognisable as bound up in capital, are, in the truest global sense. If the video were to be uploaded online and circulated through a platform like YouTube or TikTok, it is possible that, depending on how it was tagged and thereby framed for the audience, it could be monetisable to the person who posted it. We know that the home mode has truly moved out of the domestic sphere when we consider that any one of the current or future recipients of the video could choose to post it online and, if it were to circulate widely, profit from it.

Home movie aesthetics and conventions, and what they signal, have played an important role in the success of YouTube, TikTok and other platforms that are used for sharing user-produced videos. With the advent of viral videos and subsequent monetisation, a market opened for home movie uploads, particularly ones that mimicked successful formulas that had been codified through America’s Funniest Home Videos and its spinoffs years earlier.[38] AFHV and its lookalikes first introduced the idea that home movies could be mass entertainment that could attract sponsors, while the prize categories on the program organised videos into tropes that possible contributors could select or perform content for. Online meme culture resembles this self-fulfilling cultural production; easily reproduceable, imitated, or parodied content begets more of the same, hence the relentlessness of participatory viral video trends, like families doing choreographed dances (such as the “Nobody Dance” challenge) or clips of couples pranking each other (#couplecomedy).[39]

When the formula is subverted, as in the example of the video Shanika Bradshaw posted of her 103-year-old grandmother Madie Scott answering questions about what it was like to pick cotton in Georgia when she was a young girl (on TikTok as @blackbeauty_3), there is promise that the platform may yield the kind of archive of oral history that might empower the descendants of African American sharecroppers and formerly enslaved people in ways that home movie archivists have sought to do.[40] The conversation between granddaughter and grandmother possesses home mode characteristics – a nonprofessional recording device and an intimate conversation between the two in which Bradshaw sounds genuinely surprised at aspects of her grandmother’s story, as a television plays loudly in the background. Yet at the same time, we see the home mode being redefined in the intentional editing down to soundbites for a wider audience, and the additional overlay of text “Me asking my grandma about picking cotton.” What’s more, there is description below the video that encapsulates the most shocking aspects of Scott’s three-minute story: “Grandma picked cotton from 3am to 5pm every day. She was paid barely anything. Smh! #storytime.” There is communication happening within the family as Scott shares her story with her kin, but further, through Bradshaw’s editing and posting choices, communication also takes place with an imagined audience. That audience was not only hailed when Bradshaw posted the video to TikTok, but when she added a Twitter hashtag to circulate it by way of an additional platform.

The media buzz inspired by the virality of Bradshaw’s video suggests its reach and impact. However, on the platform itself, there is no “outside” of existing profit structures. While Bradshaw and her grandmother may ultimately get paid for the views of the video, the platform profits from its circulation. The media outlets that have publicised the human interest and historical value of the video also profit from this content, such as People Magazine, the NY Post, and The Independent. What comments will appear, who shares the video, and with what framing is beyond Bradshaw (and certainly her grandmother’s) control. In this way, the platform acts as archon, constantly re-contextualising the video in new ways to new people in response to user clicks, comments, and shares.

While the video depicts Scott telling an important part of her history, and the history of racial injustice in the United States more generally, Bradshaw’s lack of control over the interpretation, framing, circulation, and use of the video once it is circulating through the platform, is potentially troubling. Ruha Benjamin warns that the tenets of racial capitalism are encoded into media technologies like TikTok, as the technosocial structures that undergird online video file sharing platforms work to reproduce existing biases.[41] She writes of what she pointedly identifies as a “New Jim Code,” in which recent technologies invoke discriminatory practices of previous eras while claiming to be more objective or progressive. It is the perceived neutrality of these technologies that is dangerous, for they continue to do the work of reproducing inequality and racist ideologies, further obscuring how Black people’s labour and bodies continue to produce capital for white entities. Sheldon Pearse has written about how despite the diversity of TikTok content producers, the most visible and most followed TikTok trends feature white stars, often “feed[ing] off of the content of smaller users in an act of vampirism, growing stronger as competitors wither away, using culture as a commodity to maintain their positions.” Black cultural production is thereby credited to white producers. And as Safiya Noble underscores in Algorithms of Oppression, the pornographic and anti-Black results that appear when conducting a Google search for “Black girls” emerges from either “corporate logic of either wilful neglect or a profit motive that makes money from racism and sexism.” [42] It is of critical importance for scholars in the field to identify, analyse, and help undo the white supremacist architectures of the platforms we examine. Even though online video file-sharing platforms may appear to enhance the visibility of people at the margins, we must look to the structures that condition, and profit from, their participation.

Conclusion

Online practices of self-representation challenge earlier frameworks of “amateur” and “non-professional” media production by opening up onto different kinds of capitalist relations as they expand on existing notions of how we think about “home” and other personal/domestic spheres. As we consider the status of home movies in the online digital landscape, it is important to consider the ways home mode communication is no longer simply adjacent to commercial media practices, but rather, part of a diverse, self-made media production ecology that is contiguous with other commercial and profit-oriented media practices. The home mode of making, as we have understood it as a field, has been replaced by personal media that has been sculpted by makers and algorithms to deliver clicks, likes, shares, and ultimately, profit. The representation of the personal sphere, performance for a possibly unknown audience, and the overlapping of circuits of meaning that are inscribed and reinscribed through online video-circulation puts pressure on existing taxonomies and frameworks.

Online video platforms and the media they store and circulate now structure meaning and reinscribe relationships of power within and among home mode representations while pushing us to attend to the curatorial power of the systems and entities that shape what circulates, how it does, and why. Of importance is attention to how capital flows through these systems, commodifying images, affect, gestures, expression, movement, sounds, and desire, and how and where existing social biases are reproduced or challenged.

Notes

[1] Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987), 11.

[2] José Van Dijck, Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

[3] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

[4] Vivian Sobchack. “‘Me, Myself, and I’: On the Uncanny in Home Movies” in The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, eds. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 205-217.

[5] Liz Czach,“Acting and Performance in Home Movies and Amateur Films” in Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor, (Routledge, 2012), 160-174.

[6] Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[7] Erens, Patricia, ed. “The Galler Home Movies: A Case Study.” In The Journal of Film and Video 38 (nos. 3-4 summer-fall 1986: 15-24), 4.

[8] In his study, Chalfen analysed home movies shot between 1940-1980 by approximately 200 (mostly white upper-middle class) families living in the north-eastern United States, in conjunction with the data from survey questionnaires and interviews collected from the participants. The study is a content analysis of the people who appear in the images and aims to resolve how real-life and symbolic pictorial communities are related to each other, and how on-going human life has been transformed into symbolic representation. Through ethnographic analysis, Chalfen endeavores to resituate the historical importance of the forgotten archives of amateur images. He argues that these images could bring into focus other hidden dimensions of social and cultural significance and work toward (re)interpreting twentieth-century ideals, while providing inroads toward the production and circulation of histories that can challenge those promulgated by (professionally produced) Hollywood cinema and network television

[9] Chalfen,10.

[10] James Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002),132.

[11] Chalfen, 61

[12] Moran argues that scholars must extend the notion of the home mode “to household, to place of residence, or to a place of origin.” The home mode is “an ideal envisioned as the synthesis of three experimental domains: a personal, private space for memory or solitude; a social, public space for family or group interaction; and a physical space designed for comfort or security.” It is in this expansion of the conception of the home mode that videos of events like protest marches and Pride parades can fit; they are events in which values, traditions and symbols of groups are transmitted and maintained. Moran, 61.

[13] Patricia R. Zimmerman. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xv

[14] In tandem with home movie scholarship, many filmmakers have appropriated their own family home movies to destabilise and redress representation in the texts, utilising the home mode as a fluid substrate with which to rewrite personal and family histories. Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990, 16mm, b&w, 48 m), Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite, Peggy Ahwesh’s From Romance to Ritual (1985) and The Vision Machine (1997), Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003), and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003).

[15] Veena Hariharan. “At Home in the Empire: Reading Colonial Home Movies—The Hyde Collection (1928–1937).” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2014): 49–61; Julia Noordegraaf and Elvira Louw, “Extended Family Films: Home Movies in the State-Sponsored Archive.” Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009), 98;

Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, “The Right Kind of Family: Memories to Light and the Home Movie as Racialized Technology” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[16] Karen L. Ishizuka and Broderik Fox have emphasised how resistant ways of seeing are made possible through filmic depictions of the subaltern, highlighting the work that movies made by incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II that provide first-hand accounts of subjugation and the experience of internment. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman’s edited collection Mining the Home Movie brings these seemingly contradictory sites of nonprofessional production to the fore to recognize an historical method that finds evidence and draws interpretations of history from the disjunctures and contradictions of plural pasts, while also presenting a quarry of audio-visual details from which to extract information for future inquiry. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Broderik Fox, “Home Movies and Historiography: Amateur Film’s Re-Vision of Japanese-American Internment,” Spectator 26:2 (Fall 2006): 9-21.

[17] E. Charlotte Stevens defines fanvid as “derived from television and film sources, and approximate commercial music videos in form and duration, but are non-commercial fan works which construct creative and critical analyses of existing media. Vids are currently made and distributed digitally; however, the practice itself predates fandom’s move online. Structurally, a vid is a montage of extracts from media in a personal archive. E. Charlotte Stevens. “On Vidding: The Home Media Archive and Vernacular Historiography” in Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-released and Restored, edited by Jonathan Wroot, and Andy Willis (Springer International Publishing, 2017).

[18] Center for Home Movies, https://www.centerforhomemovies.org; Prelinger Archive, https://archive.org/details/prelinger;  Found Footage festival, http://www.foundfootagefest.com/, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://www.si.edu/museums/african-american-museum, The South Side Home Movie Project, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture https://csrpc.uchicago.edu/programs/projects/sshmp/

[19] The South Side Home Movie Project, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture https://csrpc.uchicago.edu/programs/projects/sshmp/

[20] Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

[21] Jasmyn R. Castro, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[22] Castro, 373

[23] Castro, 373

[24] Baik, 357

[25] Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. “Giving Voice, Taking Voice: Nonwhite and Theatrical” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), xix

[26] Here I am drawing on the work of Allan Sekula’s seminal essay “The Body and the Archive,” in which he illustrated how the filing cabinet where mugshots were stored actually produced “the criminal” through their organization and use. For Sekula, the apparatus surrounding the visual is what held the meaning even more than the particular images it contained. Sekula, Alan. “The Body and the Archive,” October, (1986) 39, 3-68.

[27] In 2010, the Center for Home Movies held a Digitization and Access Summit at the United States Library of Congress. As the CHM website states, “the Summit participants addressed the technical and legal issues surrounding the digitization of amateur film and video, the role of cataloging and description, and the impact that significantly increased online access to home movies would have on home movie makers, families, researchers, documentary filmmakers and the public.” https://www.centerforhomemovies.org/homemoviesummit.html

[28] For more on the relationship between home movies and television production, see John Thornton Caldwell’s book Televisuality: Style Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 

[29] I am drawing on Hetrick, who, referring to amateur video practice, uses the term video vernacular as “a new and more precise category to describe nonfiction videos made by untrained camera operators who attempt to realistically reflect life around them. Patricia Aufderheide also uses this term in the 1995 edition of Columbia Journalism Review (33, no. 5).

[30] Dwight Swanson. “The Tantalizing Challenges of the Home Movie Archive,” Velvet Light Trap; Austin Iss. 70,  (Fall 2012): 59-60.

[31] E. Charlotte Stevens. “On Vidding: The Home Media Archive and Vernacular Historiography” in Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-released and Restored, edited by Jonathan Wroot, and Andy Willis, Springer International Publishing, 2017, 148.

[32] Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms’” New media & society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364, Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2019).

[33]Berliner, Lauren S. “Shooting for Profit: The Monetary Logic of the YouTube Home Movie” in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 289-300.

[34] Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media (New York, NY: NYU Press,

2013).

[35] Jia Tolentino, “How Tik Tok Holds our Attention,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2019

[36] Mark Andrejevic. “Estranged free labor.” In Digital labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed Trebor Scholz (Routledge, 2012), 157-172.

[37] “Are Social Media Influencers Worth the Investment”? https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/08/21/are-social-media-influencers-worth-the-investment/?sh=1ff82e32f452

[38] Berliner, 289-300.

[39] #nobodydancevideo, https://www.tiktok.com/tag/nobodydancevideo?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mabelandmoxie.com%2F&referer_video_id=6807326063543274758&refer=embed, accessed December 1, 2021.

“#couplecomedy,” https://www.tiktok.com/tag/couplecomedy?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmopolitan.com%2F&referer_video_id=6808982629845634309&refer=embed&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1, accessed December 1, 2021.

[40]https://www.tiktok.com/@blackbeauty_305?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackenterprise.com%2F&referer_video_id=7029850485989379333&refer=embed

[41] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

[42] Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018).

 

Bibliography

Mark Andrejevic. “Estranged free labor.” In Digital labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (Routledge, 2012), 157-172.

Patricia Aufderheide, “Vernacular video.” Columbia Journalism Review 33, no. 5 (1995): 46.

Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, “The Right Kind of Family: Memories to Light and the Home Movie as Racialized Technology” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

Berliner, Lauren S. “Shooting for Profit: The Monetary Logic of the YouTube Home Movie” in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 289-300.

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999);

Jasmyn R. Castro, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)

Chalfen, Richard. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987.

Citron, Michelle. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Czach, Liz. “Acting and Performance in Home Movies and Amateur Films” in Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor, Routledge, 2012, 160-174.

Erens, Patricia ed. “The Galler Home Movies: A Case Study.” In The Journal of Film and Video 38, nos. 3-4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 15-24, 4.

Fox, Broderik. “Home Movies and Historiography: Amateur Film’s Re-Vision of Japanese-American Internment,” Spectator 26:2 (Fall 2006): 9-21.

Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Politics of ‘Platforms’.” New media & society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364.

Gordon, Marsha and Allyson Nadia Field. Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Gehl, Robert “YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate This Digital Wunderkammer?” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (January 2009): 43–60

Hariharan, Veena. “At Home in the Empire: Reading Colonial Home Movies—The Hyde Collection (1928–1937).” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2014): 49–61.

Hetrick, Judi. “Amateur Video Must Not be Overlooked” in The Moving Image 6.1 (2006) 66-81

Ishizuka, Karen L. and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2013.

Moran, James. There’s No Place Like Home Video. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018.

Noordegraaf, Julia and Elvira Louw, “Extended Family Films: Home Movies in the State-Sponsored Archive.” Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009): 98.

Pearse, Sheldon. “The Whitewashing of Black Music on TikTok,” The New Yorker, September 9, 2020.

Rascaroli, Laura, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan. Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, The Archive, The Web. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Sekula, Alan. “The Body and the Archive,” October, (1986) 39, 3-68.

Shifman, Limor, Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Me, Myself, and I’: On the Uncanny in Home Movies” in The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, eds. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 205-217.

Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. “Giving Voice, Taking Voice: Nonwhite and Theatrical” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

The South Side Home Movie Project, https://csrpc.uchicago.edu/programs/projects/sshmp/

Stevens, E. Charlotte. “On Vidding: The Home Media Archive and Vernacular Historiography” in Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-released and Restored, edited by Jonathan Wroot, and Andy Willis. Springer International Publishing, 2017.

Swanson, Dwight. “The Tantalizing Challenges of the Home Movie Archive,” Velvet Light Trap; Austin Iss. 70,  (Fall 2012): 59-60.

Tolentino, Jia, “How Tik Tok Holds our Attention,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2019.

Van Dijck, José, Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

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Zimmerman, Patricia R. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

 

Author Biography

Lauren S. Berliner is Associate Professor of Media & Communication Studies and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell where she teaches courses in digital media studies and visual culture.  She is the author of the book Producing Queer Youth: the Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment and co-editor of Feminist Interventions in Participatory Media: Pedagogy, Publics, Practice. Her writing has also appeared in JCMS, The Cine-files, several edited book collections, and can be seen in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Media Histories (Spring 2022) She is also an Associate Director of The Festival of (In)Appropriation, an annual showcase of experimental media.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2380

 

In the first two decades of the 21^st century, a cluster of Colombian filmmakers started to develop a distinctive body of work engaging with the country’s histories of violence through critical documentary and experimental devices. Juana Suárez has written about a generation of filmmakers with transnational histories whose work “shares a particular set of characteristics linked to aesthetics and forms of production”, including a diasporic perspective on the national, connections with alternative funding and exhibition circuits, generic and linguistic hybridity, and a political approach to experimental practice.[1] Filmmakers born in the 1970s and 1980s, including Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertas Millán, Felipe Guerrero and Juan Soto have built substantial portfolios ranging across short film, features, and installation.[2] Without imposing on them a unified identity, or defining the boundaries of a “movement”, it is possible to see an expanding constellation of moving image works with overlapping interests and strategies. Central to this commonality is a critical relationship to archival moving image and found footage, expressed in a variety of ways to appropriate, intervene. and juxtapose source materials. These strategies engage with the materiality of analogue and digital images, often retaining traces of their provenance and mediation. In doing this, the films can embody a reflection on the filmmaker’s access to appropriated images and challenge the spectator to question their own viewing position.

While this article follows emerging scholarship that recognises such a cluster of characteristics in Colombian filmmakers specifically, this must be understood in the context of broader shifts in documentary practice, particularly in Latin America.[3] María Luisa Ortega observes that, in contemporary documentary, existing images are appropriated, re-edited and often re-filmed in ways that “emphasise the material (objectual) nature of images” and explore “the traces of their (ideological) origins”.[4] Maria Luna and Carolina Sourdis consider whether there is a “specifically Latin American approach to found footage”, which may be more explicitly politicised than the kinds of experimental collage practices studied in other contexts.[5] According to Luisa Fernanda Ordóñez, “Latin American nonfiction films have approached the past, the present, and memory in diverse assemblages that combine autobiography, family history, and reflections about identity”.[6] In Argentina and Chile, for instance, those who were too young to remember the dictatorships have reopened questions that were pushed aside in the transition to neoliberal democracy, refusing a status quo that depends on forgetting the brutality of the regime and, moreover, the complicity of many citizens. In Colombia, the transition towards a state of “post-conflict” has been repeatedly delayed by the collapse or betrayal of multiple peace negotiations with different actors. Instead of a linear endpoint, there is a history of fluctuating intensities and geographies of the conflict. Sourdis and Luna find that this results in approaches to the archive that reflect political fragmentation but also a nostalgia for unity.[7] Rather than nostalgia, Suárez finds that this group of contemporary filmmakers approach the archive with “suspicion”, and struggle against the narrative pull of the idea of the nation.[8]

There are generational factors that may be relevant to this perspective. There is no consensus on the temporal boundaries of Colombia’s internal conflict, as it has shifted its intensity, territorialisation, actors, methods, and frames of reference so many times. Over more than fifty years, the war has “transformed itself and transformed the country”.[9] By 2012, when peace negotiations started with FARC, over 220,000 people had been killed and millions had been displaced. Within this extended timeline, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a critical juncture. Cocaine cartels had a grip on every level of political and economic power; landowner-backed paramilitary groups massacred peasants and opposition politicians in collaboration with the army; guerrilla groups kidnapped civilians, ran drug routes and blew up infrastructure. A glimmer of hope had appeared with a series of peace accords leading to the demobilisation of guerrilla factions, who were then betrayed and persecuted. The filmmakers discussed here lived through these years as children or adolescents, and they share an impulse to revisit these histories. Lacking the sense of closure of a “post-conflict” narrative, these explorations often adopt less linear forms, weaving together overlapping and ongoing pasts.

The films I discuss in this article engage with historical events through different strategies of mediated representation. Their “suspicion of the archive” (to use Suárez’s term) is performed through formal and rhetorical devices that complicate a simply indexical or nostalgic archive effect.[10] This critique, however, does not stop at questioning the veracity or completeness of the archive. More fundamentally, the material traces of archival mediation serve to denaturalise the use of found footage through reflexivity and distancing. In other words, the films question the filmmaker’s prerogative to display, and the audience’s right to consume audio-visual evidence.

To understand the ethical and political nuances in these filmmakers’ use of found footage and archive material, I use extractivism as a critical lens. In a structural sense, “contemporary neo-extractivism refers to a way of appropriating nature and a development model based on the over-exploitation of natural goods […] characterized by its large scale and its orientation towards export”.[11] As Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel put it, in extractivism, “‘natural resources’ are taken out of one geographic location – often on a colonial periphery – and utilised as ‘raw materials’, that is, as inputs to industrial processes elsewhere”.[12] This is a material process tied to an ideology, a “logic of extraction”, which includes extractive seeing or extractive visuality. Macarena Gómez-Barris defines “the extractive view” as one that renders territories as commodities. It is related to the colonial gaze that sees territories as empty or up for grabs, and “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.”[13] Extractivism cannot function without these abstractions; however, it is important not to lose from the analysis the material dimension of extraction.

These material and symbolic frameworks of extractivism offer a way to question how source materials – in this case, the images and testimonies of violence – are mobilised in new film works as they circulate internationally. This opens up critical perspectives on the transformation of media images of the Colombian conflict into a visual and narrative commodity that can be marketed abroad, and how critical filmmakers negotiate or resist this commoditisation. In the appropriation of existing footage there is an act of displacement, where a resource is taken from one place and transformed into a new commodity that can enter markets elsewhere. The archive, then, can be a site of extraction, but also of resistance. I propose this framing with reservations, keeping in mind Szeman and Wenzel’s warning against the “conceptual creep” of using extractivism to describe relationships that are beyond the instrumentalisation of nature, for instance by applying it to texts, a “metaphorization” that dematerialises this approach and risks “losing the very thing that gives extractivism its conceptual bite”.[14] The materiality of the archive and practices of appropriation must then be at the centre of this analysis, linked with the films’ refusal of national representation, legibility, and spectacle.

In the following discussion, I identify three structural patterns through which this resistance is articulated in specific films from this group of filmmakers. Firstly, I approach the work of Camilo Restrepo, in particular his early short film Tropic Pocket (2011), as it demonstrates the use of formal strategies (visual texture and sound) to disrupt the ethnographic gaze. I then look at Laura Huertas Millán’s work The Labyrinth (2018) as an inversion of dominant patterns of archival appropriation that acknowledge the role of fictions in shaping the material world. The final part of the essay considers the autobiographical encounter with news footage in Oslo, 2012 (2014) by Juan Soto, alongside works by Federico Atehortúa and Marta Hincapié. I argue that these strategies articulate positions of adjacency to the Colombian conflict. They offer alternatives to the illusory transparency of witnessing, by grappling with mediated relationships with historical events.

Tropic Pocket: Anticolonial illegibility

Camilo Restrepo’s work is explicitly concerned with the imbrication of past and present, through palimpsestic and non-linear forms. Trained as a painter, Restrepo questions found images through the intervention of sound and surface.[15] As Janet Stewart argues, if extractive seeing is the dominant logic, “retaining a certain illegibility” can be a way of countering its totalising effects.[16] It stops the material from becoming data, from being accumulated into colonial currency.[17] Working on analogue formats, Restrepo lets deterioration, fragmentation and low resolution interrupt the indexical reading of appropriated footage. Throughout several of his later works, most saliently Impression of a War (2015) and Los Conductos (2020), there is an interest in inscription, printing and marking on paper, fabric, or skin, which draws attention to the materiality of the film image. Appropriated footage is treated as such an inscription, a sign with a history rather than an automatic record of reality.

Restrepo’s first film, Tropic Pocket, is a 10-minute, fast-paced short. Based on an      investigation (both remote and on-site) of the region of Chocó in Colombia, the film consists of black-and-white and colour 8mm footage shot by Restrepo, and three disparate archival sources he found online while researching the area. As Suárez argues, this apparently unsystematic method using regular search engines is a critical strategy: “Restrepo shares a frustration with historical models, a suspicion towards images and the way they are organised in state archives […] his films open up a space for images found by chance”.[18] Furthermore, having found the images online, Restrepo captures them on analogue supports, not in order to erase their digital origins but to maintain the traces of their unsanctioned archival transmutations.

The oldest source from which fragments are included in Tropic Pocket is a feature-length fictionalised account of a Claretian missionary evangelising indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, shot in 16mm colour in the late 1950s by one of the priests.[19] This film combines documentary images of religious ceremonies and community work with a staged narrative about an attack on the missionary by an Afro-Colombian sorcerer, which seems both intended to increase the entertainment appeal of the film and to give a sense of peril and adventure to missionary work. The second source is a 1961 promotional film, which captures the attempt to cross the Darién gap on three Chevrolet Corvairs in order to demonstrate the cars’ toughness. This was produced by the Jam Handy organisation, a prolific maker of sponsored films that had close ties with Detroit carmakers.[20] Finally, Restrepo uses videos uploaded by Colombian army soldiers and guerrilla combatants. Tropic Pocket ends with title cards outlining these sources, but the footage is otherwise unmarked within the film.

As Jaimie Baron writes, experiencing footage as archival entails an apprehension of temporal and intentional disparity; the viewer perceives that the images were produced at a different time and for a different purpose than those of the film they are watching.[21] This “archive effect” most often results from the perception of differences in format and medium, such as the grain and blur of small-gauge film or the magnetic artifacts of analogue video, contrasting with the sharper images expected of each new audio-visual technology. In Tropic Pocket, however, these perceptual differences do not work in the expected manner. The surface of the image does not allow for a straightforward distinction between analogue and digital points of origin. The three archival sources are both digital and analogue images. In the case of Isla de los Deseos and Chevrolet Corvair (the two films described in the previous paragraph), the 16mm prints exist in archives, but Restrepo has used the poor-quality video transfers available online. In this remediated form, these sponsored institutional films thus inhabit the same platforms, the same encodings, the same computer screens as the videos shot by combatants on their phones. The perceptual traces that induce the archival effect are disorientating, as each image has undergone several transfers from analogue to digital or vice-versa and is presented digitally. The combined artifacts of digital compression and small-gauge film, as well as Restrepo’s choice to remove colour from most – but not all – of the footage, work to resist linear time and to inhibit restorative readings of these archives. Rather than presenting a nostalgic analogue past in contrast with a violent digital present, Restrepo’s film implies that past and present are simultaneous and inseparable, as both the recent and older archives speak of the forces that have laid claim to the Chocó region, revealing “a relation of domination that is ceaselessly renewed”.[22]

The older archival films used by Restrepo enact forms of extractive seeing. In both cases, the territory and its inhabitants are seen as challenges to be conquered, through persuasion or force. Restrepo thus mobilises these films against each other to expose this colonial standpoint – not as something of the past, but as an ongoing violence. This is articulated through the soundtrack and the narration. After a first silent sequence, sound comes in, but vivid animal calls are soon interrupted by insect buzzing and chainsaw engines. These loud, violent sound segue into an over-revving car engine, which marks the introduction of the Corvair images. Here, the voiceover from the missionary film is laid over the images of the car struggling through jungle rivers and hills. This juxtaposition continues with the narration displaced to the subtitles, while distorted, rhythmic music and snippets of audio from the films constitute a disquieting soundtrack. The narration from Isla de los Deseos, in which a missionary tells a boy about his evangelisation methods, reaches a crisis as the car journey ends. The rest of the film gestures towards more recent forms of violence with the combatant images and performance, while the fictional narration continues with a reference to a community under attack from pirates. The multiple layers of image, sound and narrative produce a tension, as the impulse is to interpret the images in light of the narration, but this is much more difficult here than in the first section. The final section of the film then resolves into cathartic movement, with some distorted champeta music and frenetic dancing.

For Tropic Pocket, Restrepo filmed the digital archives he was working with on Super8.[23] He justifies this as a distancing strategy, against the hyper-realism of sharp digital images, and also as an attempt to “de-instrumentalise” these sources, all of which are “vehicles of colonising ideologies”.^[24] However, the images’ coloniality is stubborn; they remain more legible than the more recent footage, so that paradoxically meaning becomes more unstable the closer we are to the present. The very short fragments potentially recognisable as combatant footage include a walk through tall grass to find a dead dog, and an explosion, both filmed in low resolution and with blocky compression artifacts. The footage shot by Restrepo in the village of San Francisco is sometimes frenetic with the movement of bodies, sometimes reaching for symbolism through performance and everyday objects. It again demonstrates a distance, a deliberate incomprehension. In this film, it is the contemporary images that are enigmatic, while the archival ones are obvious but obfuscated. Using non-representational performance, shaky camerawork and distorted sound, the filmmaker refuses to produce recordings that can be abstracted as “data” and therefore participate in the extractive logics that previous image-making enabled.

Restrepo has described Tropic Pocket as “a documentary against the document”.[25] However, after the intensity of the finale, the credits offer some documentary closure. Restrepo has included a brief description of each source as a sort of archival footnote. These notes, to some extent, explain the images, and thus dissipate their strangeness. They are partially recuperated for the audience’s knowing gaze. In these acknowledgements, Restrepo does not reference the digital mediation of the older films, but he does draw attention to the role of online video in the armed conflict, where “the manipulation of truth through the use of images has now become an ordinary weapon for any soldier and any fighter”, as the credit slide puts it. This moves away from a critique of the digital image as pure simulacrum, and instead points to a more materialist focus on the circulation and instrumentalisation of these images. By retaining the traces of the images’ transit through non-professional digitisation and small-gauge analogue formats, Restrepo’s film gives an account of his situated encounter with these archives. This refusal to abstract the archival image from its material context, even while questioning its indexicality, is a characteristic that Tropic Pocket shares with the other works I will discuss. 

The Labyrinth: Dialectics of fantasy

Laura Huertas Millán’s short film The Labyrinth (2018) is part of a series of works that she calls “ethnographic fictions”. Drawing on Jean Rouch’s notion of “ethno-fictions”, these works engage with contemporary ethnographic practices, while also treating ethnography as a discursive system imbued with fiction:

On the one hand, if one considers ethnography as an ensemble of narratives rooted in colonialism, it can be understood as a kind of fiction-making. On the other, some of the most interesting contemporary practices of ethnography have embraced a decolonial turn, sometimes by integrating the language of fiction into themselves.[26]

The Labyrinth is constructed around a voiceover testimony by Cristóbal Gómez Abel, who recounts his time working for drug trafficker, Evaristo Porras. This narco famously had a house built to emulate the Carringtons’ mansion from the TV series Dynasty (ABC 1980-1989). The film informs the viewer that Porras died penniless and the house, in the Amazonian city of Leticia, is now a crumbling ruin. The image track initially alternates between colour 16mm footage of these ruins and clips from Dynasty. The final section of the film then goes into the jungle and into the night with Cristóbal as he recounts his visions during a near-death experience. While Huertas Millán’s 16mm cinematography is saturated with the texture and colour of walls, vegetation, water and fire, the film follows Cristóbal between spaces that are all in some way beyond reality. The house is a failed fantasy, a copy of a copy, insofar as it is a simulacrum of the spectacular spaces of the Dynasty mansion. Cristóbal’s vision, on the other hand, remains unrepresented. The beautiful white space he describes is not available for the viewer’s consumption.

In a talk at the Cinemateca de Bogotá in 2021, film critic Pedro Adrián Zuluaga introduced a fragment of The Labyrinth as an example of a form of emancipatory cinema that could offer paths of resistance to the planned obsolescence and extractive drive of capitalist image-making.[27] The global media’s avid consumption of Colombia’s cocaine trade stories is an example of Zuluaga’s “transnational economy of the ruin”, with the countless Netflix documentaries about Pablo Escobar’s hippos and other excesses a case in point. The Labyrinth could be one such story, but instead the film centres Cristóbal’s agency and the reclamation of the house by people, plants, and animals. The narco story is told simply as a workplace situation, albeit a particularly dangerous one, and the ruin is another quotidian space rather than a romantic symbol. It does, however, exist in dialogue with the symbolic, and particularly with Dynasty as an example of the legitimating fantasies of extractive capitalism.

A family melodrama centred on the Denver oil magnate Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) and his wife Krystle (Linda Evans), Dynasty had top ratings in the US by 1984, while it was also being broadcast in over 75 countries.[28] The show’s representation of affluence has been linked to the entrenchment of consumerism during the Reagan era, even though the storylines ostensibly presented corporate greed as immoral.[29] For international audiences Dynasty could function as a representation of US lifestyles,[30] an aspirational slice of the American dream that obscured the realities of poverty and inequality, as well as underplaying the centrality of oil. In Dynasty, oil is a source of personal wealth but also a necessary material for a lavish lifestyle, demonstrating the mutual implication of extractivism and consumerism.

The Labyrinth contrasts the American petro-dream and its tropical simulacrum, often in humorous ways, by swapping the soundtracks. In some sections, the overwrought dialogue and string music from the TV show plays over the 16mm footage of Porras’s abandoned house. The artificial intensity of the soap opera is exposed as absurd through its juxtaposition with the organic and the mundane: a man walking through the jungle, a puddle with rubbish floating on it, an iguana making an escape. In other sections, the image track shows clips from the TV series, focusing on the mansion that Porras was trying to copy. Cristóbal’s testimony about the cocaine-laden tables and barbecue parties for army accomplices plays over repeated angles of the Dynasty house and garden. As the luxury of ballrooms, dining halls and diamond necklaces is paraded on screen, Cristóbal describes the mortal risks for ordinary coca farmers working for the cartel: “If they owed you a million pesos, or two, rather than pay you, they would send someone to bump you off”. Meanwhile, on-screen, Krystle stands alone on a balcony, as if in a gilded cage.

 

Then comes a short, striking sequence, with ten shots of oil drilling machinery towering against the sky, and then one image of a drilling tower exploding and collapsing. Appearing immediately after Cristóbal’s story of exploitation by cartel henchmen, this sequence connects their violence to that of oil barons, whose lifestyles provided an aspirational model for drug traffickers as they embarked on their own practices of extraction. As Erika Balsom writes,

Between Colombia and the United States, cocaine and oil, reality and television, multiple narratives intersect in a nexus of affluence, aspiration, and violence […] creating an accord between the violence of the drug wars, the violence of European conquest, and possibilities of survival and resistance against both.[31]

A later sequence presents a succession of cars and planes, gliding across all-American landscapes as Cristóbal recounts his childhood, hunting and fishing on the riverbank. His sense of autonomy and the ease with which he moves around the territory, on foot or canoe, express an alternative to the spectacular promises of petroculture and petromodernity.[32] This resistance is not fetishised in an ethnographic fantasy of purity, but set alongside the material trappings of the oil baron lifestyle, in a continuum of relationships to the land.

The Labyrinth’s aesthetic strategies overlap with those in Tropic Pocket, using analogue filmmaking, found footage, and soundtrack transpositions to propose a critique of colonial gazes. The coloniser’s fantasies, materialised in the petroimages of consumerist excess, are put to work against themselves. Hyperreal gilded mansions aspire to transcendence but are reclaimed by the jungle, like the Chevrolet Corvair abandoned in the Darién gap, which is the last image in Tropic Pocket. Huertas Millán’s choice to engage with an American soap opera that does not bear an explicit relationship to the Colombian context is radical, because it returns the ethnographic gaze back on the coloniser. It engages with Reaganite petroculture as a kind of “fiction-making”, like colonial ethnography. By realising the inseparability between affluence and violence, between oil barons and narcos, and between popular media ideologies and real lives, the film refuses to commodify Cristóbal’s testimony.

Oslo, 2012: Mediation and direct experience

While Restrepo and Huertas Millán work with found footage in the public domain, there is also a strong presence of home movies and the private archive in recent work by Colombian filmmakers. Ranging from experimental to mainstream documentary, works by Juan Soto, Daniela Abad, Andrea Said, Federico Atehortúa, Mercedes Gaviria, and Marta Hincapié, amongst others, have engaged with their own family archives as a means of exploring      questions of memory and history. Home movies and family photographs have had a growing presence in Latin American filmmaking since the 1980s.[33] The work of filmmakers like Albertina Carri and Andrés di Tella has been cited by their Colombian counterparts with appreciation for the reflective approaches to the archive.[34]  In the works that I study here, the personal archive works side by side with television news footage to make explicit the distance between the two, which in turn is a reflection on situated experiences of the Colombian conflict. This reflexivity serves again to counter extractive approaches to the archive, by giving back other images and by questioning the filmmaker’s right to tell certain stories, as well as the audience’s right to consume them. If the ethnographic and the extractive gazes are characterised by the erasure of their subjective standpoints, reflexivity can offer paths of resistance.

Speaking about his film Pirotecnia [Mute Fire] (2019), Federico Atehortúa reflected on his initial attempt to make a documentary about the “false positives” (thousands of cases of civilians murdered by the army and falsely presented as enemy combatants in order to obtain perks and rewards).[35]  Atehortúa recognised that he “felt limited when [he] approached this topic as [he] didn’t feel authorised to talk about this”.[36] A semi-fictionalised personal narrative about a family illness then becomes a way into the topic, framing a reflection on the function of images throughout the Colombian conflict. By positioning himself as a spectator rather than a victim, Atehortúa finds a standpoint from which to engage with the archive, which ultimately tells a story about representation rather than violence. There is a similar unease in Marta Hincapié’s Las razones del lobo [The wolf’s reasons] (2020), which refers to the conflict in the voiceover narration without showing its images, presenting instead the calm pools and manicured lawns of a country club. These films express a structural unease about the positionality of representation and the expectation that Colombian filmmakers will speak from direct traumatic experience. The films reflect on mediated witnessing while refusing to perform first-hand trauma or to appropriate victims’ narratives. This refusal is an attempt to acknowledge and be accountable for structural differences in the conflict’s impact across class divides. Aside from the heightened terrorism stage of the drug wars in the 1980s and 1990s, the Colombian conflict has mostly played out in rural areas and urban peripheries. Therefore, it was possible for children of the middle and upper-middle classes – those most likely to have home videos to look back on – to grow up experiencing war mainly as an ongoing televised event.

For filmmakers of this generation and background, questioning this perspective is ethically crucial, but it risks reifying the distance it observes. Writing on “elite capture”, Olúfémi O. Táíwò warns against the “deferential” application of standpoint epistemology, as “it focuses us on the interaction of the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the interactions we don’t experience”.[37] In the ethical attempt to avoid speaking on behalf of others, there may be a risk of assuming a separation that ignores mutual implication and responsibility. In Colombia, there is no experience that is completely outside that of conflict. As Camilo Restrepo argues, even international law has recognised the collective victimhood of Colombians, and hence, he says, “I would like to avoid that common thought that considers that only having experienced violence validates one’s interest in the topic”.^[38] Extensive research with secondary sources and witness testimony allows the filmmaker to inhabit other perspectives without mimicry, by recognising their own position as fragmentary.

Distance from the conflict is, in any case, always relative and provisional. In Juan Soto’s short film Oslo, 2012, shifting positions of proximity and mediation play out across a range of registers, from the home video to the television archive. The video starts with a warning that it is “for Colombians only” and a mise-en-abyme where Soto films his own computer screen in a flat in Berlin. The film’s title alludes to the start of the peace dialogues with FARC in the Norwegian capital in October 2012. At this inflection point in the long history of conflict, the film offers an analysis of some of the intractable obstacles on the way to peace, central amongst them the United States’ historical role in Colombian politics, played out in the pageantry of US presidential visits that have served to cement extractivist trade agreements and military support with unspoken links to paramilitary violence.

Oslo is a dense collage of moving images and sounds gleaned from nearly a century of representations of the Colombian conflict, from the 1927 anti-imperialist feature Garras de Oro [a.k.a. The Dawn of Justice][39] to a 2007 animation criticising the “phony demobilization” of paramilitaries, who were granted immunity and allowed to rearm.[40] The never-ending cycle of violence is punctuated by the state visits, captured on film and video in all their obsequiousness. At the core of the film is the 2007 meeting between George W. Bush and Alvaro Uribe, and the protests that surrounded it. The framing of this moment moves across a proliferating number of perspectives. There is the predictable news footage of pomp and ceremony, but as the national anthem plays, Soto cuts to digital video footage of the police detaining a group of young protesters as the presidential visit plays on TV. First, the television set at the detention place foregrounds the mediation that both separates and links the state visit with the act of police repression. Then, another frame appears showing this protest footage playing on a computer media player. Showing the media interface again makes explicit a second-hand perspective, which is then complicated because the filmmaker himself can be seen in the footage, holding a video camera. This is a second-hand account of an event at which the filmmaker was present, which both legitimates and fragments the veracity of the reportage.

The following section appears more immediate, intercutting protest scenes and chants with black-and-white footage of 20^th-century crowds and with the official ceremony, until the “Stars and Stripes” is interrupted by a transition to riot police firing tear gas. The camerawork becomes frantic as the filmmaker has to escape the gas and negotiate an intimidating encounter with a policeman who will not allow filming. This direct experience of repression gives way again to the archive, with news footage assembled into a harrowing sequence of dead bodies that tracks back through the decades. The sequence has a troubling abstract quality, where abject images of the dead stand in for the violence of each decade. Amongst these images, repeated twice, is a piece of footage that is as recognisable for Colombians as the Zapruder footage is to Americans: the confused moments after presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was gunned down while taking the stage at a campaign rally in 1989. This becomes an anchor point for the legibility and temporality of the other, less famous images.

The voiceover talks about the systematic extermination of the socialist political party Unión Patriótica (UP), by state forces and allies, as a condensation of Colombia’s inability to sustain the conditions for peace. In other films, Soto has explored the victimisation of members of his own family who were connected to this political party. 19º Sur 65º Oeste (2010) deals with the forced exile of one of Soto’s relatives, and Parábola del Retorno (2016) takes the imagined perspective of another one, who worked as a bodyguard to the UP’s presidential candidate, before being disappeared in 1987. The archival news footage is thus inseparable from family history and from Soto’s own relationship to it. This is, however, not explicit unless the viewer already knows this. An extra-textual or inter-textual understanding of the filmmaker’s own personal and political position thus becomes determinant for the interpretation of this sequence as distanced or intimate. Without it, the explicit footage of victims of violence risks being received as generic and sensationalist, in keeping with its television news sources.

At the start of the film, Soto declares he is making “a self-portrait”. Besides the media player sequence mentioned above, Soto appears on screen as a boy in a home video dated 1997, learning to dive in a swimming pool. The assumed innocence of the family video, edited in parallel to news clips about insurgent attacks and paramilitary massacres, speaks to the confusing experience of growing up in Colombia in the 1990s. In the swimming pool, metonymic for a family holiday, Soto appears carefree, while the montage demonstrates the intensity of war during that period. Nine years later, he is filming as he runs away from tear gas on the streets of Bogota. Five years after that, he is staring out of an apartment window in Berlin, where he is assembling this film. As Juana Suarez has observed, “central to Soto’s work is an equation between editing a film and editing life”.[41] Laura Correa and Juan Osorio note that, through his editing, Soto “not only reviews the past but reviews himself, as a way of seeing himself implicated in the images he appropriates”.[42] This implication is unstable, producing a play between proximity and distancing, where the filmmaker reflects on shifting positions and relationships to Colombian events, as first-hand participant, victim, second-hand TV viewer, or distant observer.

This fragmented positionality corresponds to the “dislocations of the national” that Suárez has found in this group of Colombian filmmakers working abroad.[43] Theirs is not an experience of exile but of relative mobility. Like Restrepo and Huertas Millán, Soto moves between Colombia and Europe (though not without the difficulties and barriers that colonial borders impose on Global South citizens). His films often combine footage shot in different countries, but also mediated accounts of events in Colombia as seen from afar.[44] The uses of archival images introduce another layer of distance, both through their temporal disparity and through their marking as media discourses, seen on television or digital screens. Oslo, 2012 is not an archive compilation, but an account of the filmmaker’s encounter with archives, including his own. Like in Tropic Pocket, the mediations that bring together digitised analogue film and television with non-professional home video formats are exposed, but the discontinuities are emphasised.

Filming a TV news broadcast as it is being watched on a TV set is a way to explain the filmmaker’s distance from the event, and thus to refer to violence without appropriating it. This can then be another way of resisting or derailing extractive uses of the archive. In Las razones del lobo, Marta Hincapié also includes the TV news playing in a country club room, bright and sterile, while a toilet can be heard to flush in the background. The final sequence of the film could be a reverse shot to this setup: María Teresa Uribe, Hincapié’s mother, who is both the protagonist of many of the stories told in the film, and a scholar of violence in her own right, is watching the news about the referendum defeat of the peace agreement in 2016. “This is a national tragedy”, she tells her daughter, “This is like a nightmare”. Suddenly, the quiet scene is invaded by the overwhelming noise of explosions. In the streets, people are celebrating the referendum results, confirming their allegiance to violence. What seemed like a distant reality from the comfort of the club reasserts itself, first as mediated information (in the voice of a well-known news anchor) and then loudly, inescapably.

Conclusion

Archive filmmaking is a process of reappropriation. Theories of extractivism can, therefore, provide tools for a critical approach to these films. Colombia’s cinematic image abroad has been dominated by violence and poverty, alongside touristic visions of a rich biodiversity ripe for the taking. However, Colombian filmmakers have long struggled with these tropes, negotiating expectations internally and abroad about how the country is to be represented. As Zuluaga argues, “memory, ruin and archive appear as dominant discourses of Colombian documentary”, which sometimes grants the archive an unproblematic, positivist evidentiary value.[45] Instead of assuming the transparency of historical footage, filmmakers like Restrepo, Huertas and Soto have found ways to interrogate “a dispersion of ruins and signs” that refuse to package both landscape and history as consumable spectacles. This questioning proceeds through different strategies, some of which have been explored in this article.

Camilo Restrepo takes images constructed from a colonial gaze and disrupts them through juxtaposition, finding points of resonance, and using the surface distortions of informal digital archives to disclose his own archival pathways. This serves to question what is in the archive – or, rather, in the non-archival repositories of internet video – and how it was created. The multiple transits between analogue and digital formats invert assumptions of legibility, as the newer images are rendered more enigmatic than the older ones with which they are in dialogue. This refuses to see the colonial gaze as a historical artifact, and instead recognises it as a structuring pattern that persists even in the filmmaker’s own approach to the topic.

Laura Huertas Millán uses an unexpected source, an American melodrama, which, placed alongside the more traditional oral testimony, allows her to establish a dialectical relationship between Colombia’s drug trade, American consumerism, and more traditional extractive industries. Like Tropic Pocket, The Labyrinth performs its critical operations through montage, but rather than disrupting the surface of the image, Huertas Millán challenges the positivist impulse of documentary by weaving it together with fiction. In this approach, testimony and fantasy are different regimes of knowledge that sustain ways of being in the world.

Juan Soto uses his own archive to produce a reflective and eclectic approach to history, focusing on US-Colombia relationships and interweaving first- and second-hand accounts of events. The news footage is framed and reframed as mediated representation, drawing attention to their material devices and formats. The autobiographical approach to editing refuses to fill in the temporal gaps, offering a fragmentary, incomplete approach to history where the personal intersects with the collective only in flashes. The filmmaker’s positionality is implicit but crucial to a non-sensationalist reading of the appropriated footage.

The use of archive footage in these works rejects the nostalgic or explanatory, refusing to render the past as linear, visible, and legible. This would seem like a promising site for forms of visuality that resist the extractive logic. While this article has identified practices of curation, intervention and montage used by the filmmakers studied, a materialist analysis of these films needs to go further, considering not only the sources of images, but their circulation and reception, as Juana Suárez starts to do in the closing section of her 2019 article. There are important questions to be asked about how the audio-visual memory of the Global South is kept, cared for, shared, and made available for appropriation. As digitisation speeds up the transnational movement of images and sounds, there are opportunities for more critical film cultures that continue to challenge the hegemony of the commoditised image.

Notes

[1] Juana Suárez, “Dislocations of the National: Colombian Cinema and Intercultural Spaces,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28, no. 4 (2020): 541–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2020.1739007, 542.

[2] These are filmmakers who are aware and supportive of each other, who cross paths at festivals and are often brought together by curators. In 2018, for instance, Juana Suárez’s “Against the National Project” programme, screened in Glasgow and Durham, included films by Soto, Huertas Millán, Restrepo, Guerrero and Gonzalo Escobar (Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2018). In a 2021 curatorial fellowship for Cinemateca de Bogotá, works by Huertas Millán and Restrepo were screened alongside the likes of Kevin Jerome Everson and Susana de Sousa Dias, as part of a reflection on memory, testimony and the ruin (Cartel Urbano, 2021)

[3] Alongside Suárez’s work, which focuses on those filmmakers who live and work outside Colombia, other authors propose different clusters. For instance, Diana Cuéllar places the work of filmmakers such as Restrepo and Guerrero within a tradition of “documentaries of dissent”, alongside the political video-art works of Oscar Campo and Claudia Salamanca. Guerrero and Campo are also studied by Carolina Sourdis and María Luna in their work on found footage practices, alongside works by Luis Ospina and others. Diana Patricia Cuéllar España, “Documental del disenso: Representación de la violencia contemporánea en Colombia” (Madrid, Universidad Carlos III, 2019); Maria Luna and Carolina Sourdis, “Colombian Found Footage: The Tradition of Rupture,” New Cinemas 13, no. 1 (March 2015), https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/ncin.13.1.51_1, 54.

[4] María Luisa Ortega, “El Mañana Empezó Ayer. Tradiciones y Rupturas En El Documental de América Latina,” in Territorio y Memorias Sin Fronteras: Nuevas Estrategias Para Pensar Lo Real (Bogota: Uniminuto, 2021), 23–46., 26. [Author’s translation]

[5] Maria Luna and Carolina Sourdis, “Colombian Found Footage: The Tradition of Rupture,” New Cinemas 13, no. 1 (March 2015), https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/ncin.13.1.51_1, 54.

[6] Luisa Fernanda Ordóñez Ortegón, El Archivo Audiovisual y la Escritura de la Historia (Bogotá: Cinemateca Distrital; Idartes, 2020), p. 113 [Author’s translation]. A range of approaches to archives in Latin American cinema are represented in Mauricio Durán Castro and Claudia Salamanca, eds., Archivo, Memoria y Presente En El Cine Latinoamericano, 1st ed. (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xngsg.

[7] Luna and Sourdis, 54.

[8] Suárez 2019, 542.

[9] Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez, Caminos de Guerra, Utopías de Paz: Colombia: 1948-2020 (Bogota: Editorial Planeta, 2021), 10.

[10] Jaimie Baron, “The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception,” Projections 6, no. 2 (November 15, 2012): 102–20, https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2012.060207.

[11] Maristella Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives, Cambridge Elements. Elements in Politics and Society in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 7.

[12] Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel, “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Extractivism?,” Textual Practice 35, no. 3 (March 4, 2021): 505–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1889829, 506.

[13] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Dissident Acts (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 5.

[14] Szeman and Wenzel 2021, 511.

[15] Suárez 2019, 554-555.

[16] Janet Stewart, “Visual Culture Studies and Cultural Sociology: Extractive Seeing,” in Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. David Inglis and Anna-Mari Almila, 2016, p. 331

[17] Gómez-Barris 2017, 10.

[18] Suárez 2019, 558.

[19] At the time of writing, fragments of this film could be viewed on Universidad Tecnológica del Choco’s YouTube channel (e.g. Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz-qcLkdi0o). The university supports the regional film and photo archive (Archivo Fotográfico y Fílmico del Chocó) and in 2006 published research on this film as part of a cinema history report by Gonzalo Díaz Cañadas.

[20] Brian Oakes, “Building Films for Business: Jamison Handy and the Industrial Animation of the Jam Handy Organization,” Film History 22, no. 1 (2010): 95–107, https://doi.org/10.2979/fil.2010.22.1.95; Rick Prelinger, “Eccentricity, Education and the Evolution of Corporate Speech: Jam Handy and His Organization,” in Films That Work, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 211–20, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdjb.16.

[21] Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 8.

[22] Camilo Restrepo, “Líneas de errancia: despliegue espacial en el montaje audiovisual,” Cuadernos de cine colombiano, no. 30 (2020): 16–27, 20.

[23] Suarez 2019, 554

[24] Diana Kuéllar, “Camilo Restrepo, un cineasta del disenso,” Nexus Comunicación, no. 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i27.10569, 15.

[25] Restrepo 2020, 21.

[26] Laura Huertas Millán, “In conversation”, Tank magazine, Issue 82 (2020), p. 17-18 https://www.laurahuertasmillan.com/ethnographic-fiction

[27] Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, “Estéticas de La Ruina y La Precariedad En El Cine Colombiano Contemporáneo” (Estudio de Campos, Cinemateca de Bogotá, May 22, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-y-Fu0APU8.

[28] “‘Dynasty’ Overseas” Variety, 315:6 (1984), 62.

[29] Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 131. Gabriele Kreutzner and Ellen Seiter, “Not All ‘Soaps’ Are Created Equal: Towards a Crosscultural Criticism of Television Serials,” Screen 32, no. 2 (July 1, 1991): 154–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.2.154., 167.

[30] Jennifer M. Keane-Dawes, “(Mis)Perception of American Media Reality: Narrating Dissonance in the Actuality of Cultural Assimilation,” in Re-Constructing Place and Space: Media, Culture, Discourse and the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas, ed. Kamille Gentles-Peart and Maurice L. Hall (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 33–52., 33-34.

[31] Erika Balsom, “Speaking into Being: The Ethnographic Fictions of Laura Huertas Millán,” Text written for the individual exhibition The spring song. le chant du printemps, Maison des Arts, Centre d´art contemporain de Malakoff, 2018, https://www.laurahuertasmillan.com/speak-into-being.

[32] Belinda Smaill, “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture,” Screen 62, no. 1 (April 8, 2021): 59–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab002.

[33] Jorge Ruffinelli, “Del Cine Doméstico al Documental Personal En América Latina. Cinco Casos,” in La Casa Abierta: El Cine Doméstico y Sus Reciclajes Contemporáneos (Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2010), 225–50, 225.

[34] Federico Atehortúa in conversation with María Paula Lorgia, Cinemateca de Bogotá, #CineClubCinemateca: Pirotecnia (Dir. Federico Atehortúa Arteaga), 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPcr8Dee3k8.

[35] “Ejecuciones Extrajudiciales En Colombia 2002-2010” (Bogotá: Observatorio de derechos humanos y derecho humanitario, 2013), 7.

[36] Atehortúa in conversation with Lorgia, 2020.

[37] Olúfémi O. Táíwò, “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher 108, no. 4 (Autumn 2020), https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo.

[38] Diana Kuéllar, “Camilo Restrepo, un cineasta del disenso,” Nexus Comunicación, no. 27 (2020): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i27.10569, 13.

[39] Juana Suárez and Ramiro Arbeláez, “Garras De Oro (The Dawn of Justice—Alborada De Justicia): The Intriguing Orphan of Colombian Silent Films,” trans. Laura A. Chesak, The Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009): 54–82, https://doi.org/10.1353/mov.0.0034.

[40] Marc van Gurp, ‘Colombia Clean’, Osocio, 2007, https://osocio.org/message/colombia-clean/.

[41]  Juana Suárez, “Cine ‘nacional’/circulación transnacional: la experiencia fílmica colombiana en el extranjero en años recientes,” Nexus Comunicación, 2016, 6–23, https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i19.661, 18.

[42] Laura Correa Montoya and Juan Osorio Villegas, “El Desplazamiento de La Mirada. En 19° Sur 65° Oeste, Oslo, 2012 y Parábola Del Retorno, de Juan Soto,” in Territorios y Memorias Sin Fronteras, ed. María Luna, Pablo Mora, and Daniela Samper (Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios -UNIMINUTO, Alados, 2021), 167–94.

[43] Suárez 2019, 542.

[44] For instance, Soto’s 2020 film, Revelaciones, is mainly structured around a long telephone conversation with his mother as she drives on a Colombian road during one of the days of a national strike. Through her account, both the filmmaker and the viewer have access to an ordinary experience during an important historical moment.

[45] Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, “Asedios a Las Ruinas En El Documental Colombiano Contemporáneo,” in Territorio y Memorias Sin Fronteras: Nuevas Estrategias Para Pensar Lo Real (Bogota: Uniminuto, 2021), 147–67. 155.

 

Filmography

Atehortúa, Federico. Pirotecnia. Invasión Cine, 2019.

Hincapié Uribe, Marta. Las razones del lobo. Sandelion Producciones, 2020.

Huertas Millán, Laura. The Labyrinth. 2018. Source: SAVVY Contemporary, https://vimeo.com/500803326, last accessed November 2021.

Jam Handy, Daring the Darién! Chevrolet Motor Division, 1962.

Martínez Velasco, Alfonso [as P.P. Jambrina] Garras de Oro / Alborada de Justicia. Cali Film, 1927.

Restrepo, Camilo. Impression of a War. 529 Dragons, 2015.

Restrepo, Camilo. Los Conductos. Montañero Cine If You Hold A Stone, 2020.

Restrepo, Camilo. Tropic Pocket. Mutokino / Collectif Jeune Cinéma, 2011. Source: https://kinoscope.org/v/tropic-pocket/, last accessed November 2021.

Restrepo, Jorge. La Isla de los Deseos. Misioneros Claretianos, c. 1958.

Soto Taborda, Juan. 19º Sur 65º Oeste, 2010.

Soto Taborda, Juan. Oslo, 2012. 2014. Source: Artist’s website. https://www.juansoto.co.uk/oslo-2012, last accessed November 2021.

Soto Taborda, Juan. Parábola del Retorno. Tardeotemprano Films, 2017.

 

Bibliography

“Ejecuciones Extrajudiciales En Colombia 2002-2010.” Bogotá: Observatorio de derechos humanos y derecho humanitario, 2013. https://coeuropa.org.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Documentos-tematicos-8-FINAL-1.pdf.

Balsom, Erika. “Speaking into Being: The Ethnographic Fictions of Laura Huertas Millán.” Text written for the individual exhibition The spring song. le chant du printemps, Maison des Arts, Centre d´art contemporain de Malakoff, 2018. https://www.laurahuertasmillan.com/speak-into-being.

Baron, Jaimie. “The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception.” Projections 6, no. 2 (November 15, 2012): 102–20. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2012.060207.

Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. Oxford: Routledge, 2014.

Cartel Urbano. “Relato Oral y Ruina,” November 28, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20211128184014/https://cartelurbano.com/eventos/agenda/relato-oral-y-ruina-proyecto-curatorial-cinemateca-de-bogota.

CCA Glasgow. “Against the National Project: Memory and Mobility in Contemporary Colombian Cinema,” 2018. https://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/against-the-national-project.

Correa Montoya, Laura, and Juan Osorio Villegas. “El Desplazamiento de La Mirada. En 19° Sur 65° Oeste, Oslo, 2012 y Parábola Del Retorno, de Juan Soto.” In Territorios y Memorias Sin Fronteras, edited by María Luna, Pablo Mora, and Daniela Samper, 167–94. Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios -UNIMINUTO, Alados, 2021.

Cuéllar España, Diana Patricia. “Documental del disenso: Representación de la violencia contemporánea en Colombia.” PhD Thesis. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2019.

Díaz Cañadas, Gonzalo. “Historia Del Cine En El Chocò.” Quibdó: Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó, November 2006. https://es.slideshare.net/udelchoco/historia-del-cine-en-el-choc.

Feuer, Jane. Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 1995.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Dissident Acts. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017.

Gurp, Marc van. ‘Colombia Clean’. Osocio, 2007. https://osocio.org/message/colombia-clean/.

Huertas Millán, Laura. “In conversation”, Tank magazine, Issue 82 (2020), p. 17-18 https://www.laurahuertasmillan.com/ethnographic-fiction

Keane-Dawes, Jennifer M. “(Mis)Perception of American Media Reality: Narrating Dissonance in the Actuality of Cultural Assimilation.” In Re-Constructing Place and Space: Media, Culture, Discourse and the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas, edited by Kamille Gentles-Peart and Maurice L. Hall, 33–52. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

Kreutzner, Gabriele, and Ellen Seiter. “Not All ‘Soaps’ Are Created Equal: Towards a Crosscultural Criticism of Television Serials.” Screen 32, no. 2 (July 1, 1991): 154–72. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.2.154.

Kuéllar, Diana. “Camilo Restrepo, un cineasta del disenso.” Nexus Comunicación, no. 27 (2020): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i27.10569.

Luna, Maria, and Carolina Sourdis. “Colombian Found Footage: The Tradition of Rupture.” New Cinemas 13, no. 1 (March 2015): 51–64. https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/ncin.13.1.51_1.

Mauricio Durán Castro and Claudia Salamanca, eds., Archivo, Memoria y Presente En El Cine Latinoamericano, 1st ed. (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xngsg.

Oakes, Brian. “Building Films for Business: Jamison Handy and the Industrial Animation of the Jam Handy Organization.” Film History 22, no. 1 (2010): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.2979/fil.2010.22.1.95.

Ordóñez Ortegón, Luisa Fernanda. El Archivo Audiovisual y La Escritura de La Historia. Bogotá: Cinemateca Distrital; Idartes, 2020. https://idartesencasa.gov.co/sites/default/files/libros_pdf/El%20archivo%20audiovisual_web%20%281%29.pdf.

Ortega, María Luisa. “El mañana empezó ayer. Tradiciones y rupturas en el documental de América Latina.” In Territorio y memoria sin frontera, edited by María Luna, Pablo Mora and Daniela Samper. 23-46. Bogotá: Uniminuto, 2021.

Prelinger, Rick. “Eccentricity, Education and the Evolution of Corporate Speech: Jam Handy and His Organization.” In Films That Work, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 211–20. Amsterdam University Press, 2009. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdjb.16.

Restrepo, Camilo. “Líneas de errancia: despliegue espacial en el montaje audiovisual.” Cuadernos de cine colombiano, no. 30 (2020): 16–27.

Sánchez Gómez, Gonzalo. Caminos de Guerra, Utopías de Paz: Colombia: 1948-2020. Bogota: Editorial Planeta, 2021.

Smaill, Belinda. “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture.” Screen 62, no. 1 (April 8, 2021): 59–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab002.

Stewart, Janet. “Visual Culture Studies and Cultural Sociology: Extractive Seeing.” In Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by David Inglis and Anna-Mari Almila, 322–34, 2016.

Suárez, Juana, and Ramiro Arbeláez. “Garras De Oro (The Dawn of Justice—Alborada De Justicia): The Intriguing Orphan of Colombian Silent Films.” Translated by Laura A. Chesak. The Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009): 54–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/mov.0.0034.

Suárez, Juana. “Cine ‘nacional’/circulación transnacional: la experiencia fílmica colombiana en el extranjero en años recientes.” Nexus Comunicación, no. 19 (July 25, 2016): 6–23. https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i19.661.

Suárez, Juana. “Dislocations of the National: Colombian Cinema and Intercultural Spaces.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, April 28, 2020, 541–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2020.1739007.

Svampa, Maristella. Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge Elements. Elements in Politics and Society in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Szeman, Imre, and Jennifer Wenzel. “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Extractivism?” Textual Practice 35, no. 3 (March 4, 2021): 505–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1889829.

Táíwò, Olúfémi O. “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference.” The Philosopher 108, no. 4 (Autumn 2020). https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo.

Zuluaga, Pedro Adrián. “Estéticas de La Ruina y La Precariedad En El Cine Colombiano Contemporáneo.” Beca de Curaduría, Estudio de Campos, Cinemateca de Bogotá, May 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-y-Fu0APU8.

Zuluaga, Pedro Adrián. “Asedios a Las Ruinas En El Documental Colombiano Contemporáneo.” In Territorio y Memorias Sin Fronteras: Nuevas Estrategias Para Pensar Lo Real, 147–67. Bogota: Uniminuto, 2021.

 

Author Biography

María A. Vélez-Serna is a lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, and a film school graduate from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is the author of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and co-author of Early Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2382

 

Introduction: Film Quilts and the Practice of a Material Archiveology

When entering the Gustavsbergs Konsthall art gallery in Sweden in 2009, visitors were surprised to see that the gallery’s windows had been covered by semi-transparent curtains of vivid colours and geometric shapes which closely resembled traditional American quilts. On closer inspection, these curtains appeared to be composed of 16mm strips of film, sewn together and arranged according to colour and pattern. The transparency of the celluloid and its arrangement created vibrant, radiating shapes that attracted the viewer closer, while also encouraging a distanced point of view. Viewing the city of Gustavsberg through the patterns of the film quilts called attention to and prompted inquiry regarding their materiality and potential to filter the world through a different point of view. Whose point of view was it?

For American filmmaker Sabrina Gschwandtner’s first solo exhibition, Watch & See (2009), the artist stitched together hundreds of yards of documentary archival footage donated to her by Anthology Film Archives, in New York City, with a Bernina sewing machine. Gschwandtner writes on her website that her “film quilts recuperate sewing’s essential role in cinema, while expanding material possibilities for quilt-making.”[1] I argue that Gschwandtner’s film quilts pose critical points of discussion around the ontology of quilt-making as a fibre art, as well as cinema as a projected medium. The qualities of both artistic media become expanded in their encounter and interaction. Most importantly, her quilted film works offer a sensorial and spatialised experience of archival film footage that leads to an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered knowledge. Through this material encounter with the audience, they reflect on and expand a conception of film archives as enclosed spaces that regulate both objects and bodies.

To study the impact of Gschwandtner’s quilted film works on film archives, I turn to Catherine Russell’s work on archiveology. Russell defines archiveology as “a mode of film practice that draws on archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations are not false images but are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value.”[2] As I show in this article, Gschwandtner’s quilts offer a critical reflection on the history of craft, and its revaluation by feminist artists, filmmakers, and critics dating back to the 1960s. Beyond the film quilts’ subject matter, Gschwandtner’s methodology interrogates the role of images in the creation of historical knowledge, and affirms their function as forms of knowledge in themselves. As Jaimie Baron argues, history becomes “not only knowable but also perceptible in these [archival] images” by bringing the viewer in direct “contact” with the past.[3] Composed of cut and stitched rescued celluloid, film quilts materialise and spatialise the practice of montage on which archiveology rests – quite literally putting the viewer in physical contact with past images. As the etymology of archiveology suggests, film quilts as well as archiveological films use “the image archive as a language.”[4] Archives, in these practices, are repositories, and offer the building-blocks for a language based on fragmentation and metaphor.

Quoting Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller”, Russell contends that “the archiveologist is in this sense a craftsperson, whose work takes place primarily at the editing table or computer, fashioning the ‘raw material of experience’ into a ‘ruin that stands on the site of an old story,’”[5] and adds that “the emphasis on gesture and detail in archiveology necessarily shifts the focus of experimental media from masculinist oversight and vision to filmmaking as craft.”[6] This conceptual framing of archiveology as craftwork powerfully echoes Gschwandtner’s commitment to meticulous manual labour deeply entrenched in the history of women’s work. For her, craft – whether it be quilt-making, knitting, or film editing – is key to the writing of a feminist history of art and media. She writes that “[i]n the era of streaming video, with film on the brink of obsolescence, I drew from the craft of quilting salvaged remnants to create a feminist future for film.”[7] Indeed, Gschwandtner’s work intervenes at the crossroads of two strands of feminist criticism that flourished in the 1970s and questioned the intersection of “gender, domesticity, and power”: the reclaiming of a history of craft as specifically feminine and subversive, and a feminist film theory that challenged patriarchal norms of representation.[8]

With the concept of archiveology, Russell intends to “emphasise the documentary value of collecting and compiling fragments of previously filmed material.”[9] Documents, for her, are produced by the process of excision and recontextualisation of archival fragments, producing renewed histories and knowledges. One could then further ask what are film quilts documents of, and how does their materiality potentially affect their documentary value as historical objects? To answer these questions, I reflect on Gschwandtner’s conscious positioning of her works within a feminist history of women’s crafts, and more specifically the gendered and racialised history of quilt-making and its disregard by institutions of the art world. I discuss the way film quilts may evoke a history of feminised labour in the film and media industry. Finally, I consider the materiality of the quilts as sensorial objects, to counter understandings of film archives as disembodied and purely visual. The material display of Gschwandtner’s film quilts offer a renewed sensorial experience of the archive, one that acknowledges the copresence of viewer and object. I expand on Baron’s definition of archival footage “as a relationship produced between particular elements of a film and the film’s viewer,”[10] to consider how this relationship might develop within a material, tactile encounter such as those provided by Gschwandtner’s film quilts.

Hands at Work (2017): The Gendered and Racialised Legacy of Quilt-Making in America

For her 2017 exhibition Hands at Work at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Los Angeles), Gschwandtner displayed a series of film quilts composed of footage from the 1981 documentary film Quilts in Women’s Lives.[11] Directed by Pat Ferrero, the film takes part in the wave of feminist artists of the 1960s-80s that fought for the recognition of craftwork as a form of fine art grounded in a specific feminine tradition and legacy. Indeed, the 1960s onward saw a renewal of interest by feminist artists in crafts such as quilt-making, knitting, and macramé, and an attempt to legitimise their place within institutions of the art world and bring attention to centuries of anonymised labour. Particularly, as Elissa Auther notes, these fibre crafts represented an essential point of access into a genealogy of women’s productions, and “an alternative history of art making” that had remained unacknowledged for centuries.[12] Critics worked to recast these crafts away from the sphere of domesticity and anonymity and into the public light, all the while highlighting the contradictions of “seeking recognition in the mainstream art world.”[13] Auther adds that “in this context, the once negative associations of fiber or craft with femininity and the home were recast as distinctive and culturally valuable features of an artistic heritage specific to women.”[14] Artists like Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin, Joyce Wieland, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Shapiro among others, reclaimed these crafts in their work, while questioning their association with domesticity. Most famously, Chicago’s 1979 installation The Dinner Party subverts the domestic setting of a dinner table by honouring thirty-nine women of significance in Western history, whose names are embroidered along the table runner. Chicago worked in collaboration with artisans specialising in needlework and china painting, acknowledging their names on panels that travelled with the exhibition for the first ten years of its history. Similarly, experimental feminist filmmakers turned to craftwork, like Joyce Wieland in Handtinting (1967-68), where she applies fabric dyes and needle perforations to found footage of a Job Corps documentary where disenfranchised black and white women are educated in typing.[15] Aside from filmmaking, Wieland (in collaboration with needleworkers) also produced textile works such as hanging quilts and cushions that combined traditionally female craftwork with political messages targeting issues of feminism and ecology (as with The Water Quilt, 1970–71). These feminist multimedia works of art participated in the revaluation of craftwork as a form of fine art, with a grounding in women’s work.

Among the key feminist texts centring on women’s crafts, Patricia Mainardi’s 1972 article “Quilts: The Great American Art” is commonly recognised as essential for the recognition of quilt-making as a quintessential American and women’s art, and reads as a manifesto against the institutional and ideological division of fine arts and craft:

[…] although the sexist and racist art world will, if forced, include token artists, they will never allow them to expand the definitions of art, but will include only those whose work can be used to rubber-stamp already established white male art styles. Because our female ancestors’ pieced quilts bear a superficial resemblance to the work of contemporary formalist artists […], modern male curators and critics are now capable of “seeing” the art in them.[16]

As Mainardi notes, from its origins in the 1660s, needlework was an art for and by women, where they played the roles of “audience and critics.”[17] Far from a uniquely domestic and functional use shrouded in anonymity, quilters displayed their crafts publicly in fairs, churches, and grange halls, often signing their quilts and naming their patterns in acts of recognition. Quilting bees (a get-together for people who sew and quilt, dating back to the eighteenth century) presented women the opportunity to gather in groups (that Mainardi compares to contemporary consciousness-raising groups) and discuss social and political events, as platforms to practice a form of public speech.[18]

Pat Ferrero’s film Quilts in Women’s Lives (1980) follows this commitment to providing a platform to women’s crafts by giving a voice to a series of quilters in the form of oral histories. Ferrero films each quilter in frontal shots, without offering an overarching voice to organise their individual experiences. Mirroring the structure of the quilts themselves, interviews are juxtaposed without any apparent order, leaving it to the viewers to form conclusions or “patterns” about the film’s message.[19] As Anne R. Kaplan notes, “the choice of the quilters (a black, an immigrant, unmarried sisters, an artist, a schoolteacher, early middle aged and elderly women, and so forth) makes the point that the art of quilting belongs to a great variety of women at different stages of life, who derive different kinds of gratification from it.”[20] The film seems to argue that orality is embedded within the fabric and structure of the quilts, as they become mirrors to the socio-economic background and the subjectivity of their makers. They are the material embodiment of a history of American women in their diversity.

Indeed, the women of the film choose to connect their quilt-making to questions of patterns and the choice of specific colours, of emotions embedded within the fabric of the quilt, and of the genealogy of patterns and quilts as objects passed down from generation to generation. Joan Mulholland similarly argues that quilts were a “communication genre” as early as the 1700s, through which women could transmit “patterns of speech” intergenerationally in what she terms “language lessons.”[21] Gschwandtner’s film quilts, while losing the orality of the original documentaries that are sewn together, reproduce this nearly aural quality of the quilts by returning to classical quilt patterns like crazy quilts, diamonds, log cabins, etc.[22] If we follow the rhetoric of Quilts in Women’s Lives, through her choice of materials, colours, and patterns, Gschwandtner inscribes a form of subjectivity into her quilts. Her own subjectivity is sewn into the quilts, while at the same time she carries a tradition of quilting that includes the “language” of the women that quilted and recorded these patterns before her. Film quilts take on the grammar of quilting, and apply it to a new medium that allows Gschwandtner to refer back to the voices of the women documented in Quilts in Women’s Lives.

By choosing Ferrero’s 1981 documentary as the primary source of her film quilts, Gschwandtner participates in this larger history of feminist reflections on women’s crafts and their inclusion in fine arts settings. Before turning to quilting and experimental film, she was most famous for being the founder and editor of the activist knitting zine KnitKnit from its inception in 2002.[23] With film quilts, Gschwandtner crosses the boundaries of crafts and fine arts by bringing film and textile together, and exhibiting them as works of art in galleries. Drawing from activist documentaries such as Quilts in Women’s Lives further addresses this ideological divide. If Ferrero’s film echoes the structure and technique of quilts in its editing and structure (through a non-directive approach and the juxtaposition of interviews), the film quilts re-spatialise the footage into material objects, sewn together into visual patterns according to colours and not narration. The very fact that the Hands at Work quilts are composed of discarded found footage vividly recalls Mainardi’s attack against the disregard of women’s crafts by fine arts institutions. Gschwandtner writes that the film strips (Ferrero’s documentary, along with other short textile documentaries from the 1950s-80s) were given to her after they were de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) following the digitisation their collections in 2009. She adds that “not only had the movies’ subject matter – mostly that of women creating textiles – been deemed unworthy of archiving, but some of the film had faded or discolored, adding an additional layer of valuelessness.”[24] First de-accessioned from the FIT, then sorted by archivists at Anthology Film Archives, these documentaries emblematise the gendered archival choices that lead to the dismissal of women’s craft as well as women’s films.[25] This narrative surrounding the rescuing of film from degradation and oblivion is common to the practice of found footage.[26] With the film quilts, this rescue from archival loss takes on a political implication, as Gschwandtner inscribes her work in the legacy of 1980s feminist art and craft historians. In the meantime, she distances herself from sacralising the film prints, by cutting and sewing them, and thus deteriorating their initial conditions. Intervening physically on archival prints through painting, puncturing, scratching, and using chemical solutions marks much of the work of found footage feminist filmmakers, such as Peggy Ahwesh, Cécile Fontaine, Annabel Nicholson, Naomi Uman, and Joyce Wieland among others. These processes enable them to alter the original message of the film and reveal its patriarchal underpinnings.[27]

If the film quilts offer a reflection on the gendered division between fine art and craftwork, they do so with a special attention to the presence of African American women in the long legacy of women quilters in American history. The film quilt that most prominently tackles this issue is Elizabeth Keckley Diamond (2014), a small format quilt depicting the black quilter Elizabeth Keckley in black-and-white film strips forming a central diamond shape. Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818-1907) was born to enslaved parents and sold as a young girl to a North Carolina slave owner. She recounted her life story in her memoirs, Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, first published in 1868, chronicling her journey from being enslaved to buying her freedom through her success in her trade as a “slave entrepreneur”, and becoming the dressmaker and confidant of Mary Todd Lincoln.[28] One of the most well-known black public figures of quilt-making, Keckley holds a central place in Gschwandtner’s quilt, with four film strips depicting her portrait in a medium close-up, intersecting in a cross in the centre of the composition. These four rows of quilt immediately capture the viewer’s attention and guide their gaze throughout the rest of the composition, representing an unknown African American family. The footage sets Keckley as the clear central figure of this film quilt portrait, acknowledging and asserting the importance of African American women in the history of quilt-making. As Mainardi and Lisa E. Farrington both note, quilting was never limited to a specific class or race in the United States, and the history of the craft reveals a network of influences between Indigenous, African, and European cultures as early as the 1600s.[29] Enslaved people such as Keckley often crafted numerous quilts for those who claimed ownership over them, frequently with highly creative techniques and styles, and it is through her craft as a seamstress that Keckley gained recognition and her eventual freedom. Unlike her other quilts from the series Hands at Work, Elizabeth Keckley Diamond works in a quasi-monochromatic manner, setting up a stark contrast between the warm coloured background made of film leaders and the cool-toned diamond shape depicting the quilt-maker. This striking contrast and the structure assemble a powerful portrait of Keckley through an allegory of her craft. With her film quilt, Gschwandtner pays homage to a key figure of American history and art.

Jonathan Walley notes that among the leaders surrounding the black-and-white diamond shape, a couple of celluloid strips depict an ornate coffee pot and what appears to be a painting. These objects function as indexes of wealth and privilege, starkly contrasting in colour and shape with the central imagery of paired down portraits of African Americans, seemingly isolated from this world.[30] As Walley writes, Elizabeth Keckley holds a privileged position within this composition, mirroring her social status: “Keckley stands as a mediating figure between the two worlds, more upwardly mobile than a typical black woman but still severely restricted by the structure of the society in which she lived. Her place at the centre of the quilt elevates her as subject but also emblematizes her distance from white society and power.”[31] On the other hand, these details only emerge upon close examination of the quilt, pulling the viewer into a more complex understanding of this historical figure. This playful push and pull of the quilt, between overall pattern and microscopic details, mirrors the feminist interpretation of quilts as a “secret language of women.”[32]

Quilt-Making and Film Editing as “Women’s Work”

If Gschwandtner’s film quilts offer a reflection on the gendered and racialised history of quilt-making, their structural components materialise this history in concrete forms. Made by stitching together celluloid strips of archival films, the quilts reproduce the craftwork that they depict. The delicate work performed by the artist is foregrounded when one approaches the quilts to examine their sutures. Gschwandtner purposefully uses the medium of film in order to recall the labour of film editing. Walley argues that the artisanal labour of sewing spatialises the process of editing, by “reimagin[ing] montage in spatial forms, lending them a concreteness they lose otherwise and throwing into relief the tropes of editing made invisible by narrative action.”[33] Moving beyond cinema as a projected medium, film quilts call attention to the materiality of the celluloid as well as the processes by which it is edited into narrative sequences. Pared down to film strips sewn together by hand, they offer a reflection on the specificity of cinema as an art form, and the craftwork that goes into film editing.[34]

This attention to sewing as a materialisation of the labour of editing inscribes Gschwandtner’s quilts within a feminist tradition of experimental handmade cinema dating back to the 1970s, along the works of Annabel Nicholson and Jennifer Reeves among others. These filmmakers pay specific attention to suturing and de-suturing as a feminist practice meant to defamiliarise the image of the female body, and more specifically a labouring female body.[35] With the experimental film Light Work I, Reeves sews together educational footage on a sewing machine, filming extreme close-ups of the sutures.[36] She interlaces these shots with footage of women weaving in factories in the film’s opening sequence. The extreme close-ups of the sewn footage, juxtaposed with imagery of women’s labour formulates a clear comparison between film editing and sewing, calling attention to the gendered labour of editing. Similarly, Gschwandtner often chooses footage of quilters’ hands stitching fabric together in close-ups, mirroring her own craft as a film quilter. In her 1973 performance Reel Time at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, Annabel Nicholson ran a loop of film through a sewing machine and into a projector, slowly breaking down the celluloid by puncturing it with an unthreaded needle.[37] She placed herself in front of the projector, delineating starkly the outline of her body while operating the sewing machine, a symbol of domestic work. Here, the gendered body of the craftsperson and editor is highlighted even more. As Gregory Zinman writes: “[…] in Reel Time, in which the seams were the subject of the work and the construction/destruction of the image was laid bare for all to see, Nicholson reintroduced the labor behind filmmaking, and through sewing bound together the notion of ‘women’s work’ and filmmaking.”[38] The invisibility of the labour of film editors, once projected on screen and embodied by Nicholson, can no longer be ignored. With these experimental works, feminist filmmakers and performers recall the anonymised and unacknowledged labour of film editors, a position that women overwhelmingly occupied.

The comparison of film editing to a form of feminised domestic labour dates from the early stages of film production. As Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen notes, editors themselves compared their work to sewing and knitting, as this domestic metaphor “opened these jobs up to women”[39] while also absorbing their labour into the films themselves, essentially rendering their work unnoticed and anonymous.[40] Indeed, performing duties that were considered repetitive and technical – such as cutting and pasting negative film together – contrary to the creative work of male authors, the “cutters” were altogether absent from trade presses and film credits.[41] These tedious and labour intensive jobs fell to young working-class women. As technology advanced, and the studio system evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, working conditions changed for female “cutters.” Longer moving pictures and multiple reels made the labour of the editor more visible on screen (as it impacted the narrative more ostensibly). The studio system reacted by segregating the tasks of the editor along gendered lines “film editing split into two subfields: the individual, male-dominated mental artistry of “editing” and the mass feminized handiwork of cutting, splicing, joining, gluing, and lacing.”[42] Only very few women rose to prominent positions as recognised film editors, as for example Margaret Booth, who began her career as a cutter for D. W. Griffith.[43] This form of gendered labour falls under what Kylie Jarrett terms “women’s work,” “the social, reproductive work typically differentiated from productive economics of the industrial workplace.”[44] This category offers a critical framework to deconstruct the way that creative domestic work – such as weaving, sewing, and knitting – came to be constructed as reproductive and anonymised throughout the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system.

Through the techniques that she uses, Gschwandtner inserts her work within this feminist critique of film labour, as she writes “for me, what related my work more to ‘craft critique’ and to feminist traditions was that the labor of the work was being done by me, with needle and thread or yarn – these things that signify what has historically been labelled ‘women’s work,’ just like film editing has been.”[45] While reproducing a form of gendered labour with her own body in the fabrication of film quilts, Gschwandtner transcends the reproductive aspect of editing and sewing by calling attention to it, and placing it at the centre of her works.[46] Her film quilts condense in material forms the questions of women’s work and the appropriation of domestic craft into reproductive labour. Her work often challenges the anonymity of feminised labour by naming the quilters and filmmakers that she represents and borrows from in her titles (like Elizabeth Keckley Diamond, 2014). The playful movement between the overall object of the quilt, the microscopic observation of the celluloid’s images of working craftswomen, and of the quilting technique sewing these images together formulates a critical argument tying together these elements into a feminist discourse.

Film Quilts as Sensory Vectors of Archival Knowledge

As noted above, Russell defines archiveology as self-reflective history-making process drawing from archival materials. The knowledge it produces is both historical and historiographical, reflecting on its own status as a constructed text. So far, I have shown how film quilts can produce a feminist discourse that confronts the structural absence of women’s narratives from the history of film and fine arts. While they use images as documents of a specific women’s history, the historical knowledge produced by the quilts is no longer transmitted didactically – as was the case in Ferrero’s Quilts in Women’s Lives – but through the materiality of the quilting process. Knowledge becomes embedded in the quilts’ stitches, connecting individual stories and techniques. It is through this alternation between the images and the process of their juxtaposition that Gschwandtner articulates the encounter and interaction of the feminist recovery of crafts like quilting and needlework in the 1960s onward with the contemporary reappraisal of the history of cinema as a one of gendered labour. Through this, Gschwandtner positions her work as part of the legacy of the feminist movement in both the arts and cinema. Particularly, her method of suturing images of craftwork, domesticity, and female community recalls works such as that of Chicago and Wieland, in their construction of a specific feminist history. Archival images become the grammar to articulate this history.

As objects made from cutting and stitching celluloid strips, Gschwandtner’s film quilts materialise the practice of archiveology and encourage an embodied relation to archival materials. To understand this interaction between archival images and viewers, I turn to Baron’s theorisation of the way found footage formulates this in terms of a relationship. In The Archive Effect (2013), Baron contends that archival images, because of their indexical quality, bring the viewer in “contact” with history.[47] She adds that the archive enters into a relation with the viewer through these film practices:

This reformulation of archival footage and other indexical archival documents as a relationship produced between particular elements of a film and the film’s viewer allows us to account […] for the ways in which certain documents from the past – whether found in an official archive, a family basement, or online – may be imbued by the viewer with various evidentiary values as they are appropriated and repurposed in new films.[48]

Concentrating on the meanings introduced by the confrontation of archival materials to viewers enables Baron to reflect on the multiplicity of interpretative contexts of found footage experiments. In the case of Gschwandtner’s film quilts, these contexts range from educational documentaries aimed towards young audiences and textile students, to feminist audiences engaged in the recognition of women’s work. Juxtaposed images, Baron claims, carry with them traces of their original intended context. The temporal disparity between intended context and context of reception – often intentional in found footage films and videos – creates the conditions for the recognition of multiple layers of historical experience in the viewer. Film quilts materialise the clash of these various historical and social contexts through their stitches that render visible the constructedness of the artist’s message. Elizabeth Keckley Diamond, for example, uses tinted blank leaders to enhance the darkness of the stitches juxtaposing black and white portraits of the quilter with warm coloured shots of ostentatious objects. They immediately appear to be from different class backgrounds, and archival sources, as their colours, compositions, and places in the quilt indicate. Blank leaders, in addition, recall the mediated nature of the images we encounter: they were once part of larger documentary films. This further leads viewers to question their original context of reception. Archival knowledge, in film quilts, becomes a sensory and nearly tactile experience. As I have argued, the film quilts’ stitches carry the knowledge of women’s labour, and a legacy of women’s craftwork. If Ferrero’s documentary “flattened” the quilts it depicted by recording them on film, film quilts work to re-materialise them into three-dimensional objects to be experienced physically. They invite a closer inspection, moving the viewers’ bodies in and out of their spaces of exhibition. The materiality of their fabric, highlighted by irregular stitching and bright colours, appeal to a sense of touch, especially when exhibited in front of windows.

Furthermore, the film quilts deconstruct the archive as a unified source of historical knowledge. This archival knowledge, as feminist archival theory demonstrates, is rooted in patriarchal order and can only be dismantled through a scrutiny of its constructedness.[49] As Kate Eichhorn writes: “rather than approach the archive as a site of preservation (a place to house traces of the past), feminist scholars, cultural workers, librarians, and archivists born during and after the rise of the second wave feminist movement are seizing the archive as an apparatus to legitimize new forms of knowledge and cultural production in an economically and politically precarious present.”[50] As Russell notes, Walter Benjamin approached the archive as a “construction site,” where fragmentation leads to openness and possibility.[51] Found footage, and film quilts in particular, by editing and juxtaposing images from a variety of contexts, break down the seamlessness of the archive, and expose its construction. Fragments from institutional and family archives cohabit to formulate new historical knowledge. Quilts mirror this heterogeneity by juxtaposing squares of different film sources, colours, shapes. Their organisation does not follow a narrative impulse, but, rather, it is grounded in more formal implications that hark back to traditional patterns and a legacy of women’s craft. What film quilts emphasise specifically is the materiality of archival images as objects subjected to decay and manipulation. Far from the supposed disembodied knowledge of official archives, the footage of the quilts physically reacts to its interactions with the artist and its viewers. These interactions escape the control of archives and their sanitised environment. Gschwandtner, for example, does not hesitate to paint over the footage with lithography ink to create more vivid colours over the film leaders. Her film quilts present and encourage a view of the archive as a series of objects connected by the situated voice of the artist, and as subject to interpretation and sensory encounters.

In choosing the archival material to integrate in her quilts, Gschwandtner refuses to follow an archival logic of the perfect print, favouring instead deteriorated prints and incomplete footage. Her work questions the archival choices leading to the de-accessioning of textile documentaries on women’s quilts, in the same vein as Peggy Ahwesh with her short film The Color of Love (1994), where she “rescued” degraded pornographic footage from a dumpster.[52] Ahwesh’s film focuses on the graphic patterns emerging from the mould and the leaks, covering the images of two women having sex with each other and a corpse. Both filmmakers emphasise the sensorial engagement with these images and their materiality, calling for an embodied response. If Gschwandtner’s quilts do not present the same level of degradation, they similarly reflect on the disregard of archival institutions for women-centred works. Furthermore, film quilts often make use of film leaders, lacking visual images. They sometimes include handwritten notes, or the titles of films, such as the “Discovering Form in Art” in the film quilt Arts and Crafts (2012) that ironically recalls the sudden “discovery” of the formal qualities of quilts by fine arts curators in the 1970s.[53]

By including leaders within her compositions, Gschwandtner expands the purview of the film archive, questioning what constitutes “film” as an object. In her film quilts, every inch of the film strip qualifies as archival material, carrying both formal capacities and historical information. Her work confronts viewers with archival hierarchies. One could wonder how the integration of film leaders into found footage expands the “evidentiary value” that Baron confers to archival materials.[54] What are the intended contexts of leaders? What traces of history do they carry with them? Gschwandtner’s quilting practice utilises them as she would recycle strips of fabric, granting them a new life and purpose outside of the archive, whilst acknowledging the emotional and subjective traces of history embedded in them.

Conclusion

To conclude, I propose a return to Gschwandtner’s 2009 Gustavsbergs Konsthall exhibition Watch & See, where she hung film over the windows of the gallery. For later exhibitions Gschwandtner’s quilts were displayed against light boxes for fear of their deterioration with sunlight. However, I argue that choosing to hang the quilts over windows in an otherwise empty gallery space crystallised Gschwandtner’s reflections on the history of quilt-making and women’s work in the film industry. Looking through them provided the viewer with a renewed experience of the cityscape, suddenly filtered through images of crafts and women’s hands. The patterns of the quilts overlaid the lines of rooftops, inviting the viewer to step closer and examine the details of the colourful film strips. Casting coloured lights into the gallery itself, film quilts also transcended this space, now imbued with new subjectivities. If (art) history repeatedly ignored and anonymised craftswomen’s points of view, these quilts reclaimed them as central in our experience of the city and the art world alike. As Gschwandtner writes, “[t]hey physically engaged the idea of shedding contemporary light on history.”[55] Furthermore, this display mechanism accentuated the materiality of the footage, its weight, sutures, and slow deterioration. Both quilts and celluloid film footage are fragile artefacts that require specific exhibitionary and archival treatment due to their materiality. By taking them out of storage boxes and dark rooms, Gschwandtner exposed their fragility as well as the craftwork that goes into making and conserving them. Her art practice transcends the archive while constantly returning to it, exposing its material components and the labour of its workers.

Gschwandtner’s more recent work – the Cinema Sanctuary Study series – returns more directly to a feminist film history, and the still-unrecognised labour of female cinema pioneers of the late 1800s to early 1900s, such as Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, and Marion E. Wong. For this new series, she searched archival collections around the world in a methodology that Russell would identify as archiveology – reprinting footage from their films onto 35mm film stock, cutting, and sewing it into entirely black and white quilt patterns.[56] She identifies her practice as a form of quilting, salvaging strips of film and fabric to create new patterns – and futures – for the history of film and craftwork. This echoes Kate Eichhorn’s call to consider archival practices as genealogical tactics. In this, Eichhorn follows Wendy Brown’s theorisation of “genealogical politics” as an inquiry into the “past of the present” that renders “the categories constitutive of the present” historical and constructed rather than natural.[57] This defamiliarising process, for Eichhorn “is not a turn toward the past but rather an essential way of understanding and imagining other ways to live in the present,” and an essential feminist tactic.[58] Gschwandtner’s archival work – whether it is centred on female cinema pioneer or the reclaiming of quilting as a feminist art – turns to a history of feminist film and artistic tradition to expose the ideology that led to their neglect, and to renew our sensorial interactions with archives in a non-hierarchical, future-oriented process.

 

Notes

[1] Sabrina Gschwandtner, “16mm Film Quilts Series (2009-2018),” https://www.sabrinag.com/filmquilts, Sabrina Gschwandtner, n.d., accessed November 11, 2021.

[2] Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 22.

[3] Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 1.

[4] Russell, Archiveology, 12.

[5] Russell, Archiveology, 22.

[6] Russell, Archiveology, 6.

[7] Gschwandtner, “16mm Film Quilts Series.”

[8] Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Tactility and Transparency: An Interview with Sabrina Gschwandtner,” in Sunshine and Shadow: Film Quilts by Sabrina Gschwandtner, eds. Glenn Adamson, Sarah Archer, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, 2013, 45.

[9] Russell, Archiveology, 27.

[10] Baron, The Archive Effect, 7.

[11] Pat Ferrero, Quilts in Women’s Lives, 16 mm, documentary (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1981).

[12] Elissa Auther, “Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–80,” The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 31, https://doi.org/10.2752/174967708783389896; See also Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

[13] Auther, “Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft,” 31.

[14] Auther, “Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft,” 31.00/00/0000 00:00:00

[15] Joyce Wieland, Handtinting, 1967-68, 16 mm, colour, silent. See Kay Armatage, “Joyce Wieland, Feminist Documentary, and the Body of the Work,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, no. 1-2 (1989): 91-101.

[16] Reproduced in Patricia Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 1st ed (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1982), 343.

[17] Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” 331.

[18] Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” 342; see also Joan Mulholland, “Patchwork: The Evolution of a Women’s Genre,” The Journal of American Culture 19, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1996.1904_57.x. Mainardi recalls that Susan B. Anthony is said to have made her first public speech during a church quilting bee in Cleveland.

[19] Anne R. Kaplan, “Review: Quilts in Women’s Lives: Six Portraits [Film] by Pat Ferrero,” The Oral History Review 18, no. 1 (1990): 123.

[20] Kaplan, “Review,” 122.

[21] Mulholland, “Patchwork,” 58; 59.

[22] For further reflection on the importance of the “handmade” as a mark of authenticity and subjectivity, see Gregory Zinman, Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and Other Arts (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).

[23] Most of the academic publications on Gschwandtner’s work focus on her knitting work and her involvement with the zine. Recently however, Jonathan Walley dedicated a chapter of his book Cinema Expanded to “Film as Weaving” and the formal experiments of Sabrina Gschwandtner, Richard Kerr, and Mary Stark, weaving film strips into sculptural forms. See Jonathan Walley, Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[24] Gschwandtner, “16mm Film Quilts Series.”

[25] See, for example, B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71, 2nd ed (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Jackie Hatfield, “Imagining Future Gardens of History,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 184–91, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2006-008; Robin Blaetz, ed., Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[26] One can think, for example, of Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Love (1994), or Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kiss (1992).

[27] For an account of feminist uses of found footage, see for example the special issue of Feminist Media Studies, “Women Without a Movie Camera”. Monica Dall’Asta and Alessandra Chiarini, “Editors’ Introduction: Found Footage: Women Without a Movie Camera,” Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2016.2.3.1.

[28] Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3039500; For historical analyses of Keckley’s labour as a slave, a seamstress and a companion to Mary Todd Lincoln, see Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Janaka B. Lewis, “Elizabeth Keckley and Freedom’s Labor,” African American Review 49, no. 1 (2016): 5–17, https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0004; Patty Wilde, “From Slave to Seamstress: Elizabeth Keckley’s Rhetoric of Emotional Labor,” in Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor, eds. David Gold and Jessica Enoch (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 31–41, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2234962.

[29] See for example Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art”; Lisa E. Farrington, “Creativity in the Era of Slavery,” in Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 26–49.

[30] Walley, Cinema Expanded, 325.

[31] Walley, Cinema Expanded, 325.

[32] Mulholland, “Patchwork,” 68.

[33] Walley, Cinema Expanded, 327.

[34] This medium specific discourse is at the centre of Jonathan Walley’s definition of expanded cinema. He writes that “expanded cinema neither abandoned the project of specifying cinema and distinguishing it from other art forms, nor cast off cinema’s historical traditions, formal conventions, or familiar materials. After an initial, and rather brief, wave of expanded cinema that equated the term with intermedia and promoted the belief that cinema could be anything, a shift occurred whereby cinema’s unwieldy and unlimited expansion encountered a reassertion of cinema’s specificity an artistic autonomy by film makers and critics. […] expanded cinema is best seen, I argue, as negotiating between cinema’s technological and aesthetic heterogeneity under one hand, and its specificity and historical continuity on the other.” Walley, Cinema Expanded, 15–16.

[35] See Gregory Zinman, “Sewing Light and Bleaching Bodies: Feminist Handmade Film Practices,” in Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and Other Arts (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020), 138–45; and Shana MacDonald, “Voicing Dissonance: Resistant Soundscapes in 1960s Feminist Experimental Film,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (2015): 89–107, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.89. MacDonald analyses the ways that filmmakers Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson, and Joyce Wieland use “discordant soundtracks [to] defamiliarize the domesticity of these private spaces and critically interrogate the domestic roles of wife, muse, and mother commonly associated with the spaces” (90).

[36] Jennifer Reeves, Light Work I, 16 mm/HDCAM, 2006.

[37] Thomas Elsaesser, in his archaeological approach to the history of the cinematic apparatus, notes that the projector is closely linked to the sewing machine and borrowed from its mechanisms. Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies,” in Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 253–266, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048529964-010.

[38] Zinman, “Sewing Light and Bleaching Bodies,” 140.

[39] Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, “Weavers of Film: The Girl Operator Mends the Cut,” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 3 (July 1, 2021): 104, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.104.

[40] For recent accounts of women’s work in the film industry, and the feminised role of the film editor, see Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016); David Meuel, Women Film Editors: Profiles in the Invisible Art of American Movies (Jefferson, IA: McFarland, 2016); Jane M. Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctt212172p.

[41] Jane Gaines and Radha Vatsal, “How Women Worked in the US Silent Film Industry,” in Women Film Pioneers Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2011), https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-nwqe-k750.

[42] Hirschfeld-Kroen, “Weavers of Film: The Girl Operator Mends the Cut,” 104–5.

[43] Margaret Booth’s interviews at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are an invaluable source of information on the labour of women editors in the early 20eth century. Kristen Hatch, “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors,” in Women Film Pioneers Project, ed. Radha Vatsal, Jane M. Gaines, and Monica Dall’Asta (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013), https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-t0y9-hv61

[44] Kylie Jarrett, “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media,” Television & New Media 15, no. 1 (January 2014): 15, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476413487607.

[45] Bryan-Wilson, “Tactility and Transparency: An Interview with Sabrina Gschwandtner,” 40.

[46] If Gschwandtner’s quilts reflect on the labour attached to analogue film editing, feminist scholars like Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, and Lisa Nakamura expand these considerations into a critique of digital technologies and their similar reliance on racialised women’s work for reproductive tasks. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991); Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 919-941, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2014.0070; Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1997).

[47] Baron, The Archive Effect, 1.

[48] Baron, The Archive Effect, 7.

[49] See for example Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York, NY: Atropos Press, 2009); Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013); Russell, Archiveology.

[50] Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 4.

[51] Russell, Archiveology, 13.

[52] Peggy Ahwesh, The Color of Love, 16 mm, colour, sound, 1994.

[53] See Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art.”

[54] Baron, The Archive Effect, 7.

[55] Bryan-Wilson, “Tactility and Transparency: An Interview with Sabrina Gschwandtner,” 43.

[56] Russell, Archiveology, 18.

[57] Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 95.

[58] Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 9.

 

Bibliography

Armatage, Kay. “Joyce Wieland, Feminist Documentary, and the Body of the Work.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, no. 1-2 (1989): 91-101.

Auther, Elissa. “Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–80.” The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 13–33. https://doi.org/10.2752/174967708783389896.

Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.

Blaetz, Robin, ed. Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Brown, Wendy. Politics out of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Tactility and Transparency: An Interview with Sabrina Gschwandtner.” In Sunshine and Shadow: Film Quilts by Sabrina Gschwandtner, edited by Glenn Adamson, Sarah Archer, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, 39–45, 2013.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Dall’Asta, Monica, and Alessandra Chiarini. “Editors’ Introduction: Found Footage: Women Without a Movie Camera.” Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2016.2.3.1.

Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies.” In Film History as Media Archaeology, 253-266. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048529964-010.

Farrington, Lisa E. “Creativity in the Era of Slavery.” In Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, 26–49. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gaines, Jane M. Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctt212172p.

Gaines, Jane, and Radha Vatsal. “How Women Worked in the US Silent Film Industry.” In Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2011. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-nwqe-k750.

Gschwandtner, Sabrina. “16mm Film Quilts Series (2009-2018).” https://www.sabrinag.com/filmquilts. Sabrina Gschwandtner, n.d. Accessed November 11, 2021.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, 1991.

Hatch, Kristen. “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors.” In Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Radha Vatsal, Jane M. Gaines, and Monica Dall’Asta. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-t0y9-hv61.

Hatfield, Jackie. “Imagining Future Gardens of History.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 184–91. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2006-008.

Hill, Erin. Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Hirschfeld-Kroen, Leana. “Weavers of Film: The Girl Operator Mends the Cut.” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 3 (July 1, 2021): 104–34. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.104.

Jarrett, Kylie. “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media.” Television & New Media 15, no. 1 (January 2014): 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476413487607.

Kaplan, Anne R. “Review: Quilts in Women’s Lives: Six Portraits [Film] by Pat Ferrero.” The Oral History Review 18, no. 1 (1990): 122–24.

Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3039500.

Lewis, Janaka B. “Elizabeth Keckley and Freedom’s Labor.” African American Review 49, no. 1 (2016): 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0004.

MacDonald, Shana. “Voicing Dissonance: Resistant Soundscapes in 1960s Feminist Experimental Film,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (2015): 89–107, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.89.

Mainardi, Patricia. “Quilts: The Great American Art.” In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 1st ed., 331–46. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1982.

Meuel, David. Women Film Editors: Profiles in the Invisible Art of American Movies. Jefferson, IA: McFarland, 2016.

Mulholland, Joan. “Patchwork: The Evolution of a Women’s Genre.” The Journal of American Culture 19, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1996.1904_57.x.

Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 919–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2014.0070.

Osthoff, Simone. Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium. New York, NY: Atropos Press, 2009.

Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

Plant, Sadie. Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1997.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71. 2nd ed. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Santamarina, Xiomara. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Walley, Jonathan. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Wilde, Patty. “From Slave to Seamstress: Elizabeth Keckley’s Rhetoric of Emotional Labor.” In Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor, edited by David Gold and Jessica Enoch, 31–41. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2234962.

Zinman, Gregory. Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and Other Arts. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020.

 

Filmography

Ahwesh, Peggy. The Color of Love. 1994. 16 mm, colour, sound.

Ferrero, Pat. Quilts in Women’s Lives. 1981; Newburgh, NY: New Day Films. 16 mm, colour, sound.

Gschwandtner, Sabrina. Cinema Sanctuary Study series. 2019-2021. 35 mm, polyester thread. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.sabrinag.com/35-mm-film-quilt-series-2019-

Gschwandtner, Sabrina. Hands at Work series. 2009-2018. 16 mm, polyamide thread, cotton thread, lithography ink. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.sabrinag.com/filmquilts

Gschwandtner, Sabrina. Arts and Crafts. 2012. 16 mm, polyamide thread, 23 1/2 x 23 in. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.sabrinag.com/filmquilts

Gschwandtner, Sabrina. Elizabeth Keckley Diamond. 2014. 16 mm, polyester thread, lithography ink, 15 7/8 x 15 13/16 x 3 1/16 in. Accessed November 11, 2021. https://www.sabrinag.com/filmquilts

Hammer, Barbara. Nitrate Kiss. 1992. 16 mm, black and white, sound.

Reeves, Jennifer. Light Work I. 2006. 16 mm/HDCAM, colour, sound.

Wieland, Joyce. Handtinting. 1967-68. 16 mm, colour, silent.

 

Author biography

Lola Rémy is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. She received her Master’s in History of Arts from Université Paris-Sorbonne. Her dissertation investigates and contextualises the formation of a post-war universalist discourse as expressed in experimental film practices of assemblage. She offers a decolonising perspective on the appropriation of Indigenous artefacts and imagery, at the core of this discourse. Her work has been published in NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies and Synoptique, A Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies. She is a member of the Archive/CounterArchive network, and the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2379

 

Introduction

In his recent project titled Machine Hallucination (2021), Los Angeles-based media artist Refik Anadol collected over 100 million images of New York City from social media and, using machine learning to “read” the images, created a 30-minute immersive experimental cinema experience that visualises the archive of snapshots. On his website, Anadol explains that computation allows “a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.”[1]

In a somewhat similar gesture, in 2018, while participating in an artist’s residency in the Netherlands, artist/researcher Anna Ridler took 10,000 digital pictures of tulips, each flower centred against a black backdrop and dutifully labelled by hand. The images were gathered with an intention to demonstrate the labour, ethics, and skill associated with assembling a dataset that could be used for machine learning. The flower images became the framework for a suite of media art projects, each offering a reflection on the shifting nature of the archive with an emphasis on an in-between state, one that brings into the foreground what is so often eclipsed in the collection of data.

In yet another archive-oriented work employing computation, in a project titled Ich halte es für eine Tragödie, daß wir uns nicht gefunden haben! [I consider it a tragedy that we have not found each other!] (2016), media artist Ornella Fieres transformed a box of letters and images found at an inheritance sale, simultaneously reading and reimagining the materials through machine learning. The result is a series of almost uncanny images and text fragments that suggest not simply the as-yet imperfect rendering capacities of machine learning, but rather the potential for an aesthetic based not on mimicry but on failure.

In this essay, I argue that, while these three projects work toward disparate ends and function at radically different scales, from the massive to the intimately personal, taken together, they represent a shift in our understanding of both the cinematic moving image and the archive, and enact a set of new relationships between human vision and digital images. They showcase the image not as stable representation but as unfolding and ongoing process, and they call attention to the fact that the perspective made available to the human is but one among many possible points of view. I should note that I use the word “archive” here in a deliberately broad sense. While in the past archives denoted collections devoted to the conservation and creation of historical record based on artefacts, with digital media, notions of image collections, datasets, and archives begin to blur. For my purposes, then, the “archives” constituted by these artists are also datasets and image collections; all three meanings cohere, in part specifically to unsettle the traditional understanding of the archive itself.[2] I will note also that my emphasis on the unsettling of stability is aligned with scholars who attend to computation and technical conditions, rather than those who describe the “anarchive” as a conceptual reorientation.[3]

Whereas in the past, the moving image and the archive relied on notions of linearity, organisation, stability, and a semblance of order, the digital archive as it is differently enacted in these three projects suggests contingency, permeability, and process. True, elements of the traditional archive remain in the sense that each of the projects involves collection, ordering, observing connections, and presenting forms of access. However, rather than assuring a history or preserving the past, the archive modelled by these projects is in flux, and its qualities are perhaps more correctly aligned with instantaneity. I make this argument not in order to bemoan the loss of stability in a world rife with electronic networks, but instead to suggest that this experience of instability is itself based on the visual, and through that, on a potentially obsolescent understanding of the image within the era of computation. To borrow a phrase from Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher, the photograph that exists within a database is a skeuomorph, an object whose appearance masks its true makeup. In this case, it suggests the innocuous snapshot of the past while in fact functioning far more powerfully within structures of surveillance, control, and power.[4]

Indeed, the projects I have selected are significant in their evocation of what has been named by Ingrid Hoelzl the “soft-image” or “post-image,” shifting from the single image as a solid, stable representation within a collection of similarly single images, to that of the distributed, in-process experiential image.^[5] Further, each artist discussed here approaches the creation of a collection of images with varied intentions that in turn illustrate a different facet of the post-image. Each also presents the material in disparate modalities that, while connected to the cinematic, produce disparate sensory experiences that point toward the post-cinematic. Most significantly, taken together, these three artworks offer a perspective on the archive in 2022 and reflect our current moment’s transition from representation to computation, as well as an experience of the archive that posits new sensorial experiences that limn the boundaries of the cinematic.

Artists and Algorithms: Technical Notes

Refik Anadol, Anna Ridler, and Ornella Fieres are just three artists are among many who have begun to explore the efficacy of what is known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in relation to moving image artwork. I highlight this point to point to the contributions artists often make in the evolution of new technologies. In summary, the GAN process generally involves two steps: in the first stage, a computational model is trained to “understand” a set of images by being “fed” a large number of reference images from a particular film or group of films; in the second step, the computer generates images with the model that are in some way related to the original images. Artists may then use the resulting material in a variety of ways.

For scholars, filmmakers, and artists unfamiliar with the brief history of the use of Generative Adversarial Networks in filmmaking, I offer a more detailed overview of the technical language and processes associated with them. Machine learning is a term developed by Arthur Samuel in the 1950s based on a program he created that learned how to play checkers. As the program played the relatively simple game, it developed improved skills, gradually surpassing the ability of human players. Machine learning, then, is a part of the larger field of artificial intelligence and describes the process through which data and algorithms emerge not simply as “recipes” that dictate a set of actions, but instead allow the machine to learn over time, based on a process of “training” using existing data. When we use Netflix, for example, the platform tracks our viewing habits and looks for connections and patterns across genres, directors, performers, and so on, and then recommends other films where it finds similarities or connections. The algorithm trains itself based on the information it gathers from users; the more data it collects, the more accurate and more effective it becomes over time.^[6]

Generative adversarial networks, which have grown more sophisticated over the last five years, take machine learning a step farther. In this process, a generator network offers random image samples to what is known as a discriminator network, which in turn attempts to ascertain which images are real and which are fake. The generator grows better over time at creating images that are real enough to fool the discriminator; the back-and-forth process creates a powerful learning system.

A group of artists have been interested in the development of machine learning specifically in the context of cinema. For example, artist and researcher Terence Broad has explored the use of GANs, and, in an essay describing his process, explains his attempts to use GANs to create more realistic images. He sketches a history, noting that the adversarial process was initially developed by Ian J. Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2013, but it was not until two years later that the process was able to produce realistic images.^[7] Building on the work of Goodfellow and Alex Radford, Broad tried to design a variational autoencoder in which the discriminator network could “assess how similar a reconstructed sample is to the real sample.”[8] This would allow the GAN to achieve precision more quickly. He explains that before he was able to create this adjustment, Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen published a paper that moved the process forward.[9] In this method, the system compares “the difference in response of the real and reconstructed samples in the higher layers of a discriminator network” that creates a “learned similarity metric” that is not focused on a pixel-based reconstruction error comparison.[10] He goes on to explain that Larsen’s model relies on an encoder, decoder, and discriminator.

Broad used this method to work with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the experimental feature film Koyaanisqatsi (1982), and John Whitney’s Matrix III (1972), creating what he calls “reconstructed films.”[11] While it is fascinating to see how the algorithm tries to reproduce the faces of actors, scenes from nature, and computer-generated animation, the most interesting experiment conducted by Broad centres on Richard Linklater’s 2006 film A Scanner Darkly (2006). Linklater shot this project on film, and then the live action footage was transformed using software that automated the rotoscoping process to create an animated feature. In the side-by-side comparison of the film’s trailer and the autoencoded version of the trailer, the transformed version boasts a painterly blur and wash of colour absent in the original. In a sense, the new version of the trailer is somehow more animated.

As another example of artists involved in using GANs in relation to cinema, Casey Reas wrote a book titled Making Pictures With Generative Adversarial Networks (2019. In it, he describes his process, writing specifically from the perspective of an artist rather than a computer scientist. He explains, “A GAN model generates pictures by inputting a list of one hundred numbers between -1 and 1. For instance, if all one hundred numbers are set to 0, a specific picture will be produced that correlates to those values. If the first number is changed to 0.1, a similar but different picture will be generated.”[12] Like Broad, Reas has used GANs to visually reimagine existing films. For example, he trained a DCGAN model on frames from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona. He notes that some of the images produced in this process resemble the film’s actors; others are odd hybrids of landscapes and bodies; and others are beautiful abstractions. Highlighting the images’ uncanniness, Reas writes: “A subset of images created through the GAN are an alternate way to imagine this essential aspect of the film.”[13]

In a final example, a research team composed of Anirudhan Iyengar, Yulia Marouda, and Hesham Hattab at the Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London created a project called “Neural Kubrick” as Iyengar’s thesis project, with a very different agenda than that of Reas. The goal was to consider how AI might be used within the filmmaking process itself, focusing on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Shining (1980). In an interview, Iyengar describes his desire to see if three different machine learning algorithms could tackle three key aspects of the filmmaking process – namely, art direction, editing, and cinematography – by using a dataset of 115,000 frames drawn from 100 movies. As he explains:

There is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that reimagines new cinematic compositions, based on the features it interprets from the input dataset of movie frames. There is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that classifies visual similarities…. And there is a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that analyses the camera path coordinates of a cinematic sequence and generates new camera paths to reshoot the original input sequence in virtual space….[14]

While it is difficult to interpret the results of the project based on the three short videos that demonstrate the machine as art director, editor, and cinematographer, the shared impulse to collaborate with machine learning to reimagine the capacities of the moving image point to a larger cultural curiosity about the connections that might be made across extensive collections of images.

In each of these cases, artists have employed machine learning to explore cinema, in effect imagining cinema not as the linear unfolding of moving images but instead as a dataset or archive with which to experiment. This reorientation, from the representation of a film on screen to the collection of a group of images to explore, enacts the shift from cinema as story to cinema as database ripe for computational manipulation.

Machine Hallucination

Turkish artist Refik Anadol has long been fascinated by the intersection of computation and cinema and he is known for his large-scale public urban artworks that typically integrate and visualise data, creating a sense of correspondence between the often-invisible forces around us and our own lived experience. The works tend to borrow the scale and visual power of cinema; they are grand, extraordinarily beautiful, and captivating. As his work has developed over the last decade and his use of computation has grown more extensive, the scale of the work has also increased.

This is evident in Machine Hallucination, with its millions of photographs of New York City, culled from various social networks and fed into a GAN. By applying machine learning to the images, Anadol and his team shift attention from the traditional modes of photography and filmmaking which focus on the capture, processing, editing, and exhibition of images, instead foregrounding the collection, collation, and layering of images. The result is not an image but a phenomenon known as the post-image.[15]

Designed for Artechouse, a space designed to showcase media art in New York, the project is presented as a large-scale projection of a 30-minute video in 16K resolution that moves through three specific chapters. The installation makes use of multiple projectors to create an immersive moving image experience that fills the walls and floor of the gallery. The imagery is dazzling as thousands of shapes – suggesting individual images from the archive – swirl and dance. At times the images are presented in a grid; some showcase the animated GANs as compilations of images are layered together. As the experience grows increasingly more dramatic, the images become wave-like, resembling colourful breakers, roiling and crashing, moving from greens and blues to reds and oranges. The viewer stands in the midst of this visual cacophony, sensing the overwhelming proliferation of images. Indeed, Anadol’s work recalls a set of terms used to describe film and digital media at various points over the last century, as when Scott Bukatman writes of “technological spectacle” and “kaleidoscopic perception” in relation to media forms that “invoke heightened, even exaggerated, bodily awareness in relation to highly technologized environments” in his 2003 book Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20^th Century.[16] While Bukatman discusses the sense of frenetic delirium coextensive with urban modernity of the last century, Anadol gives us the experience of the image removed from its representational role and let loose to function not only through radical mobility and kineticism, but as an immersive world – the data stream we hear of so often made manifest.

Anadol’s dizzying experiences of the archive overwhelm and confuse; they remap the relationship between human and machine; they offer new experiences of space and time; the orientation of the body and the gaze in cinema here is replaced and the body is disoriented. We might initially attribute this confusion to a shift from narrative, so fundamental to notions of cinema, to the archive. As Ernst van Alphen argues, “[w]hereas the role of narrative is in decline, the role of archive, in a variety of forms, is increasing.”[17] He goes on to echo Lev Manovich and the claim that the database has become the dominant symbolic and cultural form.[18] With the waning of narrative we see, too, the dissolution of the structuring principles of story. Van Alphen continues: “[a]s a result of this cultural change the symbolic form of (syntagmatic) narrativity has a more modest role to play. It is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kinds of information is embedded, but the other way around. It is in the encompassing framework of archival organizations that (small) narratives are embedded.”[19] Van Alphen and Manovich both point to the cultural shift from narrative to database with attention specifically to narrative structures. The linear timeline of film gives way to the display of innumerable image and narrative choices, and celebrates nonlinearity, looping structures, and circularity. Where traditional storytelling, especially in classical narrative cinema, privileges causal unfolding and thematic coherence across time, database structures call forward alternative structures borrowed from the world of computation.

However, it is not simply the displacement of narrative that produces the dizzying sensation. Indeed, this sense of confusion also characterises many recent Hollywood feature films, a fact addressed by a number of writers in relation to disruptions in continuity editing and a resulting lack of spatial and temporal coherence in digital cinema and what has now been dubbed “post-cinema” by scholars Steven Shaviro, Shane Denson, Julia Leyda, among others.[20] Cameras become virtual and free-floating, no longer tethered to a perceiving body, and narratives become convoluted, resembling game structures, loops, and puzzles, not only in their challenging structures, but in their pleasures, shifting from narrative immersion to problem-solving, repetition and pattern recognition.^[21]

We might also attribute the sense of disorientation to the somatic immersion of Anadol’s project. Janet Murray, writing more than 20 years ago in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), explores immersion in relation to its fundamental role in new media. She explains that we “seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.”[22] Murray’s description captures the sense of fluidity in the cascade of images, with its swirling patterns, scale, and continual motion.

Given a cultural wariness toward the increasing sense of surveillance connoted by digital media, we may feel inclined to cast suspicion on the artist who turns images into data, seemingly using the still images as fodder to create waves of visual spectacle. However, we need to know that the images had no original pure state. They were not unique and pristine pictures that were then dissolved into the swirling stew of an immersive experience. Instead, they began as noise, perhaps were tuned toward signal, and then, with Anadol, returned to noise (albeit beautiful noise). Indeed, a computational understanding of photography offers a very different model of the visual, shifting from still image to image as process, from a picture taken to a picture produced. Ingrid Hoelzl explores this concept in her essay “Image-Transaction” (2020), in which she outlines a view of images that stems from a description of the relationship between humans and their milieu presented by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and sociologist Arthur Bentley in their 1949 book Knowing and the Known, which they described as “transactional.”[23] Hoelzl extends Dewey and Bentley’s understanding of the entanglement of humans and world to include images, noting that she is moving beyond simply understanding the processual nature of the digital image. She describes the digital image in this way:

Image and data, screen and network are in fact part of a transactional ensemble where (when) the image, as the visible part of a given data exchange, coincides with the screen, as the local access point to the network – access understood as both a functional capacity and a process. Images are not merely outputs displaying network process on an outpost (the screen as network terminal). Indeed they stand (or rather proceed) in continuous relation with server and client computers, data and algorithms, signals and sensors).[24]

In a sense, then, we might understand Anadol’s Machine Hallucination as an enactment of the radical destabilisation of our concept of the image. While we tend to hang on to the idea that an image, even one on-screen, is a simple picture, it is in fact an entity that is processual, transactional, and surveillant. The hallucination, then, in Anadol’s project is perhaps more aptly attributable to the human. These images are often presented in a state of perpetual becoming from which it is impossible to extract a single, static, definitive frame; they are always flowing, morphing, and evolving without boundaries or fixed edges. In this regard, the comparisons with artifacts of human cognitive process seem apt, reflecting the slippage with which we recall memories, dreams, or hallucinations. Nevertheless, these metaphors for consciousness disserve and misdirect our understanding of their computational and algorithmic origins.

Tulips in the Algorithm

London-based British artist Anna Ridler has created a suite of projects that reflect on the nature of the database. Images of Ridler’s work may be viewed on her website, http://annaridler.com/. Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is a collection of ten thousand C-type digital prints annotated by hand and displayed in a grid formation on the wall of galleries and museums with magnets. Created while the artist was engaged in a residency in the Netherlands, the pictures were intended to bring forward some of the questions and issues sparked by datasets and machine learning. These include the role of the human in general in creating datasets, and the issue of labour that too often and too easily goes unnoticed or uncompensated. She brings an attention to labour in the project by emphasising her actions in taking each picture, writing on each one, and then mounting them one-by-one on the walls of the gallery for her shows. The introduction of the human – with wavering handwritten words and an inexact eye trying to align the images to create a grid – reminds us of the efficacies of each modality, the machine with its precision and the human with our fallibility.

Ridler explains that her decision to use tulips is tied to their connection to notions of speculation within the context of “tulipmania,” a moment in the mid-1600s in the Dutch Republic when the popular flower grew fashionable, which in turn drove prices for tulip bulbs exceptionally high before a dropping in a sudden collapse. While much of folklore connoted by tulipmania has been shown to be untrue or exaggerated, as historian Anne Goldgar highlights in her book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, tulipmania nevertheless “gives us a chance to look in microcosm at a society that was, indeed, grappling with its material values and the relation they bore to their social ones.”[25] In drawing a connection to tulipmania, Ridler suggests a corollary between the boom and bust of the tulip between 1634 and 1637 and the often outrageous claims made today regarding the value and power of NFTs, Silicon Valley startups, algorithms, and computation itself.

Ridler expanded on her collection of tulip photographs in two subsequent video projects titled Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019). Both use the image of tulips as their focus, and both continue the artist’s interest in drawing parallels between forms of financial speculation in the past and the present. However, for my purposes, the projects pinpoint the shifting status of the moving image as it engages computation and datasets. Mosaic Virus (2018) features a grid of tulips in bloom on a single screen. However, the images of the tulips shift and change based on the price of bitcoin. Each individual image, then, is no longer a “picture” that belongs to an “archive.” Instead, each image becomes a mutable index of value shifts, and the larger grid becomes a register of financial change across multiple inputs.

Mosaic Virus (2019) is a three-screen video installation also showing tulips; in this case, each screen features a single flower. The flowers shift and change in colour, size, and shape, again in correspondence with the price of bitcoin. Here, too, the image is no longer a photograph or even a drawing; the image instead serves as the interface between pictorial representation and computation, and as a figure for reminding us of archives of the past. The singular image gives way to the multiple; stasis succumbs to mutation.

In the introduction to their edited collection On the Verge of Photography: Imagining Beyond Representation, co-editors Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher describe the contemporary photograph’s role in sustaining a “multi-layered reality” as we move seamlessly among layers of data, imagery, and matter. “It seems that the digital-born image has become a hinge between these physical and digital modes of existence,” they write, “combining as it does elements of familiar ocularcentric culture – with its trust and reliance on the true-to-life photograph – and algorithmic processes that problematize the presumption of an ontological connection between images and objects.”[26] Ridler’s projects bring to the fore the shifting nature of the image, showing us clearly that it is a construct designed specifically to enact its capacities beyond merely the realm of the visual. This is an image that is in a sense inhabited by information and is therefore ongoing and emergent rather than static and historical. As Rubinstein and Fisher note in regard to the temporality of the image, the digital networked image “is not an archive of past events but a force that shapes the present.”[27] Indeed, Ridler fed some of the images into a generative adversarial network (GAN) that she used to create a series of videos, which she then sold in 2019 in an online auction as part of the first wave of NFT art.

An Intimate Archive: Letters and Postcards

In 2016, German artist Ornella Fieres came across a box of materials that belonged to a woman who had lived in the former GDR, in East Berlin, in the 1960s and 1970s. The box contained hundreds of letters, postcards, and images. Fieres has since used this personal collection of materials to think about the ways in which artificial intelligence and computation – the infrastructures that increasingly shape our status as citizens and that scaffold our relationships to each other – might conjure unknown the woman based on a process of sifting through her intimate archive.

Three specific projects have emerged from the artist’s interactions with this box of materials. In “Postcards to M,” Fieres fed two hundred postcards from the box into a neural network and the AI generated new images of the flowers. They are at once ethereal and almost grotesque in their sense of deformation. Fieres displays the images as large-scale framed prints. The petals are mottled and uneven, and even appear fleshy in places; presented as larger-than-life, the images suggest a celebration of a kind of uncanny monstrosity, referencing both flowers and the human body but resembling neither entirely.

In a second project, titled “Letters to M_HTR,” Fieres fed over seven hundred letters from the collection into a network which tried to “read” the handwriting on old, even mouldy paper. Fieres displays the AI’s attempts at translation as a series of text fragments, shown in random order on three stacked television sets. The fragments are nonsensical and often amusing, and when they appear in black and white on the old television sets, they flicker, an uncanny hail from the past across multiple technologies to the gallery in the present.

For the third part of the project, Fieres worked with the photographs that were in the box, using artificial intelligence to interpret the images. For the gallery exhibition, Fieres shows the back of the image, along with the text fragment description of the image produced by the AI. “A white bird is standing on a ledge,” is one example of the text fragment. We do not see the images but instead try to imagine what the computer saw that would render this description.

Fieres has said that her work is concerned with occultism and technology. “I build photographic apparatuses and manipulate algorithms, artificial intelligence, or software to create images that carry traces of the past and might be a foreshadowing of events in the future.”[28] Indeed, Fieres deftly sketches a spectrum of times and technologies in these pieces, linking forms prominent in the past – letters and postcards, static images, and televisions – to present technologies of machine learning and image synthesis. Seeing the odd distortions, we at once acknowledge the limitations of the technology and its seeming inability either to render a decent image of a flower or to read handwriting, but also revel in the uncanniness of the results. We become aware of another intelligence at work, and while we cannot see it, we can sense it.

It is not insignificant that both Ridler and Fieres have chosen flowers as their subject matter for their projects. Flowers are rich metaphors for the precarity of life, as well as exemplars of the ways in which the so-called natural world is now readily industrialised and produced. Flowers, however, retain their power of allegory and representation of beauty. Offering delicate flowers into the number-crunching machine of the computer brings to the fore the symbolic violence of computation, as well as the literal environmental costs of computing in the context of climate collapse. It also serves to distinguish the characteristics of both. In her book From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, Meredith Hoy references David Summers and the notion of universal metric space from his book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003). She explains that Summers develops a description of the features that make up “universal metric space” and its attendant qualities of “homogeneity, divisibility, and infinite” that she says “stand in contrast to the ‘qualitative, continuous, and unified’ spaces associated with the natural, primordial world.”[29] She continues: “[o]ne of the primary characteristics of the transition between qualitative and quantitative systems of measurement is that while qualitative systems retain some reference to the specific qualities of the particular, situated, and enworlded object subject to measurement, purely quantitative systems are notional, abstract, and separable from the format (the size, shape, volume and texture of the surface of inscription) on which an image is presented.”[30] Reading this in conjunction with the projects of Riddler and Fieres, we can see how both stage a confrontation between these two spaces; the flower, in its particularity and situatedness becomes abstract and notional, which is further represented in the fact that, in Ridler’s work,  it becomes animated.

A final point contributes to my broader argument: the imagery presented in these artworks hovers somewhere between photograph and illustration, between live action and animation, and indeed, the categories begin to lose their valence altogether. While in each case, the images are rooted in history in some manner, they lose their historical status in their lack of indexical legibility. In this way, the projects serve yet another function in this transitional moment. I turn to James J. Hodge to address this shift. In his recent book on contemporary digital media, Hodge argues that animation in particular offers a modality best suited to expressing contemporary historical experience.[31] His argument is that language-based narrative representation was the modality deployed to write history in a previous century, while animation steps forward as the appropriate form for a new era. “Animation allows for phenomenal encounters with the experiential opacity of digital media precisely without dispelling that opacity,” he writes, adding that, “[a]s a field of aesthetic forms based on the perception of absent causes, animation instantiates the very character of a digital output whose origin is always and fundamentally ever hidden from view.”[32] Hodge is referring to the ways in which computation remains invisible to us; we see only its effects. Similarly, animation obscures its substrate. He explains that animation points to what he calls the “experiential opacity of digital media,” and further, it captures its “time-based volatility.”^[33]

Taken together, the artworks by Anadol, Ridler, and Fieres explicitly engage with the proliferation of data in the 21^st century, and indeed, as computational artworks, are uniquely able to draw connections between contemporary experiences of the visible and invisible, skeuomorph and data. The three projects in a sense offer instruction in how to rethink the cinematic image, not as a complete and coherent entity but as archive-in-process, continually transforming, mutating, and shifting perspective, not as human-oriented point-of-view but as fluid morph with its own machinic sense of time and space.

 

Notes

[1] Refik Anadol, https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/

[2] David M. Berry addresses this shift in his essay “The Post-Archival Constellation: The Archive Under the Technical Conditions of Computational Media” He writes, “Computation therefore threatens to de-archive the archive, disintermediating the memory institutions and undermining the curatorial functions associated with archives.” In Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social, Ina Blom, Trond Lundeno and Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016) 117.

[3] See, for example, The Go-To How To Book of Anarchiving (2016) created at Concordia University’s Senselab; it describes the anarchive as “an excess energy of the archive,” as the archive’s supplement, and as a technique “for making research-creation and process-making engine.” Brian Massumi, “Working Principles,” The Go-To How To Book of Anarchiving (Montreal: The Senselab, 2016), 7. http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/upcoming-distributing-the-insensible-dec-10-20-2016/the-go-to-how-to-guide-to-anarchiving/. My rethinking of the archive is also very different from the questions oriented toward the power and exclusions of the archive. See, for example, Mandeeq Mohamed’s “Somehow I Found You: On Black Archival Practices,” in which the author notes, “I want to look at black lives as the excess of the archive, the messiness of histories that cannot be so easily recorded and understood, simply because there is far too much at stake to ever assign anything like humanity to black life.” In C  Magazine, Issue 137, Spring 2018, np.

[4] In the introduction to their book, Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher write, “[i]n contrast to earlier forms of photography, the digital-born image seems defined by how it exceeds familiar terms of visual experience. What one sees as an image on-screen for instance, is only conventionally presented to appear the same as the analogue photograph: it is actually a skeuomorph.” They go on to explain that the image is in fact “a variegated field of data that is not bound to obey the material and visual logic often take to be defining of photography.” “Introduction,” On the Verge of Photography: Imagining Beyond Representation, edited by Rubinstein, Fisher and Johnny Golding  (Birmingham, UK: ARTicle Press, 2013), 11-12.

[5] See Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie’s Softimage: Towards a new Theory of the Digital Image (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2015).

[6] See Sara Brown’s very clear overview of machine learning in “Machine Learning, Explained,” MIT Sloane School of Management, Ideas Made to Matter, April 21, 2021. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/machine-learning-explained

[7] “Autoencoding Blade Runner: Reconstructing Films With Artificial Neural Networks,” Medium, May 24, 2016. Broad references the research article “Generative Adversarial Nets” by Ian J. Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courvell and Yoshua Bengio, University of Montreal, 2014.

[8] Broad, “Autoencoding Blade Runner,” np. Broad is referencing the research paper titled “Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convoluted Adversarial Networks” by Alex Radford, Luke Metz and Soumith Chintala, 2015.

[9] Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Søren Kaae Sønderby, Hugo Larochelle, and Ole Winther, “Autoencoding Beyond Pixels Using a Learned Similarity Metric,” 2015.

[10] Broad, “Autoencoding Blade Runner,” np.

[11] Broad, “Autoencoding Blade Runner,” np.

[12] Casey Reas, Making Pictures With Generative Adversarial Networks (Montreal: Anteism Books, 2019) 17.

[13] Reas, 20.

[14] Luke Dormehl, “See What Happens When AI Tries to Reimagine Stanley Kubrick’s Films,” Digital Trends, November 23, 2017, no page number. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/neural-kubrick-project/ See Iyengar’s personal website as well: https://www.anirudhaniyengar.com/neuralkubrick

[15] See Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image, Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2015); Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, Daniel Rubinstein, ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020); and Discorrelated Images, Shane Denson (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

[16] Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20^th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 2.

[17] Ernst van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 7.

[18] Ernst van Alphen, Staging the Archive, 7.

[19] Van Alphen, 12.

[20] See, for example, Post-Cinematic Affect, Steven Shaviro (Washington, DC: O Books, 2010); Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21^st Century Film, Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, co-editors (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); The State of Postcinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the State of Digital Dissemination, Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era, José Moure and Dominique Chateau, co-editors (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020); and Discorrelated Images, Shane Denson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

[21] See Warren Buckland’s edited collection of essays titled Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and especially Thomas Elsaesser’s “The Mind-Game Film.”

[22] Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997; updated and reissued 2016) 98-99. See also “Immersivity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spaces of Immersion” for an interdisciplinary approach to the concepts of immersion and immersivity. By Florian Freitag, Céline Molter, Laura Katharina Mücke, Helena Rapp, Damien B. Schlarb, Elisabeth Sommerlad, Clemens Spahr, and Dominic Zerhoch, Ambiances: International Journal of Sensory Environment, Architecture and Urban Space, 2020. https://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/3233

[23] Ingrid Hoelzl, “Image-Transaction,” in Parallax, 2020, Vol. 26, No. 1, 20-33, Networked Liminality.

[24] Hoelzl, “Image-Transaction,” 24.

[25] Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017) 18.

[26] Rubinstein and Fisher, eds., On the Verge of Photography: Imagining Beyond Representation, 8.

[27] Rubeinstein and Fisher, 10.

[28] Ornella Fieres, “Artist Statement,” in the artist’s Portfolio 2021.

[29] Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017) 114.

[30] Hoy, From Point to Pixel, 114.

[31] James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

[32] Hodge, 15-16.

[33] Hodge, 16.

 

Bibliography

Alphen, Ernst van, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

Blom, Ina, Trond Lundeno and Eivind Røssaak. Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

Broad, Terence. “Autoencoding Blade Runner: Reconstructing Films With Artificial Neural Networks.” Medium, May 24, 2016. https://medium.com/@terencebroad/autoencoding-blade-runner-88941213abbe

Brown, Sara. “Machine Learning, Explained.” MIT Sloane School of Management, Ideas Made to Matter, April 21, 2021. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/machine-learning-explained

Buckland, Warren, ed. Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20^th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Dormehl, Luke. “See What Happens When AI Tries to Reimagine Stanley Kubrick’s Films.” Digital Trends, November 23, 2017, no page number. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/neural-kubrick-project/

Fieres, Ornella. “Artist Statement.” In the artist’s Portfolio 2021: https://ornellafieres.com/

Freitag, Florian, Céline Molter, Laura Katharina Mücke, Helena Rapp, Damien B. Schlarb, Elisabeth Sommerlad, Clemens Spahr, and Dominic Zerhoch. “Immersivity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spaces of Immersion.” Ambiances: International Journal of Sensory Environment, Architecture and Urban Space, 2020. https://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/3233

Goldgar, Anne. Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Goodfellow, Ian J., Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courvell and Yoshua Bengio. “Generative Adversarial Nets.” University of Montreal, 2014.

Hodge, James J. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Hoelzl, Ingrid and Rémi Marie. Softimage: Towards a new Theory of the Digital Image. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2015.

Hoelzl, Ingrid. “Image-Transaction,” in Parallax, 2020, Vol. 26, No. 1, 20-33, Networked Liminality.

Hoy, Meredith. From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017.

Larsen, Anders Boesen Lindbo, Søren Kaae Sønderby, Hugo Larochelle, and Ole Winther. “Autoencoding Beyond Pixels Using a Learned Similarity Metric.” 2015.

Murray, Janet.  Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997; updated and reissued 2016.

Reas, Casey. Making Pictures With Generative Adversarial Networks. Quebec: Anteism Books, 2019.

Rubinstein, Daniel. Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Rubinstein, Daniel, Andy Fisher and Johnny Golding, eds. On the Verge of Photography: Imagining Beyond Representation. Birmingham, UK: ARTicle Press, 2013.

 

Author Biography

Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she teaches classes on digital media, post-cinema and feminist film. She is the author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts and New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, as well as Björk Digital, and the editor of The New Ecology of Things, a collection of essays about ubiquitous computing, and David O. Russell: Interviews. She is also the co-founder of Filmmaker Magazine, dedicated to independent film; she served as editor of RES Magazine and co-curator of RESFEST, a festival of experimental media, for several years; and she writes frequently for diverse publications about experimental film, video and new media, while also exploring experimental nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in publications such as Film Comment, Afterimage, Los Angeles Review of Books, Variety, River Teeth and carte blanche.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2383

 

Introduction

Archives exclude as much as they include, eliminate as much as they preserve. The confluence of both increased technological access and social pressures have led to recent counter-archival explorations of and by communities long kept out of official archives. Centring on two participatory archival projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay argues that diasporic archives can “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both of these projects focus predominantly on gathering and digitising archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial troves of still and moving images, these participatory archiving projects excavate and inscribe “minor,” quotidian, and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s many lacunae and imposed silences. The projects also capture the material traces of complex migration histories and transnational entanglements that exceed the limits of national archival narratives. In what follows, I approach diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, which refers to the melancholies, disturbances, and traumas that diasporic subjects inherit and carry with them, as well as how these affects accrete and congeal in the media produced by their creators. Far from static, these archives are constantly in-transit, gathering and reverberating histories as they move across spatial and temporal registers.

The first section of this paper focuses on the counter-archival impulses at work in The Making of An Archive (MoaA) and Home Made Visible (HMV) and considers how heteroglossic and mobile archives exceed the boundaries of nation. Next, the paper explores diasporic archives through the concept of hauntological accretion, and argues that these two projects intervene on authoritative archives by thickening the latter with occluded histories, dust, noise, grain, and other textural traces of spatial and temporal transfer. This is followed by an examination of how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for complex imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the paper concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers.

MoaA is an ongoing project by artist, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, focused on archives of migrants who identify as POC (People of Colour).[1] The project was spurred both by the artist’s encounter with the paucity of visual documents tracing the history of multiculturalism and immigration in official Canadian archives, as well as her perusal of photographic albums of her own father, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam in 1974.[2] The project has organised workshops across Canada, to which participants are invited to bring their family albums for digitisation and to contribute personal and familial narratives that help contextualise these visual archives. HMV was a similar project by the Regent Park Film Festival, a community film festival in Toronto, which invited IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, People of Colour) participants across Canada to donate home videos for digitisation.[3] Additionally, seven IBPOC artists were also commissioned to develop projects centred on the exploration of archives.[4] Built around ideals of community engagement, HMV included a national tour across Canada, consisting of screenings of digitised home movies, workshops, and the presentation of artworks by the commissioned artists. Altogether, HMV garnered a total of 294 magnetic and analogue (videotape and film) items collected from 39 donors, which they then digitised. Donors were also interviewed, and some of their narratives were included along with their home movies. Altogether, there are over nine hours of donated footage, of which a portion has been made available on the HMV website, where users are able to view the digitised archives of fifteen families.[5]

While similar, these are not identical projects. Whereas the entire collection of digitised home movies garnered by HMV were acquired by York University Libraries, where they will be held in perpetuity in the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collection, the photographs for MoaA are part of a more amorphous and ongoing artist project.[6] Further, while HMV also has a number of the digitised collections available on their website in a systematised yet incomplete archive, the MoaA website does not contain a publicly accessible archive. Nonetheless, both projects are mobilised around the stated importance of excavating and protecting the quotidian histories of minoritised communities across Canada, and recontextualising these histories for an expanded public imaginary.

Counter-Archives

HMV and MoaA are examples of counter-archives, or creative remonstrances against national archives shaped by longstanding settler colonial histories.[7] The counter-archive, Brett Kashmere writes, “represents an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play.”[8] Similarly, Paula Amad describes the counter-archive as a “challenge to the positivist archive’s sacred myths of order, exhaustiveness, and objective neutrality.”[9] Counter-archiving thus implies an insurgent action or hermeneutics that approaches archives as paradoxically structured around the very qualities they attempt to negate or repress: (im)permanence, (in)stability, (in)completeness. Crucially, in Kashmere’s conceptualisation, the counter-archive is less about complete opposition to any official archive, than an invitation to directly engage official archives through creative experimentation, negotiation, and potential subversion.[10] In this vein, HMV and MoaA do not renounce the nation so much as they exist in tension alongside it, and point to its inherent contradictions and intractabilities.

Considerations regarding these projects’ in/direct relationship to nation are especially complex given that they are both funded by federal arts grants.[11] One assumes that HMV in particular needed to be legible in specific ways to be granted the significant amount of Sesquicentennial federal funding that it received. Official recognition through a federal arts grant would seem to hinge on the project’s demonstrated adherence to the aim of archival accommodation for the minoritised presence – a decipherable aim within the liberal multicultural model of inclusion catalysed around perpetual promises of minor reforms rather than structural overhauls. Strategic legibility can thus provide a vehicle for more complex and even potentially fugitive elements within the archive – those counter-archival threads inadvertently filed alongside more sanctioned artefacts and histories. Thus, while counter-archives can exist external to state support, they can also channel received state resources towards challenging the state’s inviolability, including through focusing on histories and narratives typically excluded from institutional archives. Further, rather than being permanently housed in institutional settings, counter-archives can be enacted in more mobile and ephemeral contexts, including through digital platforms, community gatherings, workshops, performances, etc. These more flexible and informal configurations allow for capillary dispersions of archival knowledge back to communities. Relatedly, counter-archives often depend on alternate networks of care and relationality. The endurance of the records held by HMV and MoaA indicate how counter and amateur archives can bypass official archival structures and travel along divergent routes of care and stewardship, with family and community members often becoming inadvertent archivists whose labours enable the records’ survival.

Counter-archives emerge from particular technological, social, and political contexts. In her study of the history of amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann explains how the momentous convergence of consumer culture and the nuclear family gave rise to recognisable discursive and aesthetic forms in home videos from the 1950s-1960s.[12] Amateur film can be considered counter-archival insofar as it falls outside the traditional ambit of institutional support and capture. Certainly, much of HMV’s home movies, gathered between the 1960s to the mid-2000s, dovetail with the emergence of portable film cameras from the 1960s and video from the 1970s-80s, and waned with the inundation of digital self-imaging, which irrevocably altered the processes of personal and familial “archiving.” Alongside this convergence of technological and social formations, the HMV’s and MoaA’s visual records were also produced in specific political and economic contexts. Much of these projects’ still and moving images emerged from post-1960s Canada, an era marked by a shift in immigration policy, resultant demographic changes, and the inauguration of state multiculturalism.[13] As counter-archival projects, HMV and MoaA call attention to the contradictions inherent in official state multiculturalism’s public declarations and private erasures, echoing broader critiques of the ways in which state multiculturalism masks distinctly colonial and neoliberal imperatives through a façade of benevolence and inclusion.[14] More specifically, both projects aim to rectify multiculturalism’s lacunae and elisions by helping to safeguard minoritised archives.

In contextualising her contributions, HMV participant Stella Isaac describes the importance of inscribing experiences of Black families in Canada and making their presence visible to wider publics: “It’s great to allow families the opportunity to revisit old footage, explore their history and share that. A lot of people don’t think of Black people in Canada just existing. It’s a great way to change the Canadian narrative.”[15] Another contributor from the Khmer-Krom community, an ethnic minority group from South Vietnam, recounts how their mother, Trinh Nha Truong, views their footage as a reminder that members of their community “live in Canada too.”[16] Likewise, Nguyễn’s project through MoaA is explicitly mobilised around the need to preserve narratives that disclose the “complicated histories of migration.”[17] These are histories that, along with the analogue and celluloid media on which they are carried, face obsolescence in the absence of institutional recognition and support. Nguyễn’s aim is thus to create “a new archive that seeks to represent the fractured ideology of multiculturalism from the bottom up.”[18] Departing from multiculturalism as official state technology and discourse, then, this “new archive” is understood as the potential site for more contingent and complex articulations of multiculturalism as lived difference.

In Zimmermann’s consideration of the ways in which amateur film prompts a rethinking of the archive, she points to how “the multiplication of practices, technologies, zones, and representations” can work to move us “beyond the repression of difference.”[19] Further, these heteroglossic articulations can, among other things, serve “as a corrective to nationalised representational systems” and the models of homogeneity they promote.[20] Zimmermann goes on to posit that amateur films pluralise national myths and narratives by “perform[ing] a form of psychic history-writing, a making legible of the invisible history of fantasies and social relations, a knitting of the local to the global.”[21] While official national archives work to stabilise a historical and narratological perspective, counter-archival projects like HMV and MoaA point us towards the archive’s refractions and instabilities. These films effectively become the archival shadows – the hauntological stutters and excesses that fall outside the official scope of the nation.

Hauntings and Accretions

Sociologist Avery Gordon’s influential conceptualisation of haunting can help us apprehend the heteroglossic shadows of nation and its official records and narratives. Gordon argues that haunting is “a constituent element” of contemporary life.[22] Rather than signalling absence or disavowal, haunting points us towards the “seething presence” that presses against our understanding and experience of history.[23] As Gordon notes, haunting thickens social life, because it points to the bodies, histories, and multiple forces that endure, despite the efforts to erase them. Such spectral forces speak of how different transparencies of power circulate in late capitalism. A hauntological approach would thus entail engaging with the “affective, historical, and mnemonic structures” of social forces and power relations that are often not seen, but felt.[24] Taking a lead from Gordon, I argue that we can approach diaspora and diasporic media not (just) in terms of loss and longing, but also as a process of hauntological thickening, especially through examinations of how material densities, narratives, silences, and affects accumulate in the archives.

First, we can consider the material accretions at the surface of the image itself, or what we can term “poor” images.[25] These textures, like Gordon’s historical spectres, densify the present; they accentuate the material imprints that disturb the present, thus challenging an understanding of history as unitary and progressive. Laura U. Marks notes that both film and video “become more haptic as they die.”[26] In other words, as they age, analogue formats accumulate material deteriorations, including scratches, colour distortions, bleeds, image ringing/ghosting. Recontextualised through the digital platform, HMV’s home videos and MoaA’s still images preserve these material markings and, in effect, their swelling accumulations of temporal densities. These densities are reminiscent of Lily Cho’s discussion of how diasporic subjectivity coalesces around the imbrication of past and future. Cho offers the insight that “[d]iasporas emerge through losses which have already happened but which also define the future. These losses come both before and after the emergence of diasporic subjectivity.”[27] Here, Cho expresses the contradictions of diasporas being shaped by futures that remain haunted by antecedent losses and pasts that perpetually ripple forward. Collapsing tidy narratives of survival and closure, the HMV and MoaA archives similarly assemble spectres of past, present, and future that remain unresolvable.

In addition to temporal accretions, HMV’s and MoaA’s archives also capture the material traces of complex migration histories and transnational entanglements. In her examination of how self-documentation has become a constituent element of modern migration and the growing ubiquity of portable recording devices, Alisa Lebow argues that the cinematic has become part and parcel of how we imagine diaspora.[28] Alongside their transient creators, visual archives migrate across spatial terrains, assembling and resonating histories as they move. For Arjun Appadurai, diasporic public spheres arise when “moving images meet deterritorialized viewers.”[29] Materialising through circulations of media, these diasporic public spheres move us decidedly beyond the fixed boundaries of nation. Many of the HMV home movies – captured precisely mid-flight – become the visual appendages accompanying families along protracted transnational journeys. For example, we see the Valcin family move between New York City and Montreal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before settling in the predominantly Italian suburb of St. Leonard, where they were one of the only Black families in the neighbourhood.[30] The Burkes, a Jamaican and Guyanese family, are shown with family in Bristol, England, where their father grew up and where their young family lived before moving to Canada in the early 1970s. In another example, the Husain family are shown in Iraq, where they lived shortly between the U.K. and Canada. These particular home videos are archives-in-transit – created, carried, and cared for by families along their journeys across what T. J. Demos might designate as the “psychogeography[ies] of fundamental ambivalence.”[31] This ambivalence arises precisely from migration as the experience of perpetual oscillation between home and elsewhere, loss and anticipation, severance and settlement. These archives embody the perpetual flux that makes up what Avtar Brah calls the “multi-placedness of home” for diasporic peoples,[32] while also disclosing how these communities are deeply embedded within intricate transnational affiliative and kinship webs.

Quotidian Archives

Spatial and temporal movements and accretions are also captured by HMV and MoaA’s quotidian visual records, which fracture and blur authoritative archival narratives. These quotidian archives become vehicles for hauntological imbrications of the personal, familial, and national. At times, the HMV home videos capture moments with broader historical significance, including the “storm of the century” that dumped over 40cm of snow in Montreal during the winter of 1971, captured by the Valcin family; and some of the inaugural occurrences of the Montreal Caribbean Carnival (Carifiesta) during the mid-1970s, captured by the Seaman family. Most of the footage, however, focuses on details of everyday life: family meals, weekends at amusement parks, children’s birthday parties, picnics in the park, and a summer backyard barbeque. Similarly, for MoaA, Nguyễn reveals that the “visual deficiency” she encountered in national archives made her “increasingly interested in the everyday routines, daily realities, and struggles of immigrants, particularly in its ordinary context.”[33] The images collected through this project include family portraits, social gatherings, and scenes of ordinary life. At the same time, Nguyễn also assembles certain collections to highlight particular underexamined historical narratives, including the images from donor Tatsuo Kage, who in the 1970s migrated to Canada, where he became involved in community organising, especially through the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association (JCCA). Kage’s images document his involvement in the Redress movement, as well as the JCCA protests in support of the Kanehsatake Resistance at Oka in 1990. One of Kage’s photographs captures a man at a protest holding a sign that reads, “Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Assn. Supports Mohawks.” As Liz Park notes, even amidst the media deluge coming out of Oka at the time, this single visual document offers significant testimony of “public contestation” and solidarity against the colonial state.[34]

Kage’s photograph is an unassuming visual trace that aids in fleshing out the predominantly overlooked histories of Asian-Indigenous solidarity and activism. It calls to mind Tina Campt’s examination of the power of the vernacular – or “‘less eventful’ photographs” – in constructing a politicised “counterimage” of Black diasporic communities.[35] Taken together, the “less eventful” moments accumulated by HMV and MoaA also speak of the radicality of the unextraordinary, the power of witnessing racialised communities simply moving through the vicissitudes and rhythms of ordinary life. At times, these quotidian scenes also coalesce with broader histories of resistance, affiliation, and survival, even potentially challenging hegemonic visual regimes. Critics argue that state multiculturalism is a technology of discipline that functions through the spectacularisation of otherness to maintain whiteness at its unspoken core.[36] If multiculturalism demands deracinated and commodified difference, or recitals of identity that slot neatly into well-rehearsed categories, we could argue that HMV’s and MoaA’s archival projects subvert this disciplinary gaze and focus instead on the ephemeral, contradictory, and mundane murmur of everyday life for racialised communities.

While distinctions between state or “top-down” multiculturalism and “bottom up” lived diversity are important, it remains necessary to contend with the ways that these are not always easy to pry apart. As Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung reminds us, the everyday, as captured in home videos, is not an impenetrable sphere, but one rife with the inherited forms and textures of larger ideologies. Fung, whose experimental works often return to and reengage his own home videos, writes about being unsettled when he first “reencountered” some of these archives as an adult, and was struck by how his own Chinese-Trinidadian family had been cast “to the template of suburban America.”[37] He notes that home videos reproduce the likeness of the “right family” especially across markers of social class and gender. The family he found reflected back through the celluloid seemed to resemble a heterosexual nuclear family unit as shaped through the creeping influence of US military and consumer culture on the Trinidad & Tobago of his childhood.[38] As the HMV and MoaA archives also illustrate, hegemonic forms have the tendency to infiltrate the quotidian, and vice versa.

One of the most fascinating home videos available on the HMV website features the Azure/Chan family, and reveals how the personal, domestic, familial, and national are tightly interwoven.[39] The Chans are a mixed Chinese and Russian family who lived in the small prairie town of Virden, Manitoba in the 1950s-1960s, when their footage was recorded. Running over twenty minutes in length, this celluloid footage is a collage of scenes that disclose how patriarch George Chan was ostensibly a chronicler of both his family and his small town, an amateur filmmaker and an archivist who simultaneously documented personal and collective histories. The sequence opens with a compilation of four different local RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) weddings which took place in Virden’s St Paul’s United Church. From here, the footage cuts to an RCMP Christmas dinner held at a local café owned by the Chans. The accompanying text provided by the daughter of the family, Kate, describes how her father, George, developed a relationship with the RCMP, which “helped him maintain his business,” the family-run Virden Café.[40] She also notes that the Chans were the only Chinese family in their small town of Virden, Manitoba, at the time. Following the scene at the Café, George takes his camera on a tour of the town’s Christmas lights and decorations, before heading into the Chan home, where the family is celebrating Christmas. The house is decked in a mix of Christmas decorations as well as elaborate Chinese lanterns. The Queen delivers her annual Christmas Message on the television. George’s wife, four young Chan children, and an older child from George’s first marriage are all present. The family sings carols, opens presents, and sits down to their Christmas dinner. We never catch a glimpse of George, who remains ensconced behind the camera. We are however privy to his cinematographic perspective from behind the camera, his dextrous use of various camera angles and movements and even title cards to set the scene. During the family’s Christmas celebrations, George also directs and films his children in a family play, entitled “Fun with Toy,” whose plot centres on the children nursing a sick child (a doll) back to health.

The viewer can weave rich narratives from these fleeting glimpses and unspoken subtexts woven into the Chans’ home videos. They hint at larger historical tracts – including the Western oil boom, the experience of the sole Asian family in a small Manitoban town in the mid-twentieth century, the role of the RCMP in the colonial settlement of the prairie provinces – which infiltrate seemingly mundane scenes of domestic life. But if these larger narratives of nation bear down on the quotidian, the latter also haunts the former by proliferating its shadows and contradictions. As Zimmermann notes, home movies and amateur records challenge the unity of national mythology through the unveiling of recalcitrant histories, fantasies, social relations, and popular memories.[41] The tapestry of ostensibly minor details in the Chans’ home movies – including the family’s relationship with the RCMP, the Chan children’s silk qipao dresses donned for Christmas – lead one to conjecture about experiences of racial discrimination, the hazards of assimilation, and the ambivalences wrought through cultural hybridity, which may have informed the family’s life on the prairies during the mid-20th century. Hence, traces of the quotidian have the potential to densify authoritative records of nation and multiply the latter’s spectres.

Accumulated Affects

Alongside the accretions of the quotidian traces and textures of temporal and spatial transfers, haunting also can be thought of as the thickening of affects that shape our understanding of diasporic archives. Returning to the earlier description of how material losses accumulate on the surface of the poor image, we can examine how noise and glitches introduce opacities into the otherwise smooth image and interrupt the ease or facility with which diasporic archival images are made available to their audiences. However, such losses can also affectively impel us. Imperfect visual access, for Marks, prompts a haptic engagement that can usurp visual mastery, which Marks describes as the process through which the other is “killed into knowledge.”[42] Haptic engagement is a mode that implicates the whole body in the act of perceiving. The quality of low-fidelity formats like video preserves the impenetrability of the image, so that the eye is moved to skim across surfaces as opposed to “plung[ing] into depth.”[43] This more reciprocal embodied relation with the image leaves the object of knowledge, or the “other,” intact. At the same time, the ungraspability of the poor image propels the viewer to intend ever-forward, thus dissolving sensorial and bodily boundaries in a co-implication of intimacies: “[i]n a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface.”[44] This subversion of power relations – evanescent as it may be – is, for Marks, the crux of the haptic as a generative mode of being and knowing, especially for minoritised communities.

Alongside the denial of visual transparency through poor images, the home movies collected through HMV also prevent the viewer from complete narrative access. In the absence of narrative structuring, the audience pieces together clues from fragments of quotidian ephemera. The descriptive texts offered alongside the archives provides some framework for decipherment, but they also leave much unsaid. For example, the Baksh family videos include a two-minute clip entitled “Road Trip” (2008). It is time-lapse footage of a car ride between the Scarborough and North York suburbs of Toronto shot on Super 8. Shenaz Baksh has mounted the camera on the dashboard of the car, first trained on her aunt in the passenger seat. After her aunt exits the car at some point along the journey, Shenaz points the camera at herself as she drives to pick up her next passenger, her father. When he enters the car, she again readjusts the camera to focus on him now. Her father does not speak, but looks straight at the road ahead, sometimes rubbing his chin, seemingly deep in thought. We read consternation on his face. Regarding this segment of the footage, the accompanying text simply reads: “[t]he camera is later refocused on her father in the passenger seat, as she drives him to his chemotherapy session. For the last portion of the road trip, Shenaz turns the camera onto the road itself, finally parking in front of her home where she began.”[45] We perhaps lose details and information in the quickened pace and dropped frames of time-lapse; but this acceleration also condenses time and meaning. Here, it saturates the short sequence with inferred meanings and a silence that hangs in the air dense with affect. Such silences are markers of counter-archives, which denounce the authoritative archive’s aims of completion and objectivity. They also compel their audiences by extending a space for our affective and sensorial participation.

Both HMV and MoaA seem to serve a therapeutic function organised around the aim to rectify the exclusions of official archives through processes of community engaged archival affirmations. These include the creation of collective spaces for participants to remember, share personal and familial memories, as well as exercise some form of agency over how these remembrances are then preserved and reanimated. For diasporic audiences, access to these home videos of others can also be therapeutic. The digital platform allows encounters with others’ once-private scenes of domestic life, and also becomes a site of affective engagement, knowledge production, and communal recognition. As Appadurai notes, interactive media can help construct and mobilise diasporic public spheres through acts of “reading together” that have the potential to be more meaningfully participatory than those elucidated in Benedict Anderson’s now-fraught model of “imagined communities.”[46] The quotidian archives agglomerated through HMV and MoaA form flexible communities of shared intimacies, incorporating material traces of life that seem familiar, and might fill the lacunae in the audiences’ own memories. However, rather than filling up archival gaps and silences, both HMV and MoaA instead linger on them, even drawing them out.

Extending Laura Wexler’s idea that photographs are a “record of choices,” Tina Campt argues that they are also “records of intentions.”[47] The notion of intentionality requires us to consider “the social, cultural, and historical relationships figured in the image, as well as a larger set of relationships outside and beyond the frame – relationships we might think of as the social life of the photo.”[48] We can therefore think of these images as records of affects that extend far beyond the images themselves. They are documents containing residues of feelings half observed, half repressed. They also beg questions around the affective charge of their capture – about what exactly prompted their makers’ desire to document. Many of the photographs from MoaA invite these queries. One image captures a young man, perhaps in his 20s, posed casually in a shirt and trousers, leaning by a sign that reads “Philippine Refugee Processing Centre: Freedom Plaza.” Another image shows a small child in a mushroom cut perched atop a gleaming Ford Torino, gazing slightly quizzically off camera, as if awaiting a cue from a nearby adult. In yet another photo, a teenager in sunglasses flashes a grin at the camera with one arm resting on a towering store mannequin donning an RCMP uniform. These are likely snapshots of people caught in the throes of arrival/departure/settlement, the act of documenting perhaps urged by the need to momentarily stabilise the tenuousness of being on the threshold. Appadurai claims that citizenship in modern nation-states hinges on a “tight fit between plot and character (or story and actor, or narrative and identity),” and that state mechanisms provide the “territorial ground for stabilising and connecting plot and character in verifying legitimate citizens.”[49] This suggests that plot and character are subsequently de-synchronised for migrant communities, such that the narrative and emotional scaffoldings that furnish one’s sense of “territorial, personal, and sanguinary stability” are uprooted.[50] Diasporic archives such as those captured by HMV and MoaA can thus be understood as communities’ inscriptions of narratives of historical and affective emplacement for themselves, especially in the absence of state-sanctioned technologies of narratological confirmation.

Subsequent decisions regarding whether or not to digitise and make these archives publicly available are no doubt equally affectively laden. In other words, these records gathered by MoaA and HMV all bear affective imprints – the often tacit emotional and textural modalities that are especially recognisable to others who have experienced dislocation. These imprints echo the accretions of traumas and melancholies that diasporic subjects inherit and bear with them – disturbances which Shantel Martinez refers to as the “generational hauntings” that “imprint” the body.[51] We can think of these as the dense narratives of arrival, loss, settlement, and survival that accrue along migratory journeys. The accumulated after-effects of dispersal and displacement thus mark this trove with a hauntological stain. As Lily Cho describes, diaspora rests not on definitional stability but on subjective experiences of unarticulated losses: “Diaspora is not a function of socio-historical and disciplinary phenomena, but emerges from deeply subjective processes of racial memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings which hang at the edge of possibility. It is constituted in the spectrality of sorrow and the pleasures of ‘obscure miracles of connection.’”[52] These “condition[s] of subjectivity” can form a relational nexus for diasporic audiences, who might arrive at these archives with a ready store of their own emotional histories enfolded upon the body, and who, through the refraction of these histories, might recognise a familiar glance, silence, or gesture in the cacophony of the quotidian.

Conclusion

As populations become increasingly transient, so too are the accumulated images that accompany their movements dislodged from any unitary or stable point of origin. Participatory diasporic archives like HMV and MoaA provide vehicles to, at least momentarily, encapsulate and stabilise material, temporal, and spatial movements and accretions, while at the same time allowing for quotidian histories to be recirculated, and put into emergent orbits. Focusing on these two archival projects, this paper has explored how diasporic archives can challenge and redress the elisions and exclusions in official records, especially by capturing the ephemeral and quotidian to push back against multiculturalism’s regimes of visibility. MoaA and HMV are projects that aim to gather and hold space for the still and moving image archives produced through migrations and dislocations. They have gathered a significant trove of archival materials from minoritised communities and mobilised them in an effort to insert overlooked images, narratives, and histories into public imaginaries. At the same time, one could argue that both projects also point to the impossibility of this task, or that gaps and elisions themselves paradoxically become the structuring force of the archival project, as well as counter-archival endeavours of collecting and accounting for occluded histories. This is why approaching diasporic archives through the orientation of hauntological thickening might prove useful, for it allows us to think beyond loss and trauma to the ambivalent accumulations of discourses, temporalities, and affects that bear down on the everyday. It allows us to not just come up against absence, but to reorient around an understanding of absences as potentially replete.

 

Notes

[1] “About the Making of an Archive website,” The Making of an Archive, accessed November 20, 2021, http://themakingofanarchive.com/about/#faq.

[2] Nguyễn describes how she was prompted to embark on this project partly because of how difficult it was to find actual images of the multiculturalism touted by Canada in its archives, including the Libraries and Archives Canada, the National Film Board, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Rachel Sanders, “She didn’t find much multiculturalism in Canada’s official archives — so she made her own,” CBC, October 17, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/arts/she-didn-t-find-much-multiculturalism-in-canada-s-official-archives-so-she-made-her-own-1.4358628.

[3] HMV organizers note that it was a challenge acquiring Indigenous submissions, partly due to the fact that outreach was done through Regent Park Film Festival’s existing networks, and the Festival serves predominantly Black and other racialised communities. See “Project Report,” Home Made Visible, accessed November 20, 2021,  http://homemadevisible.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HMV-Project-Report.pdf. There are some home movies donated by Indigenous families to the project, but none of these are available on the HMV website, as yet.

[4] Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour Nadine Arpin, Maya Bastian, Jennifer Dysart, Aeyliya Husain, Lisa Jodoin, and Melisse Watson were the artists commissioned by HMV.

[5] At the time of this writing, there are fifteen families whose home videos are available on the HMV website. As noted by project archivist, Katrina Cohen-Palacios, the choice regarding access was up to the individual donors and families. In Cohen-Palacios, “Home Made Visible: Partnering with a Film Festival to Preserve IBPOC Home Movies,” Archives Association of Ontario Conference: Building Bridges, Connecting Communities, October 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/38531.

[6] Nguyễn also produced an artists’ book as part of this project: Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Vanessa Kwan, and Dan Pon, eds., The Making of An Archive (Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2018).

[7] Adele Perry, “The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

[8] Brett Kashmere, “Cache Rules Everything Around Me,” Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics 2 (2010), accessed November 15, 2021. http://www.incite-online.net/intro2.html.

[9] Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 4.

[10] Kashmere, “Cache Rules Everything.”

[11] MoaA was funded by Canada Council for the Arts, as well as Södertälje kommun, a municipal fund. HMV was funded by the Toronto Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts’s New Chapter grant, a one-time grant program commemorating the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.

[12] Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).

[13] I am tracing the enshrinement of Canadian multiculturalism to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism established in 1963. Other important milestones leading up to the official adoption of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act by Parliament in 1988 include: the transition from an overtly racist immigration policy to the Immigration Points System (1967), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of Canada as a multicultural nation within the bilingual framework (1971), and the inclusion of multiculturalism in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982).

[14] See for example Eve Haque, Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework; Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2000).

[15] “Isaac Family – Sacré-Coeur Christmas Concert (2004),” Home Made Visible, accessed November 20, 2021, http://homemadevisible.ca/home-movie/isaac-family-sacre-coeur-christmas-concert-2004/.

[16] “Truong/Tram Family – 1 Month old Birthday (1992),” Home Made Visible, accessed November 20, 2021, http://homemadevisible.ca/home-movie/trinh-nha-truong-6-2-of-3/.

[17] “About the Making of an Archive,” The Making of an Archive.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1.1 (2001): 110.

[20] Zimmermann, “Morphing History,” 110.

[21] Zimmermann, “Morphing History,” 127.

[22] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 7.

[23] Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

[24] Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 18.

[25] See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux 10 (2009), accessed January 15, 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

[26] Laura U. Marks. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 172.

[27] Lily Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” TOPIA 17 (2918): 17.

[28] Alisa Lebow, “The Camera as Peripatetic Migration Machine,” Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, ed. Alisa Lebow (London: Wallflower Press, 2012), 219-232, 230-1.

[29] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.

[30] The Valcin family’s home videos were donated by filmmaker Nadine Valcin, who is shown as a young child in the videos.

[31] T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2013), 4.

[32] Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), 197.

[33] “About,” The Making of an Archive.

[34] Liz Park, “The Telling Details in Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive,” The Making of An Archive, ed. Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Vanessa Kwan, Dan Pon (Vancouver: grunt gallery, 2018), 29-30.

[35] Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 6-8. See also Brian Wallis argument about the political function of African American vernacular photography in Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (New York, NY: International Center of Photography, 2005).

[36] See for example Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation; Ghassen Hage, “Republicanism, Multiculturalism, Zoology,” Communal Plural 2 (1993): 113–37.

[37] Richard Fung, “Remaking Home Movies,” Mining Home Movies: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 33.

[38] Ibid.

[39] The Chan family videos are labelled as a contribution from the “Azure family” on the HMV website, presumably after the donor, Kate Azure.

[40] “Azure Family – RCMP Wedding & Christmas (1962),” Home Made Visible, accessed November 29, 2021, http://homemadevisible.ca/home-movie/azure-family-rcmp-wedding-christmas-1962/.

[41] Zimmermann, “Introduction. The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings,” Mining Home Movies: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

[42] Marks, The Skin of the Film, 193.

[43] Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 8.

[44] Marks, Touch, xvi

[45] “Baksh family – Road Trip (2008),” Home Made Visible, accessed November 29, 2021, http://homemadevisible.ca/home-movie/shenaz-baksh-family-road-trip/.

[46] Appadurai, “Traumatic Exit, Identity Narratives, and the Ethics of Hospitality,” Television & New Media 20.6 (2019): 562.

[47] Campt, Image Matters, 6.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Appadurai, “Traumatic Exit,” 563.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Shantel Martinez, “(Re)Animated Pasts: Diasporic Visions of Longing and Belonging,” Qualitative Inquiry 22.4 (2016): 281.

[52] Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” 15.

 

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Author Biography

May Chew is an Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her current research focuses on diasporic media and archives, haunting, decolonial aesthetics, and critical genealogies of immersion. Her work appears in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History, and an issue of the journal PUBLIC on the theme of “Archives/Counter-Archives,” which she co-edited with Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord. She also collaborates on Ethnocultural Art Histories Research in Media, Worlding Public Cultures and Archive/Counter-Archive.