Curating the Moving Image (2011) | The P&P Blog
Memory, écriture of-with archival footage.
We piece together a memory that is recollected only after encountering a fragment that reminds us of it in the external world. (Katherine Elkins)
Memory, écriture of-with the archival footage is the pilot episode of the workshop Écriture with the archival footage. Four international professional and amateur filmmakers have been individually subjected to archival amateur and documentary films they had never seen before and asked to remember-imagine the youth of their parents. How much of their imagination based on oral history and of their parents’ authentic past define these remixed works? Or are the images, eager to enter the realm of the present, pushing and writing the creators’ imaginations and memories? Where do individual and collective memory cross? Memory, écriture of-with the archival footage raises questions over which light will be cast by the presentational sequence of its remixed works and to the combination of these with their original audiovisual materials.
The processes of reconstruction of memory has been made possible thanks to the digital on line film archives. The workshop of écriture with archival footage will continue thanks to your contribution: write a visual Mnemosyne following the example of Aby Warburg, exclaim the visual concepts of colour and patterns, shout your political dissent and experiment with sound and moving images!
Program:
Il Sogno (The dream), Story/Editing by Francesca Morselli, 2.10 min, 2011.
A young woman has just learned of her pregnancy. She’s flooded by profound emotions as the perception of a new life is changing for her body and femininity. She imagines sea lanscapes that evoke a sense of freedom and escape from her social and psychological ties.
In the background lies the shadow of a rapidly changing society: women are gaining conscience of their body and their new role in society, and these changes reflect in the thoughts and dreams of the protagonist.
Francesca Morselli is a film editor and curator and a recently graduated student of Archive discipline. She is based in Amsterdam.
Zakupy (Shopping),Story/Editing by Alek Rzeszowski, 1.35 min, 2011.
Shopping for food behind the iron curtain was a complex affair. Thank goodness for the Party!
Alek Rzeszowski is a filmmaker and Polish emigre living abroad.
My parents could have been like this but…, Story/Editing by Anna Dabrowska, 6.20 min, 2011.
Poland during the 70′-80′. My parents could have been like this but I do not know. I imagine and remember them at the same time.
Anna Dabrowska is a student of archive science, a short film programmer and she seeks to be an amateur filmmaker.
This very Sunlight, Story/Editing by Milosz Hermanowicz, 6.40 min, 2011.
We take a trip back in time. We meet ancestors and the people they knew. We experience History. Is such a trip even possible?
Milosz Hermanowicz is a Warsaw-based independent film editor. www.miloszhermanowicz.com
Documentation:
Memory as the theatre of the archive footage started on the 9th of February 2011. All I knew at that moment was that I wanted to remix the beautiful found footage films of the on-line Enthusiast Archive. I was attracted by the imperfection and the warm colours of its digitized films which moreover where portraying contemporaries of my parents. I wanted to play with this readymade, meaningful and “analog” material as I could play with my video camera in my hands, with one enormous difference: I did not have to face the outside reality.
My parents could have been like this but… is an ambiguous potrayal of my parents, which could be representatives of the Polish generations of the 70′s and 80′s, but it is also an intimate reminiscence of them and of my tormented and childish idea about them. The ephemerality of their youth and of these same images. Or is the remix just another strategy to escape in the idyllic and naive past where capitalist consumption was unknown and where I, as an adolescent, always wanted to live-feel? It is probably both. One thing is certain: I used the images to write as if they were a camera-stylo but they also used me to revive themselves.
Then I remembered the Open Images Festival project, which I invented just two months ago and … click! This blog was going to be the place to realize the envisioned projects. Virtuality became reality. Suddenly I had in my mind the kind of program I was going to develop, and even with other people! I started to contact some of my friends who do editing and make films, illustrating my draft idea to them: remixing the archival footage of Enthusiastarchive.net, Openimges.eu and Archive.org to tell the past of our ancestors. Some of them where ready to start straight away, others took more time to decide.
Time became waiting, hoping, suspense, trust: excitement! Meanwhile I was deepening my knowledge about the theme of memory: Benjamin, Warburg, Assmann, Erll, Godard are among those who inspired me at first. Then Katherine Elkins:
“Remembrance or strong memory relies on an understanding of memory that is largely archival: we store the entire past, perfectly preserved, as in an archive. This new model, however, is distinctly nonarchival. We do not store the entire past, and what we do store is dispersed in multiple regions of the brain. Remembering is always an act of recollecting fragments scattered across these different regions.We must reassemble these fragments into a coherent, seamless memory. Often, of course, key elements are missing. In these instances, the gaps are filled in through a process of invention and subtle revision. The memories created to fill these gaps are continually revised through a process of evaluation based on recognition. We might think we are comparing our “memory” with some “original” stored away in a central archive. But we are really evaluating the invented memory retrospectively. If we “recognize” it, we accept it as “true.” If we do not, we revise the memory slightly and reevaluate once more.(…) Between an initial impression of an event and its subsequent recollection lies a stretch of forgetfulness. The final difference between a modern art of memory and a classical one appears in the reformulation of the self. The old, classical art of memory unifies or centers the self, enclosing the past in an internal space within the subject. This new art of memory decenters the self, drawing the person who remembers towards memories of others in the outside world.”
The readings led me to the final concept of écriture of-with the archival footage as a mutual process where the rediscovered images resuscitate personal memories but also re-write and re-contextualize themselves perpetually in the creator’s imagination. Il Sogno, Zakupy and My parents, are three remixed works influenced by the stories and images of the amateur films on which they are based, but they tell us also so much about the authors themselves. This is why I affirm the importance to show the re-contextualized works close to their inspirational and constituent sources. It is enlightening to notice how Il Sogno and Zakupy are incidentally based on the same feminine character but that in the end tell two different stories, even in a distinct genre. The workshop generated plural meanings about one given topic. Individual memories became collective when they needed to communicate to a group of people, when they had to exist outside the domestic walls. This very Sunlight is an overview of my discourse here: memories live as images enclosed in our bodies and it is our decision how to use them.
It has been a beautiful life experience of some weeks which could continue with other experiments as mentioned above: can we use the archives of these images as they were an alphabet? As the initiator of this workshop, I hope to have given my friends just another chance to be creative, to reminisce their memories, maybe to discover how to work with found footage, maybe to free themselves from them and finally to share a laugh with their families.
THIS BLOG EXISTS THANKS TO JOHN HALTIWANGER.
Memory, écriture of-with archival footage. Aleksander Rzeszowski
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Memory, écriture of-with archival footage. Milosz Hermanowicz
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Memory as the theatre of the archive footage – Visual exploration
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 ‘Collective Memory
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 ‘Access
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 ‘Moving Images Archives
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 ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma-Godard
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 ‘Basis: Walter Benjamin
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 ‘Format: Work In Progress
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Collective Memory:
Collective memory is a term coined by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), separating the notion from the individual memory. There is not only an individual memory, but also a group memory that exists outside of and lives beyond the individual. Consequently, the individual’s understanding of the past is strongly linked to this group consciousness.
Collective memory is sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In our media age – and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization – this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories. Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities where we come to share a sense of heritage and commonality with many human beings we have never met – as in the manner a citizen may feel a sort of ‘kinship’ with people of his nation, region or city.
Within this project the participants will create second hand memories reframing the past life of their parents. Found footage film will revive their memories and stimulate their creativity to produce new narratives: will they be representations of different meanings produced within the collective memory?
Access
This project is feasible thanks to the new digital technologies which create more access to the cultural heritage but also give the general public the tools to express itself.
I believe in the resources of the users and I hope for an equal access to all kind of culture and information by all citizen groups.
Internet Archives
There is an astonishing growth of on-line archives of moving images. These new, emergent forms of archival capital have an increasingly powerful grip upon culture and its reproduction.
For this project we will use resources of archive.org but more precisely the beautiful amateur found footage films from Enthusiastarchive.net and the film fragments from Openimages.eu.
“We began with a chance encounter in 2001 with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first popular feature film Amator (Film Buff) from 1979; the main character is a leading member of a factory based film club. Intrigued, we began a research project in the summer of 2002 into the existence and remnants of amateur film clubs in socialist Poland.”… (to continue on www.enthusiastarchive.org)
“Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse. Footage from audiovisual collections can be downloaded and remixed into new works. Users of Open Images also have the opportunity to add their own material to the platform and thus expand the collection.”…(to continue on www.openimages.eu)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Dir. J-L. Godard)
France, 1988-98, 266 minutes
Histoire(s) du cinéma is Jean-Luc Godard’s most devastating accomplishment as filmmaker/critic/artist/poet/historian. Produced over a period of ten years, the film project has been heralded as a work of tremendous significance to the practice of both cinema and history; most famously by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who declared it to be “the culmination of 20th century film-making”. Whilst not technically a film, Histoire(s) undoubtedly represents the ultimate labour of cinephilic love, an intensive audio-visual retrospective ruminating on the multiple incarnations of cinema, its vital intersections with 20th century history and ultimately, its immanent death, as projected by the medium’s most studied, critically devoted and playfully intellectual independent figure.
Although Godard is not my favourite director, I have to honour him for this masterpiece collage of films and historical fragments which narrates the occurred and the missed history of our past and of cinema.
France, 1988-98, 266 minutes
Histoire(s) du cinéma is Jean-Luc Godard’s most devastating accomplishment as filmmaker/critic/artist/poet/historian. Produced over a period of ten years, the film project has been heralded as a work of tremendous significance to the practice of both cinema and history; most famously by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who declared it to be “the culmination of 20th century film-making”. Whilst not technically a film, Histoire(s) undoubtedly represents the ultimate labour of cinephilic love, an intensive audio-visual retrospective ruminating on the multiple incarnations of cinema, its vital intersections with 20th century history and ultimately, its immanent death, as projected by the medium’s most studied, critically devoted and playfully intellectual independent figure.
Although Godard is not my favourite director, I have to honour him for this masterpiece collage of films and historical fragments which narrates the occurred and the missed history of our past and of cinema.
Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History (193)
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.”
“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form — it may be called fleeting or eternal — is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”
The format of this project is a work in progress: the participants remix found footage films during 5 weeks. It is an intriguing experience, a suspense and a hope.
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Memory as the theatre of archive footage – Subject background
As a programmer of European debut short films, every year I have the chance to watch the original first creations from emergent filmmakers. It is exciting, curious and challenging, especially when you deal with experimental and politically or ethically controversial films, but still I get so delighted when I receive a small amount of creative remixed films obtained from archival found footage. In this project I wanted to combine my passion for the archival footage from my prospective as a film programmer, an amateur filmmaker and a student of archival discipline and hopefully future professional of this fascinating field. I would like to set this work in progress with other people who will get attracted by the project. I believe in the surprising skills and imaginations of people and I love to push them in challenging experiences: finally unintentionally I will be a kind of producer but also a participant. It will be a total experiment, both for me and both for the other participants who probably will edit archival found footage for the first time in their life on such a personal topic: the past life of our parents. Furthermore I would like to explore here the on-line possibilities of showing remixed videos together with their original amateur archival found footage (so precious and interesting) and I hope an interesting comparison between the authentic past object and its revised, present version will emerge. Our memories and imaginations will revitalise the past in some ways.
Articulating the past historically does not mean recognising it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. (Walter Benjamin in “On the Concept of History.” )
Memory as the theatre of archive footage – WORK PLAN
Description and goals of the project:
Inspired by the ideas of Walter Benjamin about memory and the violent revitalization of the past by the present, “Memory as the theatre of the archive footage” is a project, initially enclosed within the context of this blog, where the main actors are: the present and the past, the memory and the imagination of creative people, and archival footage. Through the remix of found footage material, I and other people will recreate the history of our parents, giving way to our memories and to a free and personal proliferation of meanings. The aim of this work in progress is to encourage anyone who is interested to develop a deeper aesthetic sense, to focus on their memories and imaginations regarding their families but also to connect with the cultural audiovisual heritage which nowadays at least, thanks to digital technologies, becomes accessible and vital. Furthermore, it will be interesting to notice how different people combine ideas about history and certain images to express meanings and how the images themselves impress these people.
Finally, the works created during this 5-weeks period will be displayed online together with the original footage and some notes.
Audience:
Film students, the creative participants and their families, archivists.
Resources:
Creative people, engagement, Walter Benjamin, found footage film, archives online, (enthusiatarchive.net, openimages.eu, archive.org), editing skills.
Results of the project:
The vignette will show at least one of the remixed video next to its original archival extracts. Some impressions and comments about the whole project and the recompilations of the past by the partecipants will also be displayed.
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” (Walter Benjamin in “On the Concept of History.” )
Memory as the theatre of archive footage
Curator: Anna Dabrowska
Subject: Archive Found Footage/ Work in progress/ Collective memory
Inspiration: Walter Benjamin
“Memory is not an instrument of exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” (Walter Benjamin in “On the Concept of History.”)