of traditional myths and rituals, the film begins with colorful cactuses; the animistic camera meanders to the hectic rhythm of an improvised percussion ensemble, capturing blurred snapshots, images of fruits, and vast landscapes (fig. 4). Halfway through the film, a zoom of the rising moon with a soundtrack of ghostly female voices alludes to the violent murder of the Aztec moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, by her own brother, Huitzilopochtli. The final minutes of the film refer directly to contemporary Mexican femicides—gender-based murders of women—by showing images of sandals scattered around the ground, a pad over a patch of dry branches, underpants creased between stones, and bras hanging from the dry branches of a bush. The film takes place in the deserted area of La Mixteca, where there are numerous textile *maquilas*—manufacturing assembly plants of duty-free components for exportation. Here, the original femicide of *Coyolxauhqui* connects with the horrific wave of femicides that began in Ciudad Juárez among young women employed by the *maquilas*. Each piece of clothing on screen is a sensitive record of the physical presence of what happened in La Cañada. In this way the film becomes a collective

archive that combines the empirical—the clothes—with the **275** ancestral—the myth of Coyolxauhqui—and the poetic.

Ingrávidos' work is a system of afterlives and reincarnations that suggests a broader discourse, one that surpasses the limitations of spatiotemporal coordinates, creating relational images. What happens in Juárez is connected to what happens in Mixteca—and what happened to Coyolxauhqui—because they all take place within patriarchal neoliberal capitalism. Ingrávidos' expanded understanding of history proposes a cinema without limitations that demolishes its current architecture. A cinema that looks back at the viewers and involves them in a transcendental political visual experience that bridges the ongoing trauma of colonialism. In this way, their cinema stablishes the conditions of an anticolonial archival practice where forensics are not at the center but rather an additional element that needs to be reexamined and juxtaposed with other forms of knowledge.

*Thank you to Davani for her friendship and her trust.*

## **References**

# **Destabilizing the Official Film Archive from Within: S.N.S. Sastry's** *And I Make Short Films*

#### **Ritika Kaushik**

"India's story is there on film," said James Beveridge (Mohan 1969, 6), referring to the vast collection of Films Division of India (FD), comprised of more than 8000 films on art and culture, development and planning, citizenship and reform, children's films, defense films, and experimental films, animations, and newsreels.1 India's primary state institution of documentary and short film since independence, FD was imagined as a national audiovisual record of India's story in all its colorful renditions—an all-knowing, positivist archive. On its twentieth anniversary, FD commissioned an experimental film on its history, *And I Make Short Films*, made by S.N.S. Sastry.2 The late 1960s saw a period of experimentation at FD under the supervision of Jehangir Bhownagary, when dissonant practices emerged and figures like Sastry, Pramod Pati, and S. Sukhdev came to the fore. *And I Make Short Films* self-reflexively places film experimentation within the context of national debates about the role of documentary

1 James Beveridge, a Canadian filmmaker, exerted immense influence on the Indian documentary movement as he was closely associated with FD.

2 Sastry worked for FD from the 1950s till his death in 1978.

**278** film in a developing nation. As Sastry remixes and reappropriates footage from a variety of sources with techniques like contrapuntal audio-visual montage, the film presents a figurative history of the growing postcolonial nation. Through a focus on *And I Make Short Films* (1968), this chapter shows how Sastry's film destabilizes the official archive of state sponsored films from within. In the process, the official film archive transforms into a dynamic entity that is open to foraging and activating histories that challenge a monolithic vision of the Indian nation.

# **Style, Insider's Perspective, and Archival Appropriation**

Documentary films in India were screened compulsorily before the feature films in theaters across the country, amidst the rising cigarette smoke of impatient audiences and the din of snack vendors. In response to such inattention, Sastry began to use what was called a "flashy and nervous" (Pendharkar 1978, 78) style, leavening serious topics with humor, self-reflexivity, and irony. He achieved many of these effects by remixing preexisting footage with other media like photographs, newspapers, and popular songs—an economical way for a filmmaker with unrestricted access to FD's whole archive. In fact, in one of his only surviving pieces of writing, Sastry proposed recycling footage through a creative use of sound as a way to save precious raw stock, which filmmakers were always hard pressed to get (Sastry 1968, 9). But, apart from practical considerations, Sastry's penchant for archival appropriation also derived from his deep knowledge about FD's holdings, having previously worked as a newsreel cameraperson for FD before becoming a director. Along with the rising impetus towards experimentation during the late 1960s, Sastry's unrestrained access to footage from FD's films, his insider's perspective of working within a state institution, as well as his familiarity with FD's archive, all provided the perfect storm

of incidental and intentional circumstances ripe for the practices **279** of reuse and reappropriation that flourished in many of his films.

This is not to say that Sastry's work is entirely singular, as various international found footage filmmakers have worked from within or with institutional archives, while trying to rewrite histories through reuse of newsreels, photographs, and posters and by reworking the archive's own materials. There exist contemporary parallels with Sastry's practice in the varied works of Arthur Lipsett at the National Film Board of Canada and Santiago Alvarez at the Cuban government's Cuban Film Institute, to name a few who also made films during the 1960s and 1970s. While Sastry's reuse and reappropriation at FD runs parallel to this international history of found footage filmmaking and reflects the influence of global developments in political and experimental cinema, his practice is steeped in specific local contexts like compulsory exhibition and constraints of institutional filmmaking at FD.

# **The Archive as a Promiscuous Site**

Consider how an elusive sequence in *And I Make Short Films* intermixes a scene from a benchmark of Indian art cinema with piercing public images of a Prime Minister's funeral. We see the young protagonist from *Aparajito* (1956), the second film in Satyajit Ray's renowned Apu trilogy, look on as Sarbajaya (his mother) offers water to Harihar (his father) on his deathbed. A cut takes us to the inconsolable face of Hari Krishna Shastri in 1966, at the funeral of his father, the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (who succeeded Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964). A loud bang follows, and we see a close up of Harihar rising up to the water but falling back on the bed. A cutaway shot of pigeons flying away from a rooftop signals his death. Sarbajaya's scream and a shrill flute from *Aparajito* continue over a series of sudden cathartic cuts as we see Nehru's face carrying a distraught look, almost as if reacting to the news of the death from the previous scene, a tear drop falling from the eyes of a deer from one of the

**280** earliest major Indian animated films, *The Banyan Deer* (1957), and a shot of the burning pyre at Shastri's funeral. As Harihar's reellife death and the grief of Sarbajaya and Apu runs parallel to the real-life grief of Shastri's family, the above sequence collapses the differences between the fictional world of Apu and the domain of the Indian nation state facing the deaths of its Prime Ministers within its fateful two decades.

The scene transitions to a lot of people crying and then cuts to the shadow of a galloping horse, and we see Nehru riding it. A cleverly edited found-footage montage makes it appear that a crowd of people are looking at him in abject melancholy. An eyeline match fakes a quick exchange of nods between him and the recently elected Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Finally, we see Nehru batting in the cricket field; he hits a ball and as it goes in the air a solemn music rises. The umpire indicates that the player is out. The innings of the famed first Prime Minister of India are over, the film seems to tell us. The melancholy abruptly turns into a warning, as loud gunfire overwhelms and rages over the music and we see a shot of Nehru's dead body covered with garlands. Gun sounds continue as we see still photographs featured in quick succession of three world leaders who were assassinated: Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.

This sequence exposes the paternalistic dimension of the Indian state and its leaders like Nehru and Gandhi. At the same time, it reveals the international dimension of the nation's postcolonial history from the time of its independence, as it moves from personal tragedy in fiction, to the national tragedy of deaths of two Prime Ministers, and finally invokes figures of world leaders whose deaths left indelible impacts on the political landscape of the world. However, more than a simple evocation of contemporary political or cultural events, the sequence puts on display the permeable boundaries between the domains of art and public life, inscribed by social and cultural memory activated through recognizable ephemera.

This last dimension is further strengthened as Sastry uses **281** several scenes from the popular Hindi film *Jis Des Mein Ganga Behti Hai* (1960), the most enigmatic being a gloriously lustrous Kammo, played by Padmini, swimming sensuously in a pond. Sastry intercuts shots of Padmini swimming with the movement of an underwater turtle. Next, we see Padmini emerge breathless from the water in a celebratory declaration of love, singing "Ho Maine Pyaar Kiya (I have fallen in love!)." As the playback singer's breathy heaving continues, Sastry cuts to footage of a competitive female swimmer catching her breath. This popular film's excerpts would be unmistakably recognizable by the movie-going audiences even as they become ambiguously transformed through this intercutting and activate familiarity as well as alienation with them. While operating through formal and affective logics, the above cuts suture three different somatic dimensions—the sensuality of desire from a popular Hindi film song, the lithe aquatic rhythms of the turtle, and the matter-offact journalistic image of a young woman swimmer triumphantly catching her breath.

In both the above examples, the film makes formal connections between images and sounds from different media topographies to perform a historical function. By remediating film ephemera, it turns the archive into a promiscuous site, one where the banality of everyday life shares latent affinities with the vernacular idioms and somatic energies of popular films and art cinemas.

It must be emphasized that such use of preexisting footage, while present in Indian parallel cinema, was never commonplace in FD's films. Indeed, the film offers a jarring contrast to other FD productions that deal with its own history, such as *Through a Lens Starkly* (Kuldeep Sinha, 1992)*.* A somber and monumental film*, Through a Lens Starkly* presents FD's history with interviews while using preexisting footage denotatively to illustrate what is being said. The only exception is the film's ending sequence, which suddenly evokes an expressive tone through an eclectic mix of rapidly cut visuals and sounds, exploding with

**282** multi-valent connotations. This ending sequence, it turns out, is made up of excerpts from *And I Make Short Films,* including the above-described scene of Nehru on a horse, albeit with minor modifications. This brief part of *And I Make Short Films*'s most evocative montage sequences turns *Through a Lens Starkly*'s sombre and monumental take on FD's history into an expressive document where meanings are not easily attributable to images.

# **Curation, Archiving, and Found Footage Filmmaking**

Giovanna Fossati has argued that "found footage filmmaking, in its practice of selecting and presenting films made by other filmmakers and changing their 'meaning by placing [them] in a new context,' shares an inherent aspect of the practice of film archiving." (Fossati 2012, 3) I contend that Sastry's work begins to resemble that of an archivist as well as a curator, making FD's archive a dynamic entity where film meanings and the categories that govern them are in constant flux. Sastry's work as a filmmaker shares deep synergy with contemporary curators and archivists who carefully analyze, organize, and make records accessible to the public. For example, his work can thus be seen as akin to archives like Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, as its Indian cinema collection contains a range of experimental, art films, and both independent and state sponsored documentaries, even as the access to prints to many of which remains quite uncertain or impossible in India.3 Arsenal's collection includes films like Ray's *Aparajito*, Jehangir Bhownagary's *Radha and Krishna* (1957), or Guru Dutt's *Pyaasa* (1957) whose footage features in some form in *And I Make Short Films* (and many more in Sastry's *Flash Back* (1974)). This correspondence between selections of films is reflective of the

3 Case in point was the experimental film *Badnam Basti* (1971), which was considered lost until 2019, when it was found accidently in Arsenal's archive.

shared synergy of an accidental archivism that pervades both **283** Arsenal's and Sastry's work. Just as archives write history by selecting which films to preserve, found footage filmmakers similarly "rewrite film history" by using the films from within the institution (Fossati 2012, 4).

It is also significant here that only in the last two decades have films like *And I Make Short Films* taken a prominent place in experimental film history in India, owing to sustained curatorial efforts, like Shai Heredia's *Experimenta*, which in 2004 re-introduced FD films from 1965–75 into discourses around experimental cinema. This has been followed by Amrit Gangar's *Cinema of Prayoga* (2006), Heredia and Nicole Wolf's co-curation "Experimentations from India" for Berlinale's Forum Expanded in 2008, the weekly film club "FD Zone" (which programmed films from its own archive with contemporary documentaries), and other efforts of individual curators like Avijit Mukul Kishore.

Just as such curators have shown how Sastry's films offer alternative entry points into experimental film histories of India, we may also see in them insight into alternative histories of the Indian nation. *And I Make Short Films* unsettles the Indian nation's official historical trajectories as imagined through film, by selectively juxtaposing the heterogenous audio-visual ephemera surrounding events that define India's postcolonial moment (such as Nehru's death) with the dynamic promiscuity of popular visual culture and art. Given his intentional interventions and insider's perspective, Sastry shakes the positivist logics of the archive from within, mobilizing the possibilities of access offered by the archive's own creation. At the same time, through formal interventions that activate multiple valences of social and cultural memory from seemingly banal bits and pieces of history, his films make way for unexpected and uncontrolled meanings. Sastry's recycling of preexisting footage moves away from a representative logic to one of historiographic method, where the past is not something being re-presented, but is something to be recalled, remembered, reused, and re-made in the present.

**284** It is this logic that in turn destabilizes the archive as a static repository of the past and transforms it into a promiscuous site through new uses and relations between sounds and images. As contemporary archivists and curators compel us to look back at complete films and their connections to larger film histories, it is also pertinent that we take seriously this ephemeral and sensuous archive created intentionally through films like *And I Make Short Films*.

# **References**

# **A Festival Under Fire**

#### **Shai Heredia**

*The new cinephilia radiates outward, powered by a spirit of inquiry and a will to social and planetary change. It is no coincidence that so many filmmakers valued by the new cinephilia women, queer, indigenous, people of color—have an interest in activism, and view cinema itself as part of a larger cultural-activist project. — Girish Shambu (2020)*

At the Berlinale in 2020 I was on a panel entitled "At the End of the Red Carpet—Festivals under fire, festivals as sites of criticality." The panel was essentially a reflection on the role of the film festival in the current global landscape. My view at the time was rather cynical, and came from a place of deep sadness about the political situation in India and across the world. Responding to the title of the panel I said that maybe it was time to burn all film festivals to the ground and to start afresh, because if this is the world that we have participated in constructing then we need to stop, re-evaluate, and work towards re-ordering things.

**286** Ironically, at that same edition of the Berlinale in 2020, I found myself doing a deep dive into political films from across the world through the incredibly curated programs of films in the Forum 50 Anniversary program. I was profoundly impacted by this immersive experience. As histories of political and cultural movements came alive on screen through a diversity of stories of activism and resistance, many peoples' struggles that have shaped our times across continents were re-presented in all their cinematic glory. These films generated fresh questions and offered new answers. It became evident to me that in the current moment of historical amnesia in India, accessible film archives and distribution networks for archival films can play an important role in shaping our society.

What can the contemporary learn from the archive? How does political cinema survive, grow and express solidarity in the face of oppression? These were some of the questions that arose through my experience with archival cinema at the Berlinale in 2020. And in the subsequent years of the pandemic, as global inequalities and injustices intensified and became more visible, it was these questions that continued to echo through my mind. While vaccine inequity placed a clear value on whose lives matter, between the 'rich' and 'poor' countries, India struggled through the dark days of COVID with a fascist leader at the helm.

In March 2020, the Indian government called an immediate lockdown, giving citizens 4 hours to pack up their lives and find their way home. As people began to scramble for food, shelter, medicines, and money, millions of migrant workers lost their jobs overnight and began their long journeys back home. With no interstate transport available, women and men, boys and girls, the young and old, walked miles and miles across the country, over days and weeks to reach their homes. They carried backpacks, babies, children, and even each other. They lined the highways across the length and breadth of this country. While on their journey they were criminalized as spreaders of the virus and subjected to violence and humiliation. Many fell sick and

some sadly died. Amidst this, the ongoing anti CAA/NRC pro- **287** test movement1 led by women and students that had gained significant momentum across the country was forced to shut down. The vibrant protest site of Shaheen Bagh in the capital city of Delhi was evacuated, leaving little to no trace of the radical people, voices, and spirited energy that filled the area. Meanwhile, the Indian government congratulated itself on its response to the pandemic, turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of migrant workers, and rushed to push through a bill in parliament that disempowered farmers, sacrificing them to private industry.  These were just some of the images and stories that characterized the early COVID years in India (see Abi-Habib and Yasir 2020).

It was during this complex and difficult period that I realized it was imperative to revive Experimenta (www.experimenta. in), the biennial film festival that I founded in 2003 and that had had its 10th edition in 2017. We needed to commune and to heal. The political and cultural need of the hour was for us to devise a new language and create versatile forms of resistance before it became too late. And so, after a 5-year hiatus, Experimenta was poised to return, albeit in a new avatar. Moving away from the conventional festival format, the plan was to curate a program of political cinema that challenged the state and reflected upon the current era of uncertainty in India. But how was this going to be possible in a country where any critique of the government gets journalists, activists, and artists thrown into jail, where films are randomly banned and censored, where mainstream media is controlled, and where all cultural expression in opposition to right-wing ideology is termed 'anti-national'? The answer lay in my experience with the archival films in the Forum 50 program.

1 These protests occurred after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was enacted by the Government of India, which was essentially designed to profile minority communities, especially Muslims, and question their citizenship, ultimately towards building a Hindu India.

**288** The strategy for Experimenta 2023 was to construct a subversive curatorial framework by excavating the history of political cinema and digging deep into the archives. The program was designed to draw parallels between the current political landscape of India and peoples' struggles from other cultural contexts. How relevant is the history of global social movements today? How does cinema as an art form persist across time to offer critical representations of the aspirations, mistakes, and contradictions of nation states? These were the questions that framed the program. Respondents from across India, including artists, filmmakers, writers, activists, journalists, and scholars were invited to contextualize these historical films and connect them to the situation that we were facing on the ground today. The realities of conflicts made visible through revolutionary cinema, seemingly only relevant elsewhere and belonging to a different time, worked as activators to create a discursive environment. And so, for five days with a packed hall at the Goethe-Institut in Bangalore, Experimenta became an inclusive and safe platform for many voices of dissent.

As an aside, I would like to point out that to protect the respondents from being identified by the dark side, we chose to credit them only in the acknowledgements of the festival brochure and not under the program that they were discussing. We were advised that if anything became controversial, the brochure would operate as physical proof against these particular individuals. Sometimes, paranoia is not a bad thing.

Experimenta 2023 opened with *Rule by Consent* (1967) by Vijay B. Chandra and Pramod Pati, a propagandist film produced by the Films Division of India that celebrated the Indian democratic system and the fourth general elections of India. The irony of watching this utopian vision of a secular, socialist newly independent India on screen while considering where history has led us today was an extremely complex and emotional experience for many of us in the audience. This film led us into examining issues of migration, labor, oppression, censorship, and colonialism through Ibrahim Shaddad's *Camel* (1981) and *Hunting* **289** *Party* (1964), Chris Marker's *On vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens* (1970), and Med Hondo's *Mes Voisins* (1971). With Howard Alk's *The Murder of Fred Hampton* (1971) and Yolande du Luart's *Angela—Portrait of a Revolutionary* (1971), we addressed the Black American struggle against racism and inequitable capitalist power structures in 1960s and 70s America. Today, these films serve as relevant documents of how state-sanctioned violence is used against minorities, activists, and intellectuals. We reaffirmed the power of community organization and resistance movements through the feminist protest films of the Yugantar Collective *Molkarin* (1985) and *Sudesha* (1983) alongside *Phelandaba (End of the Dialogue)* (1970) by members of the Pan Africanist Congress, a clandestinely shot first-ever film on the horrors of Apartheid in South Africa. As we immersed ourselves into these worlds, we were able to discuss issues of caste, campus politics, student activism, police brutality, the tragedy of the state of Kashmir, incarceration of activists and journalists, and political assassinations that are an everyday occurrence in today's India.

Experimenta 2023 was a festival of protest. A protest generated through shared history, cultural memory and social consciousness as embodied in cinema. As a community in solidarity, we immersed ourselves in art as resistance and considered new strategies for subverting and challenging power structures. Through political cinema from the archives we were able to embrace social movements, celebrate the power of collectives, and reflect upon the myriad forms of protest that cinema inspires. The future of our societies is rooted in mapping a continuum with political activism of the past. And the future of the film archive is embedded in how we practice our politics as artists and curators today.

# **290 References**

Abi-Habib, Maria, and Sameer Yasir. 2020. "India's Coronavirus Lockdown Leaves Vast Numbers Stranded and Hungry." *New York Times*, March 29. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-india-migrants.html. Shambu, Girish. 2020. *The New Cinephilia*. Montréal: Caboose.

 For the true past appears in the present from time to time; it is—as is the present—inexhaustible. — Carla Lonzi*

An archive of film reels from a time long before the invention of cinema and of an unknown format was recently discovered by an Italian feminist researcher who wishes to remain anonymous. This archive was hidden in a wooden box and buried under clutter in the basement of a former women's prison from the 17th century, which today is an important location of Italian feminist history—the *Casa internazionale delle donne* in Rome. In addition, shards of what seemed like a broken mirror were discovered inside the box. Upon closer examination, it appeared that this mirror's single fragments were of an ambiguous nature: unexpectedly, they would darken and then suddenly come alive, vaguely looking like liquid crystal screens. Sometimes, they would flash for a few seconds, displaying some visual noise to then fade again and return to their opaque, mute mirroring surface.

**296** The moving image sequences discovered on the reels (that also contain unintelligible sound) show groups of women of different ages in a large overgrown garden who are engaged in various activities, sometimes difficult to discern; their style and clothes clearly link them to France of the seventeenth century, their identities are currently investigated. The women are involved in conversations and discussions, they read and take walks, at times they talk directly to the camera, and sometimes it seems that they rehearse scenes, as if it was a theatrical performance and the garden their stage and rehearsal space.

The material is often obscure, blurry, and shattered but sometimes renders intensely colorful visual impressions—stunning images that, despite being heavily affected by the long time they have been hidden underground, display a strange, compelling, and touching beauty. The sequences were printed on an unknown material which at the moment is still being forensically analyzed—a material that is soft and translucent, sensitive to light but surprisingly to touch as well, as if it were alive, almost skin-like but not skin… a material that had managed to contain these images over three hundred years, as an investigation into its date of origin has yielded.

So far, not much is known about the author of these recordings, but there are some hints that point to a young Italian actress from the seventeenth century named Armanda, originating from Palermo in Sicily, who had moved to Paris to work with Molière and then, for unknown reasons, had ended up as prisoner in the very prison in Rome that centuries later would become the Casa internazionale delle donne, where she would finally leave her treasure.

How this young woman came into possession of a camera and that recording material at a time where such technologies did not yet exist, and how she would have learned to use it and, as well, maintain the equipment charged without electricity is a miracle,

a riddle that perhaps will never be properly solved unless one **297** believes in time travel.

At this point and as a consequence of this marvelous discovery, and despite there still being more questions than answers, some histories will most certainly have to be rewritten.

 Fig. 5: Laetizia Santillan; Fig. 7: Gemma Vannuzzi.

[Fig. 1] Delhi Durbar 1903 by James Kerr (Source: Hamzic 2014, 193)

# **The Non-Human Archive**

**Veena Hariharan**

Remarking on a photographic record of a 1903 Delhi Durbar procession by James Kerr, Vanja Hamzić notes how it has been "photobombed" by a "lone canine pariah" (2014, 193) (fig. 1). He writes, "… early photographs of Indian pariah dogs are notoriously rare. Unlike tigers, elephants, monkeys, snakes and other animals typically associated with India, pariah dogs are captured by the colonial-time photographer's camera almost exclusively by chance"(ibid.). Such non-human traces can be said to constitute an *accidental archive*. Defined variously as "unintended," "unruly," "ephemeral," "anarchival," the accidental archive is stumbled upon by happenstance and serendipity in unlikely places, and contrasted to ideologically inflected institutional archives, carefully contained, even if contaminated by delirium and dust.

Curatorial logics of archives often work as filters that simultaneously enable and hinder access to the accidental ephemera that is present in all archives. Following José Esteban Muñoz's (1996) famous emphasis on ephemera's "anti-evidence" and "anti-rigor" in "queer acts" of reading, Alanna Thain (2017) gestures toward the anarchy inherent in the archive that queer

**304** or feminist readings can unravel not so much in terms of what is missing in the cache but what we failed to read previously because of dominant structures of thought. In the manner of subaltern historians who read colonial texts such as police records and legal documents against the grain of empire to reveal agential native subjects, anarchival reading can be subversive acts of resistance.

Can we extend such a reading to the non-human subject? In her deconstructivist reading of the colonial archive, postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak (2016) explains that "traces" in French, contains the word "spoor"—the tracks of wild animal dung, often used to hunt them down.1 Like trackers, who pursue wild animals from traces as diverse as pugmarks, butterflies, to yes often spoor, can we follow the scent of the non-human animal in the archive? The thing about animals, especially strays, is that they often wander into the pro-filmic by accident and end up being part of the film or image. How to read this accidental archive of animals? One way is to literally change the filters on existing archives—what if we now look in the archives not for memories, star bodies, and locations but for non-human animals?

Animal vestiges in the archive are essentially human records of their presence in objects, diaries, notes, ephemera, paintings, photographs, and films and are as such entangled with human histories of representation, exploitation, labor, or domestication. Thus, animal traces may be found in taxidermic hunting trophies, expensive ivory and fur, bones in objects of everyday use, in the racing track as speculative bids, as hybrid therianthropic figures in gargoyles, as representations in Indian temple art, or in family albums as companion species.

1 In fact, the connection is even more visible in the German language, where *Spur* is the word for trace, including that of animals, just like in the Dutch word *spoor*. The etymological origin of these Germanic words is literally 'footprint,' related to e.g. Sanskrit *sphurati* (eng. *he kicks*, *dances*).

Then, quite literally, non-humans can be agential archival agents **305** too. The shift toward recovering the "anarchival materiality" (Smith and Hennessey 2020) of film archives, for example magenta film stock, mold and decay that accrue to celluloid —are recent turns in archival reading practices. Films like *Lyrical Nitrate* (Peter Delpeut, 1991) and *Decasia* (Bill Morrison, 2002) draw attention to this by celebrating decay and making the combustible nitrate film stock itself the subject and material of the films. Juan Rodríguez calls for a "mycological study" of the bio-deteriorated image in the decomposing Havana film archive in terms of the unintended effects of non-human microorganisms—effects such as chromatic flares, which artist Alexandra Navratil in her work on the presence of non-human actants in the archive, refers to as the "metabolism of images."

Following Mahesh Rangarajan's (2014) caveat against reading animal evidence directly or uncritically off oral and visual texts, we can read archives more as process than evidence, in order to see how real-world conditions, policies, and cultural attitudes to non-human life congeal as texts. In the example that I began with, the stray dog constitutes an accidental element in the frame—ignored amidst the hustle and bustle of the city's elaborate arrangements for the coronation ceremony, overshadowed by caparisoned elephants and a sea of bystanders waiting for the durbar procession to pass. Such a rare sighting of the image of a pariah dog in the archive can enlighten us about, among other things, the largely benign human attitudes toward the stray dog in colonial India. Paired with other such archival images, and juxtaposed with legal, urban, and municipal colonial archives as well as the embarrassing riches of the extensively documented ornamental durbars, we may attempt to reconstruct a history of animals (in this case the pariah dog), animal-human entanglements, and animal protection laws in historically feral cities. Such "zoomorphic" (Pick 2011) readings, which emphasize the non-human in the animal-human dyad, will help us to write

**306** new histories where non-humans are the event rather than the accident of the human archive.

#### **References**

Alanna, Thain. 2017. "Relay Conversation Reading Room #17—Anarchival Practices (part 1)." *Instrument Inventors Initiative*, December 9. Accessed June 1, 2023. https://instrumentinventors.org/post/ relay-conversation-reading-room-17-anarchival-practices-part-1/.

Delpeut, Peter. 2012. *Found Footage: Cinema Exposed*. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Hamzić, Vanja. 2014. "The (Un)conscious Pariah: Canine and Gender Outcasts of the British Raj." *Australian Feminist Law Journal* 40 (2): 185–98.

Liptay, Fabienne. 2018. "Alexandra Navratil—Die ultimative Atomisierung des Körpers." *Kunstbulletin* 10. Accessed June 1, 2023. https://www.artlog.net/de/kunstbulletin-10-2018/ alexandra-navratil-die-ultimative-atomisierung-des-korpers.

Muñoz, Jose Esteban. 1996. "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts." *Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory* 8 (2): 5–16.

Pick, Anat. 2011. *Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film.*  New York: Columbia University Press.

Rangarajan, Mahesh, ed. 2014. *Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India's Environmental History.* Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. 2018. "Towards a Film Micology? Biodeteriorated Archival Images of Havana as Incurable-Images of the Cinematic City." *Public* 57: 171–83.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2016. Preface to the translation *Of Grammatology*, xxvii–cxii.

Trudi Lynn Smith, and Kate Hennessy. 2020. "Anarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal." *Visual Anthropology Review* 36 (1): 113–36.

# **Found or Lost? Turkey's Vulnerable Film and Video Heritage**

**Özge Çelikaslan**

*Archives cope with many challenges. Tangible archival material is threatened by vandalism due to social conflicts, economic shortfalls, theft, neglect and obsolescence of materials, and environmental factors. All archives, including well-organized and financially sustained institutional archives as well as those of the communities of dissent have to cope with these challenges and risks. They also have to deal with their archives' ephemerality, impermanence, and evanescence due to a lack of sustainability plans and financial problems, together with the threat of political oppression, censorship, and confiscation. Archives that document human rights violations in conflict countries or territories like Turkey are especially under constant threat. There are many cases of confiscated archival documents, film and video material, computers, and hard drives; confinement; and the shutting down of organizations and their projects. This paper looks at the discussion on the vulnerable conditions of film and video archives of activism and dissent communities and several practices in Turkey. The discussion here focuses on the temporality of the archives in the context of time and ephemerality. I examine the temporal*

**308** *tensions and contradictions at play and elaborate on the reasons for ephemerality regarding the activist archives.*

## **Temporality of Activist Archives**

In theory, the archive is thought of in terms of consistency, maintenance, and transmission, but in practice, archives are vulnerable, contingent, and obsolete—and activist film and video archives are the most vulnerable. Alycia Sellie et al. (2015, 462) briefly address the temporal particularities of these archives, arguing that the shifting temporalities of activist spaces and various operational challenges, especially financial costs, permanently raise significant questions. Many archives are only able to accommodate short-term projects under these conditions (ibid.), a temporal characteristic that results in a loss of trust and solidarity among members. Archival records and outcomes, knowledge, and experiences easily vanish due to the ephemerality of the material, resources, and non-eligible, discontinuous organizational and environmental conditions.

Many collections of activist film and video archives are temporary, just like the collectives they belong to and the movements they document. This is another difference between traditional archiving as a practice of the everlasting and nontraditional archival practices as always temporary. The traditional archive institutionalizes the past, hence tending to fossilize it, whereas the activist archive is continuously being made, hence inevitably endangered. Essentially, activist film and video archives must cope with the difficulties of preserving low-budget and unstable material and formats. Thus, according to Alycia Sellie et al. (2015, 10), both the collections themselves and the movements they represent are associated with impermanence. The culture of social movements is often created in formats that are already difficult to preserve because the records are created using mass production and inexpensive analog or digital materials that are unstable (ibid.).

Paalman, Fossati, and Masson (2021, 8) highlight this topic in their **309** introduction to a special issue on activating the archive of *The Moving Image* journal, asserting that "collecting such material for activist purposes often results in unstable archives" and claiming that most recent studies on the relationship between activism and social media focus on "access and re-use." The archive is thus understood as a collection that serves the "present" rather than the past (as a record-keeping system) or the future (as a system for long-term preservation) (Paalman, Fossati, and Masson 2021, 13). The instability of activist archival practices does not stem from a prioritization of access and re-use but from a variety of other reasons, such as lack of resources, political oppression, and a lack of knowledge and experience.

In fact, many factors combine to result in the instability of activist archives. Collection, acquisition, and selection require a lengthy time period, while sensitive and endangered political material is usually scattered to safeguard it from prosecution or simply because of disorganization. Considering the difficulties of archiving LGBTQI moving image archives, in 2007, Lynne Kirste (2007, 134) noted that the archival material "being 'everywhere' created both opportunities and challenges for preservation and access." Since then, over the last 15 years, LGBTQI communities have made massive progress in assembling archival materials. However, many amateur and independent film and video productions of queer communities are still stored in unsuitable environments rather than in archives. Kirste (2007, 134) explains this as due to the limited distribution opportunities of amateur and independent productions and stresses the archives' vulnerability, asserting that as long as their elements remain in filmmakers' closets and basements, they will eventually deteriorate, suffer damage, or be discarded or lost. At this stage, in fact, only the filmmakers have access to the materials. Thus, Kirste stresses the importance of archival outreach in order to make the images viewable now as well as in the future.

**310** The risk of losing historical film material of LGBTQI communities that Kirste addresses applies to many vulnerable communities. According to Kirste, avoiding the loss and deterioration, sustaining accessibility, and creating appropriate conditions for the preservation of moving image materials require "sufficient staff, climate-controlled storage, specialized equipment, expertise in film and tape handling and care, knowledge, and appreciation of moving image history and LGBT culture"—as well as money (Kirste 2007, 134). Scarce labor and financial resources are widespread problems for maintaining the archives. Housing and storage expenses are too high for many unfunded communities to cover. As Cifor (2017, 51) remarks, community archives, including LGBTQI archives, have often been and continue to be located in private homes because of systematic barriers, financial incapacities, and issues around reliability.

Regarding financial challenges, the costs of digitizing printed and analog audiovisual materials tend to be unaffordable for small, already alternative communities. Angela Aguayo (2020, 82–88) draws attention to the vulnerable preservation conditions of participatory community media in the United States. Many of the works from the 1960s and 70s are lost or disintegrating in the archive since they have been "disregarded as nonessential works of history" and thus reckoned as insufficiently important to be preserved. As Aguayo notes, in the last 50 years, microbudget community films followed the technological development from 16mm to half-inch Portapak to videocassette, from cable-access television shows to satellite transmission, and most recently to digital video, mobile phones, online networks, and drone photography (ibid.). Aguayo claims that recording and broadcast formats progress, but the ability to preserve participatory community media recedes. The recordings are continuously lost on deteriorating film and disintegrating tape and left to age in storage closets or nearly vanish on hard drives (ibid.). Indeed, the preservation problems are not limited to analog material. Digital material, also, is not stable. The high general expectations of the

preservation capacities of digital formats are also over optimistic. **311** In fact, digital(ized) materials are not a hundred percent stable and durable.

Jerome McDonough and Mona Jimenez (2007, 168) wrote that analog tapes require periodic reformatting, but the signal inevitably degrades during the transfer; thus, while "initial reformatting from analog to digital is certainly costly, future reformatting, properly executed, may prove less costly (as it is more amenable to automation) than continuing a tape-to-tape process." Digital formats enable long-term preservation facilities with different budget options. This technology, however, has vulnerabilities concerning the uncertainty of maintenance due to limited resources, capacity problems concerning labor, space, and money, and (further, ongoing) technical developments. Digital preservation is not a sustainable solution, and the digitization of archival material does not guarantee an infinite lifetime. Many incidents have ended in the loss of archives, even in the largest institutions, let alone in the under-resourced, alternative world of the activist organizations.

The commonality of maintenance problems and the main reasons for the instability of activist archival material have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners. Although not specifically focusing on the weaknesses of certain practices, this framework will help to present the general situation of archiving the moving image and the vulnerabilities of activist archival practices, including the ones in Turkey. As I have become an accidental archivist over the last ten years, I got involved in several archival endeavors in Turkey and took the initiative together to make their film and video collections accessible. These collections include militant film heritage of the 1960s and the 70s, found footage collections, analog and digital video collections of activists that I shortly review below.

# **312 Militant Film Heritage in Turkey**

The militant cinema movement in Turkey brought film cameras to the streets at the end of the 1960s. Members of the Young Cinema Movement (Genç Sinema Harketi), which broke off from Turkish Cinémathèque (Sinematek), produced the first examples of the militant cinema movement in Istanbul (Kara 2013). Enis Rıza, one of the group members, describes it as a civic and collective movement whose members also traveled to different towns and cities, recording what they observed, making short films, and distributing them.

 Despite all the challenges and difficulties, they recorded rallies, workers' marches, strikes, boycotts, occupations, and NGO activities, as well as street theater performances, and making documentaries until their office in Istanbul was shut down following the military coup on March 12, 1971, when some of their films were confiscated and many members were either arrested or fled abroad. According to Şirin Erensoy (2019, 53), one of the young filmmakers smuggled some of the films abroad and was later murdered. The rest of the collective did not know of the whereabouts of the smuggled films. On February 25, 1978, the Young Cinema Movement was finally closed down, and the films were handed over to the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, DİSK) (Kara 2013).

Films salvaged from confiscation are still in storage and have yet to come to light. A film collector and media artist, Ege Berensel (personal communication 2019), discovered a pile of militant films made before the 1980s by several groups of filmmakers, such as Real Cinema (Gerçek Sinema). Several film collectives had gathered at political parties, such as the Turkey Labor Party (Türkiye İşçi Partisi) and Turkey Communist Party (Türkiye Komünist Partisi), and syndicates, such as the filmmakers' and miners' syndicates (Sine-Sen, Yeraltı Maden-İş), along with several university socialist groups and film clubs. Many films and street tapes

from this period assumed to be 'lost' had either been seized by **313** the military commissions or smuggled abroad. Berensel found others in flea markets, secondhand bazaars, and the depots of collectors, unions/syndicates, and private collections.

Berensel started to collect 8mm films in the beginning of the 2000s. He first found an 8mm film collection of the Marxist-Leninist political movement "Devrimci Yol" (Revolutionary Path, Dev-Yol) in a storehouse. He cleaned up the films and made a telecine transfer with his own means and found an 8-hour footage of a well-known rally of miners "Yeni Çeltek" and May 1st demonstrations, including the protests of Dev-Yol fugitives (Berensel 2016, 116). Over the years, Berensel became acquainted with the junk shops, flea markets, and warehouses in Turkey, where he discovered a pile of film collections considered "lost" and developed his restoration skills to rescue them. He says:

I have acquired all kinds of devices in order to digitize images, and to telecine films and restore them. I have pursued 8mm films sold by PTT (Postal Service of Turkey), exceeding 30 years old, as they could not be delivered to their addresses. A film related to the post-12th of September (military coup) period was one that appeared among the films stored by the PTT, as they could not be delivered to the address after having been shipped abroad for developing; the footage was shot from a curtain pitch on the top of a wall in Kabataş. (Berensel 2016, 116)

Although Berensel approaches private archives, personal collections, and family storages for his devotion to bringing the lost film heritage out, he still believes that the films that witnessed political movements specifically before the 1980s still remain hidden somewhere.

Many missing videotapes have also been brought to light by archival initiatives in the last few years. Several groups and individuals recorded political events and protests during the 1990s, such as human rights abuses, civil disobedience practices, **314** precedent trials, fact-finding missions, press conferences, and interviews with lawyers, human rights advocates, and state officials. For example, artist and activist Şanar Yurdatapan collected such recordings related to human rights and freedom of expression. An archival initiative has been taking care of Yurdatapan's collections from TV stations, local agencies, and human rights organizations. There are over one hundred video files consisting of approximately two hours of footage and more than a thousand video entries, some of which last two minutes and others up to fifty minutes. There are about 250 hours of video footage covering the years 1993-2006.

This collection specifically shows that the visual memory of the 1990s is shaped by the discovery of various mass graves, bones, and bodies in excavations in waste dumps and informal graveyards and associated trials and forensic reports. However, most of the files, forensic reports, shreds of evidence, and audiovisual recordings from those years were destroyed or remain undiscovered, and the remains are left to decay in storage or are waiting for expiration on hard drives. Doğan and Bayram (2020, 214), who have analyzed Yurdatapan's collection, including the recordings of the court testimonies of victims of state violence who survived, note that most of the tapes were neither digitized nor preserved in appropriate conditions, so the short lifespan of VHS and other videotapes means that they remain undiscovered records.

# **I Want My Archive Back!**

Independent, non-institutional archiving practice has been both informally and officially regarded as a criminal act in many conflict countries, including Turkey. Having a complex relationship with archiving, some governments forbid and ban any non-sanctioned archival attempts. For instance, state-led discrimination and oppression in countries like Turkey that have a history of military coups/regimes target dissident communities

and have aimed to annihilate the political memory of leftist, **315** autonomous, and liberation movements, often enough with considerable success. The present governmental regime in Turkey can easily classify any activist archiving initiative as an illegal activity.

An example that illustrates the archival fear in Turkey that pervades in the chilling air of state oppression is the confiscation of the archive of video activist and documentary filmmaker Oktay İnce in 2019. Police seized İnce's digital archival material, which spans more than twenty years of work containing the recordings of human rights activism in Turkey (Bishara 2019). İnce's case symbolizes and reveals the history of systematic confiscation and annihilation of radical and pro-democracy archives and film materials constituting the memory of media collectives, syndicates, journalists, artists, and filmmakers in Turkey since the beginning of the 1960s.

Following the confiscation of the archival material, İnce started a series of protests and called out: "I want my archive back!" Thereby *the archive* has been brought in the country's political agenda as a cause of dissidence and a field of struggle and right (Doğan and Bayram 2020). This particular case and many others reveal the fact that it is void of a support and preservation mechanism for people's *right to the archive* and their claim for safekeeping the common documents of history enables its violation. İnce continued to protest the confiscation by Turkish authorities within and outside the system of strict pyramidal control of state security agencies, juridical structures, and information organizations until he received his hard drives back at the end of 2021.

While his digital archival material consists of more up-to-date political events, the videotape collection that was disregarded during the raid extends to the end of the 1990s and the 2000s. Shortly after the raid, İnce and I transported his videotape collection to two institutions in Europe for restoration,

**316** preservation, and digitization. The collections consisting more than a thousand videotapes in different formats are comprised of all of İnce's output in the last 20 years: footage of the LGBTQI struggle in Turkey, Kurdish displacement and the consequences of war in western Turkey, antimilitarist movement, Gezi resistance, movements of workers' unions, syndicates, human rights organizations, and the radical left in Turkey. İnce also documented the hunger strikes of prisoners against isolation policies and F-type prisons at the end of the 1990s and during the mass layoffs in 2015-16.

Protecting the archival material from possible violation and destruction refers to the right to recordkeeping. As well as making visible the violation of rights and social struggles, these records ensure the formation of a basis for public debate. As Doğan and Bayram (2020, 214) argue, the visual records in the human rights archives contribute to creating public spaces beyond the juridical space, including not only those of academic institutions and human rights initiatives but also wider arts and cultural spaces. The emergence of accountability and the potential of judicial remedy depends on human agency and the publicity that comes together around these records. In the case of the non-existence of this kind of publicity and the continuation of unjust conditions, these records preserve and bring their tacit potential to the future. Thus, such archives are powerful mobilizers of knowledge and memory, which can create global accountability with an encompassing force not only for the past but for the present and future.

# **Conclusion**

As asserted by Paalman, Fossati, and Masson "all kinds of films get neglected or endangered, but activist media especially run the risk of being lost," the reason being that "they have usually been released outside of mainstream distribution channels and often under political threat" (2021, 11). Accordingly, activists in Turkey have often not been able to provide the necessary **317** conditions to preserve their audiovisual records. Their images have been criminalized, destroyed, stolen—or just lost, literally. Remains are decaying in darkroom corners and expiring on old tapes and drives. As outlined in this paper, the difficult conditions experienced put archives and their actors in a fragile, weak, and vulnerable position prone to damage, disappearance, and loss and urgently impelling the identification and seeking of coping mechanisms. They have to tackle these challenges in their small, restricted environments, and strive to find forms of continuity and dissemination in the context of instability, precariousness, and discontinuity of specific agents. Yet, maintaining these practices would include nourishing relations within and outside the archives, attending to the archival material, and building connections among the archival initiatives and other agents.

#### **References**

Aguayo, Angela J. 2020. "Documentary Resistance: The Stories of 'We Tell' as Collective Political Agency." *Film Quarterly* 73 (4): 82–88.

Berensel, Ege. 2016. "Archiving the Garbage: On 8mm Film Archiving." *Autonomous Archiving*, edited by Özge Çelikaslan, Alper Şen, and Pelin Tan, 114–119. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona.

	- Kara, Mesut. 2013. "Sinematek ve Genç Sinema Hareketi." *Evrensel*, April 6. Accessed May 25, 2023. https://www.evrensel.net/yazi/53522/
		- sinematek-ve-genc-sinema-hareketi.
	- Kirste, Lynne. 2007. "Collective Effort: Archiving LGBT Moving Images." *Cinema Journal* 46 (3): 134–40.
	- McDonough, Jerome, and Mona Jimenez. 2007. "Video Preservation and Digital Reformatting: Pain and Possibility." In *Journal of Archival Organization* 4 (1–2): 167–92.
	- Paalman, Floris, Giovanna Fossati, and Masson Eef. 2021. "Introduction: Activating the Archive." *The Moving Image* 21 (1): 1–25.
	- Sellie, Alycia, Jesse Goldstein, Molly Fair, and Jennifer Hoyer. 2015. "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture." Archival Science 15 (4): 453–72.

# **Pleasure in/of the Archive: Porn Workshops at the Schwules Museum**

**Nils Meyn**

Despite being one of the most common and mobile of audiovisual formats in the history of the moving image, hardcore pornography receives very little attention from archival institutions. It is everywhere, but we often hear nothing about it. It does finds its way into archives, when it is confiscated, when on the contrary it is interpreted as an artwork, or simply because it would be a shame to throw it away. But in the end it is hard to shake off the subliminal cultural agreement that porn films are "smutty little movies" (Alilunas 2016) that threaten the respectability and legitimacy of institutions and that might destabilize the status of cinema as one of the most important art forms of our time. It therefore often remains unclear what exactly exists in which archives. The afterlife of hardcore porn in the archive rarely goes beyond purely storing them, and its history seems fragile and inconsistent. So how, despite these circumstances, can we value porn? How can we deal with smut, archivally and curatorially? These are questions that have only recently

**320** been garnering notice in discussions about film archiving.1 The Schwules Museum in Berlin has also begun to pose these questions more intensively with regard to its own collection of porn films. In cooperation with the Pornfilmfestival Berlin the museum regularly hosts archive workshops, to which I have contributed both in their conception and their direction.2 In these workshops the museum invites porn filmmakers, sex workers, artists, and porn fans into its archive.  Together they explore the often still undetermined place that desire, intimacy, kink, and excess have, both in the cinema as well as in the archive. This seamlessly leads to a reflection on the contours of a queer archival practice with film.

# **Living Porn Archive**

The basic goal of the workshops is to create a space that, beyond cataloguing and storing porn films at the Schwules Museum, opens up a productive exchange about the explicit contents. It is meant to make the porn films more accessible, after all, they have been neglected for a long time in the museum's collection work. Around two thirds of the porn collection, encompassing roughly 4,000 objects, remain unexplored (unlike the nonpornographic film holdings, approximately the same amount, which are for the most part catalogued by now). This work on the porn collection falls to volunteers and interns, which is typical in

the museum in general for the work of processing the holdings. **321** Their capacities, however, are often too limited to get such a copious collection completely under control. At least temporarily, the archival workshops are meant to counteract the precarity of queer collection work. In their efforts to open up a collection for a group of interested parties and to favor interactive use over pure storage, the workshops ultimately pursue the idea of a Living Archive. Conceived and mobilized by the Arsenal— Institute for Film and Video Art especially for film collections (see Schulte Strathaus 2013), the Living Archive unfolds, however, quite differently in the workshops. It consists first and foremost of involving queer communities and their intercommunication on the affective experience of pornography. In this sense, it ties in the character of the queer archive as influentially described by Ann Cvetkovich, as an "archive of feelings" (Cvetkovich 2003). This seeks to provide a space for a collective and egalitarian approach to queer memory that is as emotional as it is intellectual. This is why the personal interests of the participants are of particular consequence in the workshops; they are not required to prove any official position or professional standing. They are free to express their wishes, preferences, and fetishes so that the facilitators can find appropriate material, which sometimes produces wonderful coincidences and surprises. Through the alliance with the Pornfilmfestival Berlin, an important venue and community space for the sex-positive, post-pornographic scene in Berlin, not only have many porn fans been made aware of the workshops, but also persons who are professionally involved in the industry have registered. And their interest is not waning; the workshops are completely booked each time. More than a few participants decide, after the workshop, to support the collection work of the museum on a volunteer basis—a useful effect for the archive. One participant is now curating the film series *ForteForte* at the Club Culture Houze, a sex club in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Once a month the audience sits there on leather mats among cages, slings, and bondage chairs and watches queerfeminist porn films, partly from the collection at the Schwules

**322** Museum, on a small screen. Perhaps this is one way to realize the Living Porn Archive. The boundaries between the cinema as a static mode of film screening and the promiscuous cosmos of cruising and BDSM cultures seems to get blurred, as it has long been the cultural practice in porn cinemas and queer sex clubs. But only at the sex parties, which take place later in the day at the Club Culture Houze, does it in fact come to intimate bodily contact. This way of curating porn film screenings, less sexually than intellectually charged, which also characterizes the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (Bobák 2017, 52), initially seems to contradict the stimulating nature of porn. It achieves, however, according to Bobák, something remarkable: "a reinstatement of the sexual into public domains" (2017, 44). Such events suspend the dominant division of private and public, which traditionally relegates the presumably "obscene" cultures of pornography into the private sphere of the home or the back room of a video store. They release cultural norms from their rigidity and thus have immense political significance.

# **The Manual Histories of Smut**

Considering the porn collection at the Schwules Museum it makes sense to see sexual media practices included in the porn archive's inventory. Since the museum has not had an acquisitions budget since its founding in 1985, and because the preservation of ordinary life is one of the cornerstones of its mission, it takes donations of all kinds from individuals who, for instance, have given the museum their private home video and porn collections. This is why the film collection today predominately consists of amateur formats such as VHS, Super 8, and DVD. It is mainly made up of commercial versions as well as private dubs and reduction prints. The porn films in particular reveal traces of a media practice. Privately collected porn films often come with hand-written sticky notes and cassette labels on which collectors indexed the contents of each copy or documented their personal modes of use. Such an "erotic index of desire" (Strub 2015, 126)

reveals private collections themselves to be an archive, which can **323** tell a story, albeit an intransparent one, of pleasure and desire. "What gets collected here is also collecting itself," is how Peter Rehberg (2022, 47), the museum's archive director, puts it. In the workshops this aspect becomes part of the viewing process, for example when a group views a VHS mix tape and attempts to use the attached handwritten indexes to discover a logic behind the mode of compiling the copied sequences and clips. In addition, the object registration form, which the workshop participants are given and that puts them in the role of archivists, contains an open field in which they can enter the labelings. It often seems difficult, however, to break the materials down into discrete facts to fill in the form, "because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records" (Cvetkovich 2003, 181). For instance, we can only speculate as to exactly what a collector wanted to register with the tally sheets for each of his porn films. In addition, much of the basic data, such as the film's exact year of production or, in the case of many pirate copies, the original film title, cannot be easily determined. This "trace historiography" (Alilunas 2016, 30) required by the porn archive makes clear how fragile and vulnerable this history of pornography is. This becomes tangible, not least technologically, in expectation of media formats going obsolete. The Schwules Museum has within its resources consumer video recorders and Super 8 film viewers, which can also be used by the workshop participants. For many of them, this is their first practical experience with analog film technology. Manually turning the crank on the Super 8 viewer evokes feelings of media nostalgia, which obviously remain in many of the participant's memories. Ultimately, they get a glimpse of how porn films were watched in the past and what kind of seductive role was played in that process by the media format. Or also how "media breakdown" (Gotkin 2017, 40) defines video pornography to this day, namely when video recorders and cassettes turn out to be defective just before or during the workshop, no longer able to produce any (satisfactory) image.

# **324 Queering—Perverting the Archive**

"It enables intimacy to enter the archive, and it is valuable for that reason alone," writes Tim Dean (2014, 9), lauding the place of pornography in the archive. The workshops seem to confirm this, for if there is anything we can all agree on in the closing discussions, it is the capacity for the workshops to create a space in which taboo topics can be spoken of openly and without shame—just as is also accomplished at the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (Bobák 2017, 48).  Archival work is also community work, as the workshops signal. Intimacies in this context are not simply to be understood as bodily, but above all play out affectively between archive users and between collectors and object. But is there also space for genuine sexual arousal? As we found out in the discussions, the setting of the workshop and of archival work leads us to adopt the cerebral attitude that is expected of archivists. But the practice of collecting need not occur entirely without pleasure. In cataloguing porn films, the archive staff at the Schwules Museum have recourse to a keyword catalog conceived for porn. This favors a colloquial vocabulary over a "respectable" sexological one, and takes account of the diversity of sexual practices and fetishes. Making this diversity accessible is one of the great promises of the porn archive. Of course, against the backdrop of the specific genesis and history of the Schwules Museum, the porn collection cannot fulfill all promises.3 The discussions make transparent: a queer ethics is needed for the archive.  The majority of the museum's (porn) collection thus still refers to gay, white cis men. By contrast, the perspectives of BIPoC, lesbians, trans and inter persons are underrepresented, although they are being gradually strengthened.

preserving and exploring the unethical, problematic, or boring **325** pornographies? As the participants have aptly remarked, there are two different perspectives from which we can approach pornography: on the one hand as an artwork, on the other as a field of resonances for practices and feelings that give it meaning. The porn collection at the Schwules Museum brings these two perspectives to the fore.  It is necessary to archive porn in its forms as art and also as smut, taking account of how it is passionately appropriated in everyday life and how it reverberates there. For film archival practice, whether porn or not, this means that film culture worth preserving is not only to be found in the public sphere, but also plays out in the intimacy and private sphere of the home. Queering the film archive therefore also means taking account of often common or covert places and contexts, in which the marginalized and the perverse have used film to imagine a better and more pleasurable life. If we think of the archive as a utopia, it is a place of liberated bodies and beautiful consensus free of hierarchy, where the canon gives way to a plurality of voices and a space for resistance opens up.

#### **References**

	- Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie, ed. 2013. *Living Archive: Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice*. Berlin: b\_books.
	- Strub, Whitney. 2015. "Indexing Desire: The Gay Male Pornographic Video Collection as Affective Archive." In *Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories*, edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, 125–47. Albany: State University of New York Press.

# **Cross-Fading Archives, Resurfacing Infrastructures: The Cinema Historian as Accidental Archivist and Activist**

**Simone Venturini**

# **Introduction**

A recent Italian research project—"MMC49'76: Modes, Memories and Cultures of Film Production in Italy" (1949–1976)1 —allocated its whole first phase to taking a census of, collecting, and organizing archival sources (Comand and Venturini 2021a). Looking back at this first research stage, the aim of this article is to reflect on the relationships between historical archival incidents or "accidents," research infrastructures, and the role of the different archival, scientific, and corporate communities at stake.

Among the primary sources investigated, three archival records (fonds) in particular stimulated our academic work and placed the scholars involved in an unexpected activist framework: the Italian

1 See https://cineproduzione.uniud.it. This article stems from the collective work of the universities of Udine, IULM Milano, Parma, and Roma 3 research team and in particular the project PI Mariapia Comand, with whom its contents were conceived, discussed, and shared.

**328** film production archival series (1949–1994) housed at the Central State Archive (Archivio Centrale dello Stato, ACS); the Italian Film and Audiovisual Industry Association (Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive Digitali, ANICA) historical archive; and the online Italian Cinema (Archivio del cinema italiano) database, first put together at ANICA in 1987.

Over time, these collections have become cross-fading archives: documents and data in transition, fading because they are not catalogued (the ministerial fonds); they have been moved and taken apart (the corporate archive); or they now have different or limited ends to their original purpose (the database).

These turning points could be defined as archival "accidents," which the research group dealt with by seeking to distinguish between what can be grasped on a surface level and what goes deeper down, in other words the "archival grain" (Stoler 2009). They are the upshot of circumstances or unexpected complications resulting from epistemic, socio-economic, industrial, and technological transformations and therefore pragmatic decisions: to separate Italian and co-produced films in the day-to-day management of ministerial files, thus creating a second marginalized and for a long time invisible series at the ACS; to safeguard a corporate archive that may have been at risk of disappearing by moving it to another location; to reset the primary function of a database from historic and scholarly ends to economic and accounting purposes.

Traditional archives such as those discussed in this essay (a state archive, a corporate archive, a pioneering database) would not seem to call for critical or activist frameworks, or radical rethinkings of canonical archival forms. And yet, we immediately thought of these archives as "communal resources" requiring the engagement of several stakeholders (Paalman, Fossati, and Masson 2021). Therefore, our solution was to come up with a stewardship responding to a range of needs rather than the requirements of single projects or scholars. It was an approach

based on concrete archival cross-connections and the role of **329** communities in reactivating the archives (historians, archivists, industry professionals, state officials, data managers, and visual designers).

The research group therefore found itself working together in a communal space in the role of activists and accidental archivists shaping the future of historical research and the collective imagery and storytelling of some of Italy's most important twentieth-century industrial heritage. In particular, the team realized that these archives were not necessarily a static system of knowledge from the past. Instead, it framed them as a relational, multilayered network of documents and data, discourses and practices that came right up to the present day and could be reactivated thanks to the participation of all the communities involved. Rethinking these archives and illuminating their hidden potential as to their public and communal role made the research a means and a social responsibility and not an end. As a result, the stakeholders and research team took a cooperative and inter-institutional approach based on the development of cataloguing and research infrastructures, in view of creating a connection between the fonds–and a shared knowledge network.

Following on from these premises, I will describe how we approached these fonds, mixing cinema history, accidental archivism, and new ways of thinking to reshape the future of historical research through its infrastructures.

# **Accidental Archivism I: The Rediscovered Italian Co-Productions**

The Central State Archive (ACS) in Rome houses the papers that film producers had to send to the Directorate General for Cinema (Direzione Generale Cinema, DGC) so they could label their film as Italian and obtain the permit for public projection, processes that

**330** had to be followed to claim Italian nationality, facilitations, and therefore public funding.

In particular, a "Co" archival series—conserved at length but formerly inaccessible—was discovered2 alongside the well-known "Cf" fonds, covering 1949-1994 and the subject of research for at least twenty years.3 The "Co" "parallel" archival series contained international co-produced films and was generated on the occasion of the approval of the 1965 film law: "it was their large number, in Italian cinema's most intense period of internationalization, that made the Directorate General change their practices and separate them" (Di Chiara 2021, 36).

Here we became accidental archivists, working side by side with the ACS archivists. Together we decided to sample the files from the fonds and put together a new cataloguing model to trace and make a detailed snapshot of Italian cinema at the height of its internationalization. We queried and identified many specific historical aspects of the sources and documents and highlighted sensitive micro and macro-historical and quantitative analysis data. Metadata from more than 1,800 files were put into a new digital catalogue, enabling specific searches and at the same time encouraging quantitative questions to be asked about production companies, costs, and funding, as well as the European countries and third parties involved. Italian cinema could now be read from a new distant and transnational slant.

The research group cooperated and invested economic and scholarly resources to create an innovative database that would include the other abovementioned ACS archival series from the period 1949 to 1994 and become an entry portal for future research projects and initiatives. In addition, it would become one of the cross-connected archives forming a web atlas based

on storytelling and data visualization. **331** 4 In such a way, researchers acted as activists enabling what was still hidden to emerge and what was accidental to become infrastructural.5

# **Accidental Archivism II: The ANICA Historical Archive and the Lead-Up to a New Brighton for Italian Production Studies**

ANICA was founded in 1944. After the war, it gained a central role in the Italian and international production system and cultural scene. The association's historical archive is therefore a source of extraordinary importance for Italian film industry studies. Its history is marked by "accidents," and in particular, between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, by a reckless safeguarding initiative involving ministerial, industrial, and private institutions. It is an all-Italian story that would be worth telling.

In short, the archive needed to fade out awhile so that its enormous potential for production studies could be grasped (Brunetta 1994; Comand and Venturini 2021b). At the start of the 2000s, "when the archive was at a low ebb, no one had any idea or desire to deal with the overproduction and unsuitable spaces were filled with documents made illegible and irretrievable owing to their very number" (Saggioro 2015, 3). Thus the central core of the ANICA historical archive moved from the historical center of the Italian filmmaking industry (Rome) and its natural location (the ANICA headquarters in Rome) to the hills of Basilicata and more precisely to a warehouse at the newly established Cineteca Lucana film library in Oppido Lucano. The move was clearly

**332** driven by a fear for the archive's disappearance, but the reasons for this move to an institution still in the setting-up phase and fundamentally lacking any archival competences are still not fully explicable. Nevertheless, neither this incredible archival accident nor the tricky conditions have managed to prevent several researchers and scholars, including our research team, from dipping into the fonds housed in Oppido in recent years. The reports of those who had the chance to view the material on site, in this extraordinary, hard-to-reach place owing to the uncertain infrastructure and organization, paint a picture of historianscum-adventurers, explorers and archaeologists, and ultimately, accidental archivists.

Only more recently has there been a change of perspective, forged in part by the MMC49-'76 project, fostering the protection of the documentary heritage over individual research needs. The research group decided to go back upstream and seek out ANICA as its interlocutor. A healthy partnership blossomed, which soon led not only to the reordering of the internal fonds but also the discovery of sources and documents still present in Rome and, as we will see, the scientific "reactivation" of the ANICA Italian cinema database.

The 2020–21 reordering and cataloguing activities gave a more precise picture and measure of an archive that is actually the sum of several different archives. These activities uncovered a treasure trove of essential research documents which, thanks to new access regulations, could be consulted in a transparent and safe way. Hence, the current database reveals the ANICA archives' sensational potential for the historiography of Italian film production modes and cultures, while also underlining the basic need for archives, industry, and academia to work together in their shared mission to protect the heritage and to produce and exchange knowledge.

# **333 Accidental Archivism III: The ANICA Italian Cinema Database and the Archaeology of Italian Digital Film Studies**

The ANICA Italian cinema database6 is one of the most reliable and widely used filmography sources in Italy. What is less well known is that the archive came about as a "research project" funded by the Ministry for Tourism and Spectacle and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It was devised in 1987 by film historian Aldo Bernardini who until the early 2000s coordinated an interdisciplinary workgroup at ANICA that set up the valuable database whose "goal is to collect all the information on Italian films in a single archive … designed and set out to meet a whole series of research needs and to make selective searches of the input data" (Bernardini 1995, I–II).

The initiative can be seen as the upshot of New Film History, the rediscovery of Italian silent cinema and the consequent need to build a filmography infrastructure to reach out to film archives, scholars, and universities as well as ANICA itself, which had published Italian-made films every year since the 1950s. As the project drew to an end, the database became a central tool for the redistribution to producers of the monies recorded by the Italian copyright collecting agency (SIAE) for "private copying" of motion pictures.

The "reactivation" of the Italian cinema's historical scientific database should not be seen as a one-off, standalone project on new (Italian) cinema history but as part of a wider rethinking of (digital) research infrastructures (Noordegraaf, Lotze, and Boter 2018). In recent years, Italian film scholars and historians have started to take a closer and more conscious look at the sense, potentials, and practices of the digital humanities, beyond their merely "tactical" function (Kirschenbaum 2012, 415–28).

**334** As such, Bernardini, already a pioneer of new historiography, can now be framed as an innovator and precursor in the field of digital film studies (Grant 2012; Burghardt et al. 2020) as applied to Italian film history: "I try to best use IT resources to make and take the new conception of filmography work to its extreme consequences … IT greatly benefits filmography thanks to the possibility that it offers to store, order and compare large quantities of data" (Bernardini 2001, 258).

The current online version of that IT archive, set out following the methodological criteria adopted by its deviser to achieve his ambitious goals (Bernardini 1995, I-XXXIII; Bernardini 2001, 258–61), is just one part of a vaster set of sub-archives, fields, and relations. Therefore, we wanted to reactivate a somehow silent research infrastructure and draw out its worth through specific queries and visualizations and analyzing otherwise lost data. The first quantitative and historical-analytical questions about aspects such as below-the-line production roles and figures, transnational filming locations, and technical industries are still being investigated, and are coming up with some very interesting results for the field of production studies. By reloading the hidden archive, we have partially fulfilled what has always been the goal at the heart of the project, that is, to one day expand the data system created by the encounter between filmography and IT to make it a "global archive" of Italian film history (Bernardini 2001, 260–61).

# **Conclusions**

Ultimately, the accidental archivism triggered by the archival accidents in the three case studies and the role of accidental archivist assumed by scholars has had several positive effects on research. First of all, they have made it clear to the academic community how and how far research infrastructures can mold and fashion the research itself in terms of an epistemic ally and heuristic vehicle and not an ancillary tool. Second, they have

caused historians to adopt a stance in the public interest, pushing **335** them to act for the preservation and long-term sustainability of the heritage and the knowledge produced. Third, the renewed attention towards these archival fonds has not only aided their protection and accessibility, cross-connections, and new ways of engagement, but it has also enabled film production cultures, modes, and memories that had been pushed to one side, hidden, unresearched, to re-emerge and be shared.

In conclusion, through these archival accidents, the fonds were activated in different ways: in the first case, communities and stakeholders benefitted from the cataloguing, quantitative data analysis, and sharing through digital humanities tools and environments of the newly rediscovered archival series; in the second case, heritage of fundamental importance for Italian production studies was ordered, safeguarded, and put back together, paving the way to new paths of research and storytelling on the film industry, which forms an important part of the so-called Made in Italy label; lastly, in the third case, a pioneering database, a digital infrastructure of the historiography of Italian cinema whose roots go back to the 1980s, was reframed and brought back to its initial scholarly aims, mainly through queries and visualizing the archived data, highlighting the need for a mature field of digital film studies in the Italian context.

## **References**

**336** *L'avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes* (Numero Speciale): 3–12.

——— . 2021b. "ANICA Cinematic Universe: New Sources for the Study of Italian Cinema's Production Modes and Cultures." *L'avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscap*es (Numero Speciale): 13–33.

Di Chiara, Francesco. 2021. "Il fondo 'Co' dell'Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Alcune ipotesi per un'analisi del processo di implementazione della Legge Corona in materia di coproduzioni." *L'avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes* (Numero Speciale): 35-49.

Farassino, Alberto. 1988. "Il costo dei panni sporchi. Note sul 'modo di produzione neorealista.'" In *Cinecittà 3 / Dietro lo schermo. Ragionamenti sui modi di produzione cinematografici in Italia*, edited by Vito Zagarrio, 135–36. Venice: Marsilio.

[Fig. 1] Still frame from 35mm film reel of outtakes filmed by Stevan Labudović, showing the arrival of "The Galeb," the ship of Yugoslav President Tito in Ghana, in February 1961 (Source: Non-Aligned Newsreels x Filmske Novosti)

# **Flotsam and Jetsam**

# **Mila Turajlić**

*History disintegrates into images, not into stories. —Walter Benjamin*

Most countries' maritime laws distinguish between "flotsam" and "jetsam" as different types of marine debris. Flotsam is defined as anything that is unintentionally left behind after a shipwreck that floats to the surface after a ship sinks. Jetsam describes debris that was deliberately thrown overboard by a crew of a ship in distress—either to lighten the cargo load or as some other reaction to a problem the vessel has encountered—which is discovered floating in the water or washed ashore. The distinction is important, as it establishes the presence of intent to remove material from the ship. Flotsam may be claimed by the original owner, whereas jetsam may be claimed as property by whoever discovers it.

"Filmske Novosti," the official newsreel agency of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was the only film studio in the country directly answerable to the federal government. Mandated to document the political, social, economic, and

**340** cultural life of the country, they fulfilled this mission from their creation as a section of the partisan units during the Second World War. While television supplanted their prominence and reach from the 1970s, their work effectively ended only in the 1980s, with the twin collapse of socialism and the disintegration of the country. When I arrived to start research on my first film there, in 2005, they was a *savezna javna ustanova*—federal public institution—though we were no longer a federation. As such there was nobody—no body—who could officially appoint a new director to the institution, meaning there was no one who could authorize me access or the right to use the archive. By the following year, Serbia had adopted a new constitution, Filmske Novosti had become a republic cultural institution, and my work was underway. For the next five years, as I dug underground searching for archives to tell a history of how Yugoslavia had been narrated politically via cinema,1 forces were at work on the surface dismantling, discarding, and removing the traces of Yugoslavia from the landscape of our public memory. Institutions were privatized, archives were emptied, streets and schools bearing the names of partisan heroes renamed, public holidays changed, statues removed.

How do you face the archive of a history that has disintegrated? In a situation where, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes: "The North Pole is not where it used to be." What to make of this archive, which was at once an officially sanctioned chronicle and an agent in the creation of the social imaginary of Yugoslavia, that had now lost its political compass? What is the expectation an ideologically abandoned archive places on those of us who arrive seeking to reactivate it? How to go about imagining this practice? How to recount that search for the right critical approach, the correct emotional distance required in performing it? And how to work with the possibility of what is there?

1 *Cinema Komunisto*, 2010, 100 minutes, directed by Mila Turajlić, produced by Dribbling Pictures.

In his study on *Memory, History and Forgetting* Paul Ricœur **341** describes the condition such as the one in which I encountered the archive:

A document in an archive … has no designated addressee, unlike oral testimony addressed to a specific interlocutor. What is more, the document sleeping in the archives is not just silent, it is an orphan. The testimonies it contains are detached from the authors who "gave birth" to them. (2004, 169)

The mute and orphaned condition became the conundrum I spent the next decade of my practice trying to untangle. Having completed my first film in 2010, by 2015 I was back in the archive. What brought me there was an encounter with one of the "authors who birthed it"—in fact, the last remaining cameraman of Filmske Novosti, Stevan Labudović. Over the next three years, until his death, we would work together on addressing the orphaned and mute condition of the images he had fathered. Stevan's career and perspective on the images was shaped by the privileged position he had ascended to at the tender age of 27, in being selected in 1954 to be part of a two-man crew to film a series of voyages by ship undertaken by Tito at the height of the Cold War. Over the next decade, the presidential ship "The Galeb" (eng. *seagull*) would become the symbol of Yugoslav diplomacy as Tito left Europe to travel to 18 countries in Asia and Africa, all of which, with one exception, had just emerged from colonialism (fig. 1). These glimpses into newly-created countries, where Tito was often the first foreign head of state to visit postindependence, are complex vessels, ciphers of political (self-) representation, national imaginaries, and performative diplomacy. They were recorded without sound.

The materials Stevan filmed became the basis of what could be called 'the non-aligned collection' of the Yugoslav newsreels. Starting in 1959 the collection would expand to include materials filmed by Labudović during a clandestine mission he was sent on **342** by President Tito, to create a documentary film on the Algerian war, which the Algerian Liberation Movement (FLN) could use in its diplomatic and media efforts to win international public support in their struggle for independence from French colonialism. Sent to Algeria to create a militant image in an act of solidarity, he would end up becoming an important chronicler of the war. By the time Algeria won its independence, Labudović had, by the estimates of the Algerian Liberation Army (ALN), filmed a total of 83km of 35mm film, the reels still preserved in the vault of Filmske Novosti in Belgrade. Of particular importance was the fact that I had the chance to work with his outtakes, the unused and unseen images he had filmed, which helped me measure the disparity between his perspective and the political mechanisms of selection and editing that governed the newsreels. What complicated the process was that Stevan had authored the images, but not the words to narrate them. Someone else would make them speak in the voiceovers of the newsreels released at the time. Working through the paper documentation stored away in the offices at Filmske Novosti, and having been granted access to the Diplomatic Archives of the former Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the outline of a structure began to emerge, a staterun strategy of harnessing cinema to Yugoslavia's non-aligned agenda. A cinematic image that would not merely document the birth of the Third World project, but would be employed to create its image and make its voice heard in on the world stage. The missing sound then, was not only a physical absence, but a metaphorical one.

As we worked through the reels stacked in Filmske Novosti, of which many were labeled, but most were not catalogued or indexed, through the random gestures of opening cans and the serendipity of identifying frames, a fragmentary picture began to emerge from this debris floating around us. Stevan's presence at my side, and his personal documentation including his diaries, provided the images with a subjective gaze and political intention. His filmmaking was informed by the experience of

making propaganda as a member of the photographic units of **343** the Yugoslav partisans during World War Two. In conversation with his images in a cinema, at a flatbed editing table, in front of a laptop, we constructed a 'behind the scenes' voiceover revealing the process of their filming.2

And yet, the fragmentary nature of this archive was frustratingly incomplete. A rarely-mentioned third category of marine debris is "derelict"—the term for goods or wreckage that lie at the bottom of the sea. Joining this material that hadn't resurfaced, through displacement and decay, were memories that had also been submerged for decades. Faced with the gaps and silences of the archive, the gesture I found myself performing as a response was to solicit the missing voices in an attempt to weave an oral history around the images. Following Stevan's death, and feeling the incompleteness of a singular perspective, I begun seeking out and recording those involved in the story who were still alive. Seeking to activate the archival materials I would show them in individual or group settings, creating public and private space for them to be experienced. This work took me across the former Yugoslavia to encounter sailors who had been on the Galeb with Tito during the Voyages of Peace, diplomats who had formulated Yugoslavia's non-alignment policy, and Algerian combatants in whose units Stevan had filmed.

The response to Ferlinghetti's entreaty to "bring together again the telling of a tale and the living voice" became, over the past three years, a creative, performative, and participatory

2 A diptych of two feature-length documentary films would come out of this collaboration, entitled *Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas*: Scenes from the Labudović Reels. *Non-Aligned* (2022, 100 minutes) revisits the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement as captured through Stevan's camera and perspective during Tito's voyages on "The Galeb" and the materials filmed during the first Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade in 1961. *Ciné-Guerrillas* (2022, 94 minutes) explores Stevan's Algerian footage, by looking at how the militant image played a role carrier of the diplomatic struggle for Algerian independence.

**344** process. In each setting, from Algiers, to Accra, to Belgrade, a silent screening of the recovered archival footage becomes an invitation for those gathered to interpret and claim it, by overlaying in their own voice personal memories, interpretations, and imaginaries, generating a counter-memory. This in turn has led me to create a still ongoing practice-oriented research project we have named "Non-Aligned Newsreels," which records the construction of a new living archive. In face of the Serbian government's continued dismissal and discarding of Yugoslavia's political and cultural heritage, this 'jetsam' can be re-appropriated by those of us who salvage it, reactivate it by creating new artefacts, and see in it a poetic capacity to help imagine new forms of collective resistance—"the last lighthouse in rising seas."

> *My deepest thank you to Stevan Labudović for the cinematic adventure we traveled together, to Vladimir Tomčić and Jovana Kesić for opening the vaults of Filmske Novosti, and to Mme Zehira Yahi for opening the doors of Algeria to me.*

## **References**

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. *The Arcades Project*. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin and edited by Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Belknap Press. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. 2007. *Poetry As Insurgent Art*. New York: New Directions. Ricœur, Paul 2004. *Memory, History, Forgetting*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

# L O S T P L AT F O R M S : A CC I D E N TA L A R C H I V I S M AND THE OVERPROMISE OF TECHNOLOGY

# **Film Heritage at the Curb**

**Philipp Dominik Keidl**

What kinds of fan-related objects do archives collect, and how do these film and star-related commodities qualify as heritage? These two questions were at the center of the seminar "Film and Material Culture," which I taught in the PhD program "Configurations of Film" at Goethe University in spring 2022. With the program's doctoral students, I visited three collections on film and fan-related objects, including collectible albums, comic books, scrapbooks, promotional materials, and merchandise. At first glance, the collections told a story that begins with the passion and work of amateur collectors and ends with the official appraisal and acquisition by established heritage institutions. In some cases, we learned, fan collectors had carefully prepared, on their own initiative, the transition of their private collections to public archives. In other cases, heirs had reached out to curators and offered them complete collections or single objects that had either been known to be valued by the deceased person or had been found in basements and attics when their home was emptied. In both instances, fan collectors and the public showed an evident awareness of the value of film-related materials as

**348** well as the work official institutions perform in preserving and exhibiting them.

Yet, what struck me most were not the examples of successful transitions from private collection to public archives. An anecdote shared with me by a curator from the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (hereafter DFF) led my interest in another direction. Several years ago, a person contacted this curator to ask if the DFF would be interested in their recently deceased partner's collection of merchandise, tie-ins, promotional materials, and other film and star-related ephemera. After an initial inspection, the curator agreed to pick up part of the collection. However, due to a scheduling conflict, the appointment had to be postponed. But as it turned out, rescheduling was not an option for the bereaved spouse, who packed the items into boxes and placed them on the curb for passersby or garbage services. Apparently, the collection triggered unwelcome memories of their partner, and dealing with their grief in this moment of distress was prioritized over organizing the collection's transition into an archive; thus, the collection never ended up on the DFF's shelves. This anecdote relativized stories of successful transitions from private collections into official archives. It is a reminder that film-related material culture is lost daily, without even documentation of discarded collections, fans' curatorial practices and principles of appraisal, or the rationales of potential donors.

Scholarship on the intersection of fandom and material culture has demonstrated the importance of collecting as part of the building of fan identity (Geraghty 2014; Jenkins 2020). In many instances, fan collectors also share knowledge about their collections in their own exhibitions or media productions (Keidl and Waysdorf 2022). And in some cases, fans collaborate with official heritage institutions on temporary or permanent exhibition projects (Hoebink, Reijnders, and Waysdorf 2014). Throughout such collaborations, official heritage institutions assess the value that a collection has for their archives and its potential users. At the end of this archival appraisal, the

specificity of a particular past (the meanings and values given **349** to a collection by the fan collector) is superseded by a more generic sense of the past (the history of film and film fandom). Consequently, the material traces of a fan collection may survive, but the personal memories and the expert knowledge of the fan are habitually lost. The anecdote about the discarded collection, however, presents a different mode of assessment. Here, a fan does not take the initiative to organize the divestment of their collection. Rather, the burden falls to individuals who become custodians of a fan collection by chance and without previous interest or involvement in the fandom.

For these "accidental fan archivists," the personal relationship to the deceased influences how they handle the inherited collection more than any consideration of the contexts and subtexts of fandom and film heritage. Material culture is entwined with their experience of loss, and they often divest of the objects so that a "deceased individual may be gradually reduced to the evocation of one or two key objects [which may lead] to the simplification of their memorialization" (Miller and Parrott 2009, 506). But whereas archival acquisition and personal divestment share the tendency to transform the specific into the generic, the former usually results in the expansion of a collection while the latter commonly leads to the reduction of previously owned possessions. This connection between death, memory, and material culture affords insights into the spouse's motivation to contact but not wait for the DFF. Fandom might have been an important identity marker for the departed spouse, yet it did not define the relationship between the spouses. Other mementoes representing friendship, romance, parenthood, occupation, and other forms of leisure were perhaps better suited to remember the deceased. Accordingly, the widowed spouse was aware that the fan's collection of merchandise could be of interest to the DFF, but was not very motivated to preserve it.

I tell this anecdote not to point fingers at those who must make decisions of what to keep and what to give away in moments of **350** immense distress. Yet it is hard to imagine that the prominent estates of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Maximilian Schell, Volker Schlöndorff, or Curd Jürgens (all housed at the DFF) would have been disposed of so easily and without any outcry. Their destruction would be declared an irreparable loss for film history. What qualifies the one example as a tragedy and the other as an unfortunate series of events is not the quality of stories one could tell about advertising and merchandising articles. In recent years, research on material culture has provided profound insights into the production, promotion, exhibition, crossmedial and transmedial expansion, reception, and preservation of film and cinema culture (Affuso and Scott 2023; Askari 2022; Hastie 2007; Santo 2015; Trope 2011). Rather, it is the quantity of these objects encountered in everyday life that gives a false idea of permanence. The "rhetoric of the original" (Hediger 2005) is an important cornerstone in the conception of film heritage, putting emphasis on fragile and "auratic" things like celluloid or original production materials such as costumes, concept arts, and props. In turn, discussions on products such as merchandise are habitually defined by a "rhetoric of the generic, mass-produced, cheap and disposable," as these things fall into the category of what Wendy A. Woloson calls "crap": objects that are "paradoxical, contradictory, insincere, unnecessary, and fundamentally false" (2020, 8). Indeed, the ubiquity of "stuff" like merchandise puts it in danger of "fading from view, and becoming naturalized, taken for granted" (Miller 2010, 105). It is because of this perception of merchandise as marginal yet ever-present that fan collections—or collections of "thrown aways not thrown away" (Desjardins 2006, 40)—are in danger of being eventually thrown away for good.

Ideas like "crap" and "heritage," however, are culturally, socially, and politically determined and relative categories. As such, an anecdote about one discarded fan collection should not be understood as a call for the comprehensive transformation of crap into heritage. The main concern is how such constructs determine what can be studied and known about the history of fandom and film's material culture. According to Caetlin Benson- **351** Allott, "conditions of availability and unavailability structure scholars', critics', and fans' relation to film history" (2021, 77). While she focuses on the loss of films because of industrial logics and the deterioration of prints and videos, her argument could also be extended to the availability and unavailability of those objects that usually form the foundation of fan collections: merchandise, promotional materials, and other ephemera. Hence, while film scholars increasingly call on their peers to look "behind," "past," or "around" the screen (Benson-Allott 2021; Geraghty 2014; Gray 2010; Rehak 2014), the material culture that exists outside the screen and that structures how fans as well as general audiences think about film is discarded and lost daily.

Of course, archives can tell many successful stories about acquiring objects from collectors or their heirs. Still, this is not reason enough to be satisfied with what can already be found in film archives, as one can only engage with those objects that have been preserved and those collectors who have shared their stories. What remains unknown are the stories we do not have the chance to hear. The anecdote of the discarded collection is a reminder of those stories we cannot tell because they found their premature conclusion at a curb—not because the objects are crap, but because there is the assumption that somehow, somewhere, someone else will preserve this stuff.

#### **References**

	- Gray, Jonathan. 2010. *Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts*. New York: New York University Press.
	- Hastie, Amelie. 2007. *Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History*. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
	- Hediger, Vinzenz. 2005. "The Original Is Always Lost: Film History, Copyright Industries and the Problem of Reconstruction." In *Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory*, edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 135–49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
	- Hoebink, Dorus, Stijn Reijnders and Abby Waysdorf. 2014. "Exhibiting Fandom: A Museological Perspective." *Transformative Works and Cultures* 16 (special issue). DOI: 10.3983/twc.2014.0529.

Jenkins, Henry. 2020. *Comics and Stuff*. New York: New York University Press.

# **Unexpected, Contingent, Accidental: Cinema in the Contemporary Digital Archive**

**Ravi S. Vasudevan**

In counterpoint to the idea of accidental archivism, this essay considers the idea of a contingent archive. Archival accidents, for example the unexpected appearance of a media object opening up novel archival directions, may be based on a certain latency of a field yet to be properly articulated as a field of memory, history and knowledge. I pay special attention to the field of video as critical to an expanded archive of cinema, and how it comes to be constituted to create this infrastructural possibility, especially from the late 1980s in India.

There is an element of curiosity, and a desire for surprise, a pleasure in not knowing what we are likely to see when we trawl the Internet. Focusing on cinema in India, this paper takes the surfacing of the cinema in digital formats as a register of the unexpected, the contingent and the accidental. As I will argue, the contingent is distinctive, for what it draws attention to is not the play of pure chance; it is an engagement with the fact that the how and when of the emergence of archival objects depends on other things, actions and events. Films that were considered lost turn up on YouTube; sounds and images of lost cinematic objects

**354** may arrive in bits and pieces, as video and audio files, as memes, analog transferred into the digital, uploaded by the commitment and obsession of lovers of film, but also more casually. Provenance is not always clear, and cinephiles and lovers of film music offer proofs and weigh in with opinions to identify a film clip or a musical rendition. Elements of the official film and media archives, some of which are notoriously impossible to access, may also come to light; other parts, accessible but dormant, unused, may also yield the unexpected.

A couple of years ago, there suddenly surfaced on the 'net a series of photographs, probably dating to about 1951, just after India's independence from British colonial rule. The photographs circulated widely, on a number of sites, and attracted attention for their apparently salacious content. The photographs featured A.R. Kardar, a long-standing and respected film producer and director, with a career traversing the Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore production centers of the subcontinental film industry, dating back to the silent era. The photographs show Kardar and an associate receiving two girls who then disrobe, and finally strip to their underclothes. Kardar is shown at various distances from the girls—in one image, very close, when he touches one of the girls; he and his associate scrutinize them with great care and apparent discernment. Kardar also stands at a distance, apparently in order to view the gait of the auditioning girls as they walk. The camera for the shot is placed at an angle, and is well posed to capture the relationship between the evaluative eye of the producer and the unselfconscious, even matter of fact way the girls present themselves and perform for the producer and, of course, for the camera. However, there must have been clear instructions by camera man James Burke, then head of *Life*  magazine's New Delhi bureau, that his subjects should forget the camera, and not look at it or the person using it. Apart from one tell-tale look of this sort, from Kardar's associate, there is no breaching of this instruction. And yet the camera must have exercised a significant presence, assuming an ideal angle, and

determining the angle and line of the girls' walk (Sarkar 2023; **355** Let's Talk About Bollywood 2013). It appears Burke was successful in entering the intimate interior worlds of Bombay cinema in those years, for we also have, along with the Kardar photographs, ones capturing the Hindi film actors Madhubala and Begum Para (Bollywoodirect n.d.; Famous Personalities 2014; Old Indian Photos 2014).

While the photographs in Kardar's offices are completely unexpected, those of the women actors are not; and yet here, too, we may note a risqué quality to the pictures. Begum Para lies on the ground, striking a sultry pose and exposing her décolletage to the camera. In several shots, Madhubala's sari *pallu* (*border*) falls off her shoulders, exposing her blouse. It is the studio "audition," however, which is startling, and implies a singular and secretive public for its perusal; for while we may assume that the phenomenon of women presenting their bodies to the producer was not untypical, as in the nature of a public secret, to photograph the event was untypical, its singularity highlighted by the fact that the capture was done by a foreign cameraman. Moreover, the photograph was never published in the world of illustrated print. Finally, when it was published, it was done so well after Burke's death and anonymously, at least until we get further information about who uploaded it.1

The same goes for the appearance of films considered lost, or about which there was little or no awareness. Consider the history of information film genres. In the South Asian context, presently we have some newsreel, some topicals, perhaps one industrial or process film, promotional films, and very little in the way of advertising film.2 A particular frustration arises from the

1 The research of Sabeena Gadihoke (2022) has established that Burke's photographs came to be uploaded through an agreement between Time-Life and Google in 2008. However, the way different sets of images came to circulate and be discussed is not always clear.

2 The field considerably expands if we consider colonial amateur films and home movies, something I have addressed separately (Vasudevan 2012).

**356** fact that more might be available in deposits such as the British Film Institute, but access policies are restrictive. In one instance, I was the recipient of an informal sharing arrangement that gave me *Tins for India* (1941) by the iconic director, Bimal Roy, and made in the well-known Bengali studio, New Theatres. I proceeded to share the video more widely. There was nothing accidental about the film's emergence, but it might appear accidental because it came online without any formal or official edict. It was contingent on a collegial sharing of resources. The official release came later, when the film appeared as part of a package released online by the BFI to commemorate 70 years of Indian independence. The BFI also holds a rare Dunlop ad film, *Dream House*, made in 1954, featuring leading film actors Ashok Kumar and Meena Kumari and directed by an iconic short filmmaker, Hari Sadan Dasgupta. Unexpectedly, it is now widely and easily available on YouTube, shared by one "Shams" in 2018. The existence of these films in various foreign deposits points to the existence of an audiovisual archive that dates to colonial times, but is not available to the very people whose lives and histories constitute its main content. Here, I share the evolving agenda that has emerged to assert rights to the image, and to make such film material available to scholars, practitioners, and a wider post-colonial public (Hediger, Campanini, and Cheeka 2021).

Formally speaking, these media materials, from Burke's photographs, an as yet solitary industrial process film, a rare advertising movie, are digital deposits facilitated by the participatory architecture of Web 2.0. And, in the very process of the deposit, moving from photochemical index to digital information, they signify earlier times and present time. Quite separate from the advent of the digital, even the official archive can have the aspect of being recent and, indeed, contingent. Taking circulation and exhibition as key to the film archive, with the understanding that each cinematic performance is subject to possible mutability (Hoek 2010), my research identified railways as important not only to film delivery but also to film production, circulation, and

exhibition in the 1920s and 1930s. Sarai researcher Satakshi **357** Sinha started trawling the National (paper) Archives for further information and came across a very informative memorandum from the publicity officer of the Great Indian Peninsular Railways, AE Tylden Pattinson, dating to 1927. An instruction was scrawled on the cover of this governmental file, "Destroy by 1940." As Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (2018) has noted about the colonial origins of India's National Archives, a key component of the initiative was firstly to destroy files considered insignificant or redundant, a paring down and streamlining of holdings, rather than holding onto everything. The government archive had this original administrative design, to function as a memory that served government institutional economies and needs and ensured against unwieldy demands on space and storage. The continued existence of the memo on railways and cinema, marked for destruction, comes across as entirely fortuitous.

There is another informal domain to be explored. A number of entertainment films previously considered "lost" have surfaced on YouTube, some of which have been quite revelatory, leading to a rewriting of film chronologies. This too is a contingent, rather than accidental archive, and relates to the video as key "carrier" of feature film content. Tamil film scholar Stephen Hughes (2013) noted a few years ago that the celluloid holdings of the National Film Archives of India of Tamil cinema in the so-called studio period of the 1930s and 1940s were hugely outflanked by commercial video availability of feature films. And it is indeed in video history that we can look for the substance of a contingent film archive. Reflecting on my own development as a film historian, one shared by others of my generation, VHS was a key resource from the late 1980s. After sitting at the Steenbeck at the National Film Archives in Pune during the day, I would set off to explore video markets to get a hold of movies in the evening. Around the same time, in the United Kingdom, doing research for a dissertation on Indian popular cinema, I found myself keeping careful track of two sources. The first were the various video

**358** rental units, often doubling as sweet shops, in North and South East London. Video versions had to be scanned carefully for deletions, as it was assumed customers were primarily attracted by song and dance sequences. Personal VHS libraries of this sort helped one go repeatedly over the film with an intricacy that Steenbeck viewing did not allow for—and the films circulating in the video market were not always available as celluloid. The second option was recording from TV, with Channel 4's Cinema of Three Continents programming, and Nasreen Munni Kabir's initiatives to promote Indian cinema, getting me excellent copies of canonical films such as *Awara* (Raj Kapoor, 1951), not to mention song sequences assembled by Kabir along with interviews of composers, lyricists and others to document Hindi/Urdu cinema in *Movie Mahal* (1986–1988). By this time, companies such as Shemaroo, which originated as a book circulating library in 1962, started buying up video rights to motion pictures and setting up video rental outlets. By the mid-1990s satellite television and the development of 24-hour channels had companies getting rights in order to fill viewing time. All sorts of movies quite remote from the canonical oeuvre, including horror movies, started populating television in the early hours of the morning. Fresh from my off-air recording practice in the UK, I managed a bit of the same by using timer-recording, and despite the vagaries of electricity and cable connections.

It was in one such foray that I recorded *Amar Rahe Yeh Pyar/ May This Love Be Eternal* (Prabhu Dayal, 1961), a film about the Partition of India seen through the experience of a woman who loses her husband and child as the subcontinent careens into the horrendous blood-letting between communities. In Sarai, our media research program, the VHS was copied in the early 2000s, though I do not believe it was digitized. Nevertheless, it was available for a growing scholarship on the cultural history of the Partition. When film scholar Bhaskar Sarkar (2009) assembled material for his book *Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition*, this was one of several films he could not find

in the National Film Archives' celluloid holdings. This VHS copy **359** was an artefact of the video transformation, which involved the commercial mining of cinema for mass distribution through television and video cassette players, and now through online portals and YouTube. As Ramon Lobato (2012) points out, video constituted a shadow economy of the cinema, a distribution network which took it into a myriad viewing contexts beyond the cinema theater. I would add that not only did it reconstitute the market for feature film content, it provided the wherewithal for the expanded archive of cinema that we know today. A low-resolution video of *Amar Rahe Pyaar* now features on YouTube, along with another film Sarkar could not find in the celluloid archive, *Apna Desh/One's Own Country* (V. Shantaram, 1949). And there are many, many more such instances of lost celluloid materializing as easily accessible online video. It was an infrastructure brought into being by commercial drives and televisual programming, and drawn on by cinephiles to develop the personal collections that constitute the loosely configured online digital deposits of cinema today.

Let me return to the government archive as a site of contingency. Despite bureaucratic constraints, the official archive was a contested site in which individuals and groups who compose it play a game of peek-a-boo, watching for a viable moment to facilitate a public life to the archive. There were music lovers lurking in the thickets of the state. The archive of state broadcaster All India Radio, notoriously difficult to access, nevertheless started emerging online, as individual employees set up websites and Facebook pages to make past music programs available. In all of this, we get a sense of how the digital contemporary features a particular constellation of historical time, capturing a diverse and dispersed range of material, some of it emerging from the disaggregation of the nation-state. A state which commanded, controlled, and planned now appears somewhat differently, as decomposed into a complex matrix of motivations, impulses and artefacts that find hospitality in the digital present.

**360** From an archival point of view, it is the work of the collector outside the state who has been key to our ability to map an intricate archive of the cinema. The government radio employee sharing governmental recordings with a community of like-minded film and music lovers is part of a burgeoning group of amateur archivists and collectors. As Ravikant argues, the collector here is a complex media entity, collating film in video formats, film music in gramophone and audio cassettes, visual and print material in posters, cassette and gramophone record covers, publicity leaflets, film magazines and song booklets, even source novels where relevant. In turn, these communities of enthusiasm and sharing adapt to the new possibilities of moving material online, circulating it, and developing techniques to search the data they have assembled. The film historian is a relatively modest and minor entity in this bigger tribe.

> *This essay draws extensively on conversations I have had with Ravikant, the leading media historian who is developing a major archive of cinema, radio and print at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.*

## **References**

Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. 2018. *Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947*. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bollywoodirect. n.d. "Begum Para by James Burke For Life Magazine—1951." *Bollywoodirect*. Accessed May 23, 2023. http://www.bollywoodirect.com/ begum-para-by-james-burke-for-life-magazine-1951/.

Famous Personalities. 2014. "Madhubala Glamour Photoshoot by Life Magazine Photographer James Burke 1951." *YouTube video*, June 13. Accessed May 23, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAgvTHeG5Rk.

Gadihoke, Sabeena. 2022. "Excavating Movie Queens: The Curious Case of the James Burke Photographs." In *Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema*, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar, 147–69. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Hediger, Vinzenz, Sonia Campanani, and Deedi Cheeka. 2021. "Reconfiguring the Audiovisual Heritage: Lessons from Nigeria." *The Moving Image* 21 (1–2): 55–76.

Hoek, Lotte. 2010. "Unstable Celluloid: Film Projection and the Cinema Audience in Bangladesh." *BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies* 1 (1): 49–66.

# **Don Quixote in the Archive: Or, Making Sense of Film Heritage in the Age of Overabundance**

# **Francesco Pitassio**

*Without cinema, without the close-up, would Kracauer have been able to speak of microhistory? Carlo Ginzburg*

# **Being Don Quixote**

Surfing YouTube a user might come across totally unexpected rediscoveries,1 which, as a post on Facebook recently announced, resurface after having been believed lost for decades, as is the case of late Weimar film *Gilgi. Eine von uns* (Johannes Meyer, 1932), starring Brigitte Helm.2 Or, conversely, the internet flaneur could stumble on dubious versions of major historical works, such as the posthumous and highly controversial *Don Quixote* (Orson Welles, unfinished), which producer Patxy Irigoyen and director Jesús Franco released in 1992 (Kiwata 1992; Rosenbaum 2007).

**364** Beyond the controversies of the posthumous reconstruction, which interpolated the documentary Welles directed for the Italian TV *Nella terra di Don Chisciotte* (1964) with footage he shot from 1955 onwards for the feature film he never concluded, the version uploaded by Irigoyen/Franco is even more objectionable, as the English dubbing is not lip-synchronized and the information the caption conveys is ambiguous, as regards the origin of the edited materials and who is responsible for them.3