QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“The film act means an open-ended film; it is essentially a way of learning.”  Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema”

GSFF: AFTER THE ARCHIVE

Many thanks to Matt Lloyd and the organizers of the Glasgow Short Film Festival for organizing a wonderful day of all-things-archive.  The discussion(s) got me thinking in several directions through the archive (financial, physical, digital, conceptual).  My contribution to the discussion after the jump:

FILM FLAMES

Adventures on the Upper Nile (American Museum of Natural History, 1927)

This short clip is excerpted from Adventures on the Upper Nile, “a pictorial record of the O’Donnell-Clark African Expedition into the Southern Sudan…for the purpose of securing specimens of the rare giant eland.”  The film exemplifies the rhythms of ethnographic cinema: stretches of empty, unproductive duration (waiting, watching, etc.) punctuated by spectacular, but equally unproductive events.  In Adventures, these events include animal death/dismemberment, ritual dance, and environmental contingencies.  In this particular scene, the boat encounters a series of fires along the shore.  But, here, too, the event extends, repeats, stretches out.  It is an almost lyrical, meditative encounter, one which brings film material as such to the fore.  Here, we are told, birds dive towards the flames for insects.  We strain to see this interspecies interaction, but the birds and insects mingle with the deteriorated image, with its burns, scratches, and holes.

AIR IN SPACE

A little late to the moon party…

Lobster Films completed its restoration of a hand-colored Voyage dans la lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) in 2011.  The work took twenty years.  It is the most expensive restoration in the history of cinema.  The print premiered at Cannes with a new soundtrack by Air.  It will screen elsewhere this month (and can be found embedded in Scorsese’s 3D homage to Méliès, Hugo).  Here, one can see an interview with Serge Bromberg, the Director of Lobster Films, on the acquisition of the print (from Spain).  In the interview, Bromberg interestingly claims that the aim of the project was “to promote…and to revive the experience of ‘Trip to the Moon’.”  It would be interesting to put some pressure on the ellipses, to hear more about the promotional ends of this particular restoration and the experience promoters hoped to revive.  More interesting perhaps, is the way in which the hyper-national restoration, promotion and re-release of the film (from Lobster to Air to Cannes) conceals the transnational circuits that the film travelled before finding its way back to origin stories and national mythologies.

FYI: ENTER THE ARCHIVE

The Glasgow Short Film Festival is just around the corner (Feb 9-12).  A symposium on the archive–Enter the Archive–will be held on February 10, followed by a screening of Frank Marshall’s work.  I will be contributing to one of the panels (on archives and research).  The whole festival program can be found here.  It promises to be a fantastic series of screenings/discussions.  Fingers crossed that archive theory and silent film historiography can live up to the standards set by the symposium’s title.

ENTHUSIASM

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have gathered the remnants of socialist Poland’s amateur film clubs and made this material available under a creative commons license.  From their site:

These licenses grant you the right to use, copy, sometimes modify and redistribute any film, text or image that you find of interest here. The most important operational clause within the license is that these rights -to copy, modify and redistribute- must be extended to others. The source material, and all derivative works will become in perpetuity, a legally protected creative resource. Artists and others will be able to use and re-use the material for future creative exchange, enriching rather than depleting the public domain. 

It is rare for a virtual archive to be so open, accessible, and self-reflexive (an extension, perhaps, of the counter-forces that made these amateur films possible amid “the breathless flow” of State-sponsored media).  The site is available in Polish, English, Spanish, and Basque.  Films are streamable, downloadable, remixable.  The archive includes extensive notes on the history of the project and Poland’s film clubs.  Interviews with the amateur filmmakers and film club members available here, along with a handful of essays on the cultural, political, and art/film-historical questions that these images pose.

REBIRTH OF THE AUTHOR

A follow-up to my last post on virtual conferences:

Over the last two to three years, the term “digital humanities” has displaced “interdisciplinarity” as a kind of new bureaucratic buzzword, a rallying cry for administrators under pressure to attract students, make an impact, and embrace the future, whatever that might be.

Anxieties are high among many of those who actually research and teach in the humanities.  What will the digital do to us?  And what can the digital actually do for the humanities?  Does the “digital” have any substance?  For film scholars, the digital poses a number of questions about the boundaries of our discipline, the future of our archives, and the ontology of our beloved objects.

In his most recent piece in the NYTimes, Stanley Fish takes up the term and offers his own skeptical position.  He begins: