In this piece, Robert Gehl reflects on the archival nature of YouTube as it existed in 2009. Analyzing the structure of the platform, he theorizes that those actively shaping the future of YouTube are not the users or the platform itself but rather the “mediators”: the actors between users and producers who explore the archives in search of content to use and distribute on a larger scale. Mediators is a term he associates with anyone willing to mine and explore this archive in order to display and highlight its content. Ghel discusses bloggers, journalists, and advertisers, although the term can be applied to many others. He theorizes that YouTube accumulates footage from users all around the world, but the platform at this time is not a curator itself as the website does not categorize or produce any content on its own. Leaving this task to the users, it gives them tools to help them describe a video’s content, with keywords and tags being the most prominent. Gehl thus makes a clear parallel between the users of YouTube and the curators of an archive. Thanks to the tags the user-curators of YouTube have attached to their videos, these mediators can actively research the archival YouTube and find the content—which is now decontextualized from meaning—that best support their projects. Through this careful selection, the mediators decide which videos are remembered and therefore shape the future of the platform. Ghel concludes his piece by saying this act is not without risk, as it demands actively stealing and exploiting the labours of users who uploaded their content freely. YSP
Jean Gagnon, Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque québécoise, begins this conference paper by addressing the challenges of media preservation technologies faced by cinematheques: the long-term uncertainty and fragility of digital data and the technical challenges and cost of preserving film. Gagnon explains the challenges—largely financial—of digitizing analogue film collections, which are often too vast to adequately capture. There are challenges, too, in ensuring that digitization efforts are faithful to the original material and its presentation. Colour, for instance, is often neglected in the digitization process and lack of care or expertise risks inadequate results. Gagnon argues that preserving celluloid is a far cheaper and vastly more effective method of long-term moving image preservation, but that digitization efforts remain vital. He provides some insight into the ongoing digitization and preservation practices within Canada and, especially, their complex financial contexts. Finally, he argues that we ought not see film and digital as two sides of a debate, but rather as equally valuable tools in the conservation, restoration, and accessibility of moving image media which both need to be supported to maintain audiovisual histories.
This article examines news coverage of eastern Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993 and 1994, comparing edited broadcast news footage with unedited raw footage to argue that the material collected but not broadcast constitutes a valuable record of the conflict. A fraction of the raw footage was available through a number of different archives that author was able to access. He argues for better preservation and archiving of news footage so as to have a more complex and rich archive available for future historians. A close comparative analysis of CNN footage that was shot but not edited with the final broadcast narrative version shows that key moments in the conflict were not included, and the author speculates that this footage did not fit with the dominant narrative which positioned the Bosnian villagers as “victims.” The shots of armed Bosnian-Croatian civilians and soldiers fighting back aggressively did not suit the human rights agenda of the UN or the broadcast media. The author also describes footage of the journalists joking around and being disrespectful of the inhabitants of the village and the conflict itself. The paper makes a convincing argument for the value of archiving rushes from news media in International conflict zones, including the current state of such archives in the US and the United Kingdom. CR
KW - mass media archives KW - archival institutions KW - ethics ER - TY - JOUR TI - Resisting Extractive Uses of the Archive in Colombian Experimental Non-fiction AU - Vélez-Serna, María A. T2 - Frames Cinema Journal DA - March 22 PY - March 22 VL - 19 IS - 13–42 N1 -This article engages with the work of several Colombian experimental filmmakers who use archival materials to rethink Colombian history by re-mediating it. Their interventions are described by the author as a logic of extraction such that the archive itself becomes a site of extraction. Velez-Serna discusses extraction in terms of colonialism, materialism, and extractive visuality in which territories are rendered as commodities. The filmmakers the author discusses have a deep suspicion of the archive, given the enduring state of post-conflict which is Colombian history, mired in the multiple traumas of colonialism, dictatorship, narcotics trade, and corruption. The filmmakers under consideration—Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertes, and Juan Solo—each use different strategies to reconsider historical events, recasting the dominant discourses of Colombian documentary, nationalism, and spectacle. The past in these films is neither linear, visible, nor legible, as techniques of appropriation are used to disrupt familiar narratives, even as the image archive itself is expanded to include American melodrama, TV footage, and personal archives. CR
KW - archives and the production of histories KW - colonial archives KW - decolonization KW - found footage KW - national identity ER - TY - JOUR TI - Images Big and Soft: The Digital Archive Rendered Cinematic AU - Willis, Holly T2 - Frames Cinema Journal DA - 2022/03// PY - 2022 VL - 19 SP - 185 EP - 209 N1 -This essay discusses the work of three “post-image” artists who work with archives that are generated by computation, algorithms, and variations of machine learning that are referred to as Generative Adversarial Networks or GANs. The author describes the methodology of GANs and how it is deployed in work by visual artists Ornella Fieres, Anna Rider, and Refik Anadol to create installations that rethink the cinematic image as an archive-in-process. The archive in this sense is akin to a dataset that is able to create new sensorial experiences. The three works discussed in detail are extremely different, ranging from the intimate to the monumental; they are indicative of a tendency in contemporary art to think of the archive as a space of process, contingency, and flux. The author contextualizes the three works within a larger landscape of visual art and popular culture. CR
KW - archival theory KW - contemporary art ER - TY - CHAP TI - The Ethics of Appropriation: “Misusing” the Found Document in Suitcase of Love and Shame and A Film Unfinished AU - Baron, Jaimie T2 - Contemporary Documentary A2 - Marcus, Daniel A2 - Kara, Selmin CY - New York DA - 2016/// PY - 2016 SP - 157 EP - 170 PB - Routledge N1 -Baron’s chapter explores the complicated ethical terrain of the re-use, or appropriation, of audiovisual material in contemporary documentary film. Re-using existing audiovisual material produces a “double-layered structure” of ethics: we must simultaneously consider the ethics of the original footage and its production alongside its new use as appropriated material (157). Baron examines this question through close engagement with Vivian Sobchack’s notion of “documentary gazes.” In her analysis of Jane Gillooly’s 2013 documentary Suitcase of Love and Shame, Baron considers how the audio recordings of the documentary subjects’ love affair are deployed and the complicated ethical questions that arise from their re- (or mis-)use. Baron argues that these deeply intimate recordings are rendered “authentic,” and become so compelling for the film viewer, precisely because their makers assume confidentiality. Baron considers how the filmmaker’s attempt to maintain the subjects’ anonymity may factor into our ethical concerns. There are no visual depictions of the pair, only audio, which Baron considers as a kind of identity protection and also a way “to transform their story into a metonym for a wider historical and cultural narrative” (161). Baron then turns to A Film Unfinished (dir. Yael Hersonski, 2010), which uses film material shot by the Nazis during WWII. The author considers how the use of voiceover narration may work to contextualize the material and divorce it from its original “propagandistic” context (165). The article provides a rich analysis of the various questions that arise when documentary filmmakers deploy material from the archive and is especially insightful to understand the ethical role that archival sound plays separate and apart from the visuals which accompany it. ST
KW - ethics KW - found footage ER - TY - JOUR TI - The “Stuff” of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives AU - Manalansan IV, Martin F. T2 - Radical History Review DA - 2014///Fall PY - 2014 IS - 120 SP - 94 EP - 107 N1 -In this article, Manalansan draws upon his own ethnographic research, alongside readings in affect theory, to explore how the material conditions of the archive and archival “mess” work as a resistance to dominant forms of queer immigrant lives and conventional understandings of the archive. Manalansan studies the everyday domestic spaces of undocumented queer families, exploring how their household and material possessions—their “stuff”—operate as a kind of queer archive “to showcase the vexed relationships between and among objects, bodies, narratives, and desires” (95). The author discusses the negative social and cultural associations with messiness and the rejects such pejorative conceptions by embracing the value of mess as “a vibrant analytical frame” which provides “a visceral phenomenological grip on the exigencies of marginalized queers” (99). This anxiety over material chaos and disorder is acutely pronounced in discourses surrounding archives, but Manalansan embraces this uncatalogued “living” archive’s usefulness (105). The objects and their place in his subjects’ home are ephemeral and transient, which the author argues allows for a queer understanding of material genealogy and archival evidence. The article offers unique analysis and theorization on the very nature and value of archives and proposes a radically expansive—and queer—vision of how to conceptualize them. ST
In this article, Tess Takahashi explores the history and cultural context of queer and documentary film and video within the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre (CFMDC), based in Toronto. Deploying “queer” as “a practice or mode of reading that attempts to shift our perception of the world,” Takahashi analyses several works from the CFMDC’s collection which present radical aesthetics of fluidity and non-conformity. She discusses how the term “Canadian” can also be “queered” in the context of this archive, as many of the filmmakers whose work was circulated within the collection originate from elsewhere. LGBTQ+ hubs in the US operated as major production sites for such experimental queer films, including work by Su Friedrich and Barbara Hammer. The documentary form, Takahashi argues, tended to be the most common means through which to explore queerness explicitly. She cites nonfiction films by Armature and Lydia Wazana, Sarah Hairpin, and Jeremy Podeswa as examples of documentaries which grapple with queer identity in the 70s and 80s. Janice Cole and Holly Dale’s films on trans and gender-noncomforming subjects are also spotlighted. Takahasi provides a crucial insight into the CFMDC’s rich materials and situates the diverse body of work within the Canadian production context of experimental film and video. ST
KW - archival institutions KW - queer and trans media ER - TY - JOUR TI - An Archival Impulse AU - Foster, Hal T2 - October DA - 2004///Autumn PY - 2004 VL - 110 IS - 1 SP - 3 EP - 22 N1 -Writing in 2004, Hal Foster considers the new “archival impulse” within contemporary art practice, which sees many artists taking up “an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history” (3). He provides a foundational context for this new wave of archival work, arguing that practitioners are motivated by a desire to rediscover lost or marginalized histories, disrupt conventional histories and mass media objects, and make the archive materially present in the gallery space. Through close analysis of three artists’ work—Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean—Foster explores the diverse methods and epistemologies which undergird these archival practices. Hirschhorn’s archival art operates as a kind of “capitalist garbage bucket,” producing sculptural pieces which “play on vernacular forms of marginal barter and incidental exchange, such as the street display, the market stall, and the information booth” (7). These projects, Foster suggests, blur the demarcation between valuable materials and trash, between the natural and the artificial. Dean’s work deploys the archive to construct a “failed futuristic vision,” which often reflects the nature of the archive as “always incomplete” and under construction (12). In her photographic and film work, Dean often pulls from modernist archives in attempts to locate failed attempts at utopian world-making. Finally, in his study of Durant’s work, Foster finds the “archive as partially buried woodshed,” which he defines as a kind of reappropriating of an American counter-cultural aesthetic. Like Dean, Durant seeks the visions of utopic among the dystopic and uses pop culture iconography to forge a sense of what American political resistance looks like. ST
KW - archival theory KW - contemporary art ER - TY - JOUR TI - June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive: A Diasporic Feminist Dwelling Space AU - Jaganathan, Aditi AU - Malik, Sarita AU - Givanni, June T2 - Feminist Review DA - 2020/06// PY - 2020 VL - 125 IS - 1 SP - 94 EP - 109 N1 -In this article, Jaganathan, Malik, and Givanni explore the legacy of June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive (JCOACA), a collection of audiovisual material produced within Africa and Asia and by their diaspora. They examine the history of JGPACA, positioning the archive as an important remedy to the marginalization of Black and Asian diasporic histories within Britain. They argue that the archive “reconfigures Britishness, Blackness and diaspora by cultivating a site of contested postcolonial histories” through the assemblage of material gathered within it (95). They situate the holdings as a kind of “feminist dwelling space,” which enables the films held within it to “creating an opening, a space for dialogues around sistership and intersectional identities to emerge” (102). They emphasize the capacity of archives to launch dialogue among and outside various marginalized communities, the importance of younger generations to engage with archival histories, and the necessity “Black and Brown people to define both their own history and their own cultural memory” (107). ST
KW - African media KW - Asian media KW - diasporic media KW - feminism KW - gender ER - TY - JOUR TI - Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence AU - Carter, Rodney G. S. T2 - Archivaria DA - 2006/// PY - 2006 VL - 61 SP - 215 EP - 234 N1 -Carter takes issue with the power and silence in the archives, especially in terms of how the powerful can silence the marginalized by refusing to give them voices in the archives. As a result “gaps” are created in the archives. Carter argues that we should be able to read against the grain in order to fill the voids. However, the author also cautions that silence may be adopted by certain groups as a strategy against the powerful and their decisions should be respected, too. It is ultimately the archivists’ responsibility to ensure that everyone who wishes to have a place in the archive has the chance to do so. - MZ
With experiences of preserving his work as a director, Bill Brand discusses pressing issues in the preservation of avant-garde films in this current era of digitization. The continuous evolution in the film medium has posed challenges in terms of which is the best way to preserve avant-garde films. Brand argues that this should be case-specific and getting avant-garde films preserved is usually hard in the first place because of its small audience. Now the digital format is considered more desirable because of its cheapness and convenience. However, this shouldn’t be taken for granted because the act of digitizing may lead to the preserved film losing its medium-specific analog film qualities. Brand calls for more archivists, curators and filmmakers taking into consideration the best way to preserve avant-garde films. – MZ
Alex Byrne posits on the insufficient conditions under which Indigenous records are now curated as well as challenges on more effectively protecting Aboriginal cultural resources. Byrne argues that current curatorial practices still adopt a tourist approach that presents Indigenous people as “primitives” from the past. In order to better preserve “tangible traces of aeons old intangible experience, complex cultural interaction between Aboriginal people and the settler as well as acknowledgement of a distinct knowledge system are required. Digitisation offers a potential outlet for showcasing and annotating indigenous records, yet many libraries and museums hesitate to digitise Indigenous cultural records due to worries about copyright issues. What many archivists like the author are struggling now is to negotiate this impasse. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services have been available since at 1995 but careful guidance and adjustments are still needed for it to facilitate the preservation of Indigenous records. – MZ
In this article written in 2001, Binning calls for attention to the current situation of Canada’s audiovisual archival preservation, where a lot of early works are disappearing. William O’Farrell, the National Archives chief has appealed to the Canadian public that preservation of moving image and audio cannot rely solely on government funds. In 2000, the AV Preservation Trust launched a MasterWorks program that consists of 12 Canadian classics in the audiovisual field chosen for preservation by the Trust and its partners. In order to better protect Canada’s audiovisual heritage, private funds and support are eagerly needed. Apart from preservation, public access to these works are another major issue. As we enter the digital age, online specialty channels that cater to a niche audience facilitates greater visibility of older films/television shows, adding possible economic gains to their preservation. This might be a new opportunity for Canadian audiovisual preservation. – MZ
In this article Bastian looks at the history of custody in the field of archival practices within the Euro-American context. Starting with the debate about the actual existence of Virgin Islands folk hero Moses Gottlieb/ “General Buddhoe,” based on archival records which Danish colonial administration had claimed custody of, Bastian points out the discrepancies between contested memories of the colonizing and the colonized. The author goes on to review the origins of the concept “custody” and its evolution into postcustodialism. Integrating various archival scholars’ arguments, Bastian suggests a revision of the idea “custody,” which would involve not only control but also the provision of access. – MZ
In this article Byers and VanderBurgh point out that due to the unavailability of Canadian archives, scholars of Canadian television frequently have to rely on “trafficking in covert archives,” i.e. illicit sharing of personal collections, and raises Mary Jane Miller’s 1990 idea of an “archival paradise” that exists “in digital as well as in material space” and allows all people to be get connected to it.” (109-110) The authors note that “archiving” of any televisual content has long been considered contradictory to its medium specificity – the televisual “flow”; and since most Canadian television programs have insignificant market potential they are not licenced and basically disappear after first runs. Scholars of these materials thus have to rely on personal copies – usually recorded on VHS tapes when the content was broadcasted. These “illicit” archives also have their merits, for they loyally document the shows as they were run, with advertisement breaks. The lack of an accessible central televisual archive in Canada also leads to a “damming up” of the very flow that television supposedly is based on: the contents don’t join the global televisual circulation. Without syndication and proper preservation, television can never achieve longevity and continuity, leading to an impediment on scholarship. The authors also contest the apparent obsoleteness of VHS tapes, arguing that they serve as an artifact to our first understanding of televisual contents as an archive and appealing the audience to not be disrupted by the illusion of all-availability from abundant online archiving spaces like YouTube. Decades after 1990 when Miller proposes her “archival paradise,” we are now at a stage when this is actually possible and should hesitate no more to realise it. – MZ
In this short article, Rick Prelinger broaches the problems and possibilities of American moving image archive in the 21st century. While we seem to be in a thriving time for film preservation, the importance of the access side of the moving image archive has been continually ignored. Reasons for this marginalization of the field include concerns over copyrights, the insistence on positioning the “audience” of archival materials as a scholarly one, and archivists’ worries about “misuses” of their collections. On the other hand, recent digital platforms such as YouTube and Internet Archive provide the mainstream public an almost unlimited access to digitized media contents. This utopian “universal media distribution system” has massive potentials, but also risks becoming exclusive again if subjected to corporatization. Prelinger believes that these tensions might point to new directions, with careful guidance. He lists an inventory of productive reinvention of the field that scholars could participate in: a focus on the periphery in American archival culture; open access of academic work to nonacademic audiences; the emergence of a new generation of archivists with fresh perspectives, the presence of whom may also let archival “keepers” to reconsider to what extent archives should be accessible to the general public. - MZ
In “The Colonial Archive on Trial,” Adele Perry narrates the complicated history and politics of indigenous dispossession in British Columbia and explains why the 1991 Supreme Court decision on the case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, despite its failure to recognize Aboriginal land rights of the Gitksan and Wet`suwet`en who had long inhabited the said land, can be regarded as a trial on colonialism. The ongoing Aboriginal rights movement which started in the 19th century demand institutional recognition and settlement of indigenous territorial claims. In 1984, 54 Gitksan and Wet`suwet`en chiefs filed suit to claim a large portion of unceded land in British Columbia. It led to an extensive trial lasting more than three years, producing a vast amount of transcriptions. The chief justice Allan McEachern nevertheless denied rights to the plaintiffs on the ground that the testimonies they provided were mostly oral not written, which to him affirms the “connections between orality and savagery and writing and civilization.” (333) He was also concerned with the distinct female character in the records of matrilineal tribes. Perry argues that in his judgment McEachern takes the stance of the “imperial traveler,” dissociating the land from its inhabitants, as well as the historian, dismissing histories not confirmed by the official written archive. (337) The 1991 case thus reverted back to the 19th century to champion the white settlers. The trial ironically produced a significant body of transcripted archival materials for the indigenous peoples; but it more importantly showed a need to approach the colonial past through alternative pathways apart from the illusory “total archive.” Six years later, in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada reversed McEachern’s ruling on appeal and acknowledged the importance of the oral archive. This “unorthodox” archive remains and will always put colonialism on trial. - MZ
In this article, Jennifer O’Neal elaborates on the history of Native American archives in the U.S. and suggests possible future directions for the decolonization of the archive, referencing Vine Deloria’s “Right to Know” call to action. Native Americans have long been deprived from access to their historical records due to Euro-American colonial pressures. During the restoration movement from mid-1960s to 1980s, however, there was a surge of interest in the preservation of Native American collective memories; yet access to archival collections still mostly resided with white male U.S. archivists. Historian William Hagan, following Deloria’s suit, calls for collaboration between tribal communities and archivists/researchers; the author O’Neal on the other hand emphasizes that the establishment of archives within Native American communities is equally important. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, tribal colleges and training programs that educate Native communities on information services and facilitate their access to archival collections have been successfully established throughout the U.S. This form of gathering and repurposing tribal records can be considered as a decolonizing archival practice. As decolonization gains more awareness, non-western perspectives and the social justice model should be promoted for archival practices. At the end of the article, O’Neal raises the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as an important guidance for going forward with decolonization in tribal archives policies. - MZ
Contrary to the popular belief that film preservation in Canada wasn’t systematized until the late 1960s, between 1937 and 1969 there had been various failed attempts before to establish a total archives system. Here Lemieux’s article goes through the archival history of the National Film, Television, and Sound Archives of Canada (NFTSA) and the three phases that led to its current system of film preservation. Phase 1 is 1937 to 1948, when Gustave Lanctôt, then Dominion Archivist of Canada, first raised the importance of preserving audiovisual materials for their value as collective memory of Canada. Lanctôt became the head of the Public Archives of Canada (PAC) but his single-handed archival work at PAC was impeded by his lack of expertise as well as political hurdles. After Lanctôt retired in 1948, Dr. W. K. Lamb took over his position for the second phase, which lasted until the mid-1960s. During this time, Lamb was known for his penchant for microfilm. He successfully established the Canadian Film Archive (CFA) in 1951 yet found it hard to get private investment for the preservation of Canadian films because of worries about archival footages’ lack of commercial value. In 1964, CFA finally earned its position at the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). The 1967 fire at the National Film Board (NFB), which forever ruined many valuable films, marked the start of phase 3. The disaster ironically became an important force in the creation of a national film archive, which was realized in 1969 as NFTSA. The late 1960s and the 1970s were filled by ambitious projects such as nitrate conversion and large acquisitions of audiovisual materials. However, it would still be a great challenge for NFTSA alone to be responsible for all films that might be considered worth preserving. A sharing of responsibility was still eagerly required. - MZ
Watson argues here against the casual application of the term ‘archive’ in reference to incorrect understandings of the archive as we understand it today. He argues in favour of referring instead to ‘personal collections’, noting that the reference to an archive obscures and “reduces the labor of me and my (mostly women) colleagues to reading room furniture or “obstacles” in the way of (mostly male) historians”. Watson concludes that the obfuscation of the term ‘archive’ renders invisible the work of archivists and threatens to diminish the efforts of preservation that many marginalized archives face today.
Schweik’s analysis of the ‘Ugly Laws’ brings to light not only a historical injustice, but the ways in which these interlocking series of laws has contributed to ongoing perceptions of disability in America and beyond. Schweik has divided her book into three sections, all arranged in relation to the ‘Ugly Laws’: An analysis and recounting of these laws, an examination of American society and culture in relation to ‘ugliness’, and the relationship between disability in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and today.
Schweik seeks to examine disabled people in relation to space and their erasure from it by calling into question the very notion of ‘ugly’. She proposes a rejection of the very dichotomy of ugly/beautiful, exploring other constructions of such categories in favour of “more affirmative notions of the display of the disabled body as a site of social comprehension and of agency” (286). In doing so, Schweik articulates a view of disability that extends beyond the body and places disabled people as unconfined by the perceptions of the abled gaze.
The concept of collective memory has become a much-debated topic in academia in the recent decades and archives, widely considered to have a “special affinity” with memory, have consequently attracted significant scholarly attention. In this paper, the authors identify four major threads from archival writings: 1) the foundational role of archives in the formation of collective memory; 2) critique of the role of archives and archivists as “keepers” or “facilitators” of memory; 3) ethical questions of power dynamics in the contexts of memory and archives; 4) reconsideration of the very notion of an “archival memory,” namely the rationale for archives as traces from the past. The authors then assess the status quo of the archival research community from a statistical point of view. They perform citation analyses on 165 seed articles from four renowned English archival journals from 1980 to 2010, as well as on archival literature indexed in the ISI Web of Science, a popular bibliographic database, and Google Scholar. They examine the most cited authors/publications (“authorities”) as well as authors who cites most “authorities” (“hubs”) and also traces the frequency of archivist writing being cited by non-archivists researching on memory studies and vice versa. The result shows that the current research community on archival writings is very insular and self-refrential, meaning that archivists rarely cite non-archivists’ work in relevant fields, and their own writings are mostly overlooked by the non-archivists. Partial reason for the latter might be that archival journals are not properly indexed in WofS. The authors admit that their analyses are of limitations, one of which being they only look at English publications, but they argue that the fact that most archival writings are Anglophone and only cite Anglophone sources reveal the field’s insularity. The authors call for more collaboration between archivists and non-archivists in multi-disciplinary research on the relationship between memory and archive. - MZ
Ishizuka and Zimmerman argue for the home movie as a valid form of media to study, invoking the image of the coal miner and canary in its collectivist mentality—that when the miner needs to depart, they depart together. Conversely, the metaphor can be extended into the home movie as canary and the archival impulse it contains within, which speaks to the care and dedication that people have for the medium and their desire to document moments of time through it.
This throughline of collectivity and community can be traced within the essays themselves, notably in Ishizuka and Nakamura’s essay on Something Strong Within, detailing the experience of American Japanese internment camps, as well as de Klerk’s “Home Away from Home”, which examines home movies from the Dutch East Indies. That community is a robust part of not only the academic study of home movies, but of the reception and production of them as well is revealed many times over in Ishizuka and Zimmerman’s anthology, and speaks to a discipline that is growing past its infancy into an area of study in its own right.
The article discusses the pressing concern about the inaccessibility of pre-Internet Canadian television to international and even domestic audiences and its effect on scholarly research and the preservation of Canadian cultural history. Despite the fact that most of these contents are publicly funded, they are frequently hard to access for Canadians once they leave the networks. This is mostly because of the difficulty of renegotiating licensing and rights agreements. The authors use two case studies from their personal experiences as scholars of Canadian television to illustrate the problem. One of three shows produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) before 1990 that are available on DVD, King of Kensington (1975-1980) is still largely inaccessible: only the first season of the show can be bought through DVD, despite its commercial success when it aired and its lasting heritage in Canadian popular culture. VanderBurgh cautions that the canon formation often depends on the availability of what to watch and teach. In the second case, the long-running Degrassi (1979-2017) is an exception in terms of syndication and digital archival since its producers bought up its rights upfront. The continued presence of “the complete text” of Degrassi allows more nuanced reading of the show through binge-watching. However, Byers found that its listing in the Library and Archives Canada is confusing due to its various editions and seasons all grouped under the same name. In the conclusion section, the authors restate the negative consequences of the prominent absence in Canada’s television archive and quotes that it could also be because of the domestic audience’s lack of interest in Canadian-produced television contents, which could affect the “cultural health” of Canada. - MZ
In this piece, Bociurkiw affectionately recalls her memories of feminist media collectives during Canada’s second-wave feminism from early 1970s to early 1990s and argues for the importance of affect theory in (re)writing feminist media history. “The golden age of Canadian culture,” early 1970s saw the development of accessible video technology and community cable TV. With the government’s encouraging policies, feminist media collectives thrived in archiving women’s traumatic experiences as a form of healing. Yet later in the 1980s, as neoliberalism entered Canada, the government no longer welcomed community TV projects, resulting in fewer TV allotments and significant cuts in funding. These damaged the morality of many feminist activists as most of these organizations functioned out of their members’ collective labor, which was dependent on a reliable and self-sufficient working environment. By 1990, feminist collectives outside of Quebec and Nunavut had mostly disbanded because of internal disagreements as well as an increasing desire for individual authorship. The author, however, is optimistic about a resurgence of feminist collectives in the digital era, as video platforms such as YouTube offer new forms of media networks, just like feminist filmmakers got hold of portable video equipment in the 1970s. Bociurkiw sees this as a parallel and concludes that the second-wave feminism should be known as not a “memory,” but an “antecedent” to current social media activism. - MZ
In this transcript of a conversation between Andrew Flinn and Rob Perks at the British Library in 2012, Flinn discusses an oral history module he developed for post-graduate archive students at University College London. He begins by reflecting on the exclusion of oral history from his early academic training and his encounter with oral history materials while working as an archivist at the National Museum of Labour History. As a teacher, Flinn found that the curriculum only addressed oral history and other non-textual materials in a limited fashion, despite student interest. He attributes the delayed inclusion of oral history in the curriculum to the constraints imposed by the accrediting body to which the program is responsible. He also suggests the possibility that, in the UK context, there has been less of a historical relationship between oral historians and archivists than in the North American context, in part due to the focus on local authority documents over the active pursuit of community materials in UK record offices. Flinn argues for the importance of archivists receiving training in theoretical, methodological, and ethical frameworks relating to the creation of oral history materials; even if they do not intend to participate in the creation of such materials, they are likely to encounter these materials and work with people who do create them. Archivists with training in oral history will be better equipped to deal with oral history materials in their collections and, by working with oral historians, archivists with this training can help ensure that new oral history materials are created, labelled, and formatted for easier cataloguing and preservation. Flinn concludes by positing that limited resources and a lack of relevant skills will continue to pose a challenge for the inclusion of oral history materials in archives. However, he suggests that the increasing transferability of skills in the digital era may help ameliorate the latter issue. - TG
Considering the question of how archives might be 'decolonised' or 'Indigenised,' Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd argue that such attempts will necessarily be limited as a result of archives' colonial institutional origins. Currently, archives with material related to Indigenous peoples are rendered inaccessible to researchers as a result of institutional power structures and bureaucratic complications, including procedural difficulties created by the Access to Information and Privacy Act and related legislation. Private-public partnerships, such as Library and Archives Canada's partnership with Ancestry.ca, raise further questions about who owns archival materials and who may access them. Indigenous research is also made difficult as a result of the materials themselves; most archival materials in Canada are the products of non-Indigenous people and feature limited information about Indigenous peoples. When Indigenous peoples are represented in the archives, their agency and importance is often downplayed. Creative readings have enabled some scholars to use archival materials successfully, but many researchers have remained obstructed by the colonial perspective of archival documents. With these difficulties in mind, Fraser and Todd posit that the archives cannot be fully decolonised and that strategies to ameliorate existing issues will need to be highly context-specific. They conclude by suggesting that, instead of attempting to decolonise fundamentally colonial institutions, researchers should approach archives with "a decolonial sensibility" in order to engage with the relationships archives have with Indigenous peoples. - TG
In this transcript of his talk at Cinémathèque francaise in 2011, Alexander Horwath addresses the “digital shock” that film archives have been experiencing, especially in the past couple of years. Rather than treating digital culture as a threat, Horwath argues that it should be beneficial to the preservation of film as cultural heritage and use the Austrian Film Archive, where he works as a curator, as an example of how the digital form has been utilized as an archival tool. Horwath also believes that film museums should have more faith in the medium’s ability to hold on to its “legitimacy and viability” in front of the digital revolution and that emerging media platforms can become a new form of public film archive. Furthermore, Horwath analyzes how technological changes might free film from its storage responsibility through the industrial and non-industrial viewpoints in museums and archives. - MZ
In this paper, Henrietta Fourmile addresses three aspects that deprive Aboriginal people in Australia of access to their cultural and historical documents. The first one is the distribution of such documents: while Aboriginal people have been extensively researched, results of these researches are centralised, leading to the Aborigines and Islanders unable to pass on their own history. The second is problems of access: due to the inaccessibility of their cultural heritage, many Aboriginal people are unaware of the existence of it and such ignorance consequently caused a feeling of powerlessness; many of them also face a language barrier and alienation when they do have the chance of entering a (white) cultural institution in charge of Aboriginal archives. The third one is issues of legal ownership: Aboriginal people do not own information about themselves and are usually excluded from employment in historical/cultural institutions such as museums, whereas non-Aboriginal people have authoritative power over the writing of Aboriginal history as well as how to deal with Aboriginal cultural/historical objects. The major problem in the preservation of the Aboriginal archive, Fourmile concludes, is the European Australia’s assumption that it has the right to manipulate Aboriginal people; it is necessary that they increase Aboriginal involvement in the field and make the archival effort an interactive one. - MZ
This article states the purposes and recounts the curatorial process of “We were so far away,” an exhibition tour of Inuit oral histories of the residential school system. This collection consists of interviews with eight Survivors regarding their personal experiences of residential schools. Residential schooling was a policy adopted by the Canadian government in the early decades of the twentieth century to “civilize” Aboriginal peoples by isolating their children in off-reserve boarding schools and teaching them Western “values” that were presumed to be superior to indigenous ones. The impact of residential schools was even greater on the Inuit communities compared to their southern peers (First Nations, Métis) because the Inuit peoples, being “far away” on the north side, had been traditionally unaffected by Western colonization. Yet in the early twentieth century, the assimilation policy came together with dramatic missionary efforts, which resulted in many Inuit people converting to Christianity and caused great cultural turmoil in the community.
The exhibit aims to help the Inuit Survivors speak out the mistreatments and forced adoption of Western values they endured in residential schools and seeks to specify itself to the lived experiences of the Inuit people, thus not assuming the template of previous exhibits for the southern indigenous communities. Various measures that facilitate the distribution of these archival collections to the North are taken and the mental effects on potential audiences – assumed to be primarily Survivors – is also a major concern. Instead of treating them as cold historical objects, “We were so far away” is committed to “care for” and “protect” the traumatic residential school experiences many Inuit people have suffered and this exhibition tour hopes to contribute to their healing. - MZ
Eastwood and MacNeil begin their anthology with a reflection and a path forward in archival studies, framing their study around the questions: “How has this area of archival concern been understood historically? How is it understood today? Where are the points of continuity and contestation in discussions of this topic? How have technological changes affected the way we think about it? How have currents of thinking in other disciplines about this topic influenced our own understanding of it?” (vii). The book is divided into three subheadings, namely: Foundations, Functions, and Frameworks, which seek to explore both the theoretical ways that we consider archives, and extending out into the actual practices of archiving and the shifting ways that we have understood archival practices up to this point.
Of note is the Frameworks section, which particularly extends ideas initially proposed in the first Currents as ‘Models and Metaphors’. Elizabeth Shepherd’s section on the ‘Right to Information’ remains crucial in an era of contested journalism, and the deep dives into social justice movements and community archival practices speak to a changing perception of archival work that has grown since even the previous edition, published in 2009.
Czach grapples with the question of how to define home movies in a way that both makes sense and keeps them relevant within the context of a nation’s filmmaking practices. She proposes that if a national cinema is an area of filmmaking that seeks to depict the nation’s zeitgeist at a specific moment of time, then amateur home moviemaking can fill that gap, specifically in nations where the commercial industry is not robust or stable. She explores this idea through pre-established frameworks of national cinemas, applying those logics to amateur moviemaking to see the degree to which its practices fit the definitions established. The issue at hand, however, is not the importance of home movies, but rather how to categorize them in a way that keeps them relevant into the future. In order to continue justifying the preservation of these works, Czach argues that ideas of auteur-centric filmmaking must be reconfigured, or ‘stray’ amateur home movies—ones without known filmmakers or which fall outside of larger collections—may remain “resistant” and un-recuperable within the national heritage (36). - JSL
Cook traces the legacy of archival processes through the 20th century into the present, examining the ways in which the practice has changed in the interim, and using those paradigms to look at our contemporary archival practices, and into the future. The four paradigms (or, perhaps, frameworks, as he suggests) are evidence, memory, identity, and community. Evidence as arranging archival records “to reflect the context of their creation", memory as”a deliberate and conscious creation by the archivist, who made that critical selection decision”, and identity as “reflecting the functions and activities of society itself” (106;107; 110). Our current moment of community, Cook argues, is defined by a drive “to share archiving with communities” and having “professional archivists [...] transform themselves from elite experts [into] mentors, facilitators, coaches” ( 114). While these four paradigms still exist in the intricacies of archival thought and processes--like history they are not linear objects--Cook argues that this should not divide archivists along lines of difference, but rather embolden this new phase of community archiving and unite amongst the difference of thought. - JSL
Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley take up the issue of a lack of archival material in ‘ordinary’ television programming, specifically in the United Kingdom. They frame this specifically as a feminist issue, as the idea of ‘ordinary’ television often correlates with daytime television or Independent television networks dedicated to women’s programming and shows that target housewives. The lack of archival material, or the lack of desire to archive this material, “draws attention to the ways in which archiving practices affect and produce the kinds of histories that can be written” (153). They urge future archivists and historians to feel the pressure of this moment, referencing the then-“recent decision to downscale the recording and preservation of television” and the need to preserve this material and the “everyday moments” that comprise women’s television culture (156). - JSL
Becker seeks to find a middle ground between preservation and access, modelling her suggestions on the preservation practices for home movies through the event she co-founded, ‘Home Movie Day’. She goes on to detail the history and structure of this annual event, noting its international reach and the ways in which it has promoted preservation efforts and a burgeoning community. This structure and the values promoted by this event are further contrasted with Youtube, the most well-known “archive” for personal video materials and footage, but which does not emphasize preservation in its storage practices. Becker ends by calling on archivists to find a space where such amateur home media can be both preserved and accessible by those beyond the content owners. - JSL
Bastian’s essay can be broken down into two major sections, both of which work towards examining the legacy of colonial archival recordkeeping. First, Bastian contextualizes the idea of colonial records, and their place in history and academia, paying close attention to the shaping of the colonial empire through its records. Next, she examines the role that provenance plays in the understanding of the colonial document, asking questions such as, “[h]ow far should archivists go in establishing a context that will enable the full interpretation of the record”, in the context of documents such as slave lists, and the importance of giving voice to the enslaved peoples, rather than only the ship captains or government structures (283). Bastian argues that “[t]he full story is not told unless the cargo has a voice and the population speaks” (283). She continues on to add that provenance is important to archival scholars and archivists working with Othered populations because their voices exist “in glimpses” within the archive, but only if archivists seek them out (Wynter, quoted by Bastian 284). - JSL
Bastian uses Carnival in Jamaica as both an example of and gateway into discussing the postcolonial archive, a branching term which she defines along several parameters. To Bastian, the postcolonial archive may be “an actual repository created after colonialism” or, more broadly, “a way to find, read, and present the texts of the unremembered, the forgotten and the folk” (126-127). These definitions are not necessarily separate entities, but the postcolonial archives that Bastian points to are deeply non-traditional, ranging from South African ‘memory cloths’ to the Noongar peoples’ land as archive. Ultimately Bastian calls for an expanded idea of what constitutes an archive or archival practices, specifically as many of these practices are ephemeral and to not understand and seek to preserve them is to ultimately lose them. - JSL
Susan Aasman draws from several pioneers in various branches of archival sciences to trace the growth of archive studies as both a practice and a field unto itself, focusing on the specific trajectory of video and film archival practices. She asks what archival practices will look like in this overtly digital age, arguing that we need to have a structured, methodical means of archiving the digital, or risk losing crucial data and texts. Her arguments lay out the details of the fight to have film and TV recognized as a viable form of history and documentation worth the labour of being archived. She concludes by drawing on the lessons learned in this decades-long fight to raise a warning for the future of documenting our ephemeral digital ‘objects’, and the need to begin strategic documentation now, or risk losing information that will become precious to future generations. - JSL
In this article, Laura Horak examines how vlogs by trans YouTubers are informed by "YouTube's penchant for the personal and the spectacular," arguing that the formal conventions of these videos are determined by this penchant at the same time as they take advantage of it (573). Moreover, though the authors of these videos do not necessarily understand their work as political, Horak reads trans YouTube videos as successors to the feminist consciousness-raising documentary and asserts that they do the important political work of creating trans communities and of emphasizing trans peoples' expertise. Formally, the videos are distinguished by devices such as close framing, audiovisual markers of amateurishness, and direct address. These devices play into the popularity of the personal on YouTube, creating an intimacy between the author and the viewer that serves as a counterpoint to the objectification of trans people in dominant media. The spectacular treatment of the body in these videos, also in line with the platform's penchants, contributes to the generation and affirmation of trans bodies. However, Horak does not simply idealize these videos. She notes that, while trans YouTube videos do important work, the emphasis on individuals and their visible bodies means that social hierarchies involving race and beauty norms often determine which videos become most popular. Horak concludes her analysis of trans videos by theorizing the temporality which structures many of them, naming it "hormone time." Hormone time, particularly evident in the temporal compression which marks the representations of changing bodies and identities in time-lapse and slideshow videos, is "linear and teleological, directed toward the end of living full time in the desired gender" (580). While this temporality contradicts other, less linear experiences of transition, as well as other queer theorizations of time, its progression towards an aspirational future also offers vital encouragement to trans youth. - TG
A neglected topic in archival studies, Sloan, Vanderfluit, and Douglas address the importance of secondary trauma and its effects when working with potentially traumatizing and emotionally destabilizing archival material, which they refer to as “traumatic records.” This journal article presents a survey that was conducted in 2016 of Canadian media archivists and records managers, who were asked how familiar they were with secondary trauma, their experiences and feelings working with traumatic archival material, mental health resources available to practitioners when confronting difficult material, and the general attitude in the workplace towards trauma. The results of the survey showed a consensus within the Canadian archival community for a more open and inclusive dialogue towards potentially emotionally traumatizing archival material. Secondary trauma, also known as “compassion fatigue or vicarious traumatization” is closely related to the symptoms of PTSD. But it differs in the way that trauma is processed; while PTSD is developed from directly experiencing a traumatic event, secondary trauma is experienced and felt through “listening and learning about a person’s trauma.” Subsequently, some develop symptoms related to PTSD (intrusive thoughts, nightmares, intense distress, lack of sleep, anxiety, shame, loneliness, burnout, etc.).
Absent any consensus definition of secondary trauma within archival studies, there have been calls to direct attention to records that document “human rights abuse,” controversial material, and records that provoke feelings of discomfort and disgust. The authors, however, deem this to be insufficient considering that the majority of these materials document large scale traumatic events and fail to address smaller scale events that can provoke just as much as impact and distress. Not only is it important to address how these records function and affect archivists, it is also important to understand how documenting and “preserving” trauma can help trauma survivors and their families better understand their experience. In other words, archivists can take on a “survivor-centered approach” where there is direct engagement with archival activism and supporting victims as well as supporting their agency and healing. As the authors write, instead of the archivist taking on a passive, routine approach to archiving, she instead becomes an “active agent” with responsibilities and a role within the community to help facilitate personal as well as collective healing. MF
Ernest J. Dick’s text argues for new practices of media and sound archiving for the 1990s. Published in 1989, he reflects on the archiving practices of the preceding decades, focusing on the preservation of analog formats such as print, celluloid, and magnetic tape. And he warns of the inevitable deterioration of said formats. He highlights the difficulty of practices of upkeep, restoration, and perseverance of these formats as a result of time, labour, and money issues, and finally, the inevitable natural deterioration of analog formats. Furthermore, smaller archives with fewer resources and financial stability are at greater risk of archival deterioration. Dick adds that these older analog formats require specific playback machines (some of which are no longer being manufactured), replacement parts and pieces that are not easily located, and someone trained in operating them.
Dick’s argues that archivists need to consider carefully new technologies as they are adopted. They must consider the availability of the format they are using, and for this, Dick turns to consumer-grade equipment which is increasingly improving in quality and gradually offering smaller archives greater, more affordable preservation tools and opportunities. However, Dick also argues that it is important that archivists understand the cultural significance of these technologies. Their so-called “amateur” aspects ought not to diminish their cultural and historical significance. Moving into the next decade (the 1990s), Dick argues that archivists must take into consideration the technical limitations offered by consumer-grade formats when investigating amateur recordings, and not dismiss them outright as they may contain something of significance deemed fit for preservation. XL
Jenkins considers the history of the American South’s relation to small town libraries and their active, communal role in promoting and preserving non-theatrical films as well as the methods that these libraries exhibited film. This piece illustrates the significance of film as an audio-visual medium in preserving and exhibiting local cultures at rural libraries, not only because these films capture a region’s history, but also because they contribute and illuminate to the collective memory of a given region that could have once been presumed lost. She makes clear that it is, however, that small town, rural libraries worked in tandem with regional film archives and historical societies to form a triptych of moving image defenders that make it their mission to conserve and popularize films that are other something other than the traditional, Hollywood product. Challenging the notion of the South being socially and culturally archaic, Jenkins uses archival material to demonstrate how there was a desire for films of social value from rural populations and how libraries developed their own systems of circulation, “film packets,” across states and counties to facilitate easier access to film and other materials.
For instance, bookmobiles (delivering books to homes) aided in the democratization and mobility of historical and archival material in geographical areas where access to libraries was difficult. Film projectors and equipment were moved around with the intention of extending film to wider, rural audiences. Jenkins, through her historical discovery of the intricacies and workings of rural libraries and their cooperation of regional film archive delineates the importance of film for small towns, notably through the examples of archives from towns in Texas and Maine and how they supplied libraries with films of all formats, including home videos that emphasized local culture and heralded activities and traditions that were specific to that region. Film libraries have and will remain a meeting point for members of a community to converge, celebrate, and see films that are familiar to them as well as entertain and educate previous and newer generations. MF
In his article, Richard Lochead discusses the importance of mandatory film deposits for FIAF countries and how documenting and preserving a nation’s heritage is vital for the progression of more filmic output. Lochead uses Canada and its federal government policies related to film preservation to illustrate why archival measures like these are salient. He briefly traces a short history of the government legislation of the legal deposit in relation to different media, like books and sound recordings, video, and finally, later, film, which often accompanied a tax credit for submissions. A legislation like this required participants to submit a reference quality cassette of their films but often it failed to meet the requirements of a “negative, internegative, or 35mm print” (52). Ultimately, this ended up failing because maintaining tax credits and individual deposits proved to be too time consuming. Lochead ends with one positive development: acknowledgement from the Canadian government via the Script to Screen Policy of the 2000s, and the agreement of a “life cycle” of a record and that the production, distribution, and the preservation of a film work in tandem (53). Viewing film deposits as a contractual agreement between the government instead of a legal one proved favorable, but still lacking because government policies are not stable and are subject to change. Canada is not without hope in its struggle for maintaining its filmic heritage; the benefit of bilingualism, and a strong film culture and tradition in Quebec makes the situation a little less desolate. MF
This article by Susy Frankel concerns New Zealand’s copyright legislation, its relations to national identity, and its status on an international level. Claiming that New Zealand is a small market economy when compared with powerhouses like the United States, Frankel writes that any legislation concerning the protection of art and creators, who represent the cultural identity of the nation, should reflect New Zealand’s best interests. However, she also discusses the careful balance necessary to achieve such a goal, one that opposes the collective and the individual rights of access to creations: on the one hand, too many laws would simply smother the artistic field as creators would be unsure as to how the laws function and would refuse to dedicate the time needed to understand them; on the other hand, if the legislations are too lax and content becomes too easy to access, then it is no better since artists are economically dependent on their creations and need the security copyright offers.
For Frankel, this balance, already hard to achieve nationally, becomes even more of a problem with online platforms and digital technologies. The internet provides more access, but also increases the potential to steal other people’s works. She questions the international status of copyright legislations, and how these are often dictated and written by more powerful nations like the US, Europe and Japan. By signing their treaties, New Zealand has to agree to their terms, which may end up going against the nation’s best interests. Frankel concludes her piece with the following: she understands the delicate situation created by online technologies and does not wish for isolation; nevertheless, in the dual balance of collective/individual and national/international, she claims that New Zealand should prioritize its own needs and cultural development. YSP
In this piece, Thomas Elsaesser theorizes on the paradoxical situation of online found footage films. As he explains, many of them are intrinsically tied with loss and trauma, such as films shot in Nazi concentration camps or in colonized regions of Africa, but the ease of access offered by websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and others negates the importance of such films. Paradoxical and self-contrasting, he proposes that the modern age of technology has either enriched filmmaking by making accessible to everyone production and post-production tools, or has led to a massive de-professionalization because of how easy it is for anyone to appropriate these images and call themselves a filmmaker. YSP
This paper by Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk details their argument for an expanded discussion concerning creation-as-research, and is a follow-up to a piece they published a few years prior, ‘Research-Creations: Intervention, Analysis, and Family Resemblances.’ There, they outlined different academic practices that combined methodologies of research and creation and grouped them into four different categories: 1. research-for-creation, which entails collecting theories, technologies and practices in the stages prior to the creative process; 2. research-from-creation, which involves extrapolating information and insights from creative projects; 3. creative presentations of research, which refers to alternative forms of knowledge dissemination through creative projects; and 4. creation-as-research. This last category received the least attention and thus they wrote this article in order to draw out further reflection. Creation-as-research, or more simply research-creation, encompasses the three other categories; it is a methodology that does not see research or creation as separate, but rather as two processes intertwined with one another: creation is a form of research. To Chapman and Sawchuck, it can be used either as a new approach to modern problems, as a way to revisit old problems in new ways, or even as a reevaluation of the act of making. They use their research on mobility at Concordia University’s Mobile Media Lab (MML) as an example. For this project, researchers and performers collaborated in order to express the pervasive ableism present within Montréal. Academics gathered information about hard-to-access areas of the city, and disabled artists went on-site and creatively performed their inability to access these supposed ‘public’ areas. As an example of research-creation, this study opened the door for further studies about ableism. To recognize that the art of making is a form of academic work is to recognize that digital media production, which includes audiovisual archives, has an always-growing role in scholarship. - YSP
Elizabeth Freeman's Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories seeks to expand the notions of queer theory by introducing the concept of "queer temporalities." By "queer temporalities," Freeman refers to the corporeal queer identities experiencing temporal dissidence, where time and space are relative to the normative experience of time. Critically exploring the parallels between histories and queer identities through various artistic media, Freeman highlights the relativism and political engagement of queer experiences that seek to resist and subvert the oppressive temporal orders by which heteronormativity asserts its dominance over sexual and gendered minorities. The book further examines how the temporal difference created from queer spaces results from resistance to historical oppression through eroticism. Freeman argues that archives are not neutral historical knowledge repositories but are shaped by political and cultural forces. Freeman's book, divided into four chapters, engages with the complexities of queer historiography while acknowledging epistemological archival practices as tools to reclaim and preserve the narratives of marginalized queer voices and experiences. The first chapter, "Bad Timing, Junk Inheritances," introduces the concept of chrono-normativity, which alludes to the linearity which organizes the human experience to follow patterns over time in conformity with normative frameworks toward maximum productivity. Then, utilizing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus in relation to Dana Luciano's "chronobiopolitics," Freeman identifies the collective form of the ego forged beyond the domesticity of familial ties and the erotic choreographies of homogeneous empty time. She develops this idea through analyses of Cecilia Dougherty's independent video Coal Miner's Granddaughter (1991) and Bertha Harris's novel Lover (1976). Chapter 2, "Deep Lez," explores the anachronic performance of temporal drag as a counter genealogical practice of archiving. Looking at Elisabeth Subrin's radical feminist film Shulie (1997) alongside an art installation by Allyson Mitchell, Freeman discusses Judith Butler's citationality and take on "gender performativity" and lesbian culture in Gender Trouble. Expanding upon queer performativity theory through temporal transitivity exhibited by the lesbian and feminist experiences, Freeman claims that temporal drag is not only an instance of queer performativity but also a physical and erotic mode of feeling. In Chapter 3, 'Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," Freeman employs the notion of erotohistoriography, which she describes as genealogical and historiographical practices where past historical materials encounter the present and can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions, causing effective sensorial and cognitive corporeal sensations. Using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831), Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), and Hilary Brougher's The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997), the author traces the homosocial mode of sentimentality by proposing the body as a site of historical encounter in creating queer experiences. The fourth and final chapter, "Turn the Beat Around," analyzes Isaac Julien's The Attendant (1992) as it considers the role of sadomasochistic play in reorganizing corporal micro-temporalities. Turning to the problematic racializing logic from the erotohistoriographic texts within her research, Freeman ties in the previously established frameworks to justify the erotic disaggregated and denaturalized technique of temporality. In doing so, she offers a meta-commentary on the emergence of entangled histories and modernity. - NV
In this article, Sam Kula delineates a short and concise history of Canadian film and the nation’s preservation practices (or lack thereof), beginning from the early silent period to the 1970s. Kula admits that the Canadian film experience is not as inviting as the United States, but goes on to illustrate that there was significant activity in the country; itinerant cameramen from the Bioscope company were filming in Niagara Falls, and directors E.P. Sullivan and W.H. Cavanaugh filmed a five reel version of Henry Longfellow’s poem Evangeline in Nova Scotia (55). Despite the nation’s motivation to produce films and establish a national film culture, none of the films produced were preserved; at the article’s time of publication, only thirteen out of seventy pre-1939 Canadian feature films were known to have survived (55). The lack of Canadian presence in the medium was as evident in cinema’s early years as it was in the 1970s, despite major steps and changes with respect to output and visibility. Kula writes that the lack of care and interest in Canadian film preservation was due to government indifference and a lack of funding. Despite this, an imperfect step was made in the conservation of Canadian film with the creation of the Canadian Film Archives in 1964 in Ottawa, as well as the Connaissance du cinema in Montréal (56). Problems faced by these institutions included difficulty in acquiring long term funding as well as the need to secure proper storage facilities for easily flammable and destructible nitrate films. Kula calls for the creation of a public institution in film and television that can continue to properly safeguard Canadian productions and assist in locating and preserving the films that have been lost. However, this would require a consistent, long standing budget that could support preservation. - MF
In a brief article addressing Q2Q: A Symposium on Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada, Peter Dickson, a Professor of Contemporary Arts & English Studies at Simon Fraser University, discusses the outcome of the event and the need to build an archive to document the discussions that occurred at this conference. Identifying that there is a rich history of LGBTQ+ theater and performance art in Canada, Dickson, along with other LGBTQ+ artists and scholars present at the roundtable discussion, came to several questions regarding how to account for the history of said theater and performance art which, at present, has not been properly accounted for. These included the question of how to start documenting this history, how to properly represent diversity in contemporary Queer performance in Canada, how to define Queer performance, and how to make sure it continues to be pro-activist, feminist, anti-racist, and sex positive. Although not all the aforementioned questions were answered, Dickson concludes that we live in a world wherein homonormativity is becoming more prominent, and that not only is it important to start having these discussions, but that it is crucial to document them, archive them, and make them available to the public for educational purposes. He credits Katrina Tadros, the videographer for the symposium, for helping them in building this digital archive of discussions of LGBTQ+ theater and performance in Canada and making the history and struggles of LGBTQ+ people known. - XL
In this article, Mary Desjardins employs textual analysis to examine the compilation film Meeting Two Queens (1993, dir. Cecilia Barriga) in relation to how its identity politics create cinematic meaning through the interpellation of a spectator “who identifies with the images as a fan and who responds to their strategies of affect” (26). Desjardins fits the film into this context by “making available readings that suggest […] an overlap in terms of how straight and lesbian women might negotiate pleasure and self-identity in patriarchal culture and its ideological apparati” (27). This is made possible through the fan activity of textual poaching as a means of creating investment portfolios where fans are able to locate self-identity. Desjardins argues that Barriga is able to produce affect through the convergence of extra-textual discourses surrounding the star images of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich with Barriga’s operation of and identification within intra-textual knowledge of the stars’ films. She considers how Barriga utilizes the rhetoric and fantasies of melodrama in order to not limit the production of pleasure created by the film to a straight/gay polarization. This is shown through an analysis of the use of close-up shots of intense emotion and the ordering of narrative sequences that build to a climax of sexual seduction and end in scenes of a fall or triumph. Engaging psychoanalytic theory, Desjardins demonstrates how the pleasure of Meeting Two Queens is in how its expression of fantasy is in the setting out of desire, prolonged by roadblocks that prevent gratification, and not necessarily in its fulfillment. Therefore, Desjardins’ article demonstrates how the film “causes us to reflect not only on how meaning and identities are constructed, but also on why we get so much pleasure and pain out of that ultimately elusive process” (33). - MP
This article presents a call to action with regard to “the preservation of audiovisual archives and their accessibility to members of the research community” (285), arguing that the loss of heritage, the lack of financial support, and a lack in availability is detrimental to the current state of research in the field of communications. Centering on archival practices in Canada, Jackson examines current roadblocks in archival research surrounding production, preservation, and access to archival records by drawing on contemporary examples from Canadian media and communications contexts. Jackson proposes these issues be solved with more financial support for smaller institutions, as well as coordinated single window access to online archival collections. Jackson concludes with an extended case study of the Alliance for Canada’s Audio-Visual Heritage, later to be renamed “The AV Preservation Trust,” composed of “major stakeholders in the corporate and public domains, including producers, archivists, users, and collection managers” (290). Efforts such as the Masterworks program, which recognizes 12 culturally significant classics each year drawn from the audiovisual archives of Canada while providing necessary funding to “underwrite restoration and preservation costs” (291), are designed to attract funds from the private sector to help further objectives regarding preservation and access. This article is useful for its outlining of contemporary issues with respect to archiving practices surrounding audio-visual media in Canada, as well as in its presentation of proposed solutions to such issues. - MP
Locating her argument within a context of the class, race, and sex inequalities highlighted by living through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Michelle Caswell argues from the feminist standpoint that feelings are epistemologically valuable in archival contexts. Caswell operates on the assumption that archives as they currently exist perpetuate dominant ideologies that masquerade as universal. Indeed, “the division of the world into knowledge – based on reason – and emotional outbursts – based on feeling—is deeply rooted in dominant Western masculinist divisions of the world” (152). Caswell specifically interrogates this issue regarding the patriarchal undertones colouring the assertion that reason and logic are more valuable in archival contexts than emotion and personal preferences. She argues that a means by which these oppressive systems can be countered is to “take emotions seriously in tandem with an analysis of power” (153); to acknowledge them as “valid bases for knowing, as valid bases for archival theory and practice” (153); and most importantly, “to address emotions in relation not just to our own personal lives but also to dominant oppressive power structures” (153). This is argued by examining how feelings enable us to know; how liberation is a feeling that is a mixture of anger and joy; how anger and joy are two sides of the coin with respect to resisting oppressive systems; how the feeling of liberation must also coincide with material redistribution and shifts in temporalities away from linearity; and finally, how care must be viewed structurally through its upending of existing power relations in favour of oppressed people and is a catalyst for structural change. Caswell’s contribution to archival theory is therefore in positing a shift away from what she terms “either/or” thinking to something that is “both/and, inextricably and simultaneously both/and” (164). - MP
In this article, Paul S. Moore takes early twentieth century small town gossip columns as an “archive of cinema’s reorganization of social life” (263). Moore argues for their importance in studying early cinema as “altogether they paint a surprisingly detailed picture of the regional diffusion and institutionalization of the novelty in the years before it was a mass practice” (263). Positing an archive of the spread of nickel shows from the period between 1907-1913, Moore shows how mapping the nickel show’s appearance on a regional scale collects local cases into a mass market “without abstracting the process to global or national generalizations” (265). In contrasting the cinema culture of metropolitan centers with that of smaller cities, Moore centers the newspaper as a tool of modernity to map an analysis of how the rapid spread of the movies was “embedded within the various relations a community could have with its newspaper” (268). Moore’s typology subdivides cities and towns sorted by population size, ultimately determining that towns with 8,000 to 20,000 people are the most revealing, as metropolitan city newspapers were deemed an unreliable source for studying early cinema and the smallest municipalities were unlikely to have had the resources to save few, if any, records. Moore therefore determines that the newspaper is a neglected archival tool with respect to not only studying the “cinema of transition” (275), but as an important component in debates over the urban modernity thesis wherein filmgoers were readily embedded in metropolitan modernity via the spread of cinema and its capitalist mass market. As such, this article is useful in helping to identify how the transition from the cinema of attractions to classical cinema is underscored by the “foundational emergence of a mass market in cinema” (275). - MP
In this transcription of a speech made during a ceremony wherein he was awarded the FIAF Award, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien speaks of the importance of film preservation and proper funding. Having just donated 150 prints to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, Hou states that his decision to do so was because he knew the organization would do their best to preserve and archive these films. However, he calls attention to an issue - that the archive is under funded, therefore putting the proper preservation of these films at risk for being destroyed and lost. Hou goes on to call for government sponsorship and greater funding of film archives. He argues that cinema is a part of cultural heritage and a tool for education in elementary and high schools, and stresses the importance of artistic development and appreciation that can be derived from film viewing. In order for this to occur, there need to be greater incentives for the process of preserving, restoring, archiving, circulating, and distributing films so that they may be used as educational tools. In recent years, Hou has noticed the damaging effects that mainstream blockbuster cinema has had on art cinema, effectively casting a shadow upon it. Instead of choosing to disavow mainstream cinema, Hou calls for equal attention to art cinema, and a balance between the two; he argues that film archives are crucial in creating this balance. In concluding his speech, Hou mentions his desire to make a documentary about the Chinese Taipei Film Archive in order to show the everyday public the importance of such institutions and how cinema is a window into the past, our histories, cultures, values, and so forth. - XL
Bossin’s short text, written in 1949, argues for the establishment of an archive for Canadian films. Highlighting that Canada’s industry is both the biggest and most successful of all government funded documentary organizations in the world, Bossin stresses the importance of establishing a preservation system for these historical films that depict Canadian life in the 1900s, fearing that if immediate action is not taken, these artifacts will be lost for good. Bossin goes on to highlight that members of the Toronto Film Study Group, fronted by Gerald Pratley, a writer for the CBC, are trying to establish an archive in Ottawa, titled the Canadian Film Archive. With the intent of establishing an organization that locates, restores, preserves, exhibits and makes available these historically- and culturally-important films, they hope to create an archive that echoes that of the British Film Institute and Museum of Modern Art in New York. In identifying the reasons for a current absence of an established Canadian film archive, Bossin emphasizes the lack of government support, coupled with a failure in documenting the history of Canadian cinema and establishing a place to house them such as a national reference library. Bossin mentions a pre-existing organization, The Canadian Picture Pioneers, as already having a substantial archive, and suggests that perhaps they could play a role in helping to get more films preserved in reference libraries. In conclusion, Bossin argues that action must be taken quickly in order to begin properly preserving and archiving Canada’s rich history of film for future generations before it is too late. - XL
In Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, Alana Kumbier looks at the intersection of queerness and archival practice and how the site of documentation within unconventional archival spaces reveals a resistance to dominant modes of archiving practice. Kumbier begins by explaining how queer archival practices deal and contend with the erasure and exclusion from dominant structures of recording history, while they also strive to better attend to these gaps in archival practices beyond the scope of mere inclusion that conventional archival institutions tend to rely on. Kumbier’s book intervenes within the traditional archival space and highlights how queer practices should be understood as a challenge and critique to dominant archival attitudes and pre-existing notions of filling in archival gaps and lack. Kumbier defines her use of the term queer in her book as both describing a group of people who self-identify as such and mobilizing the term's historical notion of difference; Kumbier’s use of queer insists on emphasizing “the oppositional, the unruly, and the coalitional” practice of queer history and its contemporary thought. Wanting to combine the theoretical with the methodical, Kumbier states that her book functions as a sort of “tool-kit” for helping readers and archivists alike understand what documenting queer history looks like materially, “from the ground up.” Kumbier’s chapters discuss how various archival documents aim to recognize the ways in which queer people are materializing and authenticating their stories outside of dominant structures of storytelling and history-making. Throughout the book’s two sections, Kumbier highlights a variety of different case studies that are used to document and bear witness to queer lived experiences, such as documentaries, zines, oral histories, fabricated histories and stories, art installations, performance pieces etc.
Within the first section of the book, “Negotiating Archives and Section,” Kumbier argues that unconventional archives or counter-archives act as interventions within the traditional “repetition of practices” and serve to acknowledge experiences that are reduced to being invisible by exclusion from the dominant record keeping. These stories and accounts of queer and other minority histories are relegated to being filled-in retrospectively and, as Kumbier discusses, they often function as reasons to look for current stories that may actively be ignored.
In the book’s section section, “Archiving from the Ground Up,” Kumbier looks at several unconventional archiving practices which she calls archiving “from the ground up,” which means we should look to members of specific communities and cultures to document and contribute to a community’s historical development, rather than looking to dominant established institutions to inform a community’s record. Kumbier thus argues that through queering the archive, these practices reveal the lack and gaps within traditional archiving practices, while fostering their own archive and history relevant to their communities. EA
The article explores the relationship between film and art museums, particularly in terms of their scale and pace. Wasson argues that art museums have traditionally been conceived as large, grand, and fast-paced institutions that prioritize the display of monumental artworks, while films have been seen as small, intimate, and slow-moving works that require a different kind of attention from viewers. Wasson examines how art museums have begun to incorporate films into their exhibitions and programming, often using them as a way to enhance the experience of viewing art. However, she argues that this integration has often been superficial and has not fully engaged with the specific qualities of film as a medium. Wasson suggests that a more productive approach would be to consider how the scale and pace of film can offer a different kind of engagement with art, one that is more intimate and reflective. She also argues that the use of small, slow films in art museums can create a more democratic and inclusive space for viewers, one that is not solely focused on the display of monumental artworks. SL
In this text, Judi Hetrick describes the importance of found footage and amateur filmmaking in documenting major events and building an archive around them. Starting with the attacks on September 11, 2001, as an example, Hetrick recognizes how contributions from local members in a community can be vital in collecting information and how amateur filmmakers would come together with other professionals in the field to help create a history around those communities, no matter the events’ size. Despite not having the professional budget that goes into larger projects, found footage projects provide a more complete picture that speaks its own language than adhering to pre-established practices. SC
This article analyzes Yael Hersonski's documentary film A Film Unfinished, which examines a previously unreleased film reel from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The film reel was discovered after World War II and is known as "The Ghetto." The article discusses how Hersonski uses the previously unseen footage from "The Ghetto" to challenge the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in popular culture. The article argues that Hersonski's re-representation of the footage disrupts the idea that the Holocaust is an event that can be comprehensively represented through visual media. The article also examines how Hersonski uses a range of filmmaking techniques, including interviews with survivors, intertitles, and sound design, to contextualize and complicate the archival footage. The article argues that Hersonski's approach emphasizes the importance of critical engagement with visual representations of the Holocaust and the necessity of recognizing the complexity and diversity of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust. - SL
John Ridener’s From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory makes the case that understanding the history of archival theory is paramount to understanding archives as sites of cultural and political power. The book covers the major paradigms and approaches in the field of archival theory via a focus on appraisal theory. From Polders to Postmodernism divides the history of archival theory into three distinct periods. The first period encompasses the consolidation of theory and practice into a field in the 19th century to early 20th century, and is followed by the era of modernization from the 1930s to 1980s. Finally, the third, ongoing period is the contemporary era, beginning in the 1980s. This period is defined by globalization, pluralism, and new subjectivity. From Polders to Postmodernism approaches archival theory in a non-positivist manner, exploring the tension between objectivity and subjectivity in theoretical approaches across time. It critiques the impractical and unsuitable desire of positivism in archival work. The book posits that an understanding of the history of archival theory is a necessary tool for archivists and non-archivists alike to foster an in-depth and shared understanding of the history and role of archives. Do not expect an exhaustive history of archival theory when approaching this book; it must be noted that it does not attempt to summarize all major developments in the field, and some theoretical approaches and theorists may be absent. However, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory is an appropriate choice as a reference for the broader developments in archival theory, or as an introduction to the general history of archival theory. - CL
Stoler argues here for an "ethnographic," rather than an "extractive," approach to archival labour in the study of colonial states (84). While anthropologists have tended to use archival documents for their content, to 'extract' useful information, Stoler advocates for greater consideration of the forms of colonial archives and the documents within. Working with Foucault's understanding of the archive as a structure which determines what is and is not sayable, she writes that "[c]olonial archives were both sites of the imaginary and institutions that fashioned histories as they concealed, revealed and reproduced the power of the state" (89-90). It is therefore important to read colonial archives for their formal conventions; studying these conventions enables scholars to understand areas of both unity and disunity in the colonial apparatus and the categories it created. For instance, discussing commissions on European poverty in the Indies and South Africa, Stoler demonstrates that, through their categorizations of people, their causal structures, and their development of narrative histories, "they wrote, revised and overwrote genealogies of race" (96). - TG
In this article, Dylan Robinson approaches sovereignty as "a form of doing" that "is asserted in everyday ways" (85). Robinson argues that the topic of reception has been neglected in the existing literature on artistic and cultural expressions of Indigenous sovereignty and discusses Indigenous perception as a site of resistance to the colonial state, albeit one that can be undermined when it is communicated through settler forms of expression. Moreover, he suggests that there is not a necessary relationship between sovereign objects and sovereign reception; attention to this fact "opens up more nuanced understandings of sovereign form, structure, and sensory experience as perceived by Indigenous and settler subjects" (87). Through analyses of Edgar Heap of Birds's Native Hosts series, Cheryl L'Hirondelle's wapahta oma isonikan askiy, and the work of the collective Ogimaa Mikana, Robinson examines text-based public artworks by Indigenous artists as possible expressions of sovereignty and considers if and how these expressions of sovereignty may be perceptible to audiences. The essay finally presents Indigenous reading practices as a counterpoint to the "epistemic hunger" of settlers and settler institutions like the university, museum, and gallery, a hunger which leads to the consumption of Indigenous knowledge "without consideration of those who have cultivated, harvested, and prepared the food of thought" (96, 98). - TG
This short essay serves as an introduction to an issue of Archival Science publishing papers from the 4th International Conference on the History of Records and Archives in 2008, the theme of which was Minority reports: Indigenous and community voices in archives. Sassoon and Burrows argue that archives "are both practical and spiritual necessities" as well as key elements in "the fundamental fabric of memory" of a community (1). Contrary to beliefs in collective memory's passivity, collective memories are formed through active processes; what is remembered and how is subject to contestation. With this in mind, the conference acted as a site for those who have been disempowered within, or kept out of, the archive by these processes to discuss the relations between archival work and broader power structures. Themes of the published conference papers include the effects of community interactions with records on the meanings and uses of archival materials, the relationships between the contexts in which records are created and preserved and the content and understanding of those records, the exclusion of communities and their knowledge structures from archives and archival education, and the limitations of many archival practices with respect to non-traditional forms of records. On the latter issue, Sassoon and Burrows write that the determinations archivists make about what materials are suitable for archiving are a means by which Indigenous and other marginalized communities are excluded from archives. They conclude their essay by calling for the development of new archivist-community relationships that better represent and benefit marginalized communities, as well as for the reconceptualization of archives to include previously-excluded forms of self-representation. They also point to new technologies and digital archives as promising tools for doing this work. - TG
In this article, Elisabeth Kaplan notes that archival science has not engaged with postmodern critiques of the relationships between representation, objectivity, and power to the same extent as other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. She argues that, given the observable points of comparison between the archives profession and others in the humanities and social sciences, comparative analyses with other intellectual disciplines should aid archivists in both theoretical understanding and practice. Comparisons with anthropology are especially constructive due to a shared objective of representation and the interpretive role of both anthropologists and archivists. However, the histories of archival science and anthropology are radically different. Anthropology, from Bronislaw Malinowski's conceptualization of the participant observer to the post-structuralism- and post-modernism-influenced works of George E. Marcus, Michael M.J. Fischer, and James E. Clifford, has become ever more self-reflexive, with an escalating emphasis placed on the limitations and subjectivity of the observer/anthropologist and on the foregrounding of methodological and epistemological problems. Conversely, while archival science has seen methodological questions and changes necessitated by the importance of selection in twentieth-century archival work, "[a]rchival thinking remained relatively isolated from larger academic discourse" (216). From the 1980s, archivists such as Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz have sought to emphasize issues of subjectivity and power and to re-conceptualize the archivist as an active "co-creator of the historical record" who must work self-reflexively (216). They have been met with staunch resistance by positivist archivists who value practice at the expense of theory. While Kaplan is sympathetic to the concern that a total commitment to reflexivity may impede practice, she argues that the development of improved, if imperfect, practices alongside theoretical considerations of power and representation is necessary for the archival profession to remain relevant and to respond to analyses of the profession from other disciplinary contexts. Ultimately, she calls for a process of professional intellectualization like that seen in anthropology in which theory and practice inform one another and in which archivists embrace the uncertainty associated with experimentation. - TG
Stephen Loft theorizes the Internet in relation to Indigenous ontologies and technologies, arguing that cyberspace is a "shared space defined and articulated through the connections we have with it" and a "cosmological territory" where the past is connected to the present and the material is connected to the spiritual (175). He considers Indigenous sign technologies such as wampum and wampum belts and False Face masks as examples of the importance of hypertext and interconnectivity in Indigenous traditions. With this long history in mind, the Internet can be conceived in terms of Indigenous ontologies. Although cyberspace should not be seen in utopian terms, there exists the possibility of "[a] networked Indigenous exceptionalism" based on Indigenous principles such as interconnectedness, circularity of thinking, and continuity that "would incorporate [a] multiplicity of voices and philosophies as well as artistic practices into an expanded and expanding information structure" (178). Loft discusses two virtual networks, CyberPowPow (1996-2004) and drumbytes.org (2003) in these terms. He writes that they, and projects like them, are aligned with longstanding Indigenous practices in their embodiment of dynamism. Taking inspiration from Dale Turner's use of the term "word-warriors" to describe Indigenous intellectuals who, with anticolonial aims, productively address European intellectual contexts, Loft posits that the term "cyber-warrior" should apply to "those artists, scholars, curators, and intellectual practitioners who expand the realms of Indigenous media cosmology in respect of and with 'all our relations'" (182). - TG
In this essay, originally presented as the keynote speech at the 1999 conference 'Whose Heritage? The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Britain's Living Heritage," Stuart Hall addresses how the notion of 'British Heritage' is changing, and should change, in the multicultural context of turn-of-the-millennium Britain. He defines 'Heritage' as "the whole complex of organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation and presentation of culture and the arts" and notes that, in Britain, the preservation of existing cultural works is prioritized in discussions of Heritage (3). Hall argues that Heritage in this sense is "a discursive practice" deployed by governing authorities as part of their efforts to create national identities based on a singular collective narrative (5). As such, the decisions of selection and emphasis involved in the curation of such collections carry significant sociopolitical weight. In Britain, the Heritage has historically been constructed to serve a homogenous national identity which elides differences of class, gender, region, and position within colonial hierarchies. Hall suggests, however, that certain prevailing intellectual shifts, evidenced by an increased interest in working class (though still predominantly 'white') culture and skepticism towards the notion of "dispassionate universal knowledge," indicate the possibility for radical changes to occur in the institutional functioning of the British Heritage (7). These changes, which would require funding and institutional support, could work to include those peoples and cultures who have been excluded from the Heritage thus far. The essay concludes with a consideration of the foundational objectives that might be involved in the creation of an inclusive Heritage. Among these, Hall highlights the need for a more capacious understanding of 'Britishness,' the importance of funding and exhibiting artistic work by contemporary artists from marginalized communities, and the opportunity to create archives documenting the experiences of Black and Asian migrants in Britain. He also emphasizes the necessity of ensuring younger generations have access to traditional cultural practices and calls for greater attention to be paid to new forms of diasporic art. - TG
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin question the notion that the aesthetic and cultural principles of all new media are necessarily distinct from those of earlier media. Bolter and Grusin argue that the cultural significance of new visual media stems from their adaptations of the aesthetic forms of earlier media like perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They term this process “remediation” and observe that earlier forms of media have remediated one another; photography may be understood as a remediation of painting, for instance. Bolter and Grusin argue that remediation operates through a double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy, wherein the former seeks to efface the contours of media for the sake of transparency and user immersion while the latter foregrounds the act of mediation through multiplicity, or by interpolating several aesthetic forms within the same frame or space. The book examines the process of remediation in media through three sections. The first of these sections summarizes the theoretical framework for the entire book, offering definitions for such concepts as immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation. Here, the authors argue that all mediation is remediation, and argue for their approach to the study of remediation as a “genealogy of affiliations” rather than a linear history (55). The authors conclude this section by situating instances of remediation within particular cultural contexts, thereby identifying its material, economic, social, technological, and gendered implications. The second section illustrates how transparent immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation function within various instances of contemporary media. This section includes examples and analyses of such media as computer games, digital photography, photorealistic graphics, digital art, film, virtual reality, mediated spaces, television, the World Wide Web, ubiquitous computing, and convergence. This section exemplifies Bolter and Grusin’s method of a genealogy of affiliations, as they invite readers to explore the book in a nonlinear fashion, redirecting them to relevant theoretical context outlined in the first section through in-text references. The third and final section once again returns to the theoretical register by considering how new digital media participate in contemporary culture’s redefinition of the self. The first chapter in this section explores how new digital media remediate the self both subjectively and corporeally, in the sense that digital media can shape our bodies, our minds, and the ways in which we relate to the world. The second chapter in this section explores the notion of the virtual self, and illustrates how VR technology can inspire a greater sense of empathy with the world around us. The final chapter demonstrates how the hypermediacy of networked media such as MUDs and chat rooms remediates the romance novel in pursuit of the immediacy of sexual encounters online, which complicates stable or cogent notions of sexuality, gender, and consent. - RM
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) come into contact with vulnerable community-driven audiovisual archives, an important part of contemporary cultural heritage. This article examines the power dynamics embedded in A/CA, as well as in current ICT infrastructure, legislation, and organizational policy and resources, to address two emergent challenges experienced by the network over a three-year period. The authors ask whether and in what ways A/CA was able to oppose the extractive power dynamics embedded within the current cultural heritage preservation and ICT management systems through operational models and ICT tools that incorporate creative approaches. Locating this project where community-engaged research comes together with the study of digitization and platformization of cultural production and heritage, the authors used autoethnographic and feminist intersectional discourse analyses to examine the tensions and challenges embedded in the communities of practice that took shape over these three years. The first set of findings explores the organizational limits imposed on the network’s participants, including the lack of national and local resources for digitizing and sharing vulnerable and often marginalized media archives. This was addressed in the A/CA context by developing a flexible contracting approach for the digitization and use of the vulnerable media being digitized, as well as through the development of a national Action Plan. The second set of findings demonstrates how creative interventions in community-based partnerships and artist residencies affected the genesis of a Principles of Respect (PoR) Committee and related pragmatic in-the-field efforts to address some of the historically troubled relationships that large, official media archives have had with Indigenous and Black communities. The authors explore the ways in which creative workshops and artist residencies are mobilized within A/CA to help build a more respectful and reciprocal set of relations. Lastly, we examine the broader implications for intellectual property and content management as it is influenced by the current role of ICTs in relation to cultural heritage, suggesting some ways forward. —Claudia Sicondolfo