Archive/Counter-Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/43166

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Access status: Open Access ,
From Weimar to Winnipeg: German Expressionism and Guy Maddin
(Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, 2019) Burke, Andrew
The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.
Access status: Open Access ,
Editors’ Introduction: Why We Curate Feminist Film Archives
(University of California Press, 2024-04-01) Hennefeld, Maggie; Horak, Laura
What do we, as feminists, need right now—from cinema, from archives, from our communities? How can filmmaking, film festivals, and social movements of the past inspire or befuddle us today? And what is at stake in selecting and presenting archival works by women to create new forms of community? Whether we hold space together in a movie theater or a virtual screening room, we cannot help but draw connections between the unfinished past and the open-ended present. Forging these links is the rallying cry of the feminist film curator. In this tenth-anniversary double issue of Feminist Media Histories, we argue that everyone can contribute to the collective project of archival film curating. Unrealized feminist histories pave the way to unforeseen social possibilities. In that spirit, please join our cabal of feminist archival film curators!
Access status: Open Access ,
Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women: A Roundtable with Neta Alexander, Kaveh Askari, Renée C. Baker, Jennifer Bean, Liza Black, Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Dana Reason, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Kate Saccone, Aurore Spiers, Gonca Feride Varol, Yiman Wang, and Bret Wood
(University of California Press, 2024-04-01) Hennefeld, Maggie; Horak, Laura; Loewen, Rachel
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.
Access status: Open Access ,
Remediating the Archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts as Forms of Material Knowledge
(2022-02-18) Rémy, Lola
This article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […] are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge.
Access status: Open Access ,
2020 Symposium program
(2020-12) Marchessault, Janine
The Archive/Counter-Archive 2020 Symposium was held online on December 10-11, 2020.
Access status: Open Access ,
“Brilliant Pinkish Flare”: Cataloguing Queerness in Experimental Film
(2022-04-20) Lombar, Jaka
This blog post is the result of the work carried out on the CFMDC’s collection in relation to the Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA): Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage project. In order to learn more about the case study in which CFMDC is participating, visit: https://counterarchive.ca/case-studies/beyond-narrative-preserving-and-mobilizing-canadian-lgbt2q-films-1970-2000-cfmdc
Access status: Open Access ,
Curation as the Cure for the Archive: Groupe Intervention Video’s Vidéos des Femmes dans le Parc
(University of California Press, 2024-04-01) McLeod, Dayna; Olibet, Ylenia; Thain, Alanna
Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) is an independent artist run center in Montreal “dedicated to the promotion of videos created by women (in its most inclusive definition) by distributing and presenting them” (GIV website) At the crossroads of longevity, consistency, commitment, and the precarity that accompanies most forms of feminist labor, GIV is one of the most important “accidental” archives of feminist organizing and expression in Quebec. Their curatorial practices resist any archiving separated from the practice of everyday life. This article focuses on the thirty-year history of Vidéo des Femmes dans le Parc (VFP), GIV’s annual public and outdoor screening of new works from an open call. We trace how this event serves to “call in” artists to build feminist community and continually change GIV’s definition of who their community is.
Access status: Open Access ,
Canadian Cultural Nationalism in the Time of Digital Platforms: Reframing Proposed Amendments to the Broadcasting Act
(University of Toronto Press, 2023-03-24) Bourcheix-Laporte, Mariane
Background: Last amended in 1991, the Broadcasting Act has recently been the object of legislative reform projects with the aim of incorporating online broadcasting into the existing legislative and regulatory framework and expanding the diversity representation mandate of the Canadian broadcasting system. Analysis: The article analyzes proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Act iterated in the third and final version of Bill C-10 (2021) and in the current version of Bill C-11 (2022) and develops a critical analysis of their implications vis-à-vis discursive constructions of Canadian cultural nationalism and the model of cultural citizenship that it fosters. Conclusion and implications: Proposed amendments recuperate the cultural nationalist logic that underscores Canadian cultural policy’s efforts to secure cultural sovereignty. In the legislative reform project, this logic manifests through the continued economization of cultural production in the digital era and the perpetuation of a settler colonial vision of cultural citizenship that remains skewed by ethnolinguistic hierarchies.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Videotape Exchange Networks to On-Demand Streaming Platforms: The Circulation of Independent Canadian Film and Video in the Digital Era
(Routledge, 2023-02-28) Bourcheix-Laporte, Mariane
This chapter discusses the adoption of digital circulation practices by the Canadian independent media arts community. It positions digital modes of media circulation in continuity with the grassroots videotape exchange networks that were developed by community-thirsty media artists and activists in the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter explores how the Canadian independent media arts network has historically operated, and continues to operate, in parallel to commercial media production and distribution networks. Video had a magnetic importance. Ramon Lobato defines distribution as: “the movement of media through space and time”. This is a broad definition, but it usefully emphasizes the circulation of media, without tying it to a specific technology or medium. Today, Canada boasts hundreds of media arts centres, festivals, and collectives that support the production, exhibition, and distribution of media artworks in mediums ranging from analogue film and digital video, to sound art and new media, to augmented and virtual reality.
Access status: Open Access ,
Diasporic Archives and Hauntological Accretions
(University of St Andrews, 2022-02-18) Chew, May
Centering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers.
Access status: Open Access ,
Everything is Permitted; Nothing is Possible: Desire and Labour Under Late Capitalism
(2021-08) Bogoch, Madeline
Everything is Permitted; Nothing is Possible: Desire and Labour Under Late Capitalism is a program curated by Madeline Bogoch for Archive/Counter-Archive. The program was streamable on VUCAVU.com from August 18 - 25, 2021. The films were selected to elicit the complex relationship between capitalism and desire both in terms of the libidinal capture of consumerism, and also the utopian potential Jones refers to. In the same interview, Jones very cautiously speaks of his nostalgia for a bygone era of queerness when “sex was still able to create a space for resistance and individual/collective agency.” Produced across a span of several decades, these films express varying attitudes towards the utopian potential of sexuality against the instrumentalization of desire in neoliberalism, and the politics of both labour and sex.
Access status: Open Access ,
‘Yours in Sisterhood’: Rethinking the Feminist Archive at the 2018 Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal
(Concordia University, 2019) Rémy, Lola
Like the statue of Apollo, emerging from the Mediterranean off the shores of Gaza after centuries (maybe) underwater (L’Apollon de Gaza, Nicolas Wadimoff, 2018, 78 mins), many films from the 2018 Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) festival focused on the labour of unearthing old materials archived away. In different ways, the films document this labour, as well as the materials’ political potential to move us despite their temporal distance. Indeed, by inviting experimental filmmaker and archivist Rick Prelinger to a series of screening sessions and master classes on the theme of “Archives, Popular Documentary, NYC,” RIDM encouraged a reflection and discussion on the intersection of documentaries, archives, and urban landscapes. Some films follow the vein of Prelinger’s Panorama Ephemera (2004, 90 mins) by reflecting on the public history of specific countries through the lens of found footage. For example, Kristina Konrad’s Unas Preguntas (237 mins) and Ruth Beckermann’s The Waldheim Waltz (93 mins) both use public archives and personal footage from the 1980s to reflect on the history of Uruguay and Austria, respectively. These films bring forward a reflection on democracy and social movements with hindsight. In The Image You Missed (93 mins), Donal Foreman takes a more personal approach to the matter by entangling footage shot by his late father, documentarist Arthur MacCaig, with his own, in order to revisit a part of Irish history in parallel with his complicated relationship with his father. On the other hand, in two powerful experimental documentaries—Salomé Lamas’ Extinction (85 mins) and Talena Sanders’ Between My Flesh And The World’s Fingers (31 mins; unfortunately paired with the unabashedly masculine 4 Years In 10 Minutes by Mladen Kovacevic)—it is the landscape that comes to bear the trace of history, becoming a public and private archive. Whether it is in the form of decaying soviet architecture, or in the paths and mountains of Montana, both films create an intimate, essayistic vision of history. Sanders’ film turns to the life and work of American poet Mary MacLane by interlacing archival footage and re-enactments, superimposed with text from her diary. What is striking from this juxtaposition of text, archives, and footage of nature is the contemporaneity of MacLane’s writings on sexuality and nature. In a Q&A, the director expressed her intention to recall the sensuality and physical embodiment of her texts in the filmic form, engaging in a dialogue with them through time. However, for this review, I chose to reflect on a documentary that expands the concept of archival film, and which deeply moved me, as it resonates with my concerns as a scholar and a young woman: Yours in Sisterhood, directed and produced by Irene Lusztig (2018, 102 mins).
Access status: Open Access ,
Introduction to the Issue: Sensing the Archive
(University of St Andrews, 2022-02-17) Russell, Catherine
The seemingly endless pandemic lockdown has generated a flourishing cultural economy of media archives brought to life. Feature-length (or more) essay films on Timothy Leary (My Psychedelic Love Story, Errol Morris 2020), The Beegees, (The Beegees: How Can you Mend a Broken Heart, Frank Marshall, 2020) The Beatles (Get Back, Peter Jackson 2022), Tina Turner (Tina, Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, 2021) and the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 (Summer of Soul [or when the Revolution could not be Televised…]), Questlove, 2021) and many more, have taken archival film practices mainstream, using digital tools to remake histories of popular culture that are affective, sensorial, and experiential. Media artists and scholars have likewise been drawn to the vast archives of 20th century culture for encounters with the images and sounds of the past. This work enables us to redefine our place in a historical nexus of imagination and memory where trauma, struggle and injustice can be confronted along with new ways of plotting the future. Beyond the glitter of celebrity culture thousands of artists are excavating and recycling to create new modes of being in the world, and they do so with one eye on the revived sounds and images, and another focused on the sources, the labour, the technologies, and the desires of media archives and archivists as progenitors of history.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Annotated Archive of Archival Resources
(2025) Albaret, Eloïse; Chawla, Shaurya; Foster, Monica; Gow, Thomas; Landry, Xavier; LeJeune, Chance; Liu, Sijia; Myers, Riley; Piazzi, Mikaela; Russell, Catherine; Schmidt, Julien; Stelmazuk-Payeur, Yuri; Stewart-Lee, Jess; Sun, Dennis Ziheng; Thomson, Samuel; Vasilakos, Nikolas; Zhang, Muxin
The Annotated Archive of Archival Resources is a new educational resource that is produced and managed by A/CA members Katie Russell and Sam Thomson at Concordia University. This project takes the form of a shared Zotero bibliography with annotated entries submitted from researchers across the Archive/Counter-Archive research network. The aim of this project is to provide an accessible, public-facing resource to facilitate researchers in finding scholarship relevant to the study and creation of audiovisual archives by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. It offers a categorized and annotated listing of important works from diverse bodies of scholarship related to this central topic. The Annotated Archive of Archival Resources is integrated with Zotero to make use of the platform's searchability and capacity for sharing and formatting bibliographic data. With Zotero's tag system, researchers using the bibliography are able to filter scholarly resources by a wide variety of topics and easily locate annotations that address their specific fields of inquiry. This record includes a ris file which can be imported into bibliographic software like Zotero.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Changing Nova Scotia: Margaret Perry’s Film Bureau Archive (1945-1969), A Guide for Social Studies 8
(2022) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle; Supnet, Leslie; Ramsay, Brett
ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. The guides are easily adaptable to different grades and subjects, and educators are encouraged to use these guides as a starting point to create their own lesson plans. Each guide contains important additional context for the materials featured, including information on key participants, essays and reflections, and synopses of selected works for classroom discussion. The guides also include critical discussion questions oriented toward a range of topics to encourage students and teachers to engage critically with A/CA’s archival materials by making connections between their context of creation and contemporary issues and experiences. Margaret Perry is one of Canada’s most important, most prolific, yet least-known woman filmmakers and early film bureaucrats. Perry’s films are complex artefacts that merit careful and critical reflection. During her 24 years at the helm of the Nova Scotia Film Bureau, Perry oversaw the production and direction of over 50 films. Yet, because not much is known about her work as a filmmaker, Perry’s films have been dismissed, often without being seen, on charges of their “anti-modern” depictions of Nova Scotia. And yet, Perry’s films are significant for their creative depictions of a place and time about which limited film records remain and as a cinematic testament to the career of a trail-blazing and visionary filmmaker. The five downloadable guides listed below reintroduce and critically reframe Margaret Perry and the contribution of her films. They include important contextual information about Perry and her films, a lists of films suggested for classroom viewing, film synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. They also suggest supplementary films and resources to complement the gaps present in Perry’s work. Guide for Social Studies 8 This guide has been specifically designed for use in the Grade 8 Social Studies classroom. However, Margaret Perry’s collection of films would be a rich resource for teaching across the curriculum, in all Intermediate and Secondary grades, in subjects such as Social Studies, History, Geography, Technology Studies, Economics, Civics, and Media Studies.
Access status: Open Access ,
Toronto Living with AIDS Cable Access Video Series (1990-1991), A Guide for Postsecondary Education
(2022) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle; Supnet, Leslie; Ramsay, Brett
"ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. The guides are easily adaptable to different grades and subjects, and educators are encouraged to use these guides as a starting point to create their own lesson plans. Each guide contains important additional context for the materials featured, including information on key participants, essays and reflections, and synopses of selected works for classroom discussion. The guides also include critical discussion questions oriented toward a range of topics to encourage students and teachers to engage critically with A/CA’s archival materials by making connections between their context of creation and contemporary issues and experiences. Toronto Living With AIDS (TLWA) was a 1990-91 public access cable TV program that provided information about HIV/AIDS directly to affected communities. A series of 30-minute videos were created by artists, activists, and community organizations responding to the AIDS crisis. They drew on ideas and strategies from video and performance art, but also employed innovative methods of communication to meet their community-oriented goals. TLWA was coordinated by Michael Balser and John Greyson in collaboration with numerous artists and community organizations, and was screened on cable access television. This educational guide includes important contextual information for the series as a whole, including information on key participants, a critical reflection on the social, political and media contexts, a glossary and suggested further reading. It also suggests a list of five films from the series for classroom viewing, offering film synopses and discussion questions focused on this list."
Access status: Open Access ,
Beyond the Narrative: Asynchronicity and Fragmentation in Canadian Queer Experimental Film (1990-2000) - A Guide for Postsecondary Education
(2023) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle; Brossat, Gregory
"ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This guide introduces a selection of queer experimental films and videos curated by Chris Chong Chan Fui. It includes a curatorial essay written by Chong, a list of 4 works suggested for classroom viewing, synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas."
Access status: Open Access ,
Cable access queer: revisiting Toronto Living with AIDS (1990-1991)
(2021) Conrad, Ryan
Analyzing the Canadian AIDS activist community television series Toronto Living With AIDS provides insight into how this extraordinary program came to be, how it was received by various imagined publics, how it ended, and why revisiting this series is useful for today’s video activists.
Access status: Open Access ,
Beyond the Narrative: Identity in Crisis in Midi Onodera’s Short Films A Guide for Postsecondary Education
(2023) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle; Brossat, Gregory
ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This guide introduces a selection of films by Midi Onodera curated by Axelle Demus and Chloë Brushwood Rose. It includes a curatorial essay by Axelle Demus, a list of 6 films suggested for classroom viewing, synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students and reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that Ten Cents A Dance (Parallax) (1985) contains explicit sexual content. We recommend informing your students that this content is part of the film before you watch it with them. As part of the project, Archive/Counter-Archive has produced a number of educational guides. All A/CA guides are available digitally and for free at counterarchive.ca
Access status: Open Access ,
Beyond the Narrative: Experimental Approaches to Lesbian “Sex Talk” (1977-1997) A Guide for Postsecondary Education
(2023) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle; Brossat, Gregory
ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This guide introduces a selection of films curated by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney. It includes a curatorial essay by Meyer and McKinney, a list of 5 films suggested for classroom viewing, synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students and reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that Ten Cents A Dance (Parallax) (1985) contains explicit sexual content. We recommend informing your students that this content is part of the film before you watch it with them. As part of the project, Archive/Counter-Archive has produced a number of educational guides. All A/CA guides are available digitally and for free at counterarchive.ca

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