Archival Imaginaries

Abstract

Besides presenting a creative account of reality, in a digital format, interactive documentary plays with the interconnectedness of intermediality by assembling various audio and visual sensory modalities, including moving images, photography, illustration, animation, text, and sound (Whitelaw 2002; Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Nash 2021). Following this train of thought, the use of archival footage may open up creative possibilities, as it entails the repurposing of historical, institutional, or personal audiovisual materials into new narratives. Several authors (Russel 1999; Bruzzi 2006; Haggith 2012; Baron 2014) have significantly contributed to the critical reflection on the use of archives within traditional documentary forms, taking into account the historical, creative, and ethical layers of such content manipulation. The use of archives in interactive documentaries, on the other hand, is still a topic that requires more critical analysis, as archival footage drifts from its indexical nature (Haggith 2012) through decontextualization or repurposing, affecting the textuality of the interactive narrative. This paper aims to merge these two territories and afford an analysis of how archival footage contributes to an epistemological account of reality in interactive documentaries. Drawing upon De Jong’s (2012) taxonomy to classify how archives are used in traditional documentaries, we analyze how Welcome to Pine Point (Simmons and Shoebridge 2011) and A Short History of the Highrise (Cizek 2013) reuse and repurpose analogue archives, while interplay these archival materials with other multimedia formats. De Jong (2012) identifies the following uses of archive footage: i) the archive as an illustration; ii) as a historical backdrop; iii) a metaphorical tool; iv) a narrative resource; v) and the archive as legal evidence. Furthermore, we analyze the interactive documentaries through the concept of “archive-image” (Didi-Huberman, 2008); i. e. the meaning deriving from how archives are used in interactive documentaries and how such footage is placed in the navigation structure of the interface, contributing to the multimodal narrative. We argue that interactive documentary provides a territory of engagement and continuous momentum to revive the past by using the archive as historical validation, as well as a space of shared collective memories while remaining open to new readings, engendering multiple archival imaginaries.