Confronting the Empire: Militant archival practices in testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai film

This essay argues that a queer archive in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son (2007) recovers the historical Mexican figure Nahui Olin and allows the trans protagonist to navigate less tangible inheritances, including a destructive romantic legacy and a complex Mexican American identity. This essay asks whether, and how, inheritances can be curated and posits that queer archival practices are useful for simultaneously drawing from and rejecting powerful familial and cultural legacies. At the end the essay situates Like Son as part of a group of contemporary Chicana/o texts that claim control over the access and representation of Chicana/o histories and imagine queer futures through queer archives and archival practices. The affective and political possibilities of these queer archives further discourse of the interdisciplinary archival turn. U.S. multiethnic literature is often lauded for helping to fill in the gaps of the dominant historical archive by providing access to silenced histories of the Americas, yet contemporary Chicana/o texts such as Like Son also challenge the epistemologies and power structures that undergird institutional archives.

We have learned from the debate on diversity and inclusion that archiving is not neutral or unbiased even though it is presented in this way. Seen from the perspective of cultural humility, we need to keep learning and challenge power imbalances from both the individual and the organizational level. This article discusses what this means for digital preservation concepts.

The aim of the article is to investigate the history of the formation and current state of development of archiving of audiovisual heritage in Great Britain. The research methodology is based on a system of modern basic scientifi c pproaches (socio-cultural, systemic, interdisciplinary) and a set of general scientifi c methods – bibliographic, comparative-historical, retrospective, empirical (descriptive), critical, typological, of system analysis. The tendencies of the organization of British audiovisual archives, means and methods of formation of collectives and infrastructure are analyzed. The following methods were used: genetic, inductive, historical, comparative, as well as systematization, generalization, classifi cation. A special place in the study is occupied by the art history approach, within which, in particular, morphological analysis allowed to distinguish the genre-species structure of audiovisual heritage in individual centers of its storage. The scientifi c novelty of the study is that for the fi rst time the main reasons for the foundation and some historical stories of 4 key centers for audiovisual heritage in the UK are traced: the Imperial War Museum, the National Archive of the British Film Institute, the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales; and also revealed the composition of the documents concentrated there – an important component of world cultural heritage. The historical role of British archivists in the development of the theory and practice of audiovisual archiving is shown. The peculiarities of the British archival policy, focused (in pre-Internet times) primarily on the formation and preservation of audiovisual collections and its impact on the world practice of audiovisual archiving, are analyzed. Changes in the priorities of archives' activity in the context of digital transformation and integration into the digital media space are identifi ed. Emphasis is placed on archival initiatives in the direction of providing and updating the information and source potential of audiovisual collections. The peculiarities of the British model of organization of archiving of audiovisual heritage and functional specifi cs of its separate subjects are revealed. It is concluded that in the future the main research interest should be focused on the formation of a network of regional audiovisual archives and modern strategies for audiovisual archiving with relevant practices.

Content-based video retrieval is maturing to the point where it can be used in real-world retrieval practices. One such practice is the audiovisual archive, whose users increasingly require fine-grained access to broadcast television content. We investigate to what extent content-based video retrieval methods can improve search in the audiovisual archive. In particular, we propose an evaluation methodology tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of the audiovisual archive, which are typically missed by existing evaluation initiatives. We utilize logged searches and content purchases from an existing audiovisual archive to create realistic query sets and relevance judgments. To reflect the retrieval practice of both the archive and the video retrieval community as closely as possible, our experiments with three video search engines incorporate archive-created catalog entries as well as state-of-the-art multimedia content analysis results. We find that incorporating content-based video retrieval into the archive's practice results in significant performance increases for shot retrieval and for retrieving entire television programs. Our experiments also indicate that individual content-based retrieval methods yield approximately equal performance gains. We conclude that the time has come for audiovisual archives to start accommodating content-based video retrieval methods into their daily practice.

This article examines how community audiovisual archiving shapes the production and representation of collective identity in a diasporic setting. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among Polish Highlanders in Chicago, the study contrasts a bottom-up audiovisual Polish Highlanders Archive run by Władysław Mrowca with the documentation practices of the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America. Mrowca’s Archive operates partly as a complement to institutionalized archival practices, partly in response to its blind spots, and at times in tension with the Alliance’s logics and priorities. The analysis shows that bottom-up community audiovisual archiving challenges institutional archival authority across three interrelated dimensions of archival practice: content, medium, and access. Specifically, the case illustrates how including home movies and other informal recordings expands the representational field beyond institutional narratives; how amateur video foregrounds the ordinary as a form of archival evidence; and how open online circulation challenges institutional authority over representations. The article argues that community audiovisual archiving does not shape collective identity in isolation, but in relation to institutional archival practices. This perspective positions archival diasporas—understood as the circulation and reassembly of dispersed records—as central to the formation of the diasporic archive.

Content-based video retrieval is maturing to the point where it can be used in real-world retrieval practices. One such practice is the audiovisual archive, whose users increasingly require fine-grained access to broadcast television content. In this paper, we take into account the information needs and retrieval data already present in the audiovisual archive, and demonstrate that retrieval performance can be significantly improved when content-based methods are applied to search. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the practice of an audiovisual archive has been taken into account for quantitative retrieval evaluation. To arrive at our main result, we propose an evaluation methodology tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of the audiovisual archive, which are typically missed by existing evaluation initiatives. We utilize logged searches, content purchases, session information, and simulators to create realistic query sets and relevance judgments. To reflect the retrieval practice of both the archive and the video retrieval community as closely as possible, our experiments with three video search engines incorporate archive-created catalog entries as well as state-of-the-art multimedia content analysis results. A detailed query-level analysis indicates that individual content-based retrieval methods such as transcript-based retrieval and concept-based retrieval yield approximately equal performance gains. When combined, we find that content-based video retrieval incorporated into the archive's practice results in significant performance increases for shot retrieval and for retrieving entire television programs. The time has come for audiovisual archives to start accommodating content-based video retrieval methods into their daily practice.

This paper describes large access projects at two archives whose holdings are very different from those of most of the archives and libraries described by the participants in this symposium. Their collections consisted mostly of paper, text, or material culture. Audiovisual archives, and the audiovisual collections held in other kinds of institutions, present very specific problems when it comes to preservation and access. Today, most paper archives have growing collections of audio and video material. In this paper I have tried to provide information of interest to all archives as well specific information for audiovisual archives. In my discussions below I will refer mostly to audio formats, but as video recordings suffer from many of the same problems, my observations can also be extended to them. Since I have directed audiovisual archives since 1982, my experience spans the digital divide and allows me to comment on the continuities as well as the differences between archival practices in the pre-digital era and today.

Given the enormous backlog at audiovisual archives and the generally global level of item description, collection disclosure and item access are both at risk. At the same time, archival practice is seeking to evolve from the analogue to the digital world. CHoral investigates the role automatic annotation and search technology can play in improving disclosure and access of digitized spoken word collections during and after this transfer. The core business of the CHoral project is to design and build technology for spoken document retrieval for heritage collections. In this paper, we will argue that in addition to solving technological issues, closer attention is needed for the work-flow and daily practice at audiovisual archives on the one hand, and the state-of-the-art in technology on the other. Analysis of the interplay is needed to ensure that new developments are mutually beneficial and that continuing cooperation can indeed bring envisioned advancements.

“I am not afraid to look.” – Tom Hurndall, 2003. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, Tom Hurndall, a photography student at Manchester Metropolitan University, travelled from Manchester to the Middle East to witness the horrors in Iraq and then later in Palestine. Tom was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier on 11 April 2003 whilst attempting to rescue two children trapped by Israeli sniper fire. He later died in hospital on 13 January 2004 without gaining consciousness. He is remembered for his determination to bear witness to the conflict in Palestine and his bravery to capture the atrocities directed towards the suppression of the Palestine people. This book is a collection of lectures written by reputable scholars who offer diverse perspectives on the historical, political and cultural struggles in Palestine. Encompassed in the pages are sixteen chapters produced for the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group. Unlike predecessors of this topic, this book offers a thought-provoking and comprehensive analysis of Palestine, including architectural, cultural, legal, sociological, and psychological questions, providing a larger scope of study that has not yet been done before. Ultimately, this book explores oppression in Palestine and beyond in the Middle East. The vast study and in-depth exploration makes this an ideal book for those who are interested in the Palestine conflict, Zionism, Israel and further conflict in the Middle East, as well as a necessity for those who are studying the topic in education settings.

Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jirí Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks? Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kríženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic function and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age. The specific clashes between the figurative and material spheres are understood through the concept of a “crack-up.” This term, developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and theoretically reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, allows us to capture the convoluted relationship between figuration and materiality as inherent to the medium of film, containing negativity and productivity, difference and simultaneity, contingency and fate, at the same time, even within the tiniest cinematic units.

This introductory article reflects on how this special issue rethinks the role of audiovisual archives in shaping cultural memory, historiography, and institutional authority, with a particular focus on the liminal status of Eastern Europe. Bringing together scholars, archivists, and artists from across the region, it shifts attention from film as a finished text to archiving as a dynamic and contested process shaped by material fragility, individual agency, and institutional shortcomings. Contributors examine how archival labour—collecting, cataloguing, digitising, and curating—is embedded in wider struggles over historical visibility and cultural legitimacy in post-socialist contexts. Through case studies of state and private collections, Holocaust footage reuse, and the remediation of communist-era materials, the issue shows how memory is actively negotiated through practices of access, repurposing, and refusal. By foregrounding overlooked infrastructures and actors—such as editors, curators, and artist-researchers—it offers new methodological perspectives within archival media studies. Collectively, these contributions challenge assumptions of archival neutrality and reposition Eastern European archival practices as vital sites for rethinking media history, memory, and the ethics of historical interpretation.

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings:An Indian Baseball Story Emily Lederman (bio) Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. "Documents lie," she says casually. —Miko Kings 28 Contemporary American Indian texts engage with the materials of colonial US archives to highlight their complicity in the genocide and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Archival practices of documentation, including missionary records, the mapping of land, and the collecting or theft of artifacts and stories, are revealed as tools of settler colonialism mobilized to justify genocidal state practices. Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. Well-read authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), confront the limitations of the colonial archive and emphasize Indigenous modes of accessing, organizing, and preserving histories in their fictional texts. Contemporary American Indian novels continue to chart the violences of US colonial archives and offer a way out of a narrow historical lens. These novels open up historical possibilities and deepen historical understanding in part by repurposing colonial archival documents within Indigenous narratives and epistemologies. I focus on LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) in this article because the text explicitly theorizes and models the construction of a decolonial archive using real and fictionalized documents. [End Page 64] Placing work of the interdisciplinary "archival turn" in conversation with the tribally specific, I call collections of document, story, object, and ephemera "archives" throughout this article in order to legitimize them as sources of historical knowledge and sites of knowledge production. Such collections are uniquely powerful because they occur outside of institutions; as feminist and queer archivists have demonstrated, calling personal collections and ephemera "archives" "remains a powerful authorizing act" (Eichhorn 15). Decolonial archives are mediums for preserving and accessing history that privilege Indigenous epistemologies and deauthorize the written document as the definitive record of what has past. The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). Therefore, to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. Decolonial archives both enact Indigenous epistemologies and dismantle a narrow colonial historical lens characterized by Manifest Destiny and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and political systems. Formed outside of institutions, they redefine archival possibilities. The intentional inclusion of Indigenous narratives and epistemologies within institutions can also produce decolonial archives.1 My focus here is how literature creates decolonial archives by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame. Revealing the constructed nature of colonial historical narratives, American Indian contemporary texts tell tribally specific histories with the help of materials from the colonial archive. Both decentering and repurposing the materials of the colonial archive is a decolonizing archival practice, an act of what I call "archival sovereignty." Archival sovereignty is achieved in literature that takes control of both Indigenous histories and the colonial historical record. In addition to providing an alternative Indigenous archive, these texts decolonize the archive by intimately engaging with the colonial record. I choose the term "sovereignty" because of the work it does in marking the complex politics [End Page 65] of tribal struggles for self-determination within the context of US colonialism. Sovereignty points both to a history of tribal autonomy longer than the colonial gaze and to the necessity of working across borders, including with European American structures of power.2 I follow Jace Weaver's (Cherokee) formulation of sovereignty as both useful within colonial power structures and independent of their powers of bestowal. The archives I describe in this article are at once autonomous and in negotiation with the colonial archive. My use...

This article explores several versions of Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film ¡Qué viva México! (1932) assembled by different filmmakers in the 1930s, 1970s and 1990s. While each one of the versions claimed to ‘get as close to Eisenstein's vision as possible’ soon after its release it was judged to represent yet another example of inaccurate reading and reconstruction of the unattainable, but allegedly perfect, vision of Eisenstein. By the same token, none of the versions has ever been considered and acknowledged in its own right: in terms of what it reveals, rather than lacks. Reversing this historical trend I approach the multiple versions of ¡Qué viva México! as a unique methodological opportunity offering material testimony of how values and readings shift and mutate through time, how judgements of taste and beauty are intertwined with changing ideologies and politics, and how the ‘death of the author’ ushers in not the unlimited freedom to read and interpret texts but historically specific and constrained ways of engaging with authorial vision. As such, this discussion of ¡Qué viva México! bears on another important issue – material plurality of film as a condition of film study – and becomes instrumental in forging a productive alliance between film theory, film history, and curatorial and archival practice.

Many experimental found footage films base their meanings and effects on an interaction between the figurative content of the image and its material-technological underpinnings. Can this interaction arise accidentally without artistic appropriation? A recently digitised film by the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (1908), presents such an exercise in accidental aesthetics. At one point, the horizontal and vertical trembling of the cinematograph – obtained from the Lumière brothers – translates into a trembling of the figures on the bridge so precisely that the figurative and material spheres appear to cooperate towards a common aesthetic goal. To account for such phenomena, film theory, found footage filmmaking, and archival practice need to join forces with philosophy. More specifically, Gilbert Simondon's notion of transduction, a process based on the intersection of diverse realities within a domain, allows us to conceptualise the paradoxical interaction between the figurative and material dimensions and the unintentional meanings that arise out of it. Transduction enables the distribution of elements between these heterogeneous spheres while maintaining a certain stability within a system. In the case of archival films in which transduction occurs without prior intention or expectation, transduction can be foregrounded and prolonged. The connection between transduction and the “trembling meaning” of Opening Ceremony, understood within the wider context of camera instability in experimental found footage, will uncover the aesthetic potentialities held by the autonomous creativity of film matter and its interferences with the figurative content.

Reviewed by: From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition Diana Little (bio) From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition; BY Giovanna Fossati ; Amsterdam University Press, 2009 The rapidly encroaching shift to digital in motion picture production, archiving, and projection increasingly inspires rhetoric focused on either the overwhelming problems that technological changes create or the magnificent [End Page 109] opportunities they provide. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Giovanna Fossati's cool-headed study of films and how we watch and take care of them at this moment in technological history, manages to balance these reactions. An archival perspective on the film-to-digital transition has thus far largely been tackled in journal and technical magazine articles, blog posts, and symposia, but with the exception of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences report The Digital Dilemma, 1 this is the first book-length consideration of the topic. It is a thorough and perceptive examination that leaves few theoretical and practical stones unturned. Fossati endeavors early and often to remind her reader that technology changes rapidly enough to require a constant revision of the discussion points addressed here. The nexus of the transitional period under examination is the decade preceding the book's 2009 publication date, and a year out, it does not yet feel dated, though one can imagine that reading it ten years from now would be a different experience. From Grain to Pixel's relatively spare and slightly perplexing table of contents becomes more useful once the book's structure has been explained, and luckily this happens in the first pages. The book is organized into four chapters that are split between two parts. Part 1 offers a well-studied discussion of how the current transition to digital is shaping the techniques used both in film production and in archiving and enumerates parallels in the two worlds. Within Part 1, chapter 1 looks at the practical impact this transition is having on how we create and use motion pictures, while chapter 2 gives an overview of some theoretical perspectives that the reader can use to help understand the transition and how it affects the way we view film (literally and figuratively). Part 2 takes a deeper look at the ideas explored in Part 1 by considering real-world examples of archives and restorers grappling with the digital transition. The first chapter of Part 2, chapter 3, associates specific archives and restoration labs with frameworks and concepts introduced in the first half of the book by analyzing each institution's general approach to dealing with archival film. Chapter 4 uses restoration case studies to break down the ethical, artistic, and technological decisions made by these institutions. This last section is the most concrete and specific but continues to make use of the theoretical work introduced in chapter 2. Fossati begins by looking at how the current digital mania might affect the day-to-day and larger choices made in film archives. She illustrates how, historically and currently, archival practice is influenced by, parallels, and diverges from film production and post-production practice. Developments in digital technology may first affect the way new motion pictures are made and presented, but the influence quickly trickles down to the archives. For example, advances in digital effects and the strong trend toward the use of digital intermediates in feature film postproduction have facilitated the development of tools that allow restorers of older films to repair the ravages of time and neglect to a degree that was barely imaginable in an analog past. An excellent overview of the digital restoration process provides the necessary background to understand the case studies described later on. Though issues surrounding digital restoration increasingly dominate the conversation as the book progresses, the discussion of various modes of digital access in chapter 1 will be more relevant to staff of institutions holding smaller film collections, as they may find this to be the area where digital technology most affects their work, at least for the moment. Chapter 2 explores how film and new media theory can be used to shape thinking about motion pictures in the...