Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files

Abstract

Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.