The Otolith Group’s “Monuments to Dead Television.” Independent Cinema and the Migrant Experience in Europe between Television and the Museum

Beatrice Ferrara

doi:10.5195/cinej.2013.78

Abstract

“Monument to dead television” is the expression the British collective The Otolith Group uses to define its activity of recuperating long-lost quality films, and re-screening them in contemporary art museums and gallery spaces. What these films share is a cinematic vocation and a complex approach to the question of memory and migration in Europe, and to the role of images as testimonies or documents. This essay explores The Otolith Group’s interest in such forgotten archives of modern television in order to unearth their significance for contemporary museums today.

Highlights

This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
Since 2007, the collective has been engaged in the activity of “excavating” and “reframing” long-lost quality films: recuperating and re-screening them in contemporary art museums and galleries
— as I shall explore of the essay — what seems to motivate The Otolith Group’s interests for TV works such as those by the Black Audio Film Collective and Chris Marker seems to be, first of all, the fact that they function as a reminder of a time when the themes of identity and postcolonial migrations in Europe were being articulated and developed by independent cinema with such a force, and to such an extent, so as to foster the opening of new public media circuits

Summary

Introduction

The attention of the Group has focused so far on two major works of “excavation.” The first one is the retrospective The Ghosts of Songs — a re-presentation of the entire filmic corpus produced between 1982 and 1998 by the British experimental group Black Audio Film Collective, and originally broadcast (albeit not in its entirety) on BBC Channel 4.3 The second — the artwork Inner Time of Television — is an experiment of re-screening of the thirteen episodes of the TV-serial L’héritage de la chouette, realized in 1989 by French artist Chris Marker for the French channel La Sept.4 What these films share is a complex approach to the question of memory and migration in Europe, and to the role of images as testimonies or CINEJ Cinema Journal: The Otolith Group’s “Monuments to Dead Television.”

Results

Conclusion