Archival Footage Research Articles

SATYAJIT RAY AS A DOCUMENTARIAN: A STUDY ON RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND SUKUMAR RAY

Satyajit Ray, renowned globally for his cinematic brilliance, also left an indelible mark as a documentary filmmaker. It is to be mentioned here that the literatures and writings on Ray’s documentary are very less in number. Ray's documentaries on Rabindranath Tagore encapsulate the multifaceted persona of the Nobel laureate, exploring his literary contributions, artistic vision, and philosophical ideologies. Through meticulous research and visual finesse, Ray elucidates Tagore's timeless relevance, weaving together archival footage and dramatic reenactments to present a holistic portrayal of the poet's life and legacy. In his exploration of Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray ventures into the whimsical world of children's literature and satire to commemorate the centenary birth anniversary.This paper tries to discuss on documentaries made by Ray with special emphasis on Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray. Besides reviewing relevant literatures, the researchers have tried to describe two documentaries vividly. In addition to this, they also have taken insightful interviews of three literary and film scholars to understand Ray as documentarian. The interviews were analysed and conclusion have been drawn on the basis of that. The paper shows, beyond mere biographical documentation, Satyajit Ray's documentaries serve as nuanced reflections on the socio-cultural milieu of their respective times, offering profound insights into the artistic legacies of Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray. The paper serves to highlight the intricate nature of Ray's documentary legacy and its ongoing significance in influencing conversations within Indian cinema.

Time Never Regained: Film, Memory and History in Mila Turajlić’s Labudović Reels

Abstract The article reviews the documentary film diptych The Labudović Reels by film-maker Mila Turajlić. Based on her archival work at the Filmske Novosti production company, Turajlić discovers the legacy of hitherto unknown cinematographer Stevan Labudović. Both films are hybrid documentaries that combine archive footage with interview-style documentary, and both focus on two intertwined thematic cycles – Labudović’s coverage of the Algerian war of independence (1959–1961) and the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (1960–1961). Conceptually, Turajlić’s films engage thought-provoking matrixes, among them Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire and, more especially, Walter Benjamin’s reflections on historical progress. This review finds that the implementation of the latter blurs the boundary between the critique of the idea of progress and historical relativism, which leads to the confusing presence of mutually exclusive voices in Turajlić’s film, one calling for the reappropriation of the past, and another calling that same past into question.

Video Inpainting with Local and Global Refinement

Video inpainting is a crucial task in computer vision and video editing, involving in removing unnecessary objects and restoration of missing or corrupted regions within a video sequence. One approach that has gained prominence in recent years is the combination of local and global refinement techniques. This innovative strategy leverages the strengths of both local and global information to produce high-quality inpainted videos. In the context of video inpainting, local refinement focuses on accurately restoring missing or damaged regions by considering nearby pixels or frames. Encoder-decoder network can be employed to fill in gaps with content that seamlessly blends with the surrounding context. On the other hand, global refinement seeks to ensure temporal consistency and smooth transitions between frames, preventing noticeable artifacts or jittering in the inpainted video. In conclusion, by seamlessly blending local and global inpainting strategies, these methods can effectively remove unwanted elements from videos while preserving both spatial and temporal coherence. This technology finds applications in video editing, restoration of damaged archival footage, and even in the entertainment industry for special effects and scene corrections, ultimately contributing to the improvement of video quality and aesthetics. Keywords: Video Inpainting, Local and Global Refinement, Encoder-Decoder network, Recurrent Flow Completion, mask-guided sparse video Transformer, dual-domain propagation.

La Bayadère’s Nikiya vs. the Indian Hereditary Dancing Caste

Marius Petipa’s 1877 La Bayadère, inspired by F. Taglioni’s Le Dieu et La Bayadère as well as the opera Les Bayadères, presents the story of Indian temple dancer Nikiya and her navigation of a love triangle, ending in murder and tragedy. The character of Nikiya was inspired by Indian Bharatanatyam dancers, also known as temple dancers or Devadasis. Europe's primary exposure to this classical dance form occurred in 1838, when a troupe of “Devadasis” visited Paris on a tour of Europe, leading to several choreographers' Western adaptations in ballet. France, in particular, 's fascination with Indian culture can be correlated with France's loss of Indian territory to Great Britain in the previous century. However, most of Europe indulged in the exotic Indian "other." But Western recreations of Indian culture all too often misconstrued reality with a fantasized Oriental world. How does Nikiya's character contrast from the authentic Bharatnatyam dancers that inspired her creation?Nikiya's costuming, choreography, casting, and pieces of her plotline stray from the Indian culture and temple dancers she derives from. I use archival footage of the Bolshoi Ballet's 2013 performance of La Bayadère as well as footage of Bharatanatyam dance from Tanjore Balasaraswati's form, which upholds the traditions of the dance style. In addition, I use historical recounts covering Marius Petipa, the Devadasi European tour of 1938, Bharatanatyam dance, colonialism in India, and Indian-influenced ballets. I review Marius Petipa's diary entries as a primary source in my research. Ultimately, I argue that the only way for Western audiences to appreciate Indian temple dance was through the creation of the Westernized Nikiya.

WAR-FOCUSED SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY AS A TOOL FOR GLOBAL CHANGE

The article observes the war-focused social documentary use while calling for global change. It considers a form of documentary photography within the idea to draw the wide public's attention to vital ongoing war-caused social problems and issues.
 We also characterize social documentary as a critical genre of photography, dedicated to reflection of the life of different people, underprivileged or disadvantaged as a result of the war. The terms “war”, and “war of aggression” are concretized. It is also stated, that while conversations, political speeches, press reports or publications, the word “war” may be used to express any serious struggle, strife or campaign. Thus, references are frequently made to “war on corruption”, “war against drug dillers”, “war of worlds” or “war of genders”: the metaphor of war usually serves to convey the stressfullness of the situation, and such a metaphor must not be taken literally.
 Also, the difference between Social Documentary and Photojournalism is characterized: photos are usually taken for the future reference, whereas photojournalism images are predominantly meant for the short-term public involvement. Social Documentary images definitely may be stored for the long-term study, enabling better understanding of the modern world we live in, making sense of our living, discovering the way other people live.
 Article characterizes the main thematic motives of social documentary, such as: child labor, child neglect, homelessness, poverty, impoverished children and the elderly, and hazardous working conditions, and outlines the peculiarities of their interpretation in the context of war.
 Social documentary is to preserve the most important events or parts of the history – some details or archival footage that would rather be buried. This gives not only a better understanding of current events, but also a prospective of what we might face in the future.
 Social documentary can be an effective tool to influence our preconceptions, and develop empathy towards human beings or any creature suffering. By bringing personal stories to light, documentaries can aim much-needed wider audience’s awareness on to war-caused social problems, and facilitate the search for solution.
 The article also deals with the difference between Social Documentary and Pictorial Manipulation, which are often used to shape public opinion within global digitalized informational space.

Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and Method

In archival footage uploaded online of a concert at the University of the Western Cape in 1988 musician Robbie Jansen declared that the next composition to be performed was named 'Freedom Where Have You Been'.1 Before counting the band in, Jansen offered a short discourse on the meaning of the phrase hoya chibongo. Hearing the Afrikaans hoorie (meaning listen here) in the expression hoya, Jansen proceeded to split up the word chibongo to accentuate chi- as aurally reminiscent of the suffix -tjie that is used in Afrikaans to mark the diminutive. bongo, in this context as Jansen remarked, is the drum, leading Jansen to exclaim that the phrase hoya chibongo means to 'listen to the (small) drum', the drum that is, according to Jansen, 'the truth'. In Jansen's exact words, 'the drum speaks the truth and the drum has always been our language before these funny words that we are speaking now'. Jansen's translation was markedly oral, not only in its expression of speech and languaging but also in its invocation of a historicity through the oral; an oral tradition, for all intents and purposes. In its locatedness in a musically expressive and performative moment, Jansen expressed a duality of sound that exceeds the oral itself: calling attention to how language might be a conduit for the instrument, and how in some sense the drum might speak across time and space. It usefully deepens the often cliché proclamation rehearsed in and out of music studies in particular that music is universal, or that sound might be thought of as a kind of connective tissue that allows a specific sense-making of the social.2 In Jansens invocation of 'before' in his statement about the drum as language, and in debates around the meaning of sound to the social, it is history - or, a representation of pastness - that is called upon to bring about a set of futures where sound mediates the experience of a temporal matrix where truth, or freedom, might be found. What Jansen does/did was not necessarily an act of translation into a local vernacular as it is the blurring of the oral and the aural in a moment that might express the relation between sound, its interpretation, and its social life, obliquely. The truth for Jansen was what the drum expressed; but it was also the drum itself. The oral is aural, as the aural is oral.

Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries

Abstract Found footage filmmaking, or “archiveology” (Russell, 2008), has become a contemporary mode of understanding the collective past. At the same time, in some recent European documentaries we have a more intimate, personal use of archival (and animated) images. They construct two-strand narrative structures showing both the trauma of losing a parent and the excavation of the unresolved traumas of those ailing and passing. In Us against Us (Noi î mpotriva noastr ă, Andra Tarara, 2021) the director/daughter initiates a highly reflexive video dialogue with her schizophrenic father. Fragile Memory (Крихка пам‘ять, Igor Ivanko, 2022) is a grandson’s story about a former cameraman affected by Alzheimer’s. Postmemory and post-generational trauma work is in the focus of Aliona van der Horst’s films like Love is Potatoes (2017), in which her own mother’s emigration story is recovered through intermediality, or Turn Your Body to the Sun (2021), in which the digitally manipulated archival footage accompanies a woman’s quest for her father’s repressed memories. These are all medially hybrid films, which rely on the affordances of intermediality, and which combine present day footage with images from personal or public archives. Archiveology becomes in these films an affective tool in caring for family, and a reflection on the precarity of life and memory in general.1

The ethics of representing perpetrators in documentaries on genocide

Current discourse on the representation of genocide claims that we are currently experiencing ‘the shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator’. This raises ethical concerns over why and how documentaries engage with perpetrators. Based on an assessment of 203 documentaries on seven genocides, my article makes three kinds of contribution in addressing these concerns: (1) It discusses the ethics of representing perpetrators in archival footage, reenactments or interviews in a wider corpus than those covered in recent discussions. (2) It uncovers a broad range of ethical reasons for why documentary filmmakers engage with perpetrators, rather than seeking to establish a singular ethical ground for this engagement. This approach can do better justice to the varying cultural, historical and political contexts of the respective genocides, the different production contexts and target audiences of the documentaries, and the different styles and types of documentaries that inform the ethics of perpetrator representation. (3) It introduces two broad categories of perpetrator representation in documentaries that conceptualize the ethical purposes of this engagement differently.

Resisters

Resisters is an oppositional essay film, located in Berlin and addressed to Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist Revolutionary who was assassinated in Berlin in 1919. The key analytic approaches are located within the framework of film studies, trauma and memory studies, autobiography and theories of place, space and spectatorship. The use of hybrid cinematic strategies of critical realism and poetic re-imagining, brings the force of memory and history into the present to encourage reflection and resistance and enables the circumvention of extensive use of archive footage and exposition.

Entextualizing History through Archives: Representation of Muslim Identity in Post 9/11 Documentaries

Representation of Muslims in media post the Sept 11 attacks in the US largely focused on themes of terrorism and extremism. Such homogenized representation was particularly problematic in non-fiction media such as news and documentaries which use archival footage to create ‘reality’. The consequent circulation of these images across the globe is one of the many examples through which Muslim representation has been constructed through stock footage and sourced media images in media post the 9/11 attacks. In this paper, I examine stock images in documentary films in the form of archives to examine the representation of Muslim identity in the post 9/11 world. Using Malitsky’s framework of entextualization to analyze archival material in post 9/11 documentaries, I argue how stock images create a power differential between the East and the West (Said, 1979) reinstating imperial domination. Therefore, this paper intends to examine the use of archives that have been entextualized and re-present history to shape representation of Muslims across spatial and temporal differences through documentary films. To do so, I critically examine two post 9/11 documentaries – Secret Pakistan (2011) and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) – to study how these films position the role of Pakistan as an Islamic nation in the Global War on Terror.

From film to philanthropy

From film to philanthropy

V4Design: Intelligent Analysis and Integration of Multimedia Content for Creative Industries

Nowadays, vast amounts of multimedia content are being produced, archived, and digitized, resulting in great troves of data of interest. Examples include user-generated content, such as images, videos, text, and audio posted by users on social media and wikis, or content provided through official publishers and distributors, such as digital libraries, organizations, and online museums. This digital content can serve as a valuable source of inspiration to the creative industries, such as architecture and gaming, to produce new innovative assets or to enhance and (re-)use existing ones. However, in its current form, this content is difficult to be reused and repurposed due to the lack of appropriate solutions for its retrieval, analysis, and integration into the design process. In this article, we present V4Design, a novel framework for the automatic content analysis, linking, and seamless transformation of heterogeneous multimedia content to help architects and virtual reality game designers establish innovative value chains and end-user applications. By integrating and intelligently combining state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision, 3-D generation, text analysis, generation and semantic integration, and interlinking, V4Design provides architects and video game designers with innovative tools to draw inspiration from archive footage and documentaries, inspiring and eventually supporting the design process.

Concerning Violence: Fanon, Africa and temporality

This article examines the political significance of temporal structures in Om våld (Concerning Violence) (), a documentary that takes its title from the chapter of the same name in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The film comprises archive footage shot by Swedish television crews in Africa between the mid-1960s and 1987. It pairs images with extracts from Fanon’s book, read by singer and activist Lauryn Hill. This assemblage both celebrates African campaigns of liberation and complicates the claim to be ‘here and now’ embedded in archival material by overlaying it with a retrospective (often melancholic) vantage point, that of a postcolonial moment. On occasion, Concerning Violence comes close to reproducing a temporal framing that consigns Black Africans to the symbolic immobility critiqued by Fanon and, more recently, Achille Mbembe. How does the film endeavour to avoid this? How successful is it in arguing for the enduring relevance of Fanon’s thought?

Who Is Missing? Albums and Archives

Abstract While collecting family photographs of some of the 2.5 million Indians who fought in World War II on behalf of their British colonizer, this article's author, an artist, found that the idea of photographic “ubiquity” was turned on its head. She became increasingly aware of how socioeconomic privilege, caste, and class played a role in who was never photographed and thus who is not represented in the history of photography, in photo albums, and in military archives. Three different installations titled The UNREMEMBERED: Indian Soldiers of World War II include the use family photographs and archival footage. In this article, the artist explores questions about who is not represented in photo albums and archives and approaches to remedying their absence.

Coming Undone

Abstract Black transness has been marked and made broken by necropolitical systems of power. Theories and politics of and for black trans women have often prioritized a rejection of or confrontation with this “state of brokenness,” as poet Nat Raha terms it. Visual artist Tourmaline offers a different relationship with brokenness in her call to “come undone,” whereby those who are “broken” can gather their broken pieces together not to heal but to give and share one's pieces with another. This essay engages Tourmaline's Salacia (2019), a film about the life of Mary Jones, a black trans sex worker who became infamous in 1836 following her arrest in New York City, as producing a black trans aesthetic of brokenness. Using a collage style of placing distinct frames upon frames, Tourmaline mixes speculative retellings of Jones's life alongside archival footage of Latina trans activist Sylvia Rivera to create an image built from the pieces and fragments of the trans archive. This aesthetic of brokenness offers an aestheticization of Saidiya Hartman's “critical fabulation” that holds and cares for black transness, a practice of gathering and being-with and being-for.

Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck

Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck

Reclaiming Popular Documentary ed. by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson

Reviewed by: Reclaiming Popular Documentary ed. by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson Nora Stone (bio) Reclaiming Popular Documentary edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson. Indiana University Press. 2021. 406 pages. $80.00 hardcover; $26.00 paper; also available in e-book. Over the past twenty years, documentary film and television have become far more popular and widely available than in previous decades. Yet the scholarship on documentary has tended to privilege the most formally inventive and politically radical documentary films, from Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) to Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1989) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012). Noël Carroll pointed out this tendency to focus on the "art-documentary" in 1996, and the trend has continued.1 It is easy to dismiss popular documentaries, from fawning celebrity portraits to protracted true-crime miniseries, but doing so leaves a vital area of film and media understudied at the very moment when audiences are viewing and engaging with documentary media more than ever before. Reclaiming Popular Documentary is an excellent start to correcting this oversight. Edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson, the volume contains invigorating contributions that cover a wide swath of documentary media. In the introduction, Milliken and Anderson ask, "What is the relationship between documentary and entertainment and between popular documentary and advocacy? Can popular documentary be productively reconceived in relation to genre, modes, or rhetorical forms? Assuming the [End Page 219] popular is defined in contrast to other categories (either implicitly or explicitly), what might those other categories be?"2 The editors' capacious framing is wise because documentary's commercial relevance has not drained it of truth-telling potential or political urgency. The entrance of documentary into the mainstream media marketplace has only complicated its cultural standing. The anthology's first section covers the exhibition contexts of popular documentary. Contributors Ezra Winton and Patricia Aufderheide consider two institutions that remain important to the documentary film ecosystem: the film festival, specifically Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and public television, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The choice to foreground these two institutions is strategic—a reminder that while streaming services have invested heavily in documentary films and series, they are not the saviors of documentary. Film festivals and public television continue to be central sites for the circulation of documentaries, formation of critical consensus, and launch of new documentarians' careers. Archivist Rick Prelinger suggests some imaginative alternatives to these stalwart if imperfect institutions, however, in the book's final section, "Engaging Audiences." In film events such as Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (2006–2020) and No More Road Trips? (2013), Prelinger has assembled archival footage of a particular place or activity and screens it for audiences who are encouraged to react and chime in during the screening. The popularity of these film events is a strong argument for creating new spaces and conditions for communal engagement with documentary cinema. Prelinger acknowledges that his practice appears arcane against the streaming service landscape. He writes, "I do not seek to bury the algorithm. But I question any retreat from public assembly, especially if such retreat occurs under the rubric of engagement, as so much interactive cinema asserts.… I would also argue that restoring big-screen experience coupled with direct, dialogical participation is a route toward staging the meeting of difference without its dilution, a means to an end rather than an end in itself."3 The most groundbreaking section of Reclaiming Popular Documentary is its third, "Short Forms and Web Practices." The short online documentary is of outsized importance in today's mediascape but has commanded comparatively little scholarly attention within documentary studies. Anthony Kinik, Michael Brendan Baker, and Allison de Fren explore what the prevalence of short web docs means for professional and amateur documentarians—who they partner with, what subjects they take on, and how they develop their formal strategies—as well as for people who watch, share, and comment on them. For instance, Kinik investigates the convergence of documentary film and journalism. As the internet thoroughly transforms print journalism, leading newspapers and magazines have begun hosting short...

Looking Back inKewekapawetan: Return After the Flood. Research, Remembrance and Reclamation of a Hydro Story

This essay analyses Jennifer Dysart’s 2014 documentary film Kewekapawetan: Return After the Flood, which tells the past and present-day story of the Northern Manitoba Ithinew (Cree) community South Indian Lake and its entanglement with Manitoba Hydro. Dysart documents the history of colonial hydro policy by showcasing rare archival footage from the late 1960s and reclaims this material for the community she has roots in. At the same time, she records her search to learn about her father’s life and her efforts to reconnect with family by spending time on the land. Discussion between author and filmmaker throughout the research and writing process engages “visiting” as a methodology for studying Indigenous narrative arts. Ultimately, Dysart’s visual storytelling is a critical site of knowledge-making about the dislocation caused by large-scale resource extraction that foregrounds reconnection to family, community and land.

Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong

Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong

Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul