Film Archive Research Articles

The making of Canberra as captured on film (1900–1945)

ABSTRACT This paper traces the Australian capital city of Canberra’s representation through official, government-sponsored, Australian documentary films made between 1900 and 1945. Through a small sample of selected films, that are well preserved and held in the national film archives, we discuss their filmic intention, form, technical production and reception. In these forty plus years which end prior to the advent of technicolour, there was a progression in technical sophistication of the genre from silent to sound, and from newsreel-style reportage of pomp and ceremony towards more informal, aspirational pictures that attempt to conjure how everyday lives could be lived in the fledgling city of Canberra. We suggest that these kinds of films, that might be dismissed as mere propaganda, are useful in adding to our understanding of how documentaries became a tool in the representation and communication of a rapidly shifting national identity, that was advanced concurrently through the planning and building of a new capital city and the evolution of documentary films.

MIMEHIST: Annotating Eye’s Jean Desmet Collection

Focussing on the CLARIAH pilot project MIMEHIST: Annotating EYE’s Jean Desmet Collection, this short article discusses how the MIMEHIST project took inspiration from previous decades’ multimedia and video annotation scholarship in film studies to conceptualise video annotation functionalities for studying Eye Filmmuseum’s Jean Desmet Collection in the Media Suite. The article first discusses how MIMEHIST situated itself in relation to past and current approaches to video annotation and scholarly video editions of archival film. Subsequently, a few examples are offered of how the Desmet Collection may be studied in the Media Suite using such approaches, as a way to point to their future potential for scholars and students.

Maria Hirszbein: An (In)visible Figure of Polish Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract This article examines the career of the Polish film producer Maria Hirszbein (1889–1939/1942) in relation to the development of interwar Polish cinema, including Yiddish films, and the modern idea of a “New Woman.” Investigating Hirszbein's activities as the successful manager of her company, Leo-Film, and as cofounder and member of the Polish film producers’ unions, the article explores her professional accomplishments and innovative work style, which was based on teamwork and promoting young, talented actors, creative directors, and screenwriters sensitive to social issues. In reconstructing Hirszbein's professional biography, the text combines different sources such as press reports, film reviews, photographs from the collection of the Polish National Film Archive (FINA), and data collected by the Institute of Jewish History in Warsaw.

Danish national film archives available for reminiscence activities

AbstractBackgroundAmong important elements’ in person‐centred care is knowledge about a person’s life, and how this ties into his/her daily activities and care. Finding historical film footage about a particular local setting, or a relevant topic, is time‐consuming and difficult for the care staff. The Danish Film Institute – a government institution under the Ministry of Culture – set out to develop a platform that made part of their historical archive available for staff, to support the national agenda of creating a dementia‐friendly society.MethodBased on knowledge from reminiscence theory, suitable archive footage was selected and grouped into four packages, consisting of several short film clips and supportive documents. The platform was tested on eight nursing home residents with a dementia diagnosed, in two groups of four. Each group performed one session per week for three weeks at the nursing home. Due to COVID‐19 restrictions, only proxy data was collected in terms of interviews with a group leader and two on‐site observers after every session, about their experiences with the material and their observed participant reactions. Data collection without the voices of the participants themselves was performed due to the need for obtaining at least proxy data on the effect of targeted film clip to stimulate frail elderlies with dementia – also in a pandemic lockdown situation. Informed consent from all participants was obtained. Data and ethics approval was done in accordance with Danish law.ResultsAlthough the archive content was not targeted people with declining cognitive function, the staff assessed the effect of this pedagogical dissemination of well‐designed film clip content, as very positive in relation to the participants with dementia. The sessions managed to stimulate engaging discussion and storytelling about the participant's own life in what can be described as deep memory recollections. Some instances of transference of new knowledge about life history to daily care of the participants were reported.ConclusionThe study instances that tailored archived film content can be used in professional person‐centred care to stimulate memories of people with dementia and quality moments in participant`s daily life.

Introduction: Film Heritage and Digital Scholarship - Computer-Based Approaches to Film Archiving, Restoration and Philology

Introduction: Film Heritage and Digital Scholarship - Computer-Based Approaches to Film Archiving, Restoration and Philology

From Moving Images to Archival Films: Contemporary Uses of Non-fiction Cinema in the Promotion of Rebuilt Cities

From Moving Images to Archival Films: Contemporary Uses of Non-fiction Cinema in the Promotion of Rebuilt Cities

Organisational and economic aspects of the archives digitalisation of the State Film Fund of the Russian Federation

The object of the study is the State Film Fund of the Russian Federation; the subject is the project for the global digitisation of the State Film Fund’s film archives, launched at the end of 2018 and currently underway. The aim of the study is to analyse the State Film Fund’s digitisation project and to identify possible problems that may arise during its implementation. Research objectives are staff shortages problem analysis and the project’s socio-cultural and economic efficiency analysis. The study used the following methods: historical and genetic analysis, descriptive analysis of literature and media materials, qualitative content analysis of documents, reports and other materials, comparative analysis, secondary analysis of public opinion surveys and statistical data. The developed project of an educational portal can be practically implemented on the basis of the State Film Fund.

Analysis of the activities of the State Films Fund of Russian Federation in the context of digitalisation

The object of the study is the State Films Fund of Russian Federation, the subject is the project of global digitalisation of the film archives of the State Films Fund of Russian Federation, which started at the end of 2018 and is currently being implemented. The purpose of the study is to analyse the digitalization project and identify possible problems that may arise during its implementation. Research objectives: analysis of the problem of personnel shortage, analysis of the socio-cultural and economic efficiency of the project being implemented. The study used the method of historical and genetic analysis, descriptive analysis of literature and media materials, qualitative content analysis of documents, reports and other materials, comparative analysis, and secondary analysis of statistical data. The results of the study can be used in the implementation of the programme of digitilisation of the State Films Fund of Russian Federation archives in order to optimise this process and eliminate possible risks.

Newsreel footage of the liberation of Minsk and its art history attribution

The article is devoted to the problems of studying the Golden Fund of National newsreels of the liberation of Belarus from the German-fascist invaders. The article provides an analysis of process of systematization and cataloging of the array of front-line film archiving in the post-war decades and gives a quantitative assessment of the collections of frontline newsreels stored in the Film archives of Russia and Belarus. There is information about previously unknown archival sources such as cinematographer’s reports which allow the attribution of newsreel’s material. The article evaluates the range of practical applicability of the author’s methodology of historical and artistic attribution which is presented on the example of well-known symbolic film frames taken in liberated Minsk on July 3, 1944.

The Active Archive: Interview with Film Critic Andrei Rus

"The interview with dr. Andrei Rus, associate professor at UNATC Bucharest, tried to cover both the motivations and the developing process of the Active Archive projects, a work in progress activity of research, selection, digitalization, and dissemination of several old documentaries from the Sahia Studio Archives, on one hand, and several experimental movies made by students of the UNATC in the Sixties and Seventies on the other hand. Keywords: Andrei Rus, archives, archives activation, film archives. "

Gender and the Nasty Women of history

ABSTRACT For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, cross-dress as men, take over the government, and exhibit their outsized desires in ways that only cinema could make visible – and that remain visible due to the passionate labor of feminist scholars, researchers, archivists, and cinephiles.

Redefining twentieth century ideals of Irish womanhood: Dorothy Tyrconnell Forrest, Erina Brady, and early Irish modern dance

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of two women choreographers working with modernist dance forms in Ireland during the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of reviews, photos, and archival film, I demonstrate how these women navigated the moral panic surrounding modernist dance forms in early-to-mid twentieth century Ireland. I argue that the obstacles these women negotiated were directly related to societal norms and legislation centered on kinesthetic control of women’s bodies and sexuality. These norms resulted in associations of modern styles of dancing with improper sexuality – meaning any sexuality outside the confines of heteronormative married relationships – and suspicion of any dancing that was seen to undermine the ideals of Irish womanhood as a uniquely chaste identity.

Badnam Basti (1971): A small-town milieu in a ‘new cinema’ style

ABSTRACT Badnam Basti (Prem Kapoor, 1971) has a legendary reputation as a lost queer classic from India. The movie was located at the Arsenal Film Archive in Berlin in late 2019 and has been seen by a wider audience only a few times (all online). This essay offers a close analysis of the movie. I argue that Badnam Basti depicts a distinctly local and regional culture of North-Indian homosociality in which the movie’s same-sex relation is only one component of erotic and kinship ties that include prominent space for a female character and encompass the gamut of gender roles. As such it has a unique place in histories of South Asian queer cinema. Stylistically, the movie departs from Hindi commercial cinema as well as the long take/long shot oriented, (neo-)realist-influenced Indian art cinema, forging a challenging film style with an allegiance to Hindi literary modernism, and to the ‘new wave’ experiments of its time. I conclude that Badman Basti invites the prospect of a new research agenda centered around several Hindi films released between 1969 and 1971, at the time referred in shorthand in film criticism simply as the ‘new cinema’. These films included those made with a commercial intent as well as those now canonized in histories of the Indian new wave as formally innovative Together these films constitute an interstitial moment in Hindi cinema criticism and practice when definitions of art, commercial and new wave cinema, were all in flux.

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance: Tracing a Path of Community Survival

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance:Tracing a Path of Community Survival Alejandra Calleja Toxqui (bio), Roxana Hernández Martínez (bio), Ana Gabriela Hernández Rodríguez (bio), Rosa María Licea Garibay (bio), Enrique Moreno Ceballos (bio), Julio Cesar Quiterio Morales (bio), Ana Belén Recoder López (bio), Cecilia Ramírez Morales (bio), Lluvia Soto Rodríguez (bio), and Laetitia Vigneron (bio) Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México/FIC Silente or Mexico Silent Film Festival was born out of a collective necessity to celebrate, study, and promote silent cinema within the city of Puebla and beyond. At the time of our creation, in 2016, a great number of heritage film festivals were already in the picture, from the legendaries such as Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato and Pordenone Silent Film Festival/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, to the closer (but equally legendary) San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though we share the same raison d'être with these other festivals, there remain significant differences between us: their priorities have focused on North American and European film archives and materials, and our programming emphasizes Latin American filmmaking and exhibition contexts. Located in Puebla, one of the largest cities in Mexico, we strive for a balance in our programming that both speaks to local audiences and exposes them to silent cinema, since an initiative like ours was entirely new in the region. That was our starting point as a team, which mostly includes women and workers in [End Page 263] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. FIC Silente México opens the gates of time and invites audiences to appreciate the complexities and richness of silent films in their own cultural right. Courtesy of Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México. the cultural sector. Our labor is volunteer-driven, independently financed, and requires us to work other jobs to sustain our livelihood. Pueblan Film Culture and the Emergence of FIC Silente At the time of our first edition, Puebla was already a city of thriving film festivals, cinema schools, and cine-clubs. Yet local familiarity with silent cinema was limited to a canonical, patriarchal, and western universe of "great male masters." That is why we insisted on going back to the earliest years: to topple the canon by rediscovering its wild and unruly formations. We all encountered early cinema together as an overflowing river. That abundance further provoked us to confront the absence of cross-cultural dialogue about silent cinema that substantively includes Latin America. Doing so became an impetus for creation and emancipation in the face of established formulas, rigid conventions, and hegemonic screen markets. Simultaneously, and with this nonlinear notion of time and space in mind, we played with the idea of opening the festival to contemporary silent cinema as another aspect of our programming. We decided to expand the corpus of silent films to the twenty-first century, highlighting new works that are marked by the past but made for the present. We curated them through various genre and geographical categories, ranging from French [End Page 264] feminist farce to Bolivian docu-drama. But any technology or aesthetic strategy is fair game, as long as there is no audio dialogue. These films vary quite a bit in terms of budget, production values, and access to resources. To help level the playing field, we do not demand a registration fee from the creators, especially since we receive their materials through open-access digital platforms such as FilmFreeway and Festhome. This is how we programmed our Contemporary Official Selections and also how they became interspersed with the aesthetic practices of films from the early twentieth century. Our aim is to surprise and attract audiences of all ages, persuading and revealing to them that silent cinema is more alive than ever; it is a current multicultural social practice rather than a passing trend or obscure fetish. Along with these screenings and live cinema concerts, we established an educational program that includes courses and workshops, even for children, all designed to encourage people to question their concept of cinema, which has been predominantly shaped by the capitalist culture industry and by Hollywood-sanctioned film canons...

The Black Film Ambassador

In celebration of the Pacific Film Archive at 50, Josslyn Luckett, a former student of PFA programmer and UCBerkeley professor Albert Johnson reflects on the global reach of his career and legacy. One of the founding “co-conspirators” of Film Quarterly, Johnson presented African, Asian, and Latin American cinema at the PFA for three decades, while programming U.S. directors from Vincente Minnelli to Melvin Van Peebles across the globe. While Johnson became known for his iconic “Craft of Cinema” profile series at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), this article highlights under-acknowledged aspects of his film curation and writing, including his early championing of many of the independent Black directors known now as the L.A. Rebellion.

Edith Kramer

Edith Kramer was a film curator who directed the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) for over twenty years. In 2014, Kathy Geritz interviewed Kramer about her distinctive vision and practice of film curatorship. On the occasion of the PFA’s 50th anniversary, Geritz provides edited excerpts from those conversations, which clearly reveal how for Kramer, film curating was not just a career, but a lifetime calling.

Future Is Present

St. Louis artist Van McElwee’s Time Fork: World B (2020) is currently on exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park in Sunset Hills, Missouri. McElwee’s Augmented Reality (AR) installation is part of the park’s 2021 thematic exploration, The Future is Present: Art and Global Change, which runs through October 20, 2021. The park is displaying artist projects covering such topics as environmental crisis, tech waste, deforestation, astronomical phenomena, and alternative realities. McElwee’s electronic and video exhibitions have found audiences in London, Vienna, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, and other world capitals. His body of media art includes over one hundred single-channel video works, installations, and web projects. McElwee’s grants and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund, a Regional Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and a travel grant from the government of India. McElwee’s work has been exhibited extensively and is represented in the Kitchen Video Collection in New York City, and by Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Heure Exquise! in France, the Inter Media Art Institute in Germany, and LUX in London, UK. In a ten-year survey of his work, the curator of Anthology Film Archives, Andrew Lampert, wrote, “McElwee is an ultra-prolific digital pioneer of the highest order.”1 Our conversation took place at Laumeier Sculpture Park, by telephone, and by email over a period of several weeks in March 2021.

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

The Continuing Inspirational Social Legacy of Dr Geoffrey J. Cornish MBBS, OAM (1921-2005)

This year marks several anniversary milestones of an eminent Australian and Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) recipient, Dr Geoffrey James Cornish MBBS, abbreviated as GC throughout this letter. GC is especially renowned for a long and esteemed career in medicine, and for playing an integral, real-life role as a prisoner-of-war (POW) in World War II’s tragic "Great Escape", upon which the popular 1963 movie is based. Several journalistic and literary works (cited later) that celebrate and underscore GC’s remarkable life/professional career have previously been published through or in association with: the Aircrew Association, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian ex-POW Associations, the Australians at war film archive, an authorised biography, a community radio interview of a Cornish Family member, a historiographer’s (class) treatise, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), various newspapers, and 60 Minutes Australia. The esteemed medical career of GC includes, but is certainly not limited to, innovations in cardiac rehabilitation and anaesthetics, as well the establishment of vital Red Cross blood banks throughout regional Australia, all having significant community impact. Indeed, GC’s life of service, that extended into his eighties, contains many other dimensions and achievements of distinction which this letter briefly summarises. Additionally, original to this letter are ten short audio messages of inspiration from GC that the first Author recorded almost 20 years ago and which to best knowledge have until now never been publically released. While other more formal audio recordings of GC are available online (e.g., award acceptance speech, interview), the audio recordings of this letter are unique in their manner of personal articulation, especially towards those within his famed walking program, and the manner in which they exude the optimism and warmth that were synonymous with GC. Along with the aforementioned life summary and audio recordings, the letter also contains memoirs and photographs donated by the Cornish Family (via the second Author, daughter of GC), and subtly explores the spirituality of the quietly determined and modest man that was GC. The primary GC milestone falling in 2021 is the 100th year birthday (June) anniversary, but this year also coincides with 80th and 75th year anniversaries of respective capture as a POW whilst a Captain in the Royal Air Force (RAF), and returning to Australia to commence medical studies. Perhaps fittingly, the 100th year birthday anniversary is shared with the 2021 service centenary of the RAAF which in 1939 processed GC’s service application on behalf of the RAF. However, this socially significant letter in no way aims to glorify its unavoidable war aspect, but instead glorifies faith and humanity, as well as the strength of a man constituted by caring and generosity towards others, found within the confines of such conflict and other adversities. In a perfectly succinct narrative, journalist Tara Brown of 60 Minutes Australia describes in [1] GC’s life as a touching and inspirational story of humble heroism and enduring spirit resembling an adventure novel, but being far more fascinating than any work of fiction.

The value of digital archive film history: willingness to pay for film online heritage archival access.

With the passage of time, celluloid film degrades and valuable film history is lost, resulting in loss of cultural history which contributes to the shared sense of community, identify, and place at a local and national level. Despite the growth in digitised services for accessing cultural resources, to date no economic valuation has been performed on digital local history resources which are accessible online. Despite the recent emergence of online portals for digital cultural services in many countries (such as virtual tours of art galleries and digitisation of cultural archives) a shift which has accelerated in response to the Covid-19 epidemic, there remains a major literature gap around the value of digital culture. Failure to account for the value of digital archives risks sub-optimal allocation of resources to accessing and preserving these aspects of local cultural history. In response, we performed the first contingent valuation study to estimate willingness to pay for a free online film archive portal containing historical film footage for localities throughout the United Kingdom. Users were willing to pay an average hypothetical subscription for digital archive film services of £38.52/annum. Non-users in the general population were asked their willingness to pay a hypothetical annual donation to maintain free public access (£4.68/annum on average). The results suggest that positive social value is gained from online access to digital archive film, and from knowing that the cultural heritage continues to be digitally accessible by the public for current and future generations. We outline how this evidence aligns with a theoretical framework of use and non-use value for digital goods and services extending beyond those who currently use the portal, to those introduced to it, and those in the general public who have never directly experienced the online archive service. We also report what we believe is the first application of Subjective Wellbeing analysis to engagement with a digital cultural service. The advantage of applying methods from economics to value cultural activities in monetary terms is that it makes emerging modes of digital cultural goods and services commensurable with other costs and benefits as applied to cultural policy and investment decisions, putting it on a level footing with physical cultural assets.