Accidental

Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.

Accidental Archivism

Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past

In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema’s futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema’s public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as a political force.

Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.

The serendipitous genesis of the great archives of Arsenal in Berlin is a pure delight to explore. This volume records how a wealth of visual history accumulated as if by accident to form a fascinating whole which is so much more than its parts: a fragmented and recomposed visual archive of memories of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. A feast for any historian, artist and cinephile.

Bénédicte Savoy, Collège de France/TU Berlin

Accidental archivism, creative spaces and the reaches of technology: the mix is a world of communication and artistic possibilities. Perhaps, equally significant, the mix does transform the cinema’s public into that quintessential wayfarer who takes a backward glance o’er travelled roads to better see the road ahead.

Hyginus Ekwuazi, University of Ibadan, founding rector of the National Film Institute, Jos

A lively, hugely ambitious and generative collection, that is at once both reflective and provocative, offering a state of play and a call to action for those engaging with archives today. From manifestos to interviews, global case studies to personal accounts, this expansive collection of works expertly places in dialogue curators, artists, archivists and scholars (and the many that fall in between).

Tom Rice, University of St. Andrews

 

Read the book online at archivism.meson.press.

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Publishing Year
2023
Language
English
Pages
492
Series
Print Edition Price
€ 34.90 RRP
Downloads
Cover
License
CC BY-SA 4.0
ISBNs
978-3-95796-053-5 (Print)
978-3-95796-054-2 (PDF)
DOI
10.14619/0535
Available as
Print, PDF, HTML

The Editors

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt and the Director of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film.” He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal for Media Studies). He is a principal investigator in the research center “ConTrust – Trust and Conflict in political life under conditions of uncertainty” and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. His research concerns the aesthetics of film within the larger framework of a history of risk and uncertainty in modernity. His objects of study include Hollywood cinema and industrial and ephemeral films. In addition, he has a strong interest in the main currents, deviations, and dead ends in the histories of film theories, an interest that he pursues in part as the co-editor of the book series Film Theory in Media History. In the Kolleg he conjoins these two interests by inquiring into the ways in which the history of cinema has always been a history of a form, and format, in crisis.

Vinzenz Hediger's Author Profile

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is the artistic director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. From 2001-2019 she was a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum. From 2006-2020 she was the founding director of the Berlinale section Forum Expanded. She curated film exhibitions, such as “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World” (2009, with Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel), „A Paradise Built in Hell“ (2014, with Bettina Steinbrügge), and “From Behind the Screen” (2018), as well as research and exhibition projects such as “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice“ (2010-2013) and “Archive außer sich” (2017-2022). In 2021 she launched the biennial festival “Archival Assembly“.

Her work is dealing with the intersections of film restoration, exhibition and distribution, focussing on collaborative and decolonial thinking and practice. Schulte Strathaus is serving on the boards of the Harun Farocki Institut, NAAS – Network of Arab Alternative Screens, and the Master program Film Culture at the University in Jos/Nigeria.

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus's Author Profile

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