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Coventry Cathedral: Exploring Reflexivity in a Collage Film
No full textEmploying an extensive and diverse range of archival material, Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain chronicles the planning and construction in the 1950s and early 1960s of a modernist replacement for the medieval cathedral almost entirely destroyed in 1940. Drawing on a breadth of archival elements from a wide range of sources, the production team sought to develop a reflexive screen language that acknowledged the materialities of these elements, highlighted the production processes that created them, and located them in a screen language of spatial montage and distinctive graphics. Centred on a close reading of the opening sequence, the article explores the ways in which the film worked to develop William Wees’ conception of collage ‘to invest found footage with new meanings’. Those meanings in this case included the idea of the construction of the film as an allegory of the construction of the cathedral and the reconstruction of post-war Britain
“They Lack Imagination…” ─ Valérie Wilson and Trans Life in the Audiovisual Archive
No full textTrans people have always been represented in audiovisual media, yet the archiving practices of institutions and the creative choices of media producers have often obscured non-sensationalised appearances. The 1973 French TV program Chutes on tourne featured an interview with trans actress Valérie Wilson, but the footage held by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) remains largely unseen. In order to highlight these obscurations and to speculatively fill in the blanks of Wilson’s life, this interview with Wilson is critically centred in our article. The authors – a trans history scholar and a trans visual artist – create a written and drawn fabulation on post-war transfeminine life from the interview, a ‘forensic practice’ (Hal Foster) that is structured as much by visual presence as well as material absence
From the Culch: Lost in the Archives, Found in the Community
No full textThe author’s documentary From the Culch1 is the central case study in a practice-based research enquiry into archival filmmaking in the vernacular tradition. This paper will explore how community archival film offers a valuable alternative to filmmaking that uses institutional archival material. Insights from documentarians Nick Hector (Sharkwater Extinction, Prey) and Tim Plester (Way of the Morris, The Ballad of Shirley Collins) will shed light on the ways that contemporary archival filmmakers can honour sensitive material, examining the ethics of posthumous and community archival documentary. An interview with BBC Archive Technical Operator Tom Cox-Porter will highlight the importance of archivists themselves in bridging the gap between our personal and our national memories. Finally, we will propose that creative practice in archival spaces is an important tool in counter-balancing the reifying tendency that exists within institutional archives
Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory
No full textBook review of: Ian Milligan, Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), 230 pp., ISBN 9781421450131
More Than a Game: Television Archives in Two Acts
No full textTelevision archives are not only illustrations of the past, but also a powerful medium for artistic expression. This audiovisual essay takes an artistic approach to television archives. Producing new and unique pieces of art is one way of exploring the potential of archival footage that is kept in television vaults. The idea of developing artistic work by adding music, new voices and narratives to silent videos in the archives came out of the desire to experiment and bring new experiences of television archives out in the real world, whether in museums, cultural institutions or music clubs. The creative and experimental approach to using television archives started out as a game to motivate archivists to take pleasure in their hard and meticulous work. As part of this experimentation, there was an exploration of the metatextuality and intertextuality found in the archival videos and metadata. Working in imaginative registers took us from finding random words on old archival description cards to creating slam poetry and music. In a nutshell, it led us to creating performance art
Tele-viewing before Television in Interwar Italy. Predictions of a Future Media Practice
No full textThis article focuses on discursive accounts on tele-viewing that predated the actual introduction of television in interwar Italy. It aims to reconstruct and conceptually frame how tele-viewing, as a social practice to be and a specific manifestation of the t elevisual, was predicted in public discourse in ways that cannot be reduced to what was later commonly referred to as 'television'. To do so, it draws its sources mostly from newspapers and specialised periodicals published between the mid-1920s and the 1940s. After distinguishing the different types of media prophecies at stake, we focus on the role played by 'wireless imagination.' Later on, we comment on our corpus of source materials, demonstrating how tele-viewing was envisioned by the press alternatively as a domestic practice (home-delivered service) or a military one (remote-controlling). Finally, we explain how the early apparatuses publicly exhibited at Milan's Trade Fair in 1933 resized the visitors' expectations, sobering the excesses nurtured by wireless imagination
Colin Kaepernick and Today's (Re)Surgence of Athlete Activism: New Media Environment, New Game?
No full textScholars point to U.S. football quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a key figure in the broader rise of athlete activism since the late 2010s. In the U.S., Kaepernick challenged decades of alleged political apathy among Black athletes, which had been associated with colour-blind racism and the increasing commercialisation of sports. Since Kaepernick-like protests have transcended national borders, an examination of his case can help us understand important historical developments in the re-politicisation of minority athletes internationally. We situate Kaepernick’s activism historically and in relation to changes in the media environment. A media ecology approach allows us to examine a broad range of media strategies that enabled Kaepernick to by-pass conventional media and reach large audiences directly, with messages that gave voice to marginalised perspectives, uncovered the logics of colour-blind racism, underscored its historical and structural underpinnings, and ultimately challenged racist stereotypes and social injustice
‘Angélica la palenquera’: Collective Memory and a Decolonial Reimagining of Archival Futures
No full textThis paper examines the intersection between audiovisual archives and collective memory through a renewed approach to Yuruparí: Traditional Popular Art, a Colombian state documentary television series, focusing on the episode Angélica la palenquera (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984). Developed in collaboration with the Kuchá Suto Communications Collective in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, the project involved the screening of the restored episode followed by a collective cataloging process. At its core lay a dialogue among local historians, musicians, and community leaders of different ages, allowing memories to nuance and reshape the historically imposed archival narratives on the communities.
The project aims to broaden the categories and naming practices used by the archives that safeguard the Yuruparí collection, foregrounding the communities represented in the images and sounds in order to reclaim agency over the archives’ future. By proposing participatory approaches, it highlights broadcast archives as sites of creative engagement capable of challenging power dynamics of representation. Collaborative methodologies foster an ethical and dynamic form of access, grounded in ethnographic and qualitative systematization, while offering a framework for potential decolonial archival practices
The Relational Mode: Farideh Fardjam’s Documentary Strategies of Migration and Intersectional Archival Activism
No full textInterrogating the role of archives in sustaining historical erasures, this paper examines the overlooked work of Iranian filmmaker Farideh Fardjam, who documented Turkish labour migrants in the Netherlands in the early 1970s. Despite their historical significance, Fardjam’s films have faded into obscurity, reflecting broader archival silences surrounding diasporic women filmmakers of colour. Through an intersectional lens, this study explores Fardjam’s distinctive documentary strategies, emphasising migration and displacement as both thematic and methodological concerns. Glissant’s notion of relationality sheds light on these strategies, foregrounding relation, translingualism, and opacity. Situating Fardjam’s documentary practice within the broader shifts in 1970s documentary filmmaking—marked by emerging radical film cultures and women’s cinema—it closely analyses two documentaries. Met een nieuwe naam serves as a compelling commentary on various bordering mechanisms and tactics of dissent; Met hun zegenende handen reveals the continuum of capitalist patriarchal regimes across borders and women’s everyday resistance
Echoes and Frequencies: Tele-Visions and Wireless Technologies
No full textThis issue investigates the layered temporalities, shifting modalities, and evolving infrastructures of tele-visions – a plural, hyphenated term designating the spectrum of remote viewing technologies that have shaped, and continually reshape, how images travel and appear across distances. From early optical telegraphs and nineteenth-century electromagnetic signal relays to today's ubiquitous digital environments, these systems condition how we think about, imagine, and experience the televisual. One element emerges as a particularly fruitful entry point into the archeology of tele-visions: the wireless. In many ways, the integration of Hertzian waves into telecommunications at the close of the nineteenth century marked an epistemic shift – a profound reordering of the technical, perceptual, and conceptual frameworks through which reality is organised and understood. The present issue explores the historical, technical, and artistic dimensions of that transformation, which, beyond the mere absence of cables, ushered in a new media paradigm whose political, philosophical, and environmental ramifications continue to be redefined with each successive wave of wireless innovation