Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: In 2007, Rick Prelinger designated access the main feature of the twenty-first-century archive. Until then, he argued, archivists had “tended to privilege preservation”—even if they often considered this task as inseparable from access.1 In Prelinger’s view, the prevalence of preservation ultimately served to create scarcity. The author took issue with this and argued that archivists should instead “seek validation by creating abundance.”2In the years since, a great deal has changed. Audiovisual archives have gone from being relatively closed institutions, charged with preserving moving images and sound (often with limited means), to becoming agents of heritage within a networked landscape and in interaction with ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This article focuses on how audiovisual collections located in established or emerging archives in Latin America and the Caribbean are being activated or reactivated and how they handle keeping old audiences while engaging new, contemporary ones. In a region characterized by political unrest, the current distribution of the economy is challenged by an aggressive return of the right—especially in the last decade. Many of these far-right administrations have dismantled national policies, defunding the arts, the humanities, and research in science and technology, fields that are all essential to the creation, modernization, and survival of archives. Yet, paradoxically, the first decade of the twenty-first century ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Il faut chercher le futur, mais dans la tradition. (We must look for the future, but in tradition.)In the current debate about restitution, which primarily evolves around archaeological and ethnographical collections in Europe,1 the question of the audiovisual heritage of the Global South opens up the next frontier. This question has three aspects, which we want to discuss taking sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria as our focus. First, if we stipulate, as is now common in anthropology, an “ethical imperative for digital return of collections of field recordings to their communities of origin,”2 then how does this imperative apply to historical films held in the Global North, and how can we think of audiovisual heritage ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: In this article, we explore the potentials and possibilities in activating the silenced, discarded, misidentified, and unwelcome moving image artifacts relating to the film heritage of the Ottoman Empire. The arrival of cinema to Ottoman lands coincided with the modernization project known as Tanzimat and the eventual decline and dissolution of the empire. The historians refer to this era as the Late Ottoman Era (1839–1922). Alongside the vibrant visual culture in the capital, Istanbul, the cinema flourished in this period at multiple urban centers across the imperial lands. There were film pioneers across the Balkans, Anatolia, the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean. However, the history of early cinema ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: During Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973–90), several human rights nongovernmental organizations (HRNGOs) meticulously documented thousands of human rights abuses.1 Despite this overwhelming proof of systematic, state-sponsored terrorism, the collective memory of the dictatorship remains hotly contested, even after Chile’s transition to a more democratic mode of governance. Over the course of the three decades following the dictatorship, a wide variety of community and human rights archivists in Chile have continued to document and to raise awareness about human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship and have also focused on the increase in social inequality that has developed in its wake. A ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: This article critically assesses an online video archive that memorializes the ongoing war in Syria. This collection is known as the Syrian Archive. The total duration of footage it has published online now surpasses that of the actual war it documents. In this text, I consider its video holdings and organizational structure. I situate it theoretically, relative to adjacent activist moving image archives and within the broader political context of proxy war and empire.This case study suggests that public appeals to archives are in the process of being refurbished. The Syrian Archive merits scrutiny as an early forerunner of the operationalization of moving image collections for the imperatives of proxy war. Deeper ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Three great transitions have dominated archival discussions over the past twenty years: the digital turn, the recognition of archivists as social actors, and the effort to expand access to archival collections. More recently, a fourth transition is evolving: the emergence of archives as incubators of social change and justice.1 Although none of these transitions is anywhere near complete, archival collections have unquestionably become more accessible, thanks to the many access-positive archivists who have worked to bring collections together with users. As a longtime proponent of expanding access to moving image archival materials, however, I have come to believe that archival access as concept and practice no ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: In a 2014 interview, Ray Edmondson put lob-bying and advocacy at the center of what he considered to be one of the priorities for the audiovisual archiving sector: to seek a stronger public mandate and institutional legitimacy for appropriate funding and legislation.1 Lob-bying and advocacy are indeed activities that archivists should engage in more. Yet, in doing so, they should avoid putting forward unwarranted assumptions about the value of film collections. A lot of the “advocacy research” that has been produced in the cultural sector has celebratory flavors—which might end up damaging it rather than furthering its cause. Such research often expresses unrealistic expectations that cannot be met by cultural ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Mildred Thompson, Music of the Spheres: Mars, 1996. Oil on wood, 96 × 144 inches (243.8 × 365.8 cm). Copyright the Estate of Mildred Thompson. Courtesy Galerie Lelong and Company, New York.When the artist Mildred Thompson passed away in 2003, she left behind a broad but relatively little-known legacy. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936, Thompson, an African American woman, faced discrimination in the American art scene and struggled to find acceptance despite a promising early career. She moved to Germany in 1958 and spent most of the next two decades in self-imposed exile in Europe. Her paintings received formal U.S. gallery representation for the first time, post-humously, in 2017 and were exhibited the same ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: “Activating the archive” is an intriguing premise. It suggests that archives hold the potential for us to realize transformative social change. At the same time, it also suggests that we are the actors and that the archive is sleepy or neutral until we come along and activate it. It makes sense that the politics of archives are determined by the various decisions that we make about them, but I wonder if the opposite is also true. Is it possible for archives to activate us' Archives are not only the sum of active decisions; they often encompass materials that have survived by lucky accident. Maybe archival materials—and particularly the accidental or mysterious ones—have the power to politicize us, similarly to how ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: The Asian Film Archive (AFA) was founded in 2005 on the initiative of Tan Bee Thiam, a young filmmaker who aimed to create a place that could serve as a hub for Asian cinema. It started as a small, independent, grassroots operation and in 2014 became a subsidiary of the Singaporean National Library Board.An affiliate of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and an institutional member of the Southeast Asia-Pacific AudioVisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA) and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), the AFA currently has a collection of 2,534 titles.Karen Chan, the current executive director of the archive, joined AFA in 2006 as an unpaid volunteer. She is also the current president of ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: If I learned one thing from attending the recent Films of State1 conference, it is that being fluent in the language of acronyms when dealing with government agencies is exceptionally helpful. Over the three days, I learned about NARA, NMAC, USIS, USIA, OWI, PWA, USIS, CIE, USICA, USDA, NLM, and probably others that have escaped my note-taking. For the uninitiated, parsing the difference between the U.S. International Communications Agency, the U.S. Information Service, and the U.S. Information Agency can be a little head-scratching. Yet, however perplexing these acronyms may initially be, their abundance is but one index of the many agencies involved in government-backed film production, distribution, and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: When an American outsider becomes acquainted with the culture of European home movie scholarship, one of the first words one will learn is valorization (or valorisation, using the British spelling), which sent me to the dictionary more than once to catch the nuance of the meaning. Of all the projects exploring the possibilities of reusing home movies, one of the most inventive and productive is the Italian Re-framing Home Movies,1 now in its third edition.The brainchild of the Milan-based pair Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri, Re-framing Home Movies puts out a call for filmmakers and artists under thirty-five years old with each round of the project. The goal is to provide them with the tools to approach home ... Read More PubDate: 2021-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Subscription journal
[305 journals]
