This video essay combines a series of fiction feature films, made between the late-1990s and 2010s, in which futuristic androids and robots trade in digitised classical Hollywood archival film fragments as pedagogical and expressive traces, amassing an amateur archive. I call these fragments “film quotations” to denote the process of selection, citation, and reappropriation in these film-within-a-film moments. In this video essay, Flubber (Mayfield, 1997), S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Teknolust (Leeson, 2002), WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), and Prometheus (Scott, 2012) all “quote” classical Hollywood films, in the form of short excerpts of sound and image, projecting (or uploading?) Hollywood’s archival past onto their imagined versions of the future. As this cohort of robots explore and amass personal visual archives, mining Hollywood history for meaning and mimicry, their viewership reveals several interrelated classical Hollywood ideologies and biases: the robot-amassed archives replicate hyper-traditional behaviour, both in conforming to strict copyright rules and in depictions of gender, sexuality, and monogamy. While only Teknolust self-consciously and critically replicates hegemonic, heternormative media logics, this essay seeks to reveal how these robots’ sensorial experience of the archive select and project a misleading selection of history into the future. While touting a paradoxically easy-to-access Hollywood history, these robots cling to a tightly limited, licensed, entirely white and compulsorily cis-het digitised Hollywood archive.
{"title":"Uploading the Archive, Copy/Pasting the “Classical”","authors":"Eleni Palis","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2392","url":null,"abstract":"This video essay combines a series of fiction feature films, made between the late-1990s and 2010s, in which futuristic androids and robots trade in digitised classical Hollywood archival film fragments as pedagogical and expressive traces, amassing an amateur archive. I call these fragments “film quotations” to denote the process of selection, citation, and reappropriation in these film-within-a-film moments. In this video essay, Flubber (Mayfield, 1997), S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Teknolust (Leeson, 2002), WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), and Prometheus (Scott, 2012) all “quote” classical Hollywood films, in the form of short excerpts of sound and image, projecting (or uploading?) Hollywood’s archival past onto their imagined versions of the future. As this cohort of robots explore and amass personal visual archives, mining Hollywood history for meaning and mimicry, their viewership reveals several interrelated classical Hollywood ideologies and biases: the robot-amassed archives replicate hyper-traditional behaviour, both in conforming to strict copyright rules and in depictions of gender, sexuality, and monogamy. While only Teknolust self-consciously and critically replicates hegemonic, heternormative media logics, this essay seeks to reveal how these robots’ sensorial experience of the archive select and project a misleading selection of history into the future. While touting a paradoxically easy-to-access Hollywood history, these robots cling to a tightly limited, licensed, entirely white and compulsorily cis-het digitised Hollywood archive. ","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115366048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Centering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers.
{"title":"Diasporic Archives and Hauntological Accretions","authors":"M. Chew","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2383","url":null,"abstract":"Centering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers. ","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134374688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, “making up” lost queer history in the absence of conventional archives is a material and embodied process seen in her experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses (1992). This film centres around different queer couples portraying various erotic, physical and sexual acts. Each of these acts are aligned with voice-over interviews and visual archival ephemera detailing particular historical traumas, including the AIDS crisis and the erasure of lesbian experiences from life narratives of Holocaust survivors. I argue that the body and various erotic acts in Nitrate Kisses become sites of consciousness and cognition employed in the recovery of traumatic memory. As I explore, it is physical touch—sexual and erotic touch in particular—that acts as a conduit for accessing lost or purposefully invisibilized archival knowledge. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, I argue that sex and other forms of physical touch in Hammer’s film become a method of remembering historical injustices, making them visible through an embodied queer-feminist archival practice in order for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour.
{"title":"Historical Trauma, Queer Sex, and Physical Touch in Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses","authors":"R. Lallouz","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2384","url":null,"abstract":"For lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, “making up” lost queer history in the absence of conventional archives is a material and embodied process seen in her experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses (1992). This film centres around different queer couples portraying various erotic, physical and sexual acts. Each of these acts are aligned with voice-over interviews and visual archival ephemera detailing particular historical traumas, including the AIDS crisis and the erasure of lesbian experiences from life narratives of Holocaust survivors. I argue that the body and various erotic acts in Nitrate Kisses become sites of consciousness and cognition employed in the recovery of traumatic memory. As I explore, it is physical touch—sexual and erotic touch in particular—that acts as a conduit for accessing lost or purposefully invisibilized archival knowledge. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, I argue that sex and other forms of physical touch in Hammer’s film become a method of remembering historical injustices, making them visible through an embodied queer-feminist archival practice in order for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. \u0000This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour.","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"149 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120898627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This featurette addresses the encounter with the illicit digitised images of Barbara Rubin’s psychedelic short film Christmas on Earth (1963-65). Following So Mayer’s interpretation of Derrida’s archive fever as the ache of a phantom limb (2020), I take the film as an urgent invitation to question history and open it up to the ghosts who haunt it, demanding rightful recognition. This practice of anarchiving, to use Brian Massumi’s term, the disjointed digital archive of counter-cinema aims at reactivating the power of Christmas on Earth and building a sensual, bodily relationship with it across time and space. The hope is to revisit the past and relodge forgotten memories in contemporary contexts, so they can be inherited as a political legacy. This article contains images that feature nudity and sexual activity.
{"title":"Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth","authors":"Giulia Rho","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2389","url":null,"abstract":"This featurette addresses the encounter with the illicit digitised images of Barbara Rubin’s psychedelic short film Christmas on Earth (1963-65). Following So Mayer’s interpretation of Derrida’s archive fever as the ache of a phantom limb (2020), I take the film as an urgent invitation to question history and open it up to the ghosts who haunt it, demanding rightful recognition. This practice of anarchiving, to use Brian Massumi’s term, the disjointed digital archive of counter-cinema aims at reactivating the power of Christmas on Earth and building a sensual, bodily relationship with it across time and space. The hope is to revisit the past and relodge forgotten memories in contemporary contexts, so they can be inherited as a political legacy. \u0000This article contains images that feature nudity and sexual activity.","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"1257 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128004195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the first two decades of the 21st century, a cluster of Colombian filmmakers developed a distinctive body of work engaging with the country’s histories of violence through critical documentary and experimental devices. A nuanced use of appropriated footage is a recurrent feature in these works, signalling their engagement with historical events through mediated representation and a ‘suspicion of the archive’ (Suárez 2020, 542). This paper identifies distinct patterns in the filmmakers’ relationship to the materiality of archive materials, focusing on selected works by Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertas Millán, and Juan Soto. It argues that the remediation of digital found footage, personal and private archives enacts reflexive and distancing strategies in order to obstruct extractivist uses of images. In their choice and use of appropriated and archival moving images, filmmakers grapple with their own social and geographic positionality in ambiguous ways.
{"title":"Resisting extractive uses of the archive in Colombian experimental non-fiction","authors":"Maria A. Vélez-Serna","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2380","url":null,"abstract":"In the first two decades of the 21st century, a cluster of Colombian filmmakers developed a distinctive body of work engaging with the country’s histories of violence through critical documentary and experimental devices. A nuanced use of appropriated footage is a recurrent feature in these works, signalling their engagement with historical events through mediated representation and a ‘suspicion of the archive’ (Suárez 2020, 542). This paper identifies distinct patterns in the filmmakers’ relationship to the materiality of archive materials, focusing on selected works by Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertas Millán, and Juan Soto. It argues that the remediation of digital found footage, personal and private archives enacts reflexive and distancing strategies in order to obstruct extractivist uses of images. In their choice and use of appropriated and archival moving images, filmmakers grapple with their own social and geographic positionality in ambiguous ways. ","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130627959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […] are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge.
{"title":"Remediating the Archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts as Forms of Material Knowledge","authors":"Lola Rémy","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2382","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […] are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge.","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128734558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guest Editor’s Introduction to Special Issue of Frames: Sensing the Archive","authors":"C. Russell","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2378","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131137658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power","authors":"S. Walia","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2274","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114707834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter from the Editors","authors":"Lucia Szemetová, J. Browne","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2272","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131312576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure","authors":"Ana Maria Sapountzi","doi":"10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2275","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":423883,"journal":{"name":"Frames Cinema Journal","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121780897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：