Panel 1 - How can we use Film School archives?
Chair: Barry Dignam
In 2021 Barry Dignam was appointed to the new role of Head of European Projects at the National Film School, IADT. Formerly he was the Head of Department of Film & Media, Chair of Film & Television and Irish Course Director of Viewfinder (the Erasmus+ Joint Master of Art in Cinematography). As an educator, he has over twenty years’ experience in teaching, academic strategy and quality assurance. He studied Drama at Trinity College Dublin and Film at the National Film School IADT. As a filmmaker, he has made many multi-award-winning short films including ‘Chicken’, ‘Dream Kitchen’ and ‘A Ferret Called Mickey’. He’s had been nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes and a Berlin Bear. ‘Monged’ a feature he co-wrote with Gary Duggan premiered in 2015. His films have been presented in official selection at over a hundred and fifty international film festivals. They have been screened by top broadcasters and released on DVD, VOD and theatrically in Europe, the US and beyond.11:30 - Bringing an Archive to life Donna Lyon (VCA, Australia)
Donna Lyon is a screen educator, PhD practice-led researcher and producer, who has recently produced the independent feature film ‘Disclosure’. Her research has been focused on the digitisation, preservation and dissemination of the VCA student film archive. Alongside ‘doing’ the project, she inserted herself into the digitization of “work”, to create a holistic, personal, engaged and reflexive strategy to expand existing notions of archives, as potential staid collections.This presentation is a long tail about the transformation of a dusty archive room full of student films set in Australia’s oldest and most prestigious university-based film school (VCA). Custodian to 50 years of student filmmaking that dated all the way back to 1966 and unbeknownst to staff, the room was a ticking time bomb. Celluloid films were beginning to smell of vinegar and analogue media was fast becoming obsolete. Digital had drastically disrupted. Students wanted to be seen online and the film school needed to claim its virtual real estate. Cut to five years later. The VCA Film and Television Digital Archive Portal launches an online portal containing over 1,800 freshly digitised and preserved student film works, along with the creation of a workflow pipeline for all the born digital contemporary works. For the first time students can enter their own metadata related to their suite of films produced at film school and deep dive into film works made by their predecessors based on standardised and specialised metadata related to the screen industry. Films have been curated and written about in creative response articles, film festivals and exhibitions have been run, highlighting the archives value and ability to intersect with new audiences and ideas. The archive has truly become alive.
11.50 - Film School Archives and African film histories Gabrielle Chomentowski (CNRS – Université Paris 1)
Gabrielle Chomentowski, a historian, is a Researcher at Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (CNRS – Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) where she teaches social history. She teaches also Transnational perspective of Film History in Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Her research is focused on Film School history in a transnational perspective after the Second World War. After the World War II, IDHEC saw the integration of foreign students coming from countries of the French Union and especially from Africa. After 1960 and decolonizations, the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow (VGIK) saw also the integration of hundreds of foreign students coming from all around the world: Eastern communist Europe countries, Asia, Africa, Western Europe and at least Latin America. This presentation aimed at first to propose a historical periodization considering African students flows taking in consideration national and international agenda of France and the Soviet Union on a diplomatic and education plan. Then, I will present an overview of these African students: is it possible to make general assertions about social, educational and political characteristics of these students? Through documents from VGIK and IDHEC archives (papers and films) and thanks to interviews made with former students, I will describe how these students were integrated in educational and professional networks. This focus on African students in VGIK and IDHEC will allow us to interrogate the place of film students in cinematographic heritage and in a broader scape how to participate to a transnational history of cinema. Furthermore, I will show how archives from Film schools let to write a national cinema history for some African countries where none preservation film policy has been done.
12:10 - Lodz Film School Archive – ways to use the legacy Marchin Malatyński (Lodz Film School, Poland)
Film producer and academic teacher. Since 2015 Deputy Director and Head of International Relations at The Lodz Film School. CEO of the Indeks Film Studio. Producer of three feature films including “Tower. A Bright Day.” by Jagoda Szelc presented at Berlinale Forum 2018. The Lodz Film School is one of the oldest film schools in the world. Since it’s beginning the education program was very much focused on practical aspects of filmmaking. Not only directors but also cinematographers were shooting their own films starting at the 1st year of their education. At the early days the School established a Film Archive which has been collecting films constantly for over 70 years. The Archive of the Film School in Lodz contains a unique collection of more than six thousand short films. Among them are the first films of the most outstanding filmmakers, including Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski. A few years ago a plan was born to make available the entire collection of the Archive and to set up a special and unique website. Due to their special historical value, we decided to start with documentary shorts. Each film carries a detailed film metrics chart, featuring the full names of the artists, the technical data and a short sequential description of the content in Polish and English. Our website is aimed at all cinema lovers as well as film professionals - filmmakers and scholars of film culture. Link to the archive website: https://etiudy.filmschool.lodz.pl/