Panel 3 – Re-imagining archives
Chair: Manuel Damaso
Manuel José Damásio holds a PhD in Media Studies (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and did his aggregation also in communication at Minho University. He is an Associate Professor and the Head of the Film and Media Arts Department at Lusófona University, in Lisbon. He holds a vast experience in consulting and production concerning several areas of the field of audiovisual and multimedia production. He is the chair of GEECT – the European association of film and media schools and a member of the board of CILECT Executive Committee (International association of film and media schools). He is the coordinator of FILMEU – The European University of Film and Media Arts. He is the author of five books and several papers and chapters in international peer-reviewed publications. 16:10 - Archives – the pleasure and the pain Claire Barwell (NAHEMI, UK)
Claire Barwell led the BA (Hons) Film Production course at UCA Farnham and was Chair of Nahemi. She is now a freelance consultant and external examiner. A 6 minute PechaKucha questioning the urge to keep material. Looking at images of dust and rust I want to explore some ideas around archives, and the paradoxical nature of keeping and not keeping records.
16:16 - Archiving students’ ‘non-filmic’ virtues Dan Geva (Beit Berl, Israel)
Professor Dr. Dan Geva graduated from JSFS in 1994 with honors. He has made over 25 full-length documentary films, garnering world acclaim in festivals and broadcasts alike. He has served as a visiting scholar at The Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute of Art (2010). He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the lucrative Tel-Aviv University 2011 Dan David Prize for Promising Researcher in Cinema and Society; the 2017 CILECT Teacher Award; and Beit Berl’s 2020 Innovative Pedagogy Award. Professor Geva is the founder of “The Ethics Lab”—A CILECT project (2016). His publications include Toward a Philosophy of the Documentarian (Palgrave, 2018); The Ethics Lab Guidebook (CILECT, 2019); and Documentary: A Philosophical History (Palgrave, 2021, forthcoming).Of all the things that students generate in the course of their studies, which ones ought to be designated as worthy of archiving? One obvious answer is their films—but not only their films, I would claim. Over a period of many years, I have become convinced that the concept of “student work” should not be ascribed to the limited scope of the conspicuous filmic object, namely, the finalized film. Rather, I suggest that what is worthy of respect, preservation, and archiving of that which students produce in the course of their studies should relate equally to a their ex-filmic mental, intellectual, emotional, and ethical virtues. I speak of the value we ought to attribute to students’ recorded testimonies regarding the ethical dilemmas they have faced in the course of creating their films, whose preservation we rightfully seek. I will begin my analysis with a mention of the fact that, in the late 19th century, The Lumière brothers set out to archive humans’ inhabited external world. I will conclude my case by proposing that, 126 years later, The Ethics Lab global archive of ethical testimonials marks an epistemic and thus ethical turn from the historical project of archiving footprints of external physical space to archiving the infinitely rich internal, abstract ethical space.
16:22 - Future Archives: the virtual depositories Thomas Brennan (SADA, Sweden)
Thomas Brennan is a visual and performance artist, film colorist and currently the adjunct professor for postproduction at Stockholms Konstnärliga Hogskola (SKH), Institutionen för Film och Media. His courses and workshops on authentic color in film, transmedia, and new contexts for film have been held regionally and beyond. We are pioneers in the information age and Covid has settled us into our zoom-cocoons with our fiber-optic umbilical to work, family, and culture. As we have moved our workflows into the digital realm, the virtual world becomes a more inviting showcase for both professional and student cinematic expression. Advances in virtual reality applications, world construction software and theory, and the gaming industry have laid the foundation of the future virtual archive. I am advocating for an archive that is virtual, an archive we can properly ‘walk around in’ and experience the work. Imagine visiting the school archive through your home internet, logging in, selecting the class or student. Then, donning the VR helmet and touch-sensitive gloves, you enter the virtual world of the archive. Here, we can visit the student work, read the manuscript, screen the short film, the documentary, the animated radio report. Once we have this virtual world available, we can inspire new approaches to documenting work, we can start to populate and enrich the archival world, adding student process diaries both written and audio-video recorded (holograms?), process interviews behind the scenes with collaborators discussing tactics and strategies of art practice, draft development, etc.
16:28 - Future collaboration between film schools Gabrielle Kelly (AFI, USA)
Screenwriter/Producer Gabrielle Kelly is on the Faculty of the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles and a two-time Fulbright Scholar in Media. With expertise and a passion for global storytelling, she has mentored labs such as the Sundance Lab in the Middle East and screenwriting and producing masterclasses around the world. She worked with New York director Sidney Lumet and in Hollywood with numerous directors, writers and producers. A VP of production at producer Robert Evans’ company at Paramount she also worked at HBO, CBS Films, Eddie Murphy Productions and Warner Bros. She has taught at NYU Tisch Asia, USC, UCLA, Chapman, Irish Screen, VGIK in Russia, India, Myanmar, China and Korea. The founder of the BAFTA Archive, she also curated the NYU Tisch Asia Archive of Student Films and is committed to preservation and distribution of marginalized voices in filmmaking. Published in research papers on a variety of media topics, she is also the author of Celluloid Ceiling; Women Film Directors Breaking Through,” the ground-breaking global study of women directors. Every year the number of film school graduates from around the world increases, as do the short films they make. When the graduate film program at NYU Tisch Asia was closing a few years ago, I had the idea to create an archive of all the short films made there to preserve that time and place, which would no longer exist. Since there is no agreed template, requirement or format for preserving student films, is there value in preserving them and is a future collaboration between film schools worth pursuing?
16:40 - The Dormant Archive and the Alarm Clock Julia Clever (RITCS)
Julia Clever is a documentary filmmaker focusing on archives. She teaches transversal arts at the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sounds. Julia holds Master degrees in Cultural Sciences (VUB), and Audiovisual Arts (RITCS). Whilst working as a researcher at the RITCS Julia built up the MoBo research lab from 2014 onwards, and she has been the lab's coordinator since 2016.How ‘open source’ challenges the repositories of a film school. Six decades of students’ work at RITCS document how young artists attribute meaning to elements of the world around them. But their stories laid dormant in film cans and on outdated videotapes, stored in closets and cellars. How can we make them audible and visible? Using open source software, the school’s archiving lab MoBo developed a propriety online repository to host its students’ work. Film-rolls are were carried over to the Belgian Film Archive (Cinematek), where they are professionally stored and will be restored and scanned in the nearest future. This effort has recently started. When these works are digitized, they can be accessed via the school's archive portal mobo.ritcs.be, where students and faculty can stream students’ and alumni’s works. MoBo digitized the works from the analogue video-period, and recently students have started uploading their creative work themselves to the archive: it is the obligatory procedure to submit their tasks. This diversity in sources presents challenges for MoBo, both in front-office and back-office: continuous innovation is required, not the least in tailoring solutions for access to these resources, rich as they are, in a multidisciplinary art school. MoBo has the intention to act as an activists’ hub, together with kindred organizations – Cinéma Sauvage, Constant, among others – in the ‘copyleft’ movement, aimed at free access to artistic products, particularly by digital means. MoBo could, on the longer term, act as a laboratory for the dissemination of ‘open source’ – both the philosophy and the pragmatics – and hopes to conduct, in a near future, more legal, technological and art-based research for this ‘good cause’.