Panel 4 – Defining a Film School Archive
Chair: Jana Keeble
Since 1993 Jana has been involved with and co-organized Film Festivals throughout Slovakia in a management capacity, as well as possessing organizational, production and project management skills. In 2012 became a staff member at the Film and TV Faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and since 2018 in the position of Vice-Dean for Foreign Relations.09:30 - An Archaeological Project of Film Academy Vienna Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl, Kerstin Parth (UMDK, Austria)
Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl is Professor for Media and Film Studies at Film Academy Vienna. Among her research focuses are feminist film historiography, media and film theory, gender studies as well as artistic research. She has published extensively and has conceived various academic projects in the field of film archaeology. Kerstin Parth is a researcher at Film Academy Vienna. She was programme director at the Austrian Film Gallery, where she was responsible for the joint digital restoration project together with Austrian Film Museum and Filmarchiv Austria. She has published (with Oliver Hanley, Thomas Ballhausen) Work/s in Progress: Digital Film Restoration within Archives.The history of Film Academy Vienna began in 1951, and to this day occupies a central place in Austrian film history. Recognizing the importance of the academy’s film archive, scholars from the academy’s Media and Film Studies programme, in cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum, have been conducting a project that centres on its artistic output. Within the framework of the project, an initial technical and content-related survey of the analogue film archive holdings was carried out and a selection of works relevant to film and cultural history was made for the purpose of initial digitization. An oral history project involving extensive interviews with former students provides valuable insights into film practice. The first volume of the related book series was published in 2020. The project is currently focused on reappraising and analysing the archive’s film holdings. The examination of these films with regard to technical factors and content and the selection of works for digitization and long-term preservation are central objectives of the project. A web-based film archive database is being developed, in which all films produced at the Film Academy – past and future – can be documented, archived and made accessible to a wider public.
09:50 - Aesthetic Merit, Historicity and Economics Sharad Raj (Whistling Woods International, India)
Sharad Raj is an independent filmmaker and senior faculty at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai. A graduate of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, he has been a Creative director for several television series. He recently completed his debut feature, THE JOYOUS NIGHTS OF A RIDICULOUS MAN, that has completed the festival circuit and awaiting its release in FranceArchiving of student films is a multipronged challenge fraught with existential challenges. While the digitization of technology has made the storage-space required to archive films irrelevant, the cost and aesthetic merit remain an imperative. The paper will look at the importance of archiving student films and projects in the light of their socio-cultural and historical relevance and will contextualize it vis a vis financial implications and an ambiguous factor called “deserving”. It will examine the relevance of archiving as well, in the age of social media where most film schools have their YouTube channel. But should that absolve us of the responsibility of archiving? There are two kinds of film schools in India, public funded and private film schools. The cost of investing in high quality hard drives that are good for storing data is still very high in India. The private schools, swanky as they may seem have narrower infrastructure and depend on return-on-investment policy, hence archiving beyond immediate years is considered a burden. Add to this the fact that most student films do not pass the litmus test of film aesthetics and are considered dispensable with time.
10:10 - A Media Historical approach to the films of HFF Munchen Judith Fruh, Catalina Torres (HFF, Germany)
Judith Früh (1971, Freiburg) is Assistant Professor of Media Sciences at the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany (Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, München). Dissertation on "Problems of Television Histories and Archives analysed by the example of the long-running German TV series, TATORT“ (published 2017 by edition text + kritik). She is teaching, researching and publishing mainly in the field of Film and Television History, especially concerning the History of the HFF Munich. Catalina Torres (1981, Cali) is a Director of Photography and Filmmaker. She studied a Master in Documentary and Camera Work in the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF München). Since 2004 she has worked in the Camera Department as a Camera Operator and 1AC in over 40 films. At the same time, she specialized in Photography of Film Archives and since 2008 has participated in four books with edition text+kritik Publishing.Since instruction began in 1967, the HFF Munich has trained the movie talents of tomorrow, but at the same time, it has neglected to archive and preserve their works in a professional manner. The consistently precarious situation of the HFF’s film archive is mirrored by the precarious situation of production records and fact sheets of the films, although the situation has improved in recent years. Since 2005, the HFF Media Sciences Department, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Michaela Krützen, decided to concern itself with the HFF’s audio-visual heritage. The core of this media historical approach is the book series Film History of the HFF, published by the renowned German publisher edition text+kritik. Each book concentrates on a decade: the “wild” seventies, including films from 1967 to 1979, the “in-between” eighties (1980 – 1989) and the “praemillenial” nineties including films from 1990 to 1999. The films are presented with stills, set fotos and contextual material, i.e. production documents, and meta data like synopsis, team, cast, festival participations, awards and press reviews. The project is accompanied by many interviews held with former students, published in form of assembled dialogues introducing each chapter and of comments to specific films. So, this book series is also a multi-perspective oral history of the HFF since its beginnings, whilst drawing a big picture of the cultural and teaching context of each decade. Finally, this book series is one of the specific answers we give to the problem of film archiving at the HFF Munich.