Teaching the Materiality of Film

In this Forum article, we present a critical case study of the seminar Materiality of Film, which we taught at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich, in 2016 and 2018, in collaboration with David Landolf and Brigitte Paulowitz of Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Bern, Switzerland. Our primary motivation to develop this course was our own fascination with the material side of analog film, an interest we developed throughout our professional lives, Bregt Lameris as a cataloger and researcher at the EYE Filmmuseum and Barbara Flueckiger as a film technician in international film production. These experiences fed into our academic work, which is characterized by an emphasis and reflection on the correlations between film material, technology, aesthetics, and historiography. However, we felt that students were lacking this awareness of the material side of film and its importance for the way its objects are shaped and used. This lack has increased in recent years, since most of the current generation of students have never seen or touched a filmstrip owing to the predominance of digital projection in cinemas. Since we consider it pivotal for our students’ understanding of twentieth-century cinematographic culture to know, feel, and touch the history of film before the transition to digital technology, we decided to develop this course. We wish to make clear that we do not aim to train future archivists but to educate film scholars with a deeper understanding of the material side of their objects of study.¹

Part of our teaching method is grounded in the idea that films, projectors, and other material remains of our media past affect us as historians in a sensorial manner and help us engage with our source material. Moreover, we wish to teach students about the information we can gain from archival film prints, projectors, screens, and cameras, but not from duplicates in analog or digital formats. As such, for this course, we needed to collaborate with a film archive and selected the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Bern, which cherishes analog film in all its dimensions. First of all, it is one of the few places in Switzerland that still projects analog film and even holds a large film collection with an interesting variation of different formats and materials. In addition, Lichtspiel has placed its projectors in the same room as the spectators and, as a result, puts analog projection itself on display. Lichtspiel also safeguards an important collection of film technology devices. It carefully preserves and restores this technical collection, which includes many nonstandard devices, such as Scopitones and projectors for lenticular films. Many of these machines are functional and can be demonstrated in full operation. Several demonstrations and hands-on workshops were made possible by the Lichtspiel staff and invited speakers, who not only taught the students how to handle film materials and how to tint and tone black- and-white film but also allowed them to physically experience a collection of very special film historical sources. These hands-on experiences were contextualized by close readings of theoretical texts on the materiality of film, archival theory, media archaeology, phenomenology, history of technology, and restoration ethics. This allowed students to access film history by combining an immediate tactile approach with theoretical reasoning.

With this Forum article, we aim to share and give insight into our interdisciplinary approach to teaching the materiality of film from a film scholarly perspective—an approach, in our view, that gives students access to the past in engaging ways. We present several key elements of the syllabus. Some of these, such as film screenings, were part of every session; others constituted a session in and of themselves (i.e., the tinting and toning workshop and the excursion to the Cinegrell analog laboratory).

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

With the rise of digital technology and the increasing number of historical sources available online, debates on the materiality of film history have reemerged, especially with regard to paper sources. Richard Abel, for example, explains that with digital sources, he misses the feeling of, as Carolyn Steedman calls it in her book Dust (2001), “having been there” in the archive.² This phrase...