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  • Making Meaning of the Audiovisual Archive: Filmforum 2011
  • Ramesh Kumar (bio)
Making Meaning of the Audiovisual Archive: Filmforum 2011 APRIL 5-14, 2011, Udine and Gorizia, Italy

The city of Udine and the town of Gorizia, located twenty miles apart in northeastern Italy, played host to a ten-day international event focused on audiovisual archives in April 2011. Titled "The Archive, Memory, Cinema, Video, and the Image of the Present," the event comprised a three-day conference in Udine followed by a seven-day spring school in Gorizia. It marked the eighteenth installment of Filmforum, an annual gathering of film scholars, students, filmmakers, artists, and curators who convene to discuss a different aspect of audiovisual culture every year.1 This year, archivists joined the mix with paper presentations, panel discussions, artist and curator talks, film screenings, and workshops focused on audiovisual archives.

The event was organized by the University of Udine and the University of Paris III in collaboration with their network of partners—the Universities of Amsterdam, Bochum, Prague, Valencia, Milano-Cattolica, Pisa, and Cine-Graph—as part of their activities toward the creation of a doctorate program in audiovisual studies. The Udine conference has been a regular occurrence at Filmforum since its inception, but the Gorizia spring school started later, the 2011 event marking its ninth installment. Initially planned as two separate events, they were combined into a single one this year.

The Udine conference began on a grim note, with Leonardo Quaresima, the conference administrator and professor at the University of Udine, sharing his deep concern about the future of the conference in his opening address due to the nonavailability of funds. Furio Honsell, the mayor of Udine and an ex-rector of the university, lent a much-needed air of optimism to the morning by pledging to double his government's contribution to the conference next year.

The audiovisuals-heavy presentations were grouped into three parallel workshops on a range of themes that included "New Media Archive," "Archive, Memory, Subjects," [End Page 170] "Archival Technologies," "Archive and Historical Memory," "Beyond the Screen: Archive, Art, and Urban Spaces," and "Archival Practices: Preservation and Valorization," among others. More than one-third of the presentations were in French, which made them incomprehensible to a number of attendees unfamiliar with the language (including this reviewer). The organizers claimed that the rationale behind this was to make the conference truly international.2 Additionally, the French and English presentations were not grouped into separate clusters, making each workshop only partially useful for attendees who were not fluent in both languages. Considering that the conference was held in Italy, the French-English combination was odd because Italian students seemed most disadvantaged by it.

Making the first presentation was Amy Sargeant, from the University of Warwick, who spoke about Joseph Losey's archive at the BFI, using it as a case in point to talk about archival dust and detritus. She suggested that detritus need not be seen as unwanted remains in an archive but as clues from which to construct a narrative whole. Large gaps in archival holdings, she argued, were not disruptions but an inherent part of an archive.

Building on Sargeant's idea of archival detritus was Jan Holmberg from the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, who challenged Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as the place of origin or commencement to argue that a typical archive is less the origin of anything and more a dustbin for bureaucratic or artistic debris. In the case of films, this debris takes the form of paper records referencing the films, he said (notes and screenplays, catalogs and indexes, screening and inspection reports, etc.), which might outlive the film prints by centuries. Using the analogy of Bach's composition The Goldberg Variations, which only survives in a notebook left behind by Anna Magdalena, he suggested that similarly, in the long run, "the remains of cinema may very well be humble pieces of paper," making a strong case for audiovisual archivists to pay more attention to archival debris.

Shifting the attention from paper to audiovisual material was Jürgen Keiper from the Deutsche Kinemathek, who introduced attendees to ideas about digital archiving, which dominated...

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