2025 Montreal Symposium
Session 7 - Promoting Film Archives
Montreal, 29 April 2025
Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.
Archives cinématographiques et audiovisuelles africaines entre réemploi et valorisation : cas de la création de nouveaux films, « Thomas SANKARA : l’Humain », « Hakilitan, ou mémoire en fuite » et « Red Africa »
Léonce Tira (Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou)
The Cinémathèque africaine de Ouagadougou (CAO) was created in 1989 thanks to the efforts of Burkina Faso and African filmmakers and is affiliated with FESPACO (the largest film event on the African continent). In this sanctuary of African cinematic memory, there are more and more films made using archival footage. The use of archives in films by experimental reuse artists is particularly interesting because they see archival documents outside their context and know how to interpret them in a new light.
Our work focuses on two major Burkinabe films that were both officially selected for FESPACO and use archival footage: Hakilitan ou Mémoire en fuite by Issaka Konate (FESPACO 2019) and Thomas Sankara: l'Humain by Richard Tiene (FESPACO 2021), but also Red Africa by Dimitri Markov, shot by a non-African (Russian) but which serves to document African film heritage, particularly through reuse.
The film Hakilitan ou Mémoire en fuite is a docu-fiction film that raises the issue of the loss of collective memory by evoking the flooding of the Cinémathèque africaine in 2009 through the individual story of an amnesiac professor whose life comes back to him in fragments through archive footage of the flooding and the fire in the screening room.
The film Thomas Sankara: l'Humain is a documentary about the life of the leader of the Burkinabe revolution, Thomas Sankara, whose four-year reign was enough to leave a lasting impression on people's minds thanks to his charisma, audacity, pan-Africanism, and youth. This film is guided by the ideal of balance in the facts reported by rigorously selected contact people, accompanied by powerful archive footage.
The documentary film Red Africa recounts the socialist propaganda influence of the USSR on African states that gained independence between 1960 and 1990, based on extraordinary archives filmed by Soviet operators.
This leads us to ask ourselves: what is the power of archival images in these films? How can we encourage more creativity based on the CAO archives?
« Canciones para después de una guerra » (B. Martín Patino, 1971-1976): el documental de montaje, los archivos, y las nuevas maneras de observar el pasado
Valeria Camporesi (Filmoteca Española)
Canciones para después de una guerra (B. Martín Patino, 1971-1976) is a well-known found footage movie whose creation process, and the ups and down of its reception, have been revised and reconstructed by historians as an exemplary case to show the cultural and political significance of movies in the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy, but its implications might be analysed from a broader perspective. The reuse of popular songs that in the film accompany documentary footage fosters a powerful emotional response that disoriented at first the censors (when it was completed, with Franco still in power) and inspired later, in different moments of the history of Spanish democracy, an enthusiastic response of the public. Indeed, it can be considered a telling example of the complex functioning of the reuse of archival audiovisual material and the impact this use has on public perceptions of history.
Filmoteca Española has recently carried out the 4K digitization of Canciones’ filmic material and is currently working on Martín Patino's personal archive (donated by the director’s daughter in December 2021 and presently stored in our repository). Within it, a significant amount of material is related to the creative process and to production dealings. What these documents show is the active engagement that was eventually embodied in the film between what Martín Patino wanted to say through his editing choices, and what the changing context dictated.
The aim of this presentation is to use this case to describe and explain how Filmoteca Española works, or is striving to work, with films and film-related materials to promote and diffuse a new way to look at the past.
Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst)
This presentation explores how archives can be used as a site for realizing artistic and curatorial projects while also serving the preservation of film heritage. The focus is not primarily on the reuse of film material, but on other forms of using archives as a resource. The concept of cultural heritage – understood as national heritage – plays a key role in the distribution of resources for archiving, preservation and presentation. However, Arsenal's film collection was formed through the practice of curation and thus represents international film heritage. On the one hand, this means that no public funding is available; on the other hand, this lack creates space for reflection on the category of film heritage as such and the associated archiving practices. The project “Living Archive” (2011-2013) laid the foundation for an archival practice that understands archival work as something that sees preservation as a condition for the creation of something new. Artists, filmmakers, curators, and scholars were invited to explore the archive and develop their own projects from it. Digitization and restoration were then carried out solely to make these projects possible. The result was installations, new films, performances, sculptures, exhibitions, film series and publications. Numerous films were researched, digitized, restored and preserved. It quickly became clear that the films could be brought to new life in a contemporary context in this way. The project also recovered films that were thought to be lost, which were returned to their countries of origin. In the process, many questions arose: Where does the line between restoration and the production of something new lie? How do the new productions relate to the archive? New forms of access, interdisciplinary research and transnational discourses have made artists, curators and other cultural activists into new archivists.
Posthumous Cinema: Unfinished Films in the Archives
Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University)
The conundrum of artists’ unfinished films are not unique as they appear in notable film archives and collections. This presentation explores different typologies of what the author has been calling posthumous cinema, drawing on personal collections and institutional archives, to explore the rich potentialities of unfinished films and the concrete practices and forms of creative archival animation that have been and might be devised for them. Monika Kin Gagnon developed this working concept in her late artist-father's film archive and expanded it to other unfinished films left behind by experimental (distinct from commercial) filmmakers after their deaths, yielding a remarkably rich range of examples. This includes unfinished films by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (White Dust from Mongolia, Pacific Film Archive), Joyce Wieland (Wendy and Joyce, Cinémathèque québecoise), Charles Gagnon (R69), Peter & Mira Wintonick (Wintopia), Marion McMahon & Philip Hoffman (Racing Home) (the latter three from personal collections), as well as other better known unfinished films by Andy Warhol (Andy Warhol Museum Film and Video Archive), Maya Deren and Hollis Frampton (varied archives), and many others. How have these unfinished materials been left dormant, curated, reanimated (occasionally illicitly remediated) in distinctive ways? This presentation highlights the multi-faceted and overlapping considerations – aesthetic, affective, archival, ethical, institutional and technical – that are activated when dealing with cinematic fragments and para-cinematic ephemera. As we now inhabit a world of streaming film fragments precipitated by an explosion of camera phones, tiny screens, and self-publishing, networked platforms (YouTube, TikTok and Instagram), what might reflection on unstructured, unfinished, archived celluloid film fragments offer? Emerging scholarship has described unfinished films as "sights unseen", productively incomplete, as shadow cinema and unproduction studies; they challenge ontological certainty of what a film is, and provocatively open up critical terrains about the new media ecologies in which they flourish.
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