Video documentation „Resounding Archives – The Politics Of Listening To The Moving Image“

Welcoming Remarks by Vinzenz Hediger and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Over the last decade or so, archivists, artists, curators, and scholars have increasingly engaged with archives to make cinema’s varied and multiple pasts visible and create new futures for and with moving images. But an engagement with archives is never just an act of looking at, but also of listening to moving images. In the work of archivists, artists, curators, and scholars, archives become audible as much as they become visible. How exactly does the audible relate to the visible in moving image archives, and how does the work of opening up these archives to audiences through programs, artworks, and scholarship reconfigure that relationship? How does what we might call the re-sounding of archives shape film and media history and the audiovisual arts?

Sonic Maps of Migration: Documentary Sound Archives

Mobile sound recorders revolutionized documentary filmmaking in the 1960s, making documentaries a migratory form with an affinity for migratory movements. Increasingly, soundscapes, and sound archives have been reshaping the migratory aesthetics of documentaries. 

• Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (Goma) will talk about soundscapes and trauma. 
• Britta Lange (Berlin) will discuss the latency of colonial sound archives. 
• Moderation: Laliv Melamed (Frankfurt am Main)

Cinephilia as Sonophilia

The cinephile, a social figure of France’s postwar culture that soon emerged in similar fashion in other parts of the world, found its sonic complement in the “mélomane,” the melody-maniac or passionate music lover. In cinema, passion for sound and image are interrelated. How can we understand film as an archive of these two entangled loves? 

• Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin) will talk about Jack Smith’s record collection and film performances. 
• Pavitra Sundar (Hamilton College) will discuss feminist approaches to the history of Bombay film sound. 
• Moderation: Marc Siegel

Archive Work as Artistic Practice

With the project Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2011– 2013), Arsenal paved the way to an open archive not only for research, but also for production. Archival Assembly #3 will present installations which resulted from work in audiovisual archives or which created new archives. 

• Artist talk with Dana Iskakova (Almaty) and Susanne Sachsse (Berlin). 
• Moderation: Asja Makarević (Frankfurt am Main/Vienna/Sarajevo)

Tell Me What I See: The Art of Live Narration-as-Translation

Live commentary of films was a celebrated art form in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, outlasting the advent of sound by almost a decade. It has since re-emerged in many parts of Africa and Asia. A form of translation- as entertainment, live commentary adds new layers to a film and challenges established notions of work and authorship, with far-reaching consequences for archival and curatorial practices. 

• Matthias Krings (Mainz) and Solomon Waliaula (Nairobi) will talk about live commentary superstars in Kenya. 
• Chalida Uabumrungjit (Bangkok) will discuss the practice of live dubbing in Thailand. 
• Abigail Mann (Jos) will address Indian films dubbed in Hausa. 
• Moderation: Vinzenz Hediger

Does this Sound Right? The Ethics of Curating Sound

It seems that in archiving and curating historical film elements, the aspect of sound is treated with less constraint – or more freedom – than images. Creating contemporary music for historical films is considered a curatorial practice, in many countries dubbing is the norm. To the contrary, the visual quality of a restoration is closely measured against the original. What is the source of this inequality? Should it be balanced and, if so, how? 

• Matěj Strnad (Prague) will discuss questions of access to film history through language, sound, and music. 
• Sonia Campanini (Frankfurt am Main) will talk about new ways of experiencing film through sound-based curation. 
• Eunice Martins (Berlin) will talk about experimental live music in the cinema. 
• Moderation: Heleen Gerritsen (Wiesbaden)

Listen Up and Be Persuaded: Archives of Interpellation

Film sounds are often designed to be authoritative and persuasive, from the soundtracks of advertising films to illustrated lectures. These sounds position viewers/ listeners as citizens or consumers. They constitute an archive of interpellation in which the politics of listening to moving images become particularly salient. 

• Christian Ferencz-Flatz (Bucharest) will talk about the sound of advertising films in post-socialist Romania. 
• Tom Rice (St. Andrews) will discuss the lost art of film strip presentation, a precursor to tiktok videos. 
• Moderation: Salma Siddique (Berlin)

Sounding Out Materiality: Archiving Foley Sound

Foley is the art of adding sound effects and music to moving images. But Foley is also the work of finding unsuspected sonic lineages between seemingly unrelated materials, e.g. vegetables and plastics. Mapping and reconstructing the history of Foley, which includes lost traces of sound from the silent era, requires new modes of sonic fabulation. 

• Jonáš Kucharský (Prague) and Sara Pinheiro will talk about the Foley archive at the Národní filmový archiv. 
• Simone Nowicki (Frankfurt am Main) will discuss Foley artists and how they have localized themselves throughout history.
• Moderation: Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt am Main)

Speaking Up

Since the 1960s, the primary task of independent, political, and militant cinema has been to lend a voice to those who would otherwise go unheard. These films were often created by collectives whose members not only developed new modes of production, but also a new distribution and cinema practice intended to have a transformative effect on socio-political life. In this context, programs and manifestos were created which continue to reverberate today. 

• Fiona Berg (Berlin) will discuss feminist networks, festivals, and manifestos. 
• Ahmeed Refaat (Cairo) will talk about the 2nd Afro-Asian Film Festival that took place in Cairo in 1960. 
• Moderation: Brigitta Kuster (Berlin/Zurich)

Pirate Sounds: Composing Histories From Acoustic Fragments and Debris

After found footage films came found sound music, the creative borrowing of not just styles, rhythms, and rhymes, but entire building blocks of musical compositions. The two most significant cultural movements of the last three decades in a global perspective, hip hop and Afrobeats, provide the outlines of a new cultural order which is also a re-ordering of a shared archive of images and sounds of emancipation. 

• Tom Simmert (Mainz) will speak of pirate media and YouTube archives in Nigerian music. 
• Aboubakar Sanogo (Ottawa) will discuss hip hop and how it remediates what we might call the “African Emancipation Library.”
• Moderation: Erica Carter (London)

Archival Assembly #3 is organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in collaboration with the master’s program Film Culture at Goethe University Frankfurt, the Goethe Institut, silent green, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, and migas, a listening bar. Funding is provided by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.