Symposium Panel 10: Unarchiving Paranational Cinema

If a film does not belong to a ‘national’ cinema, who is responsible for archiving and preserving it? The dominance of national criteria in archival practice tends to neglect films bereft of a passport. The notion of “paranational cinema” as we envision it in the project “Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices” focuses on cinema beyond the nation: filmmaking and related practices that transcend, subvert, precede or succeed national frameworks which condition the production, circulation, and preservation of films. 

In our panel, we will discuss the conceptual framing and methodological challenges behind the prefix “para” by focusing on three films found in or closely related to the Arsenal archive: Dušan Makavejev’s Nevinost bez zaštite (1968), Skip Norman’s Cultural Nationalism (1969), and Assja Djebar’s La Zerda et Les Chants de l’oubli (1982). How do they process questions of “nation” and belonging, either in their form, discourse, or the material conditions at their basis? Does the history of the prints – including aspects such as subtitles, language versions, formats – speak to their irreducibility to single national contexts?

ParaNational Team

Karina Griffith is Professor of Intersectional Visual and Media Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). In her dissertation, Flânoirie: The Moving Images of Black German Cinemas, she analyzed Black German moving images from the 1960s to the present, identifying cinematic strategies of affective representation through editing, mise-en-scène, and cinematography. In 2021, she joined the curatorial team of the Berlinale Film Festival section Forum Expanded.

Petra Belc Krnjaić is a researcher, curator, and lecturer whose work focuses on amateur and experimental cinema, feminist film historiography, and audiovisual archives. She has published widely on Yugoslav film culture and has led several archival and restoration projects dedicated to amateur film heritage. She teaches film theory and avant-garde film practices at the University of Klagenfurt and VERN’ University in Zagreb.

Brigitta Kuster is a cultural researcher and artist, primarily interested in visual and film studies, (post)colonialism, and migration and border studies. She works as a professor for cultural theory and film studies with a particular focus on gender studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Recent publications include Grenze filmen. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Analyse audiovisueller Produktionen an den Grenzen Europas (2018) and Choix d’un passé. Transnationale Vergegenwärtigungen kolonialer Hinterlassenschaften (2016).

Volker Pantenburg is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Since 2024, he has been directing the SNSF project “Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices.” His publications include books on Harun Farocki, Robert Kramer, and Cinematographic Objects. In the Paranational Cinema project, he works on Skip Norman’s films and the notion of diaspora.

Nikola Radić is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on landscapes and architecture in post-Yugoslav nonfiction cinema at the University of Zurich Film Studies Department, and working as a researcher on the project Paranational Cinema — Legacies and Practices. With Nace Zavrl, he has co-edited the volume Archivism and Appropriation in Post-Yugoslav Cinema, forthcoming from Routledge.

Philip Widmann is a researcher, programmer, and filmmaker, currently working as a postdoc in the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich. He has edited Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema (2024). His book Landschaft als Methode is forthcoming from b_books.