Symposium Panel 4: Fragmentation and the Decentralization of the Archive

Today state archives collect a wide variety of films but centralize them in one location. At the same time film archives have many archive makers, including amateurs driven by a passion for specific aspects of cinema, and institutions with agendas and collection policies which do not align with the priorities of national cultural policy. In the current archival moment fragmentation remains a problem, but the decentralization of the archive also creates new potentials for the creation of relations and collectivities in and through film.

Amrita Biswas has received the Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation to conduct research at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University. She has been awarded the Wilhelm Bender Dissertation Award for excellence in research in the Humanities (VFF, 2025). Her work has been published by Routledge, Meson Press, Intellect, Open Library of Humanities, and the National Film Archive (Czech Republic).

Maral Mohsenin is the Director of Collections at Eye Filmmuseum. She holds a PhD in Film Studies, focusing on the evolution of technologies in film archives. Previously she was Head of Programming at the Geneva International Film Festival from 2022 to 2025, and worked as a film restorer and curator at the Cinémathèque suisse from 2016 to 2022. She is a member of the short film committee for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and has taught at the universities of Lausanne and Amsterdam.

Achilleas Papakonstantis is a film historian and currently Head of the Access and Research Department at the Cinémathèque suisse. He previously worked as a graduate assistant in the Department of Film History and Aesthetics at the University of Lausanne, where he regularly taught courses and seminars in film history, textual analysis, and film analysis. He is the author of Godard. Je est un autre and a member of the editorial boards of the journals Repérages. La Revue de la Cinémathèque suisse and Décadrages. For the latter, he co-edited special issues on Abdellatif Kechiche (2020) and Céline Sciamma (2024). He also regularly teaches film history and theory at ECAL (Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne).