Symposium Panel 9: Futurity and Archival Speculation

The archival record is always spotty. State bureaucracies may create saturated records (but have historically done so only in a limited set of places over sustained periods of time). Film archives, particularly at their places and times of origin, tend to be shaped by personal initiatives and social and political accidents rather than sustained collection policies. In addition, film is an art form and medium of ephemeral materiality, and archival loss is a constant threat and challenge for archivists. How can we write histories and create new futures of and through cinema from incomplete archives, and how and to what extent can and should we resort to speculation to address the gaps in the record?

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is the Artistic Director of Arsenal Filminstitut in Berlin. From 2001 to 2019 she was a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum and from 2006–2020 founding director of Forum Expanded. She curated exhibition and research projects such as Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2010–2013) and Archive außer sich (2017–2022). In 2021 she launched the biennial festival Archival Assembly. Schulte Strathaus serves on the boards of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives), the master’s program Film Culture at the University of Jos/Nigeria, and the Harun Farocki Institut. She is co-editor (with Vinzenz Hediger) of Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past (2024).

Fabian Tietke is a freelance film critic and film programmer with a focus on film and social movements, Italian, German, and Chinese film production, and film history. Text: A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism, in: Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel (ed.): Celluloid revolt: German screen cultures and the long 1968 (2019).

Dr. Hani Salwah Yaakup is Senior Lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia, working across film sociology, broadcasting, and Malay popular culture. Her research examines Malaysian horror cinema in relation to local belief systems, indigenous folklore, and cultural identity. Her recent work spans audiovisual heritage, environmental humanities, and living archives, with a focus on preserving indigenous knowledge, oral traditions, and environmental memory among Orang Asli communities in Malaysia.