This year's Summer School takes place from August 24-26 at silent green Kulturquartier and the Arsenal cinema. Entitled "ONE PLUS ONE. Curating the Archive", it is focussing on questions of digitizing, restoring, and long-term archiving which are currently topics of great concern for the Arsenal.
Time is running short, since analog films are already threatened with disintegration, and the costs are so great that as a rule financing first has to be found for every effort. Despite the pressure to act quickly, we should not overlook that collective memory also contributes to how we engage with film history in the long term. Films live on in the memories of those who have seen them. The way that a film gets burned into memory is closely linked with the conditions of its reception. When, how, and under what conditions was a film seen? What other films or film events framed the screening?
One Plus One: The Summer School 2017 assumes that an archival film can only have significance in relation to the present, and cannot be remembered separately from the concrete situation of its presentation. The contributions and workshops are about the practice of curating. How do I create spaces for perceiving archival films, in which film history can become an experience of the present? How can exhibition and screening practice contribute to the formation of memory and thus to the processes of archiving?