Archival Assembly #3

Picture and sound form a whole, and yet in general the dominance of the image prevails when dealing with the medium of film, and this also applies to debates surrounding film heritage. But what does it mean when only the image or the soundtrack of a film has survived in part or in whole? What do we learn about cinema when we incorporate oral history, Q&As, dubbed versions, gossip, and radio broadcasts about cinema? What happens during “V-jaying,” a live translation and commentary practice in East Africa, or during live dubbing, a typical practice during the 16mm era of Thai cinema?

The third edition of our festival Archival Assembly considers the potential of transnational archive work from the perspective of the aural. The resulting asynchronicity when the worlds of image and sound are separated creates a new framework for history and the present.

A symposium is again a key element. It has been organized with the Institute for Theater, Film, and Media Studies of Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, represented by Vinzenz Hediger, who conceived it in collaboration with Artistic Director Stefanie Schulte Strathaus: “The title Resounding Archives: The Politics of Listening to the Moving Image is programmatic: Going into the archive means not only viewing images, but also hearing them, listening closely to them, as Godard defines the task of cinema itself (“ausculter,” listening to the world in images and sound). Ten panels will take different geographic, historical, and curatorial perspectives on the question: How do the lingering sounds of the archive change film and media history and artistic practices?”

Part of Arsenal’s future offices will be turned into a one-time-only exhibition space. Around a reading room in which visitors will have access to our dialogue list archive, artworks and archival projects by Saodat Ismailova, Dana Iskakova, Susanne Sachsse, UMAM Documentation & Research, and Eunice Martins and Andre Bertetzki will be presented.

In the series Found Futures, which will take place at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, participants will present projects, ideas, knowledge, and questions related to precarious archives and archival discoveries. Topics will include radio broadcasts about cinema and audio recordings of Q&As, ARchipelago – an archival project on the Yugoslav Wars – the vision of an AIDS film archive in collaboration with Edition Salzgeber, oral history projects from Iran and Lebanon, and sound archives from Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau. The final event is a collaboration with Goethe in Exile and focuses on the partially lost film archives of Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan.

For the first time, the newly opened migas, a listening bar, is one of the event spaces. Each day of the festival, two-hour audio recordings will be heard: These include revival presentations of radio pieces produced for the cinema in 2011 by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dani Gal and Achim Lengerer, and Tony Conrad and Keren Cytter under the title Screen Off – Action for Cinema on Air upon the invitation of Forum Expanded and Klangkunst im Deutschlandradio. Didi Cheeka, Filipa César, and Marinho de Pina have curated programs from audio archives in Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau. Another program presents radio broadcasts about cinema produced by public broadcaster SWF between 1946 and 1969. Finally, we will play recordings of post-screening discussions made during the Berlinale Forum in the 1970s and 1980s at Delphi Kino, as well as Foley sounds from the Národní filmový archiv, Prague.

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

Arsenal  – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V.  is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Arsenal—Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V.
Potsdamer Straße 2
10785 Berlin
Germany

silent green
Gerichtstraße 35
13347 Berlin
Germany

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Lindower Str. 20/22, Haus C
13347 Berlin
Germany

Gerichtstraße 53
13347 Berlin

migas, a listening bar
Lindower Straße 19
13347 Berlin