Exploring Moving Image Archives: Practices, Theories, and Research

A brown bag workshop with Grazia Ingravalle—bring your lunch!

Sponsored by the Media Studies Research Group Collaboratory at C21

In the early 1930s, the transition to sound projected a new sense of historicity onto silent films—many of which were rapidly disappearing under the indifference of their producers—prompting efforts to establish the first archives to preserve these now old films. Decades-long debates around film’s artistic potential, documentary value, and educational and propagandistic use culminated in the creation of the first film archives in Europe and North America, sanctioning the identification of films as objects of enduring cultural value worthy of institutional preservation. Nearly eighty years later, the first collection of archival films was added to the UN Memory of the World Register. Along with UNESCO’s stamp of approval, digital technologies have fueled a renewed scholarly interest in the work of film archives by providing new modes of preserving and displaying the history of cinema and archival films.

Led by film archival scholar Grazia Ingravalle, this workshop will examine film archives at the intersection of preservation, exhibition, and historical interpretation. More specifically, it will address questions related to current archival practices (including preservation, digitization, restoration, exhibition, and access), theories of the archive, film archival research, and the politics of archiving and curatorship. This discussion-centered workshop will provide plenty of opportunities for questions and debate.

Grazia Ingravalle is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Brunel University London, where she is working on a postdoctoral research project about colonial archival films and contemporary archival exhibition practices. Her work addresses the intersections between film historiography, archiving, and present archival film curatorship. She received a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of St. Andrews and has published in The Moving Image, for which she also co-edited a themed issue on digital humanities and film archives, and Screen. She is currently working on her book manuscript Museums of Cinema: Archival Film Curatorship from Analog to Digital.