4 | Audiovisual Traces
Recent Submissions
- ArticleDestroyed Statues, A Bolex 16 mm Camera, and an Old Jeep: The Traces of History in FLAT TYREKo, Li-An (2022)Regarding FLAT TYRE as a cinematic work recording destroyed public statues in post-martial law Taiwan, this article explores the images of the statues captured in the film, with a focus on the meta-perspective presented by the director Huang Ming-Chuan to reflect on the creation of the images, and analyses how the film interprets the history of Taiwan with the statues as “raw materials” for the reconstruction of the history.
- ArticleDigital Digging: Traces, Gazes, and the Archival In-BetweenKreutzer, Evelyn; Stiassny, Noga (2022)Traces and gazes have become leading paradigms in dealing with the (visual) history of the Holocaust within academia. This multi-modal project, composed of the following paper and the video essay “The Archival In-Between”, reflects on the connection between traces and gazes, proposing to think of them as a gaze-trace ‘entity’, which resides in an in-between state. Connecting, juxtaposing, manipulating, and fragmenting various textual and filmic traces from the audiovisual heritage of the Holocaust, the project explores this gaze-trace entity in a self-reflexive manner. It performs a theoretical, empirical, ethical, and poetic investigation into the “in-betweenness” potential of the archive footage by digital means. In so doing, the project aims at exploring and demonstrating the inherent potential of videographic methods to study audiovisual memory.
- ArticleExacting the Trace: Re-archiving Film Historiography in PHOENIX (Christian Petzold, 2014)Mazor, Yael (2022)The article proposes reading Christian Petzold’s PHOENIX (2014) as another form of what Catherine Russel has termed ‘archiveology’. Turning to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of gesture and its reliance on Walter Benjamin’s concept of language, it suggests that Petzold’s engagement with traces of the past in his film materializes through deconstructing film historiography and subsequently re-establishing it. Thus, PHOENIX emerges as another form of ‘archiveology’ through a reclamation of film history.
- ArticleFilmography of the Genocide: Official and Ephemeral Film Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews 1933-1945Schmidt, Fabian; Zöller, Alexander Oliver (2022)A comprehensive list of archival film material related to the genocide, including film materials which are only mentioned in contemporary sources, or which were only reported by witnesses after the war. A tabulation which encompasses lost films, if indeed there is considerable evidence for them, is bound to upend the prevailing notion that filming during the genocide was highly exceptional and mostly carried out in the handful of instances surviving as archival material today.
- ArticleIssue 4: Audiovisual Traces. EditorialAstafeva, Tatiana; Greiner, Rasmus (2022)
- ArticleMovie Theatre(s) of Memory: Audiovisual Traces, Reenactment and Remediation in CINE MARROCOS (BR 2018)Krämer, Marie (2022)Once a host of Brazil’s first international film festival, Cine Marrocos is now a squat. Together with its inhabitants, filmmaker Ricardo Calil goes on an audiovisual search for traces: What traces does such a festival leave behind? And how can we make them visible and reinterpret them? This article explores the question of how reenactment and remediation can be used to (re)read and (re)write existing, but also new audiovisual traces.
- ArticleSecret Publics: Preserving and Curating Audiovisual Traces of LGBTIQ+ Self-Documentation in Austria and beyondMüller, Katharina (2022)As a history of subcultures, queer history is always also a history of spaces, whether analogue or virtual, in which alternative ways of living are made possible. In Austria, this history unfolded within one of the most stubbornly hostile legal environments for queer people anywhere in (Western) Europe. Drawing on the Austrian Film Museum’s “Rainbow Films” collection (working title), this article explores the ephemeral audiovisual self-documentation of the LGBTIQ+ community in or with links to Austria. It focuses primarily on noncommercial films/videos produced outside formal artistic contexts: home movies, activist films, campaign videos, coming-out films, club films, etc., and conceives of these films and videos not as “private films” but as ephemeral spaces of a “secret” but nonetheless real public that stands opposed to the omnipresent privatization of existence.
- ArticleWork and Life: Toward a New Type of BiographyBasaldella, Dennis (2022)Based on a case study, the article shows how a new view on biographical information can enrich and most of all improve historical studies of film and television and lead to a better understanding of work in the film and television industry.
- Article“…will you show that on your British television?” Acceptable Levels as Historiographic Metafiction: Problematising Historical ReconstructionDennehy, Tadhg (2022)The article is a textual analysis of the film ACCEPTABLE LEVELS (John Davies, 1983) and its wider position within the context of cinematic representations of the Northern Irish conflict. Through this device, of a film within a film, its production and subsequent broadcast, ACCEPTABLE LEVELS’ focus is on the way in which the media reports, constructs, and interacts with significant news events, how it engages with the historical moment and the audiovisual trace it leaves behind through the reporting, or non-reporting, of moments of violence and civil unrest.