Seminars

In its focus on Müküs, a small town in the mountainous far East of Turkey and her late father’s birthplace, this prize winning essay film by Kurdish artist Pinar Öğrenci listens gently to the memories of a landscape that has witnessed the eruptions of the Armenian genocide and the recent and ongoing Turkish war on the Kurds. Archival photo images of Armenian life are superimposed ghost-like on documentary images from the present under Turkish military occupation. Armenian songs accompany pans of snowy mountains. As the film shows old men playing chess, Öğrenci, who now works in Berlin, conjures up Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle in silent subtitles, thus broadening a local memory work into a multirelational realm. In its move to salvage remembrance of a submerged and threatened past, Avalanche offers a palimpsest of enforced erasures, not just of avalanches of political violence, but of slowly changing ways of life that have led inexorably to a loss of population, migration and exile. The film was shown at Documenta 15, Berlinische Galerie and at several biennials.

The 1901 Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York, celebrated the independence and expansion of the nations of the Western Hemisphere and the technological advances of the nineteenth century. Related aspects of imperialism, colonialism, and race-as-spectacle served as repeated tropes across the 350-acre exhibition, structuring the experiences of the exposition’s 8 million visitors. This paper looks at a set of motion pictures shot by American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. of Buffalo’s Midway exhibit The Old Plantation to ask: What images of Black labor and leisure do the exhibit and the films present? What forms of temporality are at work across the exhibit and the films? What can these films tell us about cinema’s role in negotiating histories and representations of slavery and its aftermath at the turn of the century?

An examination of recent Russian documentaries created by women directors. These “partisan films” highlight the image of a protesting people and contain feminist protest against the authoritarian power of Putin’s regime, the calcified hierarchy of state institutions, familial patriarchal stereotypes or various forms of violence. Films by Taisiya Krugovykh, Daria Khrenova and Gluklya fall into the category of participatory political documentary cinema which combines a democratic vanguard, contemporary art and elements of different documentary genres and draws the director into interactive relations with participants and events. New technology and new platforms allow them more flexibility and help to erode the division between documentary makers and the artists they film. Without screening licenses, these films (Pussy Versus Putin, Putin Versus Pussy, “Pavlensky: Life Naked”, “1 st May: 2017-2019) cannot be shown in Russia legally.

The systems that relayed cinema through neighboring regions into Iran after the Second World War did more than simply transmit feature films as capsules from abroad. They reorganized the sites and conditions of cinema’s creative labor. As circulation of second-hand prints accelerated in the 1950s, their afterlives needed to be managed and engineered. What were the structures of the business transactions and the definitions of intellectual property that made it possible for films to move in the way they did? What kinds of technical maintenance reworked these objects in transit? This presentation offers a conception of circulation worries as a way to trace these questions through archives of film distributors, lawyers, accountants, and technicians. Worry was material before it was emotional. The archaic meanings of the term describe a process wear and tear, either rapid and violent or protracted and subtle. To worry an object is to disintegrate it, as a pet worries a chew toy. The term is also used to describe persistence through difficult work or challenging travel. Both of these material definitions highlight the driving factors of a materially focused cultural history of cinema in transit: the fragility and the endurance of films. Film prints are worried in an instant by sprocket teeth, but they also worry along through formal and informal distribution networks. There is something in the sense of worry as an expression of care, as a feeling associated with sustaining rather than dominating or disrupting, that unites these archival traces of connection and frustration with a fragile medium.