[ecrea] NeMLA 2015: The Becoming of Archival Images in Documentary Filmmaking Seminar

CFP NeMLA, Toronto, April 30-May 3, 2015:

The Becoming of Archival Images in Documentary Filmmaking Seminar  ?

Chairs: Hudson Moura (University of Toronto), Marta Marín-Dòmine (Wifrid 
Laurier University) ??



Deadline: September 15, 2014



Archiving is in itself a gesture of the present caring about a past that 
one wishes to project into the future, or as Jacques Derrida puts it, a 
token of the future. However, contemporary cinema is marked by a new 
approach to the archive, most specifically to the circulation of 
archival images inserted in documentary films, through their 
materialization that implies the coexistence of at least three different 
modalities of appropriation: a) the canonical one that searches in these 
images the referent of past historical events; b) the use of archival 
images to fictionalize memorial narratives; and, c) the creation of 
false archival images to underline the tension between fiction and 
truth. Parallel to these trends in documentary filmmaking, the 21st 
century created the new phenomenon of ‘digital storages’ by the constant 
production of images that are instantly part of a virtual archive which 
aim is not necessarily that of becoming a “token of the future”, a trace 
of what it has been, but a storage of what constantly “is”: a huge 
global wasteland of images that are the result of multiple purposes that 
span from surveillance (CCTV) to the instant demand of global 
communication or the narcissistic inscription of oneself in the constant 
flow of the present. How do archives contribute to the invention of the 
past? What do archival images add to documentary filmmaking in terms of 
their value as “true” documents? When a documentary becomes an archive 
itself? This Seminar seeks to elicit the debate around the use of this 
quasi-infinite repository of images (digital storages) in documentary 
filmmaking (circulation, appropriation, creation of new meanings) as 
well as to open the possibility to reflect on the appropriation of the 
“archive” as a genre (the mimicking of the archives’ aesthetics) and its 
ethical implications.



Please send your 300-word proposal by September 15, 2014 through the 
NeMLA website https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15353 Email 
(hudson.moura /at/ utoronto.ca) or (mmarin /at/ wlu.ca) with any and all questions. 
Papers will be considered for an edited volume.



--
Hudson Moura
Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Toronto
73 Queen's Park Crescent
Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1K7
Tel: 416-585-4442
http://www.spanport.utoronto.ca/faculty/moura
(hudson.moura /at/ utoronto.ca)




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