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Looking for a “Now‐Time” in Family Film Footage: Appropriating and Activating Archival Images in the Present
Author(s) -
Grossman Alyssa,
Kirstein Høgel Arine
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1111/var.12201
Subject(s) - amateur , descendant , visual arts , space (punctuation) , computer science , multimedia , sociology , art , history , archaeology , physics , astronomy , operating system
This article presents an ongoing project, Mneme‐Automaton/Memory‐Machine , which involves collaborative interventions with an existing body of amateur family film footage and written texts. As an integral part of engaging with this material, we identify our different relationships to it: one author as a direct descendant of its producers, the other with no personal connection to the collection. Although both of us are remote in time and space from the original contexts of its production, our intention is to identify a Benjaminian “now‐time” for the material to activate it in the present and render it visible and legible in new ways. In this article, we describe and appropriate selections of the film footage, thereby transforming it into an archive that evokes subjective and affective sensations and experiences that extend beyond the “historical index” of the source material.