Consciously Collective

Archive Fever 1.0 explores how four filmmakers redefine our visual history.

by Shaun Brady

Chick Strand

[ film series ]

In 1995, French philosopher Jacques Derrida published Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, a prescient book-length lecture meditating on the concept of the archive. At the dawn of the Internet age, Derrida recognized "a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement."

That fever has bloomed into an outright epidemic as the growth of YouTube, Wikipedia and those other sites we obsess over has created a massive new electronic archive, almost a real-time updated collective unconscious for society. But the idea of exploring and repurposing the repositories of culture and memory is nothing new, even if it's been accelerated and democratized over the past two decades.

Derrida's piece, and its ensuing ramifications, have sparked a fascinating new series devised by Film @ International House curator Robert Cargni, almost a stream of consciousness musing on the subject expressed through a varied and surprising collection of films.

Defining the archive as "a repository for any personal memories, shared histories, objects and documents through which we revisit the history of our time," Cargni has assembled four programs by filmmakers who rework the archives of our visual culture.

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"Derrida notes that while archives only contain traces of what happened there — not the thing itself — we will always yearn to know what was lost, what burned and disappeared with the ashes," Cargni explains via e-mail. "The problem of memory has always been a preoccupation of filmmakers, historians, film theorists and programmers. What special responsibilities does art have with respect to past events in order to remain invested with value and emotion?

"How do filmmakers confront the problem of constructing a meaningful connection to the past? How does facing the past through cinematic representation in fact transform the present reality? Different film genres have different modes of configuring these questions and thus of proposing answers to them. Our series seeks to explore the varied representations of the formation of historical consciousness expressed through the archive, visual media and art of cinema."

The series begins on Thursday with a selection of films by Chick Strand, who passed away this summer at 78. Strand's work blends found and new footage into a sort of impressionistic documentary or essayistic poetry. The program also includes Soft Fiction, an alternately sensual and impactful exploration of female sexuality; Mosori Monika, which allows Spanish missionaries to condemn themselves by trumpeting how an elderly Warao Indian woman now strives to "die like a Spaniard"; and the elegiac Krystallnacht, a simple yet devastating eight-minute piece dedicated to Anne Frank.

Friday night's program concentrates on the films of Christina Battle, who will also give a workshop and master class on working with film loops on Saturday afternoon. The young filmmaker hand-processes footage, creating explosions of color behind silhouetted oil wells, or watching as a herd of buffalo stampede through the film frame and into their own transcendent dissolution. In four minutes of manipulated still woodcuts of the Salem witch trials, her film Hysteria manages to be a blunt recoiling from political violence.

Saturday features two programs: The first consists of two pieces by the Milan-based Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who manipulate archival footage mainly from early cinema. The series draws to a close with The Juche Idea, Jim Finn's repurposing of North Korean propaganda into a dry-comic mockumentary about a South Korean video artist undertaking a communal arts residency in the land of Kim Jong Il.

As implied by the "1.0" in the title, this is the first of a series of such programs, in which Cargni plans to invite local programmers, curators, archivists and artists to contribute their own reflections on the theme. "They should propose the archive as a site for creative intervention, one that enables new possibilities for preserving and representing individual memory within a larger historical consciousness," Cargni says. "I welcome adventurousness."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Thu.-Sat., Dec. 10-12, $8, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.