Archival power and audiovisual memory : recognizing social inequality in film archives

• How can heritage institutions deal with the challenges of diversity policies and possibly work as an intervention into hegemonic memory? This paper looks at the dynamics of recognition and visibility in national film archives. Setting out to examine on what terms marginalised lives of social and ethnic minorities are made visible, it analyses the work of national film archives in Sweden and the UK. This approach positions the archive into an object of analysis, shifting the focus on the archive as a site of knowledge retrieval to a site of knowledge production (Foucault 1972, Stoler 2002). Instead of looking at ways of including minorities as a priori identities, I suggest studying the processes of regulation according to which different lifestyles and experiences become ‘acknowledgeable’ (Schaffer 2008, Thomas et al 2017). The paper discusses how archives can foreground archival social inequalities as a result of collection policies, colonial representations or metadata management.  It will look at ways of reflecting on hegemonic power structures in the curation of online content. The case studies will be ‘The BFI Player’, the online portal of the British Film Institute, and the Swedish website ‘Filmarkivet.se’, which has created access to some of the digitized collections from the Swedish National Film Archives, administered by the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and the Royal Library (KB).

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

archives

digitization

film archives

heritage

recognition

Film Studies

Filmvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)