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Call for Papers: A Film Scholarship without Films? Reimagining Israeli Cinema History through the Archive

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Symposium, hosted at The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University (Israel), 5-6 July 2022 (in-person, with online participation available)

In the introduction to the 2007 anthology Looking Past the Screen, Eric Smoodin points to a methodological lacuna within the conventional form of film historiography. This form – which “has at least since the mid-1950s been dominated by the study of the film itself, often organized around genre, nation, or authorship” – is not without its great benefits for historical knowledge; yet by emphasizing cinematic text over context, it has also missed out on important historical insight that may be garnered from closer scrutiny of nonfilmic archival holdings. In order to offer a corrective, Smoodin suggested that we imagine an alternative form of historiography, one which decenters the film in favor of other types of film-related material found in the archive.

Since pointing to this possibility of a “film scholarship without films,” Smoodin’s suggestion has materialized into exciting new avenues of research within various precincts of cinema studies. In the growing body of academic work on Israeli film history, however, the impact of such developments has rarely been felt. As early as 2001, historian Moshe Zimmerman lamented the tendency of Israeli cinema scholars to “analyze the content, narrative, ideological and aesthetic aspects of finished films,” while showing an “almost total disregard” of primary sources that may reveal “the conditions of technology, funding, production, distribution and mediation [of] filmmaking in Israel.” A few worthwhile exceptions notwithstanding, over the past two decades little has changed: Israeli film scholarship continues to leave nonfilmic archival materials unexplored, and by extension, its own historical paradigms largely unchallenged.

This symposium proposes that we reconceptualize Israeli film historiography in light of cinema studies’ recent focus on exploring the archive. As such, the event aims to highlight two interconnected sites of concern. The first of these has to do with accounting for the current state of archiving for Israeli film-related primary materials. To date, there is no central archive dedicated to these materials, with main archival activities concentrating on the films themselves. Accordingly, and in spite of contemporary digitization efforts, copious amounts of relevant content remain inaccessible, or worse – unarchived. This is particularly disconcerting in the case of disenfranchised constituencies such as the Palestinian people, whose film history stands under erasure due to the eradication of material traces, or their sequestering and dispersal within classified archives (as those of the Israeli Defense Forces). Yet even archives of more “sanctioned” objects and texts suffer from neglect due to an absence of rigorous archival attention or sufficient government and private funding. Thus, if we are to move Israeli cinema studies “in the direction of new sources of material and toward the possibility of film histories in which films themselves might have a modest place and none of the singular importance that marked the discipline for so long” (Smoodin 2014), then we must first map out what types of sources are actually out there in both public and private collections. On this foundation, we may begin planning for an adequate platform that networks these sources and therefore allows for their more effective induction into film history.

Concurrently, the quest for redefining the archive must be intertwined with a revision of how film scholarship may work with archives. Here, in our second site of concern, we take inspiration from examples of “writing film histories without films” outside of Israeli cinema studies. For many years now, such research has not only pointed to undervalued yet potentially worthwhile objects of film culture, from posters to press kits, fan books to trade journals, production memos to government files; they also made us aware of new and creative ways to use these sources of information, which a constant disciplinary focus on filmic textual analysis has unfortunately marginalized. Implementing these methods onto Israeli film-related archival sources could produce new histories, which are particularly sensitive to Israeli cinema’s place within a transnational landscape of moving image traditions; it could also redefine what skills are necessary for film scholarship to deepen its historical engagement – especially with respect to recent developments in Digital Humanities, which offer cutting-edge avenues of research and data visualization. These are ambitious goals, yet we hope our symposium will serve as a modest first step towards their realization.

With these emphases in mind, we invite scholars of various disciplines to submit paper proposals that fall under the following headings:

  • Completed or ongoing research projects on Israeli film history, whose findings testify to substantial and meaningful use of archival materials that are not the films themselves (such as reviews, memoirs and testimonials, production and censorship files, financial data, trade journals, advertisements, on-set photos, etc.).
  • Proposed research projects on Israeli film history, which can point to particular databases/collections/archives of nonfilmic film-related materials, and provide methodological insight into how these may be used.

Selected papers will be presented in-person at Tel Aviv University, July 5-6, 2022 (online participation also possible). In addition to scholarly panels, the symposium will also include commissioned workshops by archival specialists, who will introduce the range of different film-related materials under their supervision and discuss how these may contribute to future research.

Paper proposals should include an abstract (no more than 300 words) and full contact information (with institutional affiliation). Please submit them via email to symposium organizers Dr. Dan Chyutin (dchyutinfilm@tauex.tau.ac.il) AND Yael Mazor (yaelmazo@tauex.tau.ac.il) by March 15, 2022.

We look forward to your proposal!

Dan Chyutin and Yael Mazor

The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University

Advisory committee: Prof. Dr. Raz Yosef (Tel Aviv University), Dr. Boaz Hagin (Tel Aviv University), Prof. Dr. Rachel S. Harris (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne), Dr. Ori Levin (Tel Aviv University), Dr. Hilla Lavie (Hebrew University)

Winner of the 2021 IAMHIST Challenge, this event is generously sponsored by the International Association of Media and History, with the specific aim of encouraging graduate students/early career scholars to develop their professional networks and acquire research-related skills.

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IAMHIST Challenge event: Moving Images, Institutional Bodies

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Date: 5 November 2021

Time: 11:30am – 5:30pm (GMT)

Price: £4 (including booking fee) / free for members and concessions, and IAMHIST members

Venue: Cinema 1, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (this will be an in-person event)

Registration Link:  https://www.ica.art/films/symposium-moving-images-institutional-bodies

(IAMHIST members can attend this event for free: to register, please email ankorporaal@gmail.com)

This event is curated and moderated by Astrid Korporaal, PhD candidate at Kingston University and Lecturer at the University of Groningen.

This event explores the creative and ethical use of moving image, film and photography as a medium for engaging with contested institutional collections, archives and histories. Specifically, institutions connected to the incarceration, exploitation and separation of bodies and objects from specific social, geographical, and cultural contexts. The symposium aims to bring the history of representational image-making and mass media at the service of colonial, carceral and imperialist archives and collections, into dialogue with the potential capacity of image-makers to disrupt these institutional lineages. It aims to explore how documentary media have been used to shape the collective definitions and accepted values of authenticity, truth, belonging, criminality and ownership in public and private spaces

While research has been done into the history of audio-visual media used as techniques for categorising, classifying, documenting and surveilling colonial and incarcerated subjects, this event aims to develop a further perspective. It brings together academics, artists, curators and historians, to explore what Ariella Azoulay calls ‘potential history’ in promoting the creative, critical and decolonial repositioning of archives, institutions and creative practices.

The artists and researchers presenting in this event expand our notions of what it means to give and receive access to restricted spaces. How do the images we are able to circulate run parallel the movements that bodies can make across borders? And might creative interventions with the technologies that give us access to images, influence the histories of bodies that we are able to tell?

Schedule:

11:30: Introductions + screening (tbc)

12:00: Panel 1: Institutional Archives, Research Companions and Unruly Histories

12:15: Erika Tan on her film works engaging with colonial museums in ‘Malaya’ and the connection between historical and technological dislocations of objects and entering into a dialogue with the forgotten history of a Malayan weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who was brought to the British Empire exhibition in Wembley in 1924.

12:45: Nikolaus Perneczsky in conversation with Didi Cheeka on moving image restitution histories and archives, with a screening of Cheeka’s film Memory Also Die (2020) which focuses on memory as political taboo, fifty years after the collective trauma responsible for the death of memory in Nigeria: Biafra.

13:15: Panel discussion

13:45: Lunch break

14:45: Panel 2: Institutional Inversions and Reclamations

15:00: Screening of Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys’ video works, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2019) and Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition (2017, with Bayley Sweitzer) which critique institutional archives, collection and the excavation of indigenous cultural heritage for outsiders’ consumption.

15:30: Judy Price on her research on Holloway Woman’s Prison and her film installation The Good Enough Mother (2020), which features a sculpture of a baby from the Dorich House Museum acquired for the first Mother and Baby Unit at HMP Holloway in 1948 and explores the subject of incarcerated pregnancy.

16:00 Khadija Carroll on her artistic work and collaborative research with the Immigration Detention Archive and the Pitt Rivers Museum.

16:30 Rhea Storr on her work and research into the heritage and bodily resistance of Junkanoo, Bahamian carnival, with a screening of her work Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (2020)

17:00 Panel discussion

 Speakers include: 

Erika Tan is an artist, curator and researcher whose work focuses on the postcolonial, transnational and decolonial – working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects. Tan is currently The Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow. Her work has been exhibited & collected internationally. Current projects include: Art Histories of a Forever War—Modernism Between Space and Home, Taipei Fine Art Museum; ESOK, Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; Frequencies of Tradition, Incheon Art Platform, Korea; In/reproduction: The 4th Global Overseas Chinese Artists Exhibition, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen China; Barang-Barang, Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition, Kingston School of Art; “Asian Heads” Dorich House Museum, London.

Didi Cheeka is co-founder and curator of Lagos Film Society – an alternative cinema center dedicated to the founding of Nigeria’s first arthouse cinema. He is the artistic director of Decasia – Berlin-Lagos Archive Film Festival. Didi is currently researching and digitizing Nigeria’s rediscovered audiovisual archives.

Nikolaus Perneczky is a writer and curator based in London. His postdoctoral research project—a critical inquiry into the politics and ethics of global film heritage—considers the archive(s) of World Cinema in relation to colonial legacies of epistemic violence and unequal exchange. Along with curator and archivist June Givanni, Nikolaus is currently working on a podcast series on Africa’s moving image heritage and the question of restitution.

Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Arts Center, e-flux, UnionDocs, and Microscope Gallery.

Jackson Polys is an artist who lives and works between what is currently called Alaska and New York.  His work reflects examinations into the limits and viability of desires for indigenous growth. He began carving with his father, Tlingit artist Nathan Jackson, in high school, has worked as an artist based in Alaska as Stron Softi, with solo exhibitions at the Alaska State Museum and the Anchorage Museum, and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts (2015).

Judy Rabinowitz Price is interested in how art can produce different ways of thinking about contested sites and engage with collective struggles. Her research-led practice includes photography, moving image and sound, composed as single-screen works and multiscreen installations.  Price often draws on images and sounds from archival sources as well as the sustained study of a place or space through networks, collaborations and activism. Palestine was an enduring focus of her work from 2008-2017 with two bodies of work Within This Narrow Strip of Land (2008) and Quarries of Wandering Form (2017).Her most recent work explores how women are affected by the criminal justice system in the UK through the prism of HMS Holloway that was decommissioned in 2016.  The End of a Sentence 2020 draws on individual and collective stories of prison to make visible issues around gender, class, race and economy as well as reflecting on Holloway’s legacy spatially and ideologically as a site of remembrance and absence.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an Austrian-Australian artist and historian based in Vienna. She is the Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham, Professor of History at the Central European University. Her films and installations have been shown internationally including at the Venice, Marrakech, and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM, Manifesta, Taxispalais, Extracity, HKW, Royal Museums Greenwich, Savvy, LUX, Chisenhale, SPACE, Project Art Centre Gallery Dublin, St Kilda, Melbourne, and the Casablanca Film Festival. She is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony (2014); The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations (2016), Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium (2017); Mit Fremden Federn: El Penacho und die Frage der Restitution (2021); The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe (2022). She is the co-author of Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (2020) and co-editor of Third Text journal.  www.kdja.org

Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who makes work about the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. Masquerade as a site of protest or subversion is an ongoing theme in her work in addition to the effect of environment on cultural production. She is a co-director of not nowhere an artists’ film co-operative and resident at Somerset House, London. Storr is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020 and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize. Recent screenings/exhibitions include New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, Artist Film International (Whitechapel Gallery) and National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This is event is support by the International Association for Media and Art History’s IAMHIST Challenge, and the Make Film History project. Make Film History is funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Networking Call’ (grant numbers AH/V002066/1 and IRC/V002066/1).

Rhea Storr, Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (Still), 2020

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