Luna Hupperetz (University of Amsterdam)
The Militant Film Circuit of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms: Reconstructing a Dutch Multi-sited Cinema History in Light of the Cineclub Film and Paper Collection (IISH)
Luna produced this original video in May 2020 as an alternative to being able to (with Floris Paalman) screen 16mm films and talk in person from Cinema 1 at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
The original abstract of 2019 reads:
A cultural ecological approach to archiving: the case of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms at the International Institute of Social History (IISH)
Activist films from the 1960s and 1970s served the fight against social inequality and capitalist exploitation of natural resources, which provide historical references to current concerns regarding sustainability, climate change, and migration. Some of the films made an attempt to coherently address various problems, La hora de los hornos (Solanas & Getino, 1968). However, it is mostly through larger corpora that interconnections become visible. We therefore focus on the collection of 135 films and documentation from the Dutch film distributor and producer Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms. While kept at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, it is long neglected, to become an ‘orphan archive’. In spring 2019, students and staff from the University of Amsterdam and Eye Filmmuseum made steps to disclose the collection.
We encountered problems of damage, cataloguing standards, copyrights, questions of unicity, and lacking data to locate the films elsewhere. However, our attention has especially been drawn to instances of appropriation, such as translations, modified versions, different films put together on reels for programming purposes, and foreign films paired with Cineclub’s own productions. Such acts of appropriation draw links between different issues, places and people. Following the spatial turn in the humanities, localizing social and cultural expressions and practices, our research has focused on the environment in which the films emerged and to which they refer. Moreover, applying the anthropological theory of cultural ecology, we have observed how the films fulfill functions of monitoring and feedback, to reinforce or change developments. Based on Luhmann’s sociological system theory, these can be understood as functions of memory and oscillation (the latter to cross borders and to draw perspectives). The archival function of collective memory is well established; less so are other collective cognitive functions.
The Cineclub Vrijheidsfilm collection shows us if the same functions apply to larger corpora, and what happens to them in the case of an orphan archive. Thinking along activist appropriation strategies, through the question how internationally distributed films were shown locally, we consider how such collections can be appropriated today’s preservation and presentation. This aim entails the establishment of a network of archives and universities, and mapping the cultural ecology in which such collections can fulfill collective cognitive functions. This will enable us to better understand our current relationship to climate and water as well as migration and social justice, and the role that film corpora (could) play in them.
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL HISTORY (IISH)
“In more than 80 years, the Institute has built one of the largest socioeconomic historical collections in the world, with over 4,000 archives, 1 million books, 550,000 photos, 100,000 posters, more than 6,000,000 digital objects and datasets.”