[Unarchiving] in Lviv, Ukraine

Update: Monday, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:25 PM Dan Streible <dan.streible@nyu.edu> wrote:
         Opportunistically, at 3am today, Facebook communications with colleagues in Lviv led to a live online classroom visit with Ukrainian scholar-archivists Bohdan Shumylovych and Oleksandr Makhanets. At 12:30pm (NYC time) they were in Zoom with the NYU students gathered in the Curating Moving Images class. It was dark in Ukraine, past curfew, but from their home basements in Lviv, they spoke about their work at the Urban Media Archive, which included a collaboration with a historian of Soviet-era amateur film, Maria Vinogradova. We all agreed this was worth doing, if only to remind us that the newest manifestation of Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a creation of a warmongering apparatus that generates disinformation. The Urban Media Archive‘s home, the Center for Urban History, has become a shelter, providing beds and food to Ukrainians under fire. Impressive people. So dedicated are these two, demonstrating grace under literal fire. We in the class were inspired and our Ukrainian colleagues expressed they are grateful for the support and dialogue. 

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A tree grows in Lviv.

The second day of the May 2020 Orphan Film Symposium concluded with a set of screenings introduced by archivists, filmmakers, and scholars. The theme was climate. The internationalism was inspiring, as was the temporal spread (from 1914 to 2019). Films from Germany (pretending to take viewers “around the world”), the Danish Film Institute’s film of the Arctic of Greenland segued to the Museo del Cine’s Argentinean amateur films of Antarctica; two American films documenting and imagining a dying planet; a Ukrainian archive salvaging a 1970s amateur film to create a new work for its “[unarchiving] project.” Two newly scored silent films. A compilation of unknown provenance. An incomplete work. Nontheatrical nonfiction. Pictures both beautiful and ugly of a planet in distress. 

Here we highlight the final segment, in which the creative practice of “unarchiving” is introduced, live from Lviv, Ukraine. 

Oleksandr Makhanets & Bohdan Shumylovych
(Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine)
The [Unarchiving] Program: A Decayed 1970s Amateur Film Becomes “Derevo” / The Tree

The film Derevo (The Tree, Oleh Chornyi and Hennadiy Khmaruk, UKR, 2019) is not on line here, as it’s award-winning success keeps it in the festival circuit for now. 

Thanks to our allies for the inspiration.