Opening remarks (3′) on Counter-Archives by Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia U) were followed by the first of two presentations in Session 2 of 16 — Black Atlantic/Black Pacific: Archives, Restitution, Activism. This opening morning presentation followed the opening night screening of Iré a Santiago (Sara Gómez, ICAIC, Cuba, 1964).
Susan Lord, Jenn Norton, Brandon Hocura, Michelle O’Halloran, & Rebecca Gordon (Queen’s University)
Apparitions: Vulnerable Media Lab Projects and the Case of Sara Gómez
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/732210177
Q&A for all panelists followed the session’s presentation on the Atrato and Colombian Pacific Archive: watch here.
Abstract: The Vulnerable Media Lab is film and media digitization, preservation and restoration infrastructure and a research lab. Working with artists, technicians, archivists, graduate and undergraduate students, the VML undertakes digitization of media from research partners, primarily in Canada and Latin America. Our contribution to Orphans: Counter-Archives is twofold: 1) to provide an overview of the activities of the VML with an eye to discussing the challenges and insights that come from working across publics and 2) to focus on the work we are doing with the Sara Gómez archive. The VML is digitizing and restoring all of Sara Gómez’s documentaries.
Sara Gómez was an Afro-Cuban filmmaker who died in 1974 at the age of 31, leaving behind her three children, two husbands, loving friends and comrades, nineteen documentaries, a feature film, and an image of utopia. The impact of her short life, not just on those who knew her but also on the formation of the Cuban film institute; on ethnographic and autoethnographic filmmaking practice; on political discourses of race, gender, and revolution; and on that which could be represented. Since her death and until recently, her films were in the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) film archives. Many elements were lost or destroyed by mold and other forms of neglect that stem from an under-resourced national archive and by the politics surrounding Sara’s legacy as an Afro-descendant and feminist filmmaker. How do the material condition of the elements speak? What do they say and how can we understand them across time, social and cultural differences? How much do we “clean”? What do we lose? And how do we represent this in our metadata and documentation in a way that is consistent with and attentive to emerging protocols of Black archival practices?
The VML is dedicated to the the history of counter-publics, solidarity and radical friendships, and other intersecting, justice-seeking activities in the cultural sector. We develop research on alternative, minor, and radical media holdings and distribution networks and contribute to the growing interest in and activism around ethical archiving practices and robust metadata for Indigenous, queer, Afro-descendant, and women’s media. By showing the restoration processes for the Gómez archive in the context of Orphans allows us to both contribute and to learn from the Orphans community as we undertake this work.
Sara Gómez’s films were left unattended in the ICIAC vaults until 2020 when Arsenal Berlin and we in the VML began the processes of restoring, digitizing and documenting. Arsenal, under Markus Ruff, restored the feature film. Several of the documentaries have not been screened since they were made in the 1960s. One was banned. Most original elements are gone. While ICIAC housed and holds the rights to the films, the condition of their archive is a direct representation of the political and economic crises Cuba faces. This project is a collaboration between ICAIC and the VML, between the south and the north. A way of bringing Sara Gómez home and making her visible to the world.
The presentation includes a “before and after” restoration excerpt from the Gómez documentary Guanabacoa: Crónicas de mi familia (1966). Susan Lord introduced a screening of the 13-minute film the following evening.
Bios
- Susan Lord is Professor of Film and Media and Director of Vulnerable Media Lab (VML). Recent publications: co-editor with María Caridad Cumaná, The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution (Indiana UP 2021) and Public no. 57: Archive/CounterArchives (Summer 2018), eds. May Chew, Susan Lord, and Janine Marchessault.
- Jenn Norton is an artist, technician, and adjunct lecturer in the Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University, specializing in restoration software for the VML.
- Brandon Hocura, PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen’s University, is also founder and Director of Séance Centre, specializing in audio archives; lead researcher on the Gómez project audio restoration.
- Michelle O’Halloran is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies. With a background in film and animation studies, her research explores fan-made archives of anime and manga in a transnational context. As a VML technical assistant she is digitizing analog media from “marginalized” sources.
- Rebecca M. Gordon (PhD Indiana U) is a film studies scholar, archivist-in-training, and VLM research associate. Her research interest is US National Parks visitor center films and videos, especially in parks that have recently begun to change out audiovisual stories of what the parks mean, which often take for granted a settler-colonialist or “white-environmentalist” approach to the parks and the parks’ patrons, for updated media that define the parks at least in part as indigenous spaces. <rebecca-gordon.com>
More about
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- Student-Researchers with the Archive/Counter-Archive Project
- the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University at
- ICAIC; “Instituto Cubano del Arte e Indústria Cinematográficos,” by Mariana Villaça, TransAtlantic-Cultures (Apr. 2022)
- Luciano Castillo (gracias), Cinemateca de Cuba, ICAIC. See Valeria Rotella, “Cultivating the Legacy of Cuban Cinema: A Conversation with Luciano Castillo,” Current magazine, Criterion.com, Nov. 30, 2020.
p.s. The Orphan Film Symposium thanks VLM and ICAIC for inspiring and permitting use of a frame from an ICAIC countdown leader attached to a Gómez print.
As Matt Soar and Lost Leaders has been reminding OFS viewers over the past decade, we’ve much to learn from leaders.