April 11, 2008

Event: Archive Fever at NYPL

This coming Monday April 14 at the New York Public Library:

“One of the most compelling issues explored by artists in recent years centers on the nature and meaning of the archive, that is, how we create, store, and circulate pictures and information.

Against the standard view of the archive which evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers and filing cabinets with historical artifacts or the dusty shelves of the library, an active archival impulse has emerged which engages the attention of contemporary artists and thinkers as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images.

Okwui Enwezor, curator of the exhibition Archive Fever—Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography, will sit down with Paul Holdengräber to talk about the archival impulse at work in museums, libraries, and in various artistic practices. This inquiry will be followed by two conversations between first Christian Boltanski and Luc Sante, and then Lorna Simpson and George Lewis.”

more info at http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=4169

-Grace Lile

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April 10, 2008

New Human Rights Archives newsletter from ICA

The Archives and Human Rights Working Group of the International Council on Archives has published its first newsletter. According to the editorial,

“The newsletter will appear on a monthly basis until the ICA Congress in July 2008. A possible outcome of the Congress could be the establishment of a formalized Network, possibly within the ICA, on archives and human rights. Until the Congress, where new decisions may be taken, the contents of the Newsletter will reflect news and comments that each one of us decides to share. The languages of contributions will be English, French and Spanish. As a general rule, translations will not be provided. But, if at all possible, contributors are invited to send texts in at least two of these languages.”

posted by Grace Lile.

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April 4, 2008

Orphan Film Symposium pt. II

The Orphan Film Symposium made possible a fantastic convergence in NYC of archivists, filmmakers, scholars and students from around the globe this past week, with equal diversity represented in the film and video program. In addition to screenings of animated shorts, educational films, silents, newsreels and government sponsored films, we were pleased to see a number of presentations pertaining to human rights issues.  Along with an offering by our own Grace Lile on the work of WITNESS, some highlights included:

- Lucy Smee from the Asian Film Archive discussed political filmmaking in Singapore, and presented the banned video of Martyn See, SINGAPORE REBEL.  Because of his work, See has been threatened with prosecution by the government and had his camera and footage confiscated. You can see a low quality version of SINGAPORE REBEL here.

- Filmmaker Dan Drasin presented his amazing film from 1961, SUNDAY, considered to be one of the first social protest films of the 1960s. You can view SUNDAY here.

- Library of Congress Nitrate Vault Mgr. George Willemen presented a series of stills from a recently discovered lost reel from the 1926 film THE PASSAIC TEXTILE STRIKE - about the historic strike at six textile mills in Passaic, New Jersey.   You can see the prologue of this film on www.archive.org by clicking here.

- Marsha Orgeron of North Carolina State University and Mark Toscano from the Academy Film Archive (along with Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang Fuller) presented newly preserved film of acclaimed director Sam Fuller’s Falkenau liberation footage from 1945.  You can see a segment here, which includes some of Fuller’s own commentary on the footage.

-Chad Hunter, WITNESS Media Archive

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March 25, 2008

Orphans Film Symposium

WITNESS Media Archive staff will participate in the Orphans Film Symposium this week.

What is an orphan film?

From the Orphans website: Narrowly defined, it’s a motion picture abandoned by its owner or caretaker. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small- and unusual-gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and sundry other ephemeral pieces of celluloid (or paper or glass or tape or . . . ).

Taking place for the first time in New York City, this 6th incarnation of the Symposium will focus on “works of/about/by/against/under ‘the state,’ broadly conceived. Speakers will address the role of orphan films in recording, representing, constructing, and imagining the state, as well as the work of state-run AV archives worldwide.”

Included in the three day line-up will be this session listed below - focusing on human rights, and will include a presentation by WITNESS Media Archive Manager Grace Lile:

Watching Human Rights

  • Laura Kissel (USC) Representations of Human Disability in Scientific and Educational Films
  • Jason Livingston (Ithaca College) Onondagas vs. NYS (Phil Mallory Jones and the Ithaca Video Project 1972)
  • Grace Lile (Witness Media Archive) amateur video as agent for human rights
  • Mona Jimenez (NYU MIAP) chair

Stay tuned for a report from the Symposium.

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March 21, 2008

Behind the Abu Ghraib photographs: Gourevitch/Morris New Yorker article

Thanks to everyone at Duke for a great visit. I had the opportunity to meet and speak with a great group of archivists there, as well as to screen Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the North Caucasus to a more general audience. Produced with partner Human Rights Center Memorial, the video documents the problem of enforced disappearances and torture, as a hallmark of the second Chechen war, and now spreading to neighboring republics. For more visit the Hub.

On the plane home I read Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’s New Yorker article, Exposure: the Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib, a postmortem (as it were) on the Abu Ghraib photographs taken by Sabrina Harman and others. I haven’t seen Morris’s film yet but the article is superb. One comes away both repelled by and sympathetic to Harman, appalled at her actions and yet acutely aware that her drive to document, however perverse, allowed the Abu Ghraib story to emerge. Harman, along with a number of other recruits who took or appeared in photographs, was court-martialled and convicted; the interrogators were not. What’s fascinating to me - as an archivist of images, often of abuse and suffering - is knowing the story behind the images; even a single, static photograph is endlessly complex in terms of how it came to be, its creator’s motives or point of view, its literal truthfulness versus its symbolic truthfulness. Gourevitch/Morris describe the circumstances of the most famous of the photographs, of a man the MPs dubbed Gilligan, hooded, shrouded, attached to electrical wires, standing on a box. They write:

“…the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols…”

“The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.”

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March 12, 2008

Event: visit to Archive for Human Rights at Duke

Next week I’ll be visiting and speaking at the Archive for Human Rights at Duke University. I’ll be screening a recent Memorial/WITNESS video, Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the Northern Caucasus, and talk about some of the production and archiving processes and challenges; the announcement is here. I’m looking forward to seeing the Duke Archive; it is a fairly new initiative but is off to a dynamic start under the guidance of Patrick Stawski, its first human rights archivist. Collections include papers of local grass-roots organizations, as well as the video collection assembled in the 1990s by the International Monitor Institute.

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March 5, 2008

U Conn Symposium

I returned last night from a brief but really productive symposium at the University of Connecticut, organized and hosted by the Dodd Center, home to the University’s human rights collections. The symposium was designed in part as a follow-up to last October’s conference at Columbia, and an effort to foster collaboration and resource-sharing among organizations – academic, NGOs, independent – holding human rights collections. There were perhaps twenty of us there which allowed for a lot of direct discussion, including with the keynote speakers, Patricia Wald, longtime US federal appeals judge who served on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, probably the foremost authority on human rights archives in the world.

Patricia Wald delivered the Sackler lecture on Monday to a general University audience; she spoke about problems in two areas of human rights law, women’s rights and criminal tribunals. Judge Wald also spoke to our smaller group the following day, sharing some perspectives on issues relating to documents of the ICTY. For example, who makes the decisions about what to save, where are the archives kept, who controls and who has access? Other complications result from the language differences, the sheer length of the trials, and standards of document authentication. She remarked that for the ICTY the archives of the Nuremberg trials were extremely useful, given the lack of other precedents for international tribunals.

Trudy Peterson spoke about a number of topics, including her work the past few years with the Guatemala Police Archives (Please see Kate Doyle’s article in the December 2007 Harper’s for more on the story of the Guatemala archive’s discovery and recovery) and about a recent visit to Sierra Leone. She also talked about several sets of documents seized from Iraq which have either been in or remain in US possession. In the case of some tens of thousands of boxes of documents removed by US and British forces in 2003, the ALA, SAA and other professional organizations are calling for their return to the Iraqi National Archives. (See the ALA resolution here . )

The list of possible issues for discussion was ambitious and of course we touched on only a few, but the day ended with some concrete plans for steps forward by creating a web portal as a vehicle for aggregating and sharing information about our organizations, collections, best practices, events, etc etc.

There was much more; I’ll try to report more in the next few days.

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February 21, 2008

Event: Human Rights Archives & Documentation at U Conn

March 3 & 4, 2008: The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut is hosting a one and a half day symposium, “Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Transforming Ideas into Practice.” Speakers include Patricia Wald of the ICTY and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, former Acting Archivist of the US and expert on the records of truth commissions.


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November 8, 2007

WITNESS launches the HUB

WITNESS has launched the HUB http://hub.witness.org. This is the first participatory site devoted to human rights media.

As archivists we would love to see participation from those in the archival community, including though not limited to the uploading of human rights related archival footage. The purpose of the site is to provide a platform for change and activism, but we believe the inclusion of older documentaries, footage and other media will be important to provide context and depth to any issues being spotlighted. We will be drawing on our own collection, but believe this is a tremendous opportunity to engage others who might hold human rights media to provide access to them, thus illuminating their ongoing relevance, and providing deeper understanding of current struggles and issues.

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October 12, 2007

Further thoughts on AMIA-Rochester

A follow up to the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference two weeks ago: WITNESS Archive staff attended an thoughtful session entitled “Recording Retribution: Issues in the Curation of, and Access to, Actuality Footage of War and Atrocity.” Speakers included staff from the Imperial War Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Inkulla Media. Presentations focused on the tension between providing access to important historical footage and respecting the privacy and dignity of the individuals depicted. Various clips were shown to that tension.

- Footage of 1941 war ship being torpedoed and blown apart. No individuals are seen by the viewer. Without accompanying context, you would not know that you were watching the moment of death for the 850-some people on board. The question was raised: should this be allowed use for a commercial advertisement of a “blow out” sale?

- Footage of WWII soldiers in 1944 experiencing “shell shock” or post-traumatic stress disorder. Without accompanying context, we do not know that the doctor who shot the film intended it be used ‘for medical records only.’ If used for a documentary on the war, it is possible that living relatives might see the footage. Are we right to allow re-contextualization from private medical record to television broadcast?

Largely, archivists consider footage requests on a case-by-case basis. Generally, requests to archives for this type of footage for television commercials, advertising, video games, etc. are not considered appropriate use. When denied, the person requesting may accuse the archive of “censoring” requests and prohibiting access.

On the other hand, many archivists now seem to feel that ethical concerns are outweighed by the public seeing the footage – so many are providing digital access through streaming on their websites and on platforms like YouTube. One archivist observed that there are 44,000 images alone on YouTube relating to WWII. However, along with greater access comes the concern that the footage is being viewed (and perhaps commented on) by people who aren’t emotionally or ethically equipped to respond to the images in the way we intend or hope.

The session only touched the surface of the ethics-versus-access debate, but I am hopeful that further discussion will continue beyond the conference.

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