Recent years attest to a significant change in the representational practices of film historiography. As a consequence of digitization, visual display formats occupy a more prominent role in scholarly and museum practices as means for contemplating the historicity of archival film. This development prompts a discussion of how we might appreciate digital formats as “visual secondary sources” which reproduce and recast historical tropes. To address this discussion the article proposes a combination of institutional and medium specific analysis as a framework for analysing this transition’s consequences. The permanent Panorama (2012) installation at EYE Film Institute Netherlands – a multiplescreen installation which offers a panoramic vision of film history using video excerpts from EYE’s digital collection – constitutes the article’s core example.
The article analyses how the installation’s arrangement as a panorama situates the excerpts within two different film histories. First, the analysis attends to how the installation’s taxonomy suggests a connection to former deputy director Eric de Kuyper’s philosophy of film history and emphasis on cinema’s intermediality. Second, it considers the installation in relation to classic, cinephile conceptions of panoramic vision. Conclusively the article provides some brief remarks on how the analysis’ findings might help us further our discussion of visual display formats as visual secondary sources.
application/pdf
2036-461X
16346
22-23
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama: A Case Study in Digital Film Historiography
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
14
New Studies
2014-10-01
2021-09-10
2014-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Christian Gosvig Olesen
2014/10/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
2036-461X
22-23
en
Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama: A Case Study in Digital Film Historiography
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16346/17026
14
Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama:
A Case Study in Digital Film Historiography
Christian Gosvig Olesen, Universiteit van Amsterdam




Abstract

    Recent years attest to a significant change in the representational practices of
    film historiography. As a consequence of digitization, visual display formats
    occupy a more prominent role in scholarly and museum practices as means for
    contemplating the historicity of archival film. This development prompts a dis-
    cussion of how we might appreciate digital formats as “visual secondary sourc-
    es” which reproduce and recast historical tropes. To address this discussion
    the article proposes a combination of institutional and medium specific analy-
    sis as a framework for analysing this transition’s consequences. The permanent
    Panorama (2012) installation at EYE Film Institute Netherlands – a multiple-
    screen installation which offers a panoramic vision of film history using video
    excerpts from EYE’s digital collection – constitutes the article’s core example.
    The article analyses how the installation’s arrangement as a panorama situates
    the excerpts within two different film histories. First, the analysis attends to
    how the installation’s taxonomy suggests a connection to former deputy direc-
    tor Eric de Kuyper’s philosophy of film history and emphasis on cinema’s inter-
    mediality. Second, it considers the installation in relation to classic, cinephile
    conceptions of panoramic vision. Conclusively the article provides some brief
    remarks on how the analysis’ findings might help us further our discussion of
    visual display formats as visual secondary sources.


  The past decades have witnessed the emergence of an array of digital access
and reuse formats for film heritage, in scholarly and museum contexts. In these
contexts, formats such as interactive diagrams, video essays, DVDs, maps and
museum installations provide new techniques for visualizing, representing and
contemplating the historicity of archival material. Since the mid-1990s CD-ROM
and DVDs have been developed into advanced, annotated, historical-critical for-
mats for the scholarly study of film history as have online maps.1 And in more


1
 Film historian Yuri Tsivian’s award-winning CD-ROM Immaterial Bodies: Cultural Anatomy of
Early Russian Films (1999) or the annotated, historical-critical Hyperkino DVD editions of film

                                            Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                                      Christian Gosvig Olesen


recent years a number of online platforms and museum displays have emerged
from a range of European film heritage institutions.
   In light of this development, it appears urgent to understand how the dis-
ciplinarity and epistemology of film history is negotiated with digital forms of
visualization and moving image appropriations. Film scholars are beginning
to draw attention to this consequence of digitisation, voicing a need to ana-
lyse and theorize in greater depth how social and technical factors condition
this shift in representational practice. Film scholar Vinzenz Hediger has for
instance highlighted that the role which film historians, archivists and cura-
tors play as decision-makers in conceiving access and reuse formats potentially
becomes more crucial than ever before in developing new traditions in the
digital age.2 Katherine Groo conversely argues, drawing on Lev Manovich’s
new media theory, that digital techniques of moving image appropriation, to a
greater degree “foregrounds the contingent and dialogical encounter between
historian and artefact.”3 In a proposition which echoes literary scholar George
P. Landow’s hypertext theories from the early 1990s, Groo suggests that the
non-linear and open-ended nature of digital representations foster a conver-
gence between post-structural forms of narration and historiography.4 This de-
velopment, according to Groo, deauthorizes film history by inviting alternative
interpretations which emphasize film historiography’s contingency.
   These points reflect that film scholars are beginning to nurture a discussion on
the status of digital formats as historical representations in a manner which paral-
lels on-going debates in the discipline of history. As historian David J. Staley has
made the case for over a decade, visualizations of archival material in diagrams,
videos and museum installations need to be taken seriously as “visual secondary
sources” in their own right which fundamentally shape contemporary historical
understandings.5 In this regard, digital representational practices suggest a radi-
cal departure from and end point for established historiography as they instan-
tiate new forms of access to and experiences of film history, which can appear
fragmented, open-ended and non-narrative in respect to linear, written prose.
As David J. Staley argues, digital visual history as opposed to prose, introduces
a new set of distinct representational modes which work differently; for instance
by analogy rather than logic, or synthesis rather than analysis by relating events



historians Natascha Drubek and Nikolai Izvolov or the Austrian Filmmuseum’s ground-breaking
DVD editions of Dziga Vertov films testify to this development.
2
  Vinzenz Hediger, “Politique des Archives. European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in
the Digital Age,” in Rouge, no. 12, 2008.
3
  Katherine Groo, “Cut, Paste, Glitch and Stutter: Remixing Film History,” in Frames Cinema
Journal, no. 1, 2012, p. 13.
4
  Ivi, p. 3. This view is also one of the key tenets in the hypertext theory of literary scholar George
Landow, see George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1991.
5
  David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization and History, M.E. Sharpe, Arnonk - London 2003, pp. 59-60.

146
                      Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


in dense, “thick depictions” without a linear mode of access.6 In this respect, it is
pertinent to say, that a significant development is taking place, when it comes to
the forms which film historiography begins to take on.
   Yet, one may also argue that these points overemphasize digitisation’s trans-
formative effect upon historiography from primarily a technicist, formalist per-
spective which neglects the role which institutions continue to play in a digital
age. As media scholar and political theorist Régis Debray has stressed on several
occasions since the early 1990s, digitisation should theoretically make cultural
heritage institutions as physical sites superfluous and privilege general users, but
in fact often tend to nurture the opposite effect.7 Debray proffers that “the cen-
trifugal dematerialization of data’s supporting base increases our need to re-cen-
tre ourselves on the basis of symbolic reference points.”8 Mindful of this point
we should remain attentive to how digital representational practices pertain to
the contexts they emanate from and reflect institutional priorities.
   In this article I address this discussion through an analysis of a particular exhi-
bition format; EYE Film Institute’s Panorama. The Panorama is part of the per-
manent exhibition area the Basement located in the EYE Film Institute Nether-
land’s recently inaugurated museum building at the river IJ in Amsterdam. Using
state-of-the-art digital projection, the format offers an interactive environment,
in which video clips from EYE’s digitised collection can be projected and ex-
plored. Installed in a fully darkened room, the eleven wide-angle beamers which
make up the installation form a 360-degree projection to evoke the format of a
historical panorama: a cylindrical painting that visitors could behold from a cen-
tral position, typically depicting significant historical events. To find out what ex-
actly could be the history which the spectator can behold in the Panorama, is the
main objective of this article, which also tries to make the case that film scholars
need to be more attentive to the institutional environments in which digital for-
mats emerge to understand how established historical tropes are reproduced in
digital moving image appropriation practices. To this end I discuss the Panorama
in relation to its institutional context to understand how its exhibition design
reflects the archival policies and visions of film history of EYE (previously the
Nederlands Filmmuseum). In this regard, I draw on historian and anthropologist
Michel de Certeau’s concept of “historiographical operation”9 and its tripartite
division of historiography as constituted by 1) a social place of production, 2) a
practice conditioned by specific techniques and supports of inscription – wheth-
er a role of papyrus, note blocks or computers and 3) a representation – a staged
form of writing which eliminates the signs of institutional as well as technical


6
  Ivi, p. 55.
7
  Régis Debray, Transmettre, Odile Jacob, Paris 1997 (Eng. ed. Transmitting Culture, Columbia
University Press, New York 2000, p. 60).
8
  Ibidem.
9
  Michel de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’Histoire, Gallimard, Paris 1975 (Eng. ed. The Writing of History,
Columbia University Press, New York-Chichester, 1988, pp. 58, 69, 86).

                                                                                                 147
                                     Christian Gosvig Olesen


procedures which led to its appearance. My analysis considers a select number
of clips in relation to the installation’s arrangement in comparison to previous
projects at the Nederlands Filmmuseum and to classic, cinephile film history
writing to elicit the format’s underlying philosophy of film history. Conclusively,
I provide some brief remarks on how my analysis may further our understanding
and discussion of the current shift in film history’s representational practices.


Space as a Key to Historical Abstraction in a Digital Age

   While museum scholar Andrea Witcomb in the following quote summarizes
debates on digitisation in museum studies, it can be taken to succinctly encapsu-
late a recurrent premise of debates surrounding film heritage digitisation:

     For those who interpret it as a threat, the implications are a loss of aura and institutional
     authority, the loss of the ability to distinguish between the real and the copy, the death
     of the object, and a reduction of knowledge to information. For those who interpret it
     as a positive move, such losses are precisely what enable new democratic associations to
     emerge around museums. For them, the loss of institutional authority equates with the
     need for curators to become facilitators rather than figures of authority...10

    On the one hand, a number of film preservationists and historians take dig-
itisation in film archives and its forms of access to undermine the core values of
a classic, cinephile mode of museum exhibition. This position holds, that the
critical function and autonomy of the curator as well as the material experience
of archival film disappears, when digitised collections are made available to gen-
eral users with a less genuine interest in film. This is a view which has been pro-
posed by film preservationists and curators such as for example Freddy Buache,
Raymond Borde and Alexander Horwath. As argued by Horwarth, digitisation
seems for example more driven by the market’s desire to create immaterial, free-
flowing “image-banks,”11 or as opined by Borde and Buache, by detached, bu-
reaucratic concerns which embody in database management.12
    On the other hand, a position has emerged, which perceives digital access


10
   Andrea Witcomb, The Materiality of Virtual Technologies: A New Approach to Thinking about
the Impact of Multimedia in Museums, in Fiona Cameron, Sarah Kenderdine (eds.), Theorizing
Digital Cultural Heritage. A Critical Discourse, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2007, p. 35.
11
   Alexander Horwath, “The Market vs. the Museum,” in Journal of Film Preservation, no. 70,
2005, pp. 6, 8.
12
   Raymond Borde, Freddy Buache, La crise des cinémathèques... et du monde, L’age d’homme,
Lausanne 1997, p. 6. As Buache and Borde write: “Les cinémathèques sont aujourd’hui des clin-
iques du film. Les techniciens en blouse blanche évaluent, diagnostiquent et restaurent du matériel
laissé sur le bord de la route par le cinéma. Une objectivité foudroyante préside à leurs travaux.
Ils opèrent sur ordinateur. Ils ne sont ni des chercheurs de trésors, ni des partisans. Ils voient les
collections qui se déroulent sur leurs machines, comme les fondés de pouvoir entretiennent et
surveillent les actifs d’une banque.”

148
                      Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


formats as harbingers of a more democratic engagement with archival collec-
tions. This view implies that digital access formats emancipate and empower
the user as an active co-producer and creator of texts, narratives and mean-
ings. Such a vision is prominently discernible in Lev Manovich’s foundational
book The Language of New Media.13 A key tenet in Manovich’s new media
theory is that hyperlinking in databases and multimedia formats breaks down
established narratives and hierarchies, to allow users to create new ones, when
navigating through non-linear pathways.14 In Manovich’s view, the database
does not represent a constraining bureaucratic logic but conversely holds a
liberating potential. With regard to film archives, such a view arguably reflects
in media scholar Jamie Baron’s argument that the meaning of digitised archival
footage is defined predominantly in the viewer’s experience and appropriation,
rather than in an archive’s authoritative definition.15
   While proposing antagonistic ideological responses to digitisation, both
positions identify a subversion of institutionalized historical narratives, in the
transformation of collections into either immaterial “image-banks” or user-
generated multimedia appropriations. In this respect, both positions arguably
nod to Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography, articulated in the em-
blematic phrase that “History decomposes into images, not into narratives,”
to indicate an inherent contingency of image-based historiography, as a dis-
tinguishing feature not only of modern visual culture but also in particular of
databases and digital culture.16 In different ways these positions point to the
problem formulated in the introduction, that to understand what constitutes
a historiography in digital formats is no longer a matter of analysing history
as a language system with attention to causation, for example, as proposed by
key theorists of the 1960s and 1970s’ “linguist turn” such as Hayden White
and Richard Rorty. This rather becomes, one could argue in line with Staley, a
matter of analysing how digital techniques and tools of visualization are used
to establish analogies between historical events and moments to sustain his-
torical tropes. Faced with digitisation, these positions propose analytical foci
for understanding the transformation of film historiography which identify the
core agents of this process outside of traditional institutions. Along those lines
institutions have only little or no say in shaping this process.
   Conversely, as suggested by Hediger, the activities of film archivists, histo-
rians and curators might on the other hand give a privileged insight into how
film heritage institutions define film history through digital moving image ap-
propriations. This view seems particularly pertinent when considering that digi-


13
   Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2001, p. 76.
14
   Ibidem.
15
   Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect. Found Footage and the audiovisual experience of history,
Routledge, Abingdon (Oxon) 2014, pp. 7, 142.
16
   Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press,
Cambridge (MA) 1991, p. 220.

                                                                                              149
                                    Christian Gosvig Olesen


tal techniques – as in other sectors of society – increasingly permeate everyday
life, both in film heritage institutions and academic settings where they become
embedded in the agendas of specific archival policies and research programs.17
From this perspective, it appears necessary to reintroduce a focus on the agency
of institutions into the discussion as a way of understanding how the shift in rep-
resentational practices is molded. In this regard, one could take Certeau’s notion
of “historiographical operation” to be also encompassing digital practices, as it
conceptualizes of tools of visualization as more than mere auxiliary inscription
devices, but also as constitutive of historiography in specific knowledge spaces.18
   Consequently, a focus on sites of production and institutional practices may
provide a key to understanding how historical tropes are reproduced in digital
formats, and might enhance our apprehension of digitisation’s transformation
of historiography. From this conceptual vantage point, the following sections
analyse the permanent Panorama installation at EYE Film Institute Nether-
land’s museum building in Amsterdam as a form of film historiography, by
eliciting the conditioning factors which can be found in the institution, such
as established archival taxonomies, philosophy of history and previous moving
image appropriation practices.


Panorama/Panoramique

   EYE Film Institute’s Panorama (2012) is part of the permanent exhibition
area the Basement located at the recently inaugurated museum building at the
river IJ in Amsterdam. The installation is produced and designed in collabora-
tion with local companies Beamsystems and Submarine and draws inspiration
from a panoramic exhibition format developed by museum scholar Sarah Kend-
erdine and multimedia artist Jeffrey Shaw at the City University of Hong Kong’s
Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALIVE).19
Installed in a fully darkened room, the eleven wide-angle beamers which make
up the installation form a 360-degree projection that surrounds the visitor. Four
of the installation’s eleven beamers cover the room’s corners with what remi-
nisces vertically running film strips, while the remaining seven are connected to
individual consoles spread out through the room (fig. 1).




17
   Marianne
   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
             van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, Mirko Tobi-
as Schäfer (eds.), Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, Amsterdam
University Press, Amsterdam 2011, p. 8.
18
   Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, cit.
19
   Giovanna Fossati, Found Footage Filmmaking, Film Archiving and New Participatory Platforms,
in Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati, Jaap Guldemond (eds.), Found Footage. Cinema Ex-
posed, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012, pp. 182.

150
                       Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama




          Fig. 1 – Wide-lens view of the EYE Panorama’s interior. Source: www.eyefilm.nl



   Each console enables the projection of sixteen thirty-second film fragments on
the screen facing the visitor, in juxtaposition with clips on the adjacent screens
controlled by other visitors. To facilitate the visitor’s selection of clips, the con-
soles represent individual themes: Magic, Color, the Netherlands, Exploration,
Film Stars, Slapstick and Battle. The sources of the clips vary greatly, drawing
from European avant-garde and art cinema to Hollywood blockbusters and uni-
dentified bits of travelogues, creating an eclectic encounter of titles and periods
for the visitor walking through the installation’s consoles. In the Color console,
an excerpt from Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
(1989) meets the Dutch absolute film Diepte (1933) by Frans Dupont. The con-
sole themed Exploration brings together travelogues and ethnographic films with
an excerpt from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
   Clearly, EYE’s installation evokes the format of a moving, historical pano-
rama; a cylindrical painting that visitors could behold from a central position,
typically depicting significant historical events. But at a first encounter with the
installation, it does not seem evident which film history the format exactly pro-
poses. EYE provides only a sparse blurb of the installation’s set-up, selection of
clips and function in the Basement area on the museum’s website, which does
not appear in the on-site installation. It reads as follows:

     The highlight is the Panorama, a room where visitors will be surrounded on all sides by
     film fragments, and where they can browse through EYE’s collection with the help of
     seven control panels. There are nearly one hundred regularly changing scenes that can
     be viewed, and these are grouped around the themes Discovery of the World, Film Stars,
     Colour, the Netherlands, Slapstick and Battle.20


20
  See http://www.eyefilm.nl/en/node/992238, last visit 18 February 2014. Note that the categories
used in this description diverges slightly from the categories used in the installation’s current set-up.

                                                                                                    151
                               Christian Gosvig Olesen


   The absence of the blurb in the on-site installation, invites the visitor to make
sense of the images’ juxtaposition in the installation, and to draw instead on his
or her respective frames of reference, to discern the format’s film historical vision.
In this respect, the installation’s eclectic juxtapositions might initially appear as
disjunctive, and be perceived as a particularly a-hierarchical film history which
privileges primarily the user’s experience of reception, in line with new media
theories which align digitality with critical theory. On the other hand, the tax-
onomy used in the installation and the inclusion of a particular set of clips might
suggest, for the museum visitor who is familiar with EYE’s previous exhibition
formats, that the Panorama proposes a regime of interaction which relies on con-
cepts of film historiography closely associated with the institution’s history. It is
this latter point which I would like to pick up in relation to the Panorama, based
on my own experience of walking through the installation. Because it seems that
an attentiveness to the life cycles of some of the clips, their juxtaposition and the
format’s taxonomy in relation to EYE’s vision of film history and prior exhibi-
tion practices, might elucidate how the Panorama to some degree pertains to a
specific institutional vision of film history and how it develops it.
   Departing from this observation, I suggest in the following analysis, that
EYE’s Panorama appears to be playing with two different, to some degree op-
posite conceptions of panoramic vision of film history. On the one hand, the
appearance of a small number of clips and categories suggests that the Panora-
ma sustains a more revisionist model of film history, related to the institution’s
philosophy of film history as articulated in the late 1980s by former deputy
director Eric de Kuyper. On the other hand, the Panorama’s taxonomy also
seems to draw on a more classic, cinephile conception of panoramic vision – a
panoramique – which sustains notions such as national cinemas, stylistic devel-
opments and genres as a precondition for film historiography, which proposes
a more canonical film history.


The Panorama and Eric de Kuyper’s “Aesthetic of Film History”

   Walking through the Panorama, the appearance of one particular film excerpt
in the console themed Magic seems to invite an approximation of this installa-
tion to the philosophy of film history articulated at the Nederlands Filmmuseum
in the late 1980s; an excerpt from the early trick film La fée aux pigeons (Pathé,
1906) by Segundo de Chomón and Gaston Velle in which a fairy transforms
handkerchiefs into pigeons. As film historian Juan-Gabriel Tharrats concisely
summarizes this Pathé production from 1906 the film is “A magical story, that
justifies all kinds of scenery, transformations and apparitions.”21
   The excerpt is recognizable from a different context in which it has been pre-

21
  Juan Gabriel Tharrats, Segundo de Chomón – Un pionnier méconnu du cinéma européen.
L’Harmattan, Paris 2009, p. 97.

152
                      Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


sented in a play with cinematic categories reminiscing the ones in EYE’s Panora-
ma and which opens itself up to the following reflection. This is in the context of
Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch’s found footage work, Film Ist. 7-12 (2002)
which consists partly of footage from EYE’s collection. As EYE’s Panorama,
the chapters of Deutsch’s film is divided into different cinematic categories –
7. Comic, 8. Magic, 9. Conquest, 10. Writing and Language, 11. Emotions and
Passions, 12. Writing and Document – to explore different aspects of the film
medium through the juxtaposition of film fragments and excerpts. In the eighth
chapter entitled Magic, the excerpt from La fée... included in the Panorama’s
Magic console appears. This chapter of Deutsch’s film opens with a text simply
stating “Film IS Magic,” and aims at demonstrating, as Deutsch explains on his
website, the development of special effects in early cinema by intercutting frag-
ments from La fée…, with other early Magic films of de Chomón, for example
Le Spectre Rouge from 1907, to create a historical exploration of trick and féerie
films, pointing toward later horror films.22
   In EYE’s Panorama, as in Deutsch’s film, the fragment from La fëe... is present-
ed in the console themed Magic with a display text stating: “Film IS Magic.” The
display text echoes Deutsch’s description of his Magic chapter. Whereas Deutsch’s
Film ist. 7-12 for example only includes early cinema excerpts, the Panorama Mag-
ic console groups together excerpts from several Segundo de Chomon and Georg-
es Méliès films with snippets of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London
(1984) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), among others.
   In the larger framework of Deutsch’s film, La fée is juxtaposed with the other
chapters’ fragments, which centre on different themes and draw on a wider va-
riety of sources. Chapter nine for example, Conquest, focuses on colonial film
or chapter eleven, Emotions and Passions, centres on Italian diva films from the
1910s. Thus, in the overall context of Film ist 7-12, Deutsch juxtaposes the ex-
cerpt from La fée... with excerpts from a colonial film such as By Aeroplane to
Pygmyland (1926), or with shots of Italian diva Lyda Borelli from Amleto Paler-
mi’s Carnevalesca (1918) (fig. 2).




22
  Gustav Deutsch’s description of the Magic chapter reads as follows: “8. Magic. Early masters
of film such as Georges Méliès often came from the milieu of showmen and magicians. It was
only logical therefore that they would be responsible for inventing all the tricks and reality al-
ienations which only film techniques could produce – stop tricks, time lapse, superimpositions
and reverse action in all manner of combinations. Film replaced trapdoors, levers and invis-
ible ropes. It was enough to stop the camera while the lady left the stage. The transformation,
when someone or something became something else became the central theme of the majority
of magic-films. Later the same tricks were built into normal plots and so became essential ele-
ments in early fantasy and horror films.” See http://www.gustavdeutsch.net/index.php/en/films-
a-videos/72-film-ist-7-12.html, last visit 27 February 2014.

                                                                                              153
                                     Christian Gosvig Olesen




Fig. 2 – La fée aux pigeons appearing in chapter 8. Magic of Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist. 7-12 (2002).



   These juxtapositions seem to have left a residual in the Panorama. Also ap-
pearing in the Panorama is the clip from the aforementioned colonial film By
Aeroplane to Pygmyland. While Deutsch uses this clip in chapter 9 Conquest,
it appears in the Panorama in the Exploration console together with an excerpt
from Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Furthermore, while
no diva films are included in the Panorama, it does comprise a section of clips
with famous film personalities in the Film Stars console.
   Film archivist and historian Nico de Klerk who worked on the production of
Film ist. 7-12 has stated that Deutsch’s use of sources represents a vision of film his-
tory, which in making these juxtapositions is more democratic. As de Klerk writes:

     ...home movies rub shoulders with the first Lumière films, a classic of the silent avant-
     garde blends in with early farce. All these materials find themselves in a democratic mix
     (...) Deutsch strips the films he re-uses of film history as we know it.23

   Considering the arrangement of EYE’s Panorama, this a-hierarchical vision
of film history that levels canonized films and masterpieces with industrial film
seems to be echoed in the installation and account for parts of its structuring
principle, providing a possible explanation as to why By Aeroplane to Pygmyland
“rubs shoulders” with 2001: A Space Odyssey.


23
  Nico de Klerk, Designing a Home. Orphan film in the work of Gustav Deutsch, in Wilbirg Brain-
in-Donnenberg, Michael Loebenstein (eds.), Gustav Deutsch, Österreichisches Filmmuseum/
SYNEMA – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, Wien 2009, pp. 117.

154
                      Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


   But one can go further back than Film ist to argue that such a vision of film
history is historically closely tied to EYE as an institution. Beyond the parallel
between the Panorama and Film ist. 7-12, one sees this vision in the philosophy of
film history developed at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in the 1980s and the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, then deputy director Eric de Kuyper proposed a meta-histor-
ical approach to film history which he dubbed an ‘aesthetic of film history, that
articulated a set of problems with film history writing as it was then widely prac-
ticed. A contention toward mainstream film history in de Kuyper’s critique was,
that film historians who conducted research in the film archive, seldom accounted
for the scarcity and contingency of film history’s source material as experienced
by film archivists. In the late 1980s, archivists at the Nederlands Filmmuseum felt
that film historians coming to the archive were too concerned with establishing
linear film histories based on notions of schools and national styles, neglecting that
film archives contain anonymous fragments which do not fit into these accounts.
The existence of these fragments in de Kuyper’s view suggested an impossibility of
writing comprehensive, teleological film histories and should instead prompt film
historians to acknowledge that film history is synecdochic and can have multiple
developmental lines, appearing as a “Swiss Cheese” full of holes, where the holes
are just as significant as what is left.24 As de Kuyper suggested:

     The story of film aesthetics could have a very different developmental line than that of
     other film histories, giving more space to disruptures and discontinuities, the interplay
     with other aesthetic domains, and more generally accepting the fact that we have to
     work with ”fragments of a history of film” where the holes and losses are even as sig-
     nificant as what is still there!25

   With its suggestion to recognize alternative developmental lines, de Kuyper’s
essay proposed an acknowledgement of the intermediality between cinema and
other visual display formats from before the emergence of cinema. This can be
regarded as a point which derives from early cinema studies, and in particular
American film historian Charles Musser’s “history of screen practices,” or to go
further back the seminal Technique et Idéologie – essays published by film theorist
Jean-Louis Comolli in Cahiers du cinéma in 1971-1972 and its critique of among
other things contemporary periodisations in technological histories of film.26
   To promote this understanding of film history and of the film archive, the
Nederlands Filmmuseum produced numerous compilation films and TV docu-
mentaries using neglected parts of its collection. Films such as Peter Delpeut’s
Lyrical Nitrate from 1991, the television documentary De Tijdmachine: Overpei-
nzingen bij 100 jaar beeldcultuur (The Time Machine: Reflections on 100 Years


24
   Eric de Kuyper, “Anyone for an aesthetic of film history,” in Film History, no. 6:1, 1994, p. 106.
25
   Ibidem.
26
   For the most recent anthologized and update edition of these essays, see Jean-Louis Comolli,
Cinéma contre spectacle, Verdier, Lagrasse 2009.

                                                                                                155
                                      Christian Gosvig Olesen


of Image Culture, 1996), Diva Dolorosa from 1999 directed by Delpeut and pro-
duced by Frank Roumen, the Bits & Pieces programs which circulated in fes-
tivals, and later found footage films by filmmakers such as Gustav Deutsch.27
These multiple re-workings, foregrounded the fragments and conceived them as
malleable objects, of which the meaning could be constructed in numerous ways
from multiple entry points in relation to other fragments and well-known films,
thereby questioning and challenging the historical status of the latter.28
   In the Panorama this philosophy seems to be reflected in the taxonomies, display
texts and clips proposed in the consoles. Thus, it seems that the format proposes
a regime of interaction within which the visitor can create encounters between
clips, which ties up to this philosophy. From this perspective, EYE’s use of the
panoramic format to display parts of its digitised collection might then encourage
visitors to think critically of film history’s foundations and developmental lines.
   On the other hand, as the next section discusses, holding up this philosophy
of film history and the comparison between Film ist. 7-12 against another sub-
stantial part of the Panorama’s consoles and clips, also suggests a more canonical
film history in this particular format.


The Panorama as Panoramique and Cinephile Film History

   In contrast to the “aesthetic of film history” discussed above, a more canoni-
cal frame of reference also characterizes the selection of clips in the Panorama
and could be said to shape its historical vision. In the installation’s first consoles
Netherlands, Film Stars and Slapstick, excerpts from a range of canonical titles
appear, which by being grouped into these particular categories seem to a lesser
degree to “strip film history as we know it” but instead to reinstall it.
   As the first console which meets the spectator, the Netherlands console for
instance explicitly invokes the notion of a Dutch national cinema, by containing
excerpts from some of the most canonized Dutch films such as Paul Verhoeven’s
Spetters (1980). This is followed by the console themed Slapstick offering among
others a visual reference to Chaplin. Arguably, these categories sustain more tra-
ditional notions and guiding principles of film historiography such as national
cinemas and stylistic schools, representative of the historiography which an ‘aes-
thetic of film history’ sought to challenge.


27
   Itzia Gabriela Fernandez Escareño, La Compilation, un outil paradoxal des films muets recyclés
par Peter Delpeut et coproduits par le Nederlands Filmmuseum (1989-1999), PhD dissertation, Uni-
versité Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2009, pp. 19, 440.
28
   Furthermore, it is particularly suggestive in relation to the EYE’s Panorama, that Deutsch’s Film ist
project, has also been displayed as a panoramic installation on several occasions for example at the
2002 International Filmfestival Rotterdam, which also aligns with a wider tendency in found footage
filmmaking. See Christa Blümlinger, Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im
Film und in der Medienkunst, Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2009 (Fr. ed. Cinéma de seconde main. Esthétique du
remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux medias, Klincksieck, Paris 2013, pp. 286-287).

156
                      Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


   With their appearance in the Panorama, these categories and clips could be
said to inflect a historical vision upon the installation, which pertains to a more
classic cinephile film history and its conceptualization of panoramic vision as
a structuring principle for discerning masterpieces. Looking beyond the Pano-
rama, and the history of panaromas as a visual display format culminating in the
nineteenth century, it seems pertinent to recall that the panoramic also carries a
particular meaning in cinephilia and in film historiography as a mode of percep-
tion and vision which lays the foundation for a film history of masterpieces.
   With regard to classic cinephilia from the 1920s and the 1950s-1960s, the pano-
ramic can for example refer both to ritualized viewing habits and to the panorama
of masterpieces which early film histories would promote through their discern-
ment and comparison of particularly beautiful cinematic moments. As a ritual-
ized viewing habit, panoramic vision refers to idiosyncratic, spectatorial postures
which enhance the identification of such moments, to create the fundament for a
masterpiece model of film history. Filmmaker and key figure of the French Nou-
velle Vague Jean Douchet, has described for example his own spectatorial habit
of choosing a specific position in the cinema, in order to privilege a “sweeping
vision” of the cinema screen, which may increase his possibilities of identifying
remarkable, hidden cinematic moments and details of beauty in the frame.29
   Such ritualized, subjective spectatorial habits, have sustained the writing
of film histories since the early cinephiles in the 1920s – Louis Delluc, Marcel
L’Herbier and Germaine Dulac – promoted the concept of photogénie as a way
of discerning moments of cinematic beauty based on their subjective viewing
experiences. While these habits are arguably less common today, this vision pro-
vided a basis for some early film historians to create canons and to write interna-
tionalist, general film histories, which were attentive to different national schools
and styles, and which linked filmic moments kaleidoscopically across time and
space as a panoramique of film art’s development.30
   This model of history is discernible particularly in French film historiography
which emerged out of “first wave” cinephilia in the 1920s. The 1920s writings
of French film theorist, historian and ciné-club activist Léon Moussinac can be
regarded emblematic in this respect. Establishing a historical understanding of
cinema as an art form by using photogénie as its theoretical conception, Moussi-
nac’s Naissance du cinéma31 was central in creating a frame of reference films,
drawing examples from the repertory of contemporary film distribution in Paris.
This reference frame would later, as we now know, become institutionalized in
cinémathèques and film libraries when the film preservation movement gained


29
   Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington 2006, p. 45.
30
   Bernard Eisenschitz, Die Utopie einer Welfilmgeschichte. Französische Ansätze der Filmhistorio-
grafie, in Hans-Michael Bock, Wolfgang Jacobsen (eds.), Recherche: Film – Quellen und Methoden
der Filmforschung, text + kritik, München 1997, p. 120.
31
   Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinema, J. Povolozky, Paris 1925.

                                                                                              157
                                    Christian Gosvig Olesen


momentum in the 1930s. The title of Moussinac’s later Panoramique du cinéma
(Au sans pareil, 1929), is directly suggestive of a panoramic model of vision,
which compares key moments particularly from a set of North-American and
European films as absolute cinematic masterpieces.32 While these early histories
were linear and overtly teleological, in their pursuit to promote the recognition
of cinema as an art form, they established an internationalist referential system –
a panorama – of films to sustain their conception of film history as an art form.
   The choices in the Panorama can be said to evoke these highlights and stages
of development in film by revolving around concepts such as distinct national
styles in an internationalist perspective, the development of cinematic acting –
slapstick for example and the development of film as an art form, as demon-
strated through the appearance of Frans Dupont’s Diepte among other titles.
In this regard, while a part of the Panorama seems to suggest an ‘aesthetic of
film history’ another part seemingly invokes a classic, canonical, cinephile film
history, corporealised in its immersive, panoramic set-up using a “thick descrip-
tion,” to use Staley’s words, to invoke the cinephiles’ comparisons of moments
and eclectic encounters of films across time and geographical origin.
   In this respect, the format arguably displays both a classic, “amateur” para-
digm of film history pointing back to the heydays of first wave cinephilia histo-
riography, while at the same time including perspectives from a later more aca-
demically informed film historiography and its emphasis on intermediality and
the contingency of historiography.33 If compared to de Kuyper’s “aesthetic” it
appears then that the particular format of the Panorama suggests a move towards
a more easily recognizable frame of reference and canonical film history, in its use
of the set-up’s “thick depiction,” thus leaning towards a traditional film history.


Conclusion

   In this article I have addressed the emerging debate on film history’s shift-
ing representational practices in a digital age, departing from the propo-
sitions put forward by respectively Vinzenz Hediger and Katherine Groo.
Subsequently addressing the antagonistic responses to digitisation’s conse-
quences for film archives and heritage institutions, I have made the case
that processes of social appropriation and institutionalized historiography
continue to play a crucial role in reproducing historical tropes in digital ac-
cess and reuse formats. In doing so, I have borrowed Michel de Certeau’s
concept of “historiographical operation” which has enabled me to analyse


32
   Also Georges Charensol, Panorama du cinema, Kra, Paris 1930 can be seen as a suggestive exam-
ple of early film historiography in this respect.
33
   Philippe Gauthier, “L’histoire amateur et l’histoire universitaire: paradigmes de l’histoire du
cinema,” in Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 21,
no. 2-3, 2011, p. 88.

158
                        Panoramic Visions of the Archive in EYE’s Panorama


the case of EYE’s Panorama in relation to the specific, institutional context
within which it emerged.
   In my analysis of the Panorama, based on the comparisons with Gustav
Deutsch’s Film ist. 7-12 and Eric de Kuyper’s “aesthetic of film history” it ap-
peared that the installation contains residuals of Film ist’s taxonomic juxtapo-
sitions. This observation led me to the conclusion that as a panoramic display
format, the Panorama partly underlines cinema’s different beginning points and
developmental lines, potentially inviting the beholder to think of cinema’s pos-
sible, multiple origins. At the same time, the installation, by introducing and
relying on more traditional categories seems to approximate this philosophy to a
canonical film history’s notions of national cinemas, acting styles and film art. As
I have argued, the use of a ‘thick depiction’ in the panoramic format can be seen
in this regard as vital in embodying a classic type of cinephile, panoramic vision.
This provided an example of how a traditional film history can be conveyed by
effectively using the specific representational forms of digital display formats.
   In making these points, my discussion of EYE’s Panorama showed, how an
attentiveness to institutional processes of technological appropriation may yield
an understanding of the ways in which institutions make sense of digitised col-
lections and create historical understandings through analogies and taxonomies
drawn from established historical paradigms. Analysing the Panorama from this
vantage point, it is possible to counter the strong notions that digital formats
either subvert traditional forms of historiography or create entirely new ones.
Through this intervention I have downplayed the materialist, formalist implica-
tions of digital formats as a radical departure from existing historical tropes and
sought to balance it with institutional analysis. I have argued that it is necessary
to take such an approach in this transitional moment, to provide an analytical
avenue which may fruitfully reorient and further the critical discussion of film
historiography’s digital representational practices. As a concluding remark, I am
in this respect sympathetic to Régis Debray’s point that in order to understand
technological change it is necessary to acknowledge the longue durée of ideas and
mentalities as a long history which circumscribes that of the rapid development
and evolution of techniques.34 I believe that in order to apprehend the current
digital transition we should – as Debray suggests – first take a diachronic look
at how “founding ideas [were] themselves founded” to then take a synchronic
look at how ideas are transmitted through the material organisation of contem-
porary technical systems.35 To apply this perspective, I would argue, could lead
us to deeper insights on how digital media specificities are negotiated and used
to recast film historiographies. Furthermore, it could pave the way for a more
historically informed discussion of how digital formats rearticulate or (re-)invent
new traditions through digital, material practices.


34
     Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale, Gallimard, Paris 1991, pp. 51.
35
     Régis Debray, Transmitting Culture, cit., p. 99.

                                                                                  159
