



This article explores the necessity of gestures for film analysis and argues for a conception of media archaeology as gestural practice. Celluloid film copies are not only projected and watched but also touched repeatedly: they are put together and taken apart again, collected, restored and stored — or, on the contrary, forgotten, sorted out and destroyed. Each individual film is an equally fragile material thing with a micro-history of its own. The broad spectrum of gestures practiced in handling films will be examined on the basis of three examples dating from the 1990s where video technology became an important tool: first, Interface (Schnittstelle, Harun Farocki 1995) and Playback (Hartmut Bitomsky 1995), which demonstrate a self-reflective practice of film analysis whereby pointing to details of the arrested images or touching a film strip with the fingertips are crucial gestures. Second, I analyse the careful handling of archival material in Transparencies (Trasparenze, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi 1998), in which the authors re-filmed severely damaged footage recorded during World War I, and examined it frame by frame in a gestural way. What is at stake here is a rethinking of how to archive films and the need for what I call an ‘ecology of archiving’.




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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
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2021-10-05
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2024-03-10
Cinéma & Cie
Petra Löffler
2020/10/01
Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg
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Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice
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Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice
Petra Löffler, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg




Abstract

    This article explores the necessity of gestures for film analysis and argues for
    a conception of media archaeology as gestural practice. Celluloid film copies
    are not only projected and watched but also touched repeatedly: they are put
    together and taken apart again, collected, restored and stored — or, on the
    contrary, forgotten, sorted out and destroyed. Each individual film is an equally
    fragile material thing with a micro-history of its own. The broad spectrum of
    gestures practiced in handling films will be examined on the basis of three
    examples dating from the 1990s where video technology became an important
    tool: first, Interface (Schnittstelle, Harun Farocki 1995) and Playback (Hartmut
    Bitomsky 1995), which demonstrate a self-reflective practice of film analysis
    whereby pointing to details of the arrested images or touching a film strip with
    the fingertips are crucial gestures. Second, I analyse the careful handling of
    archival material in Transparencies (Trasparenze, Yervant Gianikian and Angela
    Ricci Lucchi 1998), in which the authors re-filmed severely damaged footage
    recorded during World War I, and examined it frame by frame in a gestural way.
    What is at stake here is a rethinking of how to archive films and the need for
    what I call an ‘ecology of archiving’.


Touching Film Material

   In his 1985 essay Analyses in Flames (Is Film Analysis Finished?), film
critic and theorist Raymond Bellour questions the future of film analysis,
inevitably confronting not only the transience of the moving image but also
the ‘irreducibility of the filmic substance’ — a substance that fascinates
and stimulates, but nevertheless limits analysis because of ‘the exceptional
resistance mounted by the analytic material’.1 This resistance of film material
manifests itself when a filmstrip is cut, jointed and glued, or runs through a
projector. Among film professionals, the editing table was, at that time, the

1
 Raymond Bellour, ‘Analysis in Flames (Is Film Analysis Finished?)’, Diacritics, 15.1 (Spring
1985), 52–56 (p. 52).

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 35, Fall 2020
                                          Petra Löffler


preferred instrument for a frame-by-frame analysis of film material. Jean-Luc
Godard’s seminal Histoires du cinema (1988−1998) poses the correspondence
between freeze-frames at its centre. At the same time, the video recorder
made it possible to fix the moving image, making it an ideal instrument for
the analysis of videotaped imagery. Yet, as Bellour asserts, the resistance of
the filmic substance remains as ‘the mad desire to touch the film itself’.2 He
thus concludes: ‘There are no longer, or should no longer be, any analyses
of films. There are just gestures’.3 Bellour places the singularity of the film
experience at the centre of his understanding of film analysis and argues
for a close viewing of the moving image frame by frame, shot by shot. By
advocating gestures, he insists on the encounter with film as a singular event,
experiencing the rhythm and the editing of the film and thereby approaching
the filmic substance itself.
   If gestures are to replace analysis, then, the question becomes what are the
gestures with which to approach the filmic substance? In the following, I will
argue that the desire to touch films is not a bad one — on the contrary, it can
serve as the very source for the analysis of film as part of the material world.
The sense of touch and, more precisely, gestures are not only a way to approach
the materiality of photographs and films, they also possess a productivity of
their own. Gestures stand for ‘a concept that is fundamental to the creation
and reception of visual images’.4 Media theorist Vilém Flusser attributed great
importance to gestures for what he called the ‘universe of technical images’. In his
understanding, the pressing of keys, for instance, is mainly linked to typewriter
and computer keyboards operating computational programming.5
   Gestures relate people and things in space as well as in time, they are a language
of the body, and they can also create connections between images. It has been
widely noted that the affinity of gestures with film and visual media, in general,
consists in their close relationship to motion as well as to emotion. Furthermore,
film theorists such as Laura U. Marks have reclaimed vision as a haptic perception
and embodied experience.6 Taking inspiration from Giorgio Agamben’s widely
discussed ethical notion of gesture as the heart of cinema, exposing what he calls
‘mediality as such’,7 I will focus on film analysis as a gestural practice that is able
to unfold the historicity of film at the level of the image’s materiality itself. This

2
  Ivi, p. 54.
3
  Ivi, p. 53.
4
  The quote is by Keith Moxey reviewing the edited volume Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and
Drawing, ed. by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes (New York, London:
Routledge, 2017); see also Barbara Grespi, Il cinema come gesto. Incorporare le immagini, pensare
il medium (Rome: Aracne, 2017).
5
  See Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis, London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 24.
6
  See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
7
   See Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Id., Means Without End: Notes of Politics
(Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 49–60.

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                    Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice


includes the desire to touch the filmic substance and the complex relationship
between gesture and glance as part of a critical thinking with film that considers
it a specific, historical material.
    For the film director and critic Harun Farocki, the handling of film material
played a crucial part in teaching film classes and doing film analysis. In a short
contribution to the German film journal Filmkritik in 1980, he argues that the
cutting room and the editing table were essential to his understanding of film
analysis.8 Here, he also speculates about a ‘gestural thinking’ as a way of practising
film analysis. According to Volker Pantenburg, Farocki, in his essay film Interface
(Schnittstelle, 1995), practises this way of thinking with film and demonstrates the
importance of gestures in analysing some central filmic operations like framing
and cutting.9 He especially focuses on the differences between cutting a celluloid
film and cutting a video.10 To cut a film means to make an actual cut in the image or
sound strip, as Farocki explains, whereas to edit a video requires only the operation
of copying from one tape to another. The difference between the two visual media
becomes evident when comparing the gestures implied in each case. As Farocki
states, he touches a film strip or sound reel with his fingertips (‘Fingerspitzen’) to
perceive the cut or the glue before he sees or hears it. For him, this simple gesture
indicates a perception and a sensibility or intuition (‘Fingerspitzengefühl’) that
is crucial for film analysis. That is, touching the film material creates a tactile
experience initiating a sense of how the film was made — in other words: to touch
a film is a way to think with the film.
    Working with videotaped material involves gestures of another kind. Here,
it is no longer about touching the material itself but about inserting a videotape
into the recorder and pressing keys — gestures, which nevertheless need the
sensibility of touch. In Interface, Farocki explicitly shows the different gestures
in handling a filmstrip or a videotape and addresses the specificity of each
media technology. However, the gesture of pointing to significant visual details
presented on screen is a way to approach the moving image without touching the
film material itself. The gestures inherent in the analysis of visual media change
with the media technology that provide these images.
    Farocki sustained a lifelong interest in gestures as a mode of productivity,
connecting bodies and actions in space and in time. In The Expression of Hands
(Der Ausdruck der Hände, 1997), he claims that film has to transform all tactile
sensation into glances because it is not a medium of touch but of vision. Yet,
in analysing the complex chains of gestures performed by a pickpocket in
Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller 1953), Farocki uses his own hands over

8
   Harun Farocki, ‘What an Editing Room Is’, in Id., Nachdruck/Imprint: Texte/Writings, ed. by
Susanne Gaensheimer, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Berlin, New York: Vorwerk 8, Lukas & Sternberg,
2001), pp. 79–85.
9
   See Volker Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard: Film As Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2015), pp. 157−220.
10
   The German word ‘Schnitt’ (‘cut’) indicates the main procedure in film editing, and ‘Schnittstelle’
literally means the exact place of the cut.

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                                          Petra Löffler


the video monitor. Together with the spoken commentary, they are his most
important instruments to analyse film. As film scholar Doreen Mende’s detailed
examination shows, Farocki frequently points with his hands to specific details of
a sequence to emphasize his analytical observations of technical images ranging
from celluloid film to computer simulations.11
   Hartmut Bitomsky, like Farocki a former student at DFFB, was also interested
in new ways of film analysis.12 His video Playback (1995) focusses on the practice
of film analysis with videotaped images in the context of a workshop on film
preservation. The participants of the workshop discuss early films that were
transferred to video in order to watch them several times, fast forward and
rewind the moving images easily and analyse them in detail. Playback shows the
gathering of film directors, scholars, archivists and students around a collection
of monitors: they speak about what they are seeing; they operate the keyboard
of the video recorder and point, with their almost touching hands, to details
of interest. These people execute a film analysis as gestural and participatory
practice in a very direct manner. Moreover, their operating and indicating
gestures sometimes encounter the gestures performed by people on screen. This
random encounter expresses the potential of gestures to connect people and
things in space and in time.
   It is no coincidence, that one aim of the 1995 workshop was to decide which
film copies are worth being preserved and restored. To make this decision, the
film scholars discuss the historical and aesthetic value one can attribute to these
copies archived in the Netherlands Film Museum (Amsterdam), the organizer
of the conference. Among the participants was Peter Delpeut who advocated
for the preservation of damaged nitro film reels. His compilation film, Lyrical
Nitrate (1990), resulted from the growing interest in the history of singular film
copies from early cinema — and from a profound understanding of the fragile
materiality of cellulose-based film.13
   While electronic media and digital editing now dominate the film industry,
nitro and celluloid film has not entirely disappeared. Film archives and other
cultural institutions continue to store and maintain vast inventories of films
that once were not only projected and watched but also, more importantly,
handled over and over again. These films have been put together and taken
apart, collected, stored and restored. As such, these nitro or celluloid films were
not only perceived visually and acoustically, but also physically and they were
repeatedly touched by human hands. Passed, as they are, from hand to hand, they
might even be understood as ‘distributed objects’ — objects possessing a history

11
   See Doreen Mende, ‘The Many Haruns. A Timeline Through Books and Hand Gestures
from 18,000 BC-2061’, e-flux journal, 59 (November 2014) <https://www.e-flux.com/
journal/59/61102/2061/> [accessed 29 February 2020].
12
   See Frederik Lang, Hartmut Bitomsky: Die Arbeit eines Kritikers mit Worten und Bildern (Wien:
Synema, 2020). I thank Michael Baute for drawing my attention to Bitomsky’s Playback.
13
   To mention are also the found footage films Decasia (Bill Morrison 2001) and Film is (Film ist,
Ernst Deutsch 1998−2009).

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                    Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice


and an agency of their own.14 This touching and handling leaves innumerable
traces on the film material and affects our ability to preserve them. Moreover,
photochemical substances such as celluloid are subject to their environments.
That is to say, films and photographs are fragile material things that undergo
numerous states of transformation, changing in accordance with the varying
conditions of temperature, light and humidity to which they are exposed — and
they are always in the process of deterioration and decay.
   In the 1990s, new film history shows a great affinity with media archaeology
in investigating the dispersed genealogies of media technologies and the variety
of localized media practices.15 Far from being a single scientific discipline with a
clear-cut research methodology, media archaeology is a heterogenic field where
different research interests meet. In addition to Friedrich Kittler’s and Jussi
Parikka’s approach,16 I would identify as a key media archaeological issue the
fragility of the media materials and the related bodily practices of care and repair.
The observation of the short or long lifespan of substances and their compounds
from which technical devices and media infrastructures are made, opens media
archaeology to ecological questions because these substances interact with their
environment and react to heat or cold, dryness or wetness.17 The limited stability
and durability of technical devices and media infrastructures is strongly related to
these interactions and thus to environmental conditions. The global circulation
of media materialities depends on economic calculations and geopolitical
conditions that must also be considered.18
   From a media-ecological perspective, the traces of their use and storage form
part of the ‘social biography’19 of every reel of celluloid film or photographic
print. As individual, material things, they have a singular micro-history
demanding specific practical approaches. My proposal of media archaeology as
gestural practice stems precisely from this idea that accounts for the ecology
of media materiality, its ‘variations in texture, ductility, rates of decay’.20 To
illustrate it, I will refer to the method of ‘analytic camera’ which was developed

14
   See Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
15
   Media theorist Siegfried Zielinski has coined the term in 1994. See his Deep Time of the Media:
Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT
Press, 2006). See also Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. by Erkki
Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Jussi
Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge UK, Malden MA: Polity Press, 2012).
16
   See Jussi Parikka, ‘Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and Ecological Media History’, Archiv
für Mediengeschichte, 13 (2013), 69–78.
17
   See my article ‘Medienarchäologie und Film’, in Handbuch Filmtheorie, ed. by Bernhard Groß,
Thomas Morsch (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), pp. 1−16 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-
09514-7_35-2> [accessed 9 November 2020].
18
   See Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2011).
19
   See The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by Arjun Appadurai
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
20
   Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, London: Duke University
Press, 2010), p. 58.

                                                                                                77
                                           Petra Löffler


by two filmmakers, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, in order to
examine damaged nitro-film material frame by frame. Through this gestural
film analysis, they contribute to the idea of a ‘critical cinema’ focusing especially
on the entanglement of Italian visual culture with the geopolitical histories of
imperialism, colonialism and racism.


An ‘Analytic Camera’

   Since the 1970s, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have been employing a gestural
practice in their work on the battered material of films from the early decades
of cinema, which they track down in local archives as part of their project to
reconstruct their complex geopolitical and colonial histories. Many of their
‘archival films’21 make use of the extensive film material recorded by Italian
filmmaker and cameraman Luca Comerio in the early decades of the twentieth
century, including, primarily, battles of World War I, as well as extended travels
through various European and African countries, and the rise of Italian fascism.
In spring 1982, when Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi were granted access for the
first time to Comerio’s private archive in Milan, they became immediately aware
of the precarious state of the film material that had survived two World Wars
and decades of time in Comerio’s old film lab.22 In order to work with this fragile
material, their preliminary operation became preserving it for analysis by re-
filming it frame by frame, a process they describe explicitly as ‘vivisection’.23
   Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi demonstrate their sensitive handling of the found
archival material in their short video Transparencies (Trasparenze, 1998) through
the audible whirring of the camera as it approaches the highly damaged footage,
capturing every scratch, every sharp crack or cut at close range. The camera
follows the careful handling of the sensitive and highly flammable nitro-film
material with a pincer to start a detailed examination of each individual frame
(fig.1). The transparent frames are illuminated to provide a better view of the
captured figures and their environment. In a 1995 essay, Gianikian and Ricci
Lucchi describe their method for dealing with damaged footage, employing the
principle of the ‘analytic camera’ consisting of two interdependent elements:
first, the careful preparation of the damaged filmic substance and, second, the
re-filming of the material frame by frame using a sort of a ‘microscopic camera’
in order to examine every detail.24



21
   Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi made their first long ‘archival film’ Karagoez – Catalogo 9.5 in 1981.
22
   See Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Notre caméra analytique (Paris: post-éditions,
Centre Pompidou, 2015), pp. 88–90.
23
   Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 274–84 (p. 277).
24
   Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, pp. 85–97. The filmmakers here refer to experiments with stop-motion
cameras conducted by Eadweard Muybridge and Jules-Étienne Marey, in the nineteenth century.

78
                   Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice




       Fig. 1: Transparencies (Trasparenze, Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi 1997).
                                    By courtesy of the authors.



   The objective of these operations is to prevent further damage and decay
from the sensitive material and to point to the fragility and volatility of every
single frame. By appropriating and reediting decayed film material, the
filmmakers turn documentary film into a monument: it is the film material that
speaks (and acts) for itself, as film scholar Christa Blümlinger has claimed.25
Moreover, viewing the film material from the perspective of the filmmakers’
camera, we experience the extent of its decay to the point that virtually none
of the image’s visual content can be identified. In their approaching camera
guiding the view of the spectator, gestures are transformed into glances —
Farocki’s claim is made literal here. When the camera zooms in and focuses on
individual frames, more and more singular signs of damage and deterioration
become recognizable. In Transparencies, the preparation of the film material,
the touching of it with a pincer and the re-filming frame by frame, including
enlargement and duplication, are related gestures of work that are part of a
gestural film analysis.

25
  See Christa Blümlinger, Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und
in der Medienkunst (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009), p. 143.

                                                                                            79
                                           Petra Löffler


   The filmstrip investigated in Transparencies belongs to the material
that Comerio himself recorded or collected in 1916 from battles at Monte
Adamello in the Southern Alps. What particularly affects the two filmmakers
here, is the double erasure of human life: once through acts of war and second
through the decay of the photochemical emulsion on which their figures had
been fixed, but which happened to leave only the rocks intact. In their close
examination of the footage, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi refer to this ghastly
double erasure of human figures. A red line across a frame reminds Gianikian
of a trace of blood and captures the filmmaker’s particular interest. Of course,
it is impossible to determine the origins of the red trace after so many years,
but had it actually been human blood, it is plausible that it originated from
an injury. However, every scratch or cut, every sign of damage or chemical
decay, every trace, like the red line, makes the filmstrip a singular event of film
history and, at the same time, a material thing with a singular biography.
   Transparencies ends with a common gesture in handling footage: the camera
follows the unrolling of a heavily damaged film reel that has been preserved.
Unfortunately, the entire strip of rolled up film sticks together, and a strange
sound can be heard as it is pulled apart by hand — a gesture that is, however,
not captured by the camera and thus remains outside the visual frame. Despite
the fact that hands are completely out of sight, they are not absent at all.
Without question, hands are necessary to adjust and operate the camera, to
open the film can and unroll the film, to hold the pincer and manage the light
source. All these common gestures remain largely unseen and unnoticed.26
Gianikian’s and Ricci Lucchi’s work of documentation and preservation is an
analytical gesture through which to approach and finally unveil human bodies
and their environment captured on film — a substance that is itself subject to
the passage of time.
   The gestures in their analytical work include not only the re-filming, reframing
and precise examination of individual frames, it incorporates also off-screen
gestures: unrolling film reels, putting strips of film on a light table and fixing them.
For the filmmakers, as for film preservation in general, touching the material in
one way or another is not, as Bellour’s statement suggests, a ‘mad desire’ but
a necessary practice. For in the work of preservation, filmic substance is not
primarily the projected moving images but the reconstitution of the material of
which these images are made.
   As was customary at the beginning of the twentieth century, the images
Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi seek to preserve are fixed on nitrate or nitro-film,
a highly inflammable and, hence, particularly dangerous material that also
decomposes quickly under unfavourable storage conditions. The unstoppable
decay of this footage represents the ultima ratio for their analysis of the films, as


26
  Bellour asserted that Gianikian’s and Ricci Lucchi’s constituted a ‘gigantic catalogue of twentieth
century gestures’. See Raymond Bellour, ‘L’arrière-monde’, Cinémathèque (Autumn 1995), 6–11,
reprinted in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, pp. 205–211 (p. 210).

80
                   Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice


the filmmakers emphasize, ‘C’est là toute l’histoire du nitrate, qui nous intéresse
autant pour sa forme que pour sa contenu, pour ce qu’il contient de mémoire
et de violence. Pour nous, cette mémoire qui lentement s’efface a une grande
valeur symbolique’.27 For them, then, the photosensitive material, its form as
film and its visual content, holds historical value for its symbolic relationship to
memory. In their perspective, the decay of nitro-film material is similar to the
fading of cultural memory. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi even speak of the self-
extinction of film material — ‘auto-effacement’ — and emphasize their artistic
intention to preserve the cultural memory inscribed in the archived films of
Luca Comerio. Yet, their desire to make visible and indestructible the traces
of memory inscribed on the decaying film material does not allow them to fall
prey to a well-known archival phantasm — the desire to come into a complete
possession of the past. As film scholar Jamie Baron has shown in her study The
Archive Effect, every historical film document is inevitably only a fragment and,
therefore, any reconstruction, whether analytical or artistic, must deal with the
inevitable gaps in the archive.28




                  Fig. 2: Memory Reel (Adela Muntean 2015). Screen capture.




27
  Ivi, p. 55.
28
  See Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History
(London: Routledge, 2014).

                                                                                            81
                                          Petra Löffler


   Moreover, as philosopher Jacques Derrida has prominently argued, archives
are institutions of power and have ever been subject to destruction and the
desire of extermination.29 Adela Muntean’s short film Memory Reel (2015)
captures the remains of an abandoned film deposit in the Romanian town
of Cluj that became obsolete after the political and economic collapse of the
country in 1989. The unrolled film strips are distributed everywhere covering
the soil populated by plants where they undergo intensified processes of decay
(fig. 2). The destruction of the film deposit and the decay of the film material
are parallel with the desire to forget a past that is permeated by memories of a
repressive socialist regime. To save these memories captured on film, the artist
interviewed contemporary witnesses and rewound some of these films on a
big reel by hand. The installation of her Memory Reel in art exhibitions is not
simply a gesture of care, it points to the necessity of a politics of remembrance
that is also an ecology of archiving.


Ecology of Archiving

   Once composed, photochemical materials undergo a continuous process of
decomposition. Cellulose-based photographs and films, negatives as well as
positives, gradually fade under the influence of light, humidity and air, they get
scratches and stains through frequent use and change their colours, until finally
the photochemical emulsion dissolves. Every negative, every print and every
reel of film is ultimately an unstable assemblage of various chemical substances
interacting with its surroundings and thereby in a permanent state of flux.30 They
are not simply manufactured things, objects of visual pleasure or critical analysis,
but transitory compounds of matter that produce, as sociologist of science
Bruno Latour has put it, their own ‘waves of action’.31 Following this argument,
we might think of materials performing gestures and, in doing so, extending
gesturality beyond human action.
   A media archaeology understood as a gestural practice might profit from
these considerations in two ways: firstly, the self-empowerment of substances,
materials and their mixtures present considerable challenges, especially to
archivists and cultural memory institutions that have the task not only to
store and preserve photochemical materials, but also to work with them in a
way to acknowledge their potentials as materials and material compositions.
Under the label ‘archival art’, artistic methods and strategies are combined,

29
   See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago,
London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
30
   Anthropologist Tim Ingold places the many interactions of concrete substances, such as clay and
wood, at the centre of what he calls an ‘ecology of materials.’ See Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology
of Materials’, The Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012), 427–42.
31
   Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2017), p. 101.

82
                    Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice


so that the transience of archived objects becomes the starting point for
exploring our critical engagement with the archive materials.32 Secondly, a
gesture-based media archaeological approach should be combined with the
ecology of archiving. The gestures performed by archivists and artists alike
produce a ‘tacit knowledge’ in Michael Polanyi’s sense;33 a knowledge that,
once more in our era of digitization, deserves to be re-evaluated as a crucial
legacy of film history.




32
   See for instance Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis, ed. by
Stefanie Schulte-Strathaus (Berlin: b_books, 2013).
33
   See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1958) and The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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