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2036-461X
19099
10
en
Julia Noordegraaf
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
From the Archive to the Gallery. Displacing Colonial Footage in the Work of Fiona Tan
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
8
New Studies
2008-03-01
2022-11-26
2008-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Julia Noordegraaf
2008/03/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
2036-461X
10
en
From the Archive to the Gallery. Displacing Colonial Footage in the Work of Fiona Tan
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19099/16882
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          FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE GALLERY.
          DISPLACING COLONIAL FOOTAGE IN THE WORK OF FIONA TAN
          Julia Noordegraaf, Universiteit van Amsterdam




                                                     The archive has to be read from below, from a position
                                                      of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced,
                                                   or made invisible by the machines of profit and progress.
                                                                                               Allan Sekula1

             In recent years the archive has become a major trope in the humanities. Rather than as neutral
          bodies aimed at collecting, ordering and storing our documentary heritage, archives are viewed
          as cultural artefacts, that actively shape the nature of that documentary heritage and its use. From
          sites of knowledge retrieval, archives have come to be seen as sites of knowledge production2.
          The documents that archives hold – as those that have been lost or neglected – form the basis for
          the way we remember the past and thus play a crucial role in the formation of individual and col-
          lective identity3. In this sense, the archive actively shapes the way we see ourselves and how we
          situate ourselves between past, present and future. As art historian and critic Hal Foster has point-
          ed out, contemporary artists also have shown a renewed interest in the archive as a source and
          topic for their work4. For these artists, the archive serves as a site for developing alternative mem-
          ories or reconstructing forgotten pasts. They achieve this by elaborating on the found image,
          object, and text and presenting them in a new form.
             In this article I discuss the reuse of colonial and ethnographic footage from the Dutch East-
          Indies (present-day Indonesia) in the film and video installations Smoke Screen (1997), Facing
          Forward (1999) and Tuareg (1999) by the visual artist Fiona Tan. The analysis of these cases aims
          to investigate how the displacement of film from the archive to the gallery changes the specific
          nature of the archival image and its meaning. Besides, it investigates the situation of the viewer
          towards the archival footage and the people and pasts it documents. The central concept that I
          explore is that of displacement, both in the literal sense of displacing film from the archive to the
          cinema or museum, and in the more conceptual sense of displacing meaning.
             Tan’s work is of particular interest because it addresses the various aspects of displacement that
          occur when archival footage is screened in the gallery space. Her reframing of the ethnographic
          and propagandistic film fragments that are the basis for the above mentioned works come to ques-
          tion the discourse about the colonial enterprise in Indonesia and our contemporary perspective on
          it. Besides, her installations invite viewers to develop an affective relation with the footage and
          the subjects it documents; Tan’s choice of close-ups or medium shots of people facing the cam-
          era stimulates our affective association with the people and their histories. The texts, sounds and
          new images that she uses at the same time support the formation of this affective relation and
          emphasise the difficulty of relating these histories to our present-day concerns. Tan’s installations
          thus involve viewers with the archival footage in a way that makes those images productive for
          understanding ourselves via the unknown other.
             Each case serves as starting point for discussing a particular aspect of displacement that occurs
          when archival footage is moved from the archive to the gallery. First, artists working with archival
          material literally displace that material from one context to another. In doing so, they reframe it

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        JULIA NOORDEGRAAF

        in a way that plays with earlier readings of the material and that adds new layers of meaning to
        them. This reframing often takes the form of a compilation – a collage of existing material, pos-
        sibly combined with new texts, sounds and images. A discussion of Tan’s film installation Smoke
        Screen illustrates the displacement of meaning that occurs in such a reframing of archival footage
        in a compilation film. Second, displacement of archival material to the gallery entails a specific
        involvement of the viewer. Tan’s film and video installations all focus attention on the act of look-
        ing, thus making the viewer implicit to the framing of the archival material in the gallery space.
        This specific positioning of the viewer towards the archival images is the topic of Tan’s video
        installation Tuareg, a work that in order to be experienced fully requires the displacement of the
        viewer in the gallery space. Finally, this displacement in space invites a displacement in time,
        connecting the present of the viewer to the past documented in the archival images. A discussion
        of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne (memory) project in relation to Tan’s video installation Facing
        Forward serves to show how the displacement of archival images can be a means to establish an
        affective memory of the past.


        Editing as a Window Cleaner
           Fiona Tan is a visual artist born in Indonesia in 1966 from a Chinese-Indonesian father and an
        Australian mother. She was raised in Australia, left for Amsterdam when she was 18 and has been
        living and working there ever since. In her work, mostly film and video installations, identity is
        a central theme, especially as it is defined in relation to time and place.
           Tan often works with “found footage”, that she presents in compilation films that are usually
        presented as film or video projections in the gallery space5. Since compilation films use archival
        material not as illustrations of real events, but as images that draw attention to the constructed
        nature of media productions, these films have the potential to critique, challenge and possibly also
        subvert the power of cinematic representation6. As Tan puts it: «The recycling of film fragments
        or photos breathes new life into the images; they are liberated from the harness of their original
        context. Recycling makes it possible to see images in a new way. Recycling creates new images.
        Editing as a window cleaner»7.
           With this particular interest in working with existing footage, Tan can be considered an artist
        working from what Foster has termed “an archival impulse”. In his discussion of Thomas
        Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant as exemplars of artists working from this archival
        impulse, Foster indicates that these artists present their archival materials «as active, even unsta-
        ble – open to eruptive returns and entropic collapses, stylistic repackagings and critical revi-
        sions»8. The aim of these works is to «fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants»9.
        Artists do so by elaborating on the found image, object, and text and presenting them in a new
        form. Tan’s film installation Smoke Screen illustrates how the displacement of archival footage
        from the archive to the gallery can be a means to critically engage viewers with the images and
        the history they represent.


        Displacing Meaning
          In 1926, the Dutch cameraman Iep Ochse recorded a fascinating scene on the island of Bali,
        Indonesia: three toddlers cheerfully smoking a cigarette. The brief shot – it lasts eleven seconds

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                                                                          FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE GALLERY

          – shows three naked children that fill the frame; they are seated facing the camera, the youngest
          sitting on the eldest boy’s lap. The latter vigorously inhales and exhales, creating a cloud of smoke
          that fills the screen. He then passes on the cigarette to the boy on his right and lovingly grooms
          the lock of hair of the youngest child.
             When this shot was used in a film for the Dutch newsreel production company Polygoon in
          1940, the scene was accompanied by a spoken commentary, saying «These babies take advantage
          of the fact that mother went shopping» (Tropisch Nederland, 1940). The scene is thus being
          explained as an example of innocent, naughty behaviour that occurs when mothers leave their
          children alone.
             In her film installation Smoke Screen Tan deconstructs this reading of the scene. She edited the
          shot in a short compilation film that is supposed to be played in a continuous loop. In the begin-
          ning, her film uses the traditional documentary format: we see the shot, followed by a title card
          that explains the place and estimated date of the recording. The second title card repeats the 1940s
          reading of the shot: babies taking advantage of the fact that mother went shopping. After that,
          however, the film becomes more ambiguous. Again we see the toddlers, now followed by the
          enigmatic title card «Boys will be men». This text seems to suggest that smoking is part of a rit-
          ual marking the transition from childhood to manhood, and invites reflections on the fact that
          these children have since grown up to be men.
             The uncertainty about the meaning of the shot increases further with the next title card “With
          my own eyes”. Whose eyes have actually witnessed this scene? From the first title card we know
          that the shot is archival footage – «Indonesia, maybe 1930» – so the scene cannot have been wit-
          nessed by the artist herself. But then who saw and recorded it? Or does the text perhaps refer to
          the viewer, who is confronted with the filmic documentation of the scene and thus sees it “with
          her own eyes”? Finally, the film shows the artist herself, with a toy camera held before her right
          eye. She seems to re-enact the recording of the original situation with a toy camera: we are now
          watching the artist mimicking the cameraman who filmed these three Indonesian children.
             Then the film starts over again, and by now the viewer knows the texts and images are highly
          ambiguous. By constantly repeating the images of the toddlers and alternating them with differ-
          ent texts and the shot of the artist herself, the meaning of what we see becomes increasingly
          blurred. The contrast between the old, archival footage and the new, self-reflexive texts and
          images invite the viewer to adopt a more distant standpoint. From this standpoint the relation
          between the camera, the people filmed, the artist and the viewer is being questioned. Who are
          these children? Where does the footage come from? To what extent was it staged? What has
          become of the kids? But also: why are we looking at it now? How do we relate to these images
          from colonial Indonesia?
             As anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler said: «Every document comes layered with
          the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment»10. In this
          case, that moment was the situation of Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule. Ochse’s shot was first
          used in a propaganda film that was screened in an educational setting, aimed at promoting life in
          the colony among the people in the homeland. Eventually, that film was incorporated in a state-
          sponsored archive, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. Tan directly refers to that pre-
          vious framing of the shot by including the title card of the original film, explaining the scene as
          an innocent example of naughty behaviour. However, by using various new texts and images,
          these previous layers of meaning are accompanied by new ones. The constant reframing of the
          shot by Tan here functions as a deconstruction of the different layers of meaning that remained
          unconscious in earlier times (as in the case of a propaganda film like Tropisch Nederland) or that
          have been forgotten. The result is a new, self-reflexive discourse on the past11.

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        Displacement in Space
           The self-reflexive nature of Tan’s work is particularly evident when she combines the archival
        footage with shots of herself. As literary scholar Ernst van Alphen states with regards to another
        of Tan’s works, Linnaeus’ Flower Clock (1998): «This striking juxtaposition of obviously old and
        new footage emphasizes Tan’s act of placing herself in the image. Like Alice in Wonderland she
        has found access to an imaginary world. She appropriates the old images into her present»12. The
        insert of the shot of the artist with a toy camera in Smoke Screen similarly serves to emphasise
        the artist’s contemporary, subjective perspective on the footage of the toddlers.
           Besides, the shot of the artist directs the viewer’s attention to the constructed nature of Tan’s
        film and of cinematic representations in general, as to the viewer’s active role in making sense of
        the images. When looking at the artist “looking” at the shot of the three Balinese children, the
        viewer comes to question his or her own relation to the material, and to the conditions in which
        it was originally shot: «Tan’s videos and films all reflect on how the medium functions as an agent
        that creates specific relationships between the viewer and the image»13. The viewer is thus invit-
        ed to actively participate in the artist’s montage and to reflect on the possible earlier meanings of
        the footage that Tan now deconstructs.
           The fact that Tan’s works are usually presented as film or video projections in the gallery space
        further underlines the active role of the viewer in the interpretation of the archival material.
        Contrary to cinematic and televisual spectatorship, where viewers are more or less required to sit
        still and watch the film as it unfolds over time, in the gallery space both the images and the spec-
        tator are mobile. The German thinker Boris Groys explains that «a video or movie installation in
        a museum neutralizes the ban of motion that determines the viewing of these pictures in a movie
        system. Pictures and spectators are allowed to move at the same time»14. Consequently, compared
        to the cinema or television spectator, the viewer of film and video installations in the gallery
        switches «from a passive position to a more interactive one, from an observer separate from the
        apparatus to a participant»15. According to film scholar Raymond Bellour, installations guide the
        viewer towards composing and recomposing the images and words that are being presented16. In
        the space of the gallery, then, the physical displacement of the viewer is required to make sense
        of the work17.
           Fiona Tan’s video installation Tuareg is a case in point. The basis of this work is a filmic por-
        trait of a group of twelve children, ranging in age from baby to teenager, that playfully pose for
        the camera. The children are laughing, moving about, and bumping into each other, while two of
        the older boys in the back row are mimicking a fight. They are all wearing white dresses, except
        one toddler in the front, who is wearing a chequered dress. In the background we see a tent, illus-
        trating the nomadic lifestyle of the Tuareg. The shot lasts about twenty seconds, then fades into
        freeze-frame for a few seconds before starting again. This work is supposed to be projected on a
        transparent screen that divides two separate rooms. In that way, the viewer can literally approach
        the same image from two sides: on the one side you see the image as it is, on the other side of the
        screen it is reversed. A different soundtrack on both sides – on the one side the sound of birds,
        flies and the chatter of children; on the other the more ominous sound of howling wind – under-
        lines the changing perspective on the image evoked by the viewer’s physical displacement in
        space.



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                                                                          FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE GALLERY

          Displacement in Time
             The displacement of the viewer in the gallery space parallels the physical displacement of the
          footage, from the geographical location where it was shot, to the archive, and then to the gallery
          space. This displacement in space also entails a displacement in time: from the moment of record-
          ing to the inclusion and storage in the archive and the subsequent appropriation of the material in
          the artist’s and viewer’s presence. One of the attractions of working with archival material is that
          it presents the opportunity to investigate the relevance of past events for our present and future.
          As Foster indicates, the archival elements reused in contemporary visual art works serve as
          «found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work serves as a possible portal
          between an unfinished past and a reopened future»18. This connection between past, present and
          future is achieved through «affective association»19. In that sense, archival art works refer to the
          past in a way similar to how memory works: images of past people, places and events are com-
          bined and recombined in constantly changing constellations. As a consequence, our interpretation
          of the objects and events from the past is constantly changing too; each time we approach them
          from a different perspective.
             The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) developed a method for analysing the his-
          torical development of art that reflects this same dynamic. In his vast library, which was moved
          from Hamburg to London in 1933 and is now part of the Warburg Institute, Warburg collected
          thousands of books. The organisation of these books was not a static arrangement – Warburg con-
          stantly regrouped them in order to reflect new ideas about the interrelation of facts. He thus used
          the physical arrangement of the books as an objectification of his thought; a method that helped
          him to fathom the psychology of artistic creation20.
             Warburg also collected thousands of black and white photographs of sculptures, paintings,
          prints, tapestries and other forms of imagery. For his Mnemosyne project, which aim was to cre-
          ate an atlas in images (an «art history without a text», as he himself described it), Warburg
          arranged these photographic reproductions on black panels, in order to find new and unanticipat-
          ed interpretations of the relationships between works from different times and places21. In this
          way, he used the technique of montage «to activate dynamic properties [of individual art works]
          that would be latent if considered individually»22. The result is similar to the effect of cinemato-
          graphic montage: «The Mnemosyne panels function as screens on which the phenomena produced
          in succession by the cinema are reproduced simultaneously»23. According to art historian Georges
          Didi-Huberman, what was characteristic for Warburg’s photographic panels was their exchange-
          ability: the photographs could always be taken off the panels and endlessly be recombined with
          other images, thus keeping their meaning open and avoiding a final point of interpretation24.
             As art historian and film curator Philippe-Alain Michaud argues, Warburg used the changing
          constellations of his books and photographs in his library as a means to elaborate «a type of
          thought that espoused the movements of intuition, […] a thought inseparable from the body and
          the encounters affecting it»25. Warburg’s method of studying recurring motifs in the arts thus
          emphatically included the observing subject and its association with the subject observed, in a
          way similar to how Tan uses self-reflexive images and texts in her work.
             Warburg was principally concerned with the “survival” of gestural expressions from Antiquity
          in the art of the Renaissance. In 1895 he converted this historical quest «into a geographical and
          ethnological displacement to the sierras of New Mexico», where he studied the rituals of the
          pueblos26. As Michaud argues, after this trip Warburg understood that:

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          The experience of otherness is necessary to interpret the familiar, that geographical distance
          is a metaphor of the past – one that is intimate and personal as much as historical and col-
          lective – and that traveling is a technique of anamnesis. The exotic motif […] ceased to be
          simply the object of research and became its reflection, opening knowledge up to the con-
          sciousness of otherness27.

           It is exactly this metaphorical relation between distance in space and distance in time, and the
        engagement of the contemporary viewer with otherness, that is addressed in Tan’s video installa-
        tion Facing Forward.


        Facing Forward with Found Footage
          For Facing Forward Tan chose ethnographic footage from the collection of the Netherlands
        Filmmuseum and edited it into a film of eleven minutes, that is usually projected on a gallery wall.
        The film opens with a black and white shot of a large group of non-western (Indonesian?) men
        who face the camera as if they were having their portrait taken. In the middle, three white men
        (missionaries?) are seated, flanked by other white men in army suits and leisure wear. This open-
        ing shot is followed by other shots of (Indonesian) men and women staring silently in the cam-
        era. The flicker and the scratches in the images, as well as the fact that they are in black and white,
        suggest that we are watching archival footage.
          The images are accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of a gong and a violin-like one-tone
        sound. We then see the title of the film, underscored by a five-tone piano sound that suggests mys-
        tery and anticipation. This minimalist soundtrack continues throughout the film. The film then
        takes us on a car ride to an unidentified Indonesian city where the passers-by are looking curi-
        ously into the camera lens. We hear a voice-over reading a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible
        Cities – a text about travelling through time and place28. The voice-over cites Marco Polo, who
        explains to Kublai Khan that:

          What he sought was always something lying ahead, even if it was a matter of the past.
          Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had:
          the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign,
          unpossessed places29.

          In the rest of the film, this scenario is repeated. We see different shots of people from various
        parts of the world who appear to be made to pose in front of the camera. This impression is rein-
        forced by the inclusion of shots of a white man operating a film camera who is wearing a head-
        band decorated with four feathers. A shot of two African women wearing face masks epitomises
        the contrived nature of the footage: women who do not want their faces to be seen are being
        forced to “face forward”.
          At the end of the film, the images from the opening sequence are repeated, accompanied by the
        voice-over that resumes the narration from Calvino’s text: «By now, from that real or hypotheti-
        cal past of his, Marco is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another
        of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now
        someone else’s present»30. The film ends with a shot of two young girls shyly smiling towards the
        camera.

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                                                                          FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE GALLERY

            Like the insertion of the shot of the artist filming in Smoke Screen, the inclusion of the shot of
          the cameraman in Facing Forward focuses attention to the role of the camera in constructing a
          relation between the viewer and footage. Tan here not only stimulates spectators to develop a spe-
          cific interpretation of the images, but also to reflect on the gaze with which they regard the peo-
          ple portrayed: «The cultural other is subjected to observation; but the observing self is also
          included»31. Because she here mostly uses medium-shots or close-ups of people staring into the
          camera, she allows those who are subject to observation to look back: being forced to face for-
          ward here turns into scrutinizing the observing subject. It is through this gazing at each other that
          contemporary viewers are invited to establish an affective relation with the people portrayed in
          the films Tan re-presents.
            In order to make this affective association productive, the work also invites reflection on the
          relation between present-day viewers and the past as documented in these images. Tan achieves
          this by including the hypothetical conversations between the traveller Marco Polo and the emper-
          or Kublai Khan taken from Calvino’s book. In Marco Polo’s view, past, present and future no
          longer form a linear continuity: «The past is something which in fact can only be reached in the
          present or the future»32. There is a conflation between places from the past and places in the pres-
          ent; in each new city, he finds a past that he did not know he possessed. Marco Polo’s reflection
          on his travels can be seen as metaphoric for the displacement of the footage from the archive to
          Tan’s video installation. Tan uses archival material from other times and places in order to stim-
          ulate critical reflection on the viewer’s contemporary perspective on the past, and its relevance
          for his or her future. In that sense, Facing Forward demonstrates how «relating to the past as well
          as to distance is always a matter of alterity (times as well as spaces are different) and a matter of
          identity (the past, the distance as such, being part of our present culture)»33.


          Conclusion
            The discussion of Fiona Tan’s film and video installations served to show how the displacement
          of archival footage from the archive to the gallery can be a means to actively engage viewers with
          images of distant places and times, and to stimulate reflection on how encounters with otherness
          are inextricably linked to the formation of one’s own past, present and future identity. As I have
          argued, this transfer of archival material from one context to another couples the physical dis-
          placement of both archival objects and viewers (displacement in space) to a displacement in time,
          resulting in a displacement of meaning. Displacement seems a useful concept to describe this
          process because, rather than emphasising the dislocation of archival materials, it stresses a shift
          or transference of these materials from one context to another. In this sense, «every “displacement
          from” is always also a “displacement to” a new context […] and a displacement in time»34.
          Therewith, the travel of archival documents through different contexts remains “grounded” in a
          specific space and time.
            Since it does not obliterate the place and time from which the material originates, the displace-
          ment of colonial footage from the archive to the gallery is a means to physically and emotional-
          ly connect present-day viewers to the past as evoked by the footage. Paradoxically, the more one
          emphasises the distance in space and time that separates the observing subject from the subjects
          observed by the camera, the stronger the connection between the two becomes. The further Marco
          Polo travels, the more he is being confronted with his past, the less he understands who he is:
          «Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the

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        much he has not had and will never have»35. In this sense, Facing Forward invites us to reflect
        on who we are, where we came from and where we are going: we have to look back in order to
        face forward.




        1    Allan Sekula, Reading an Archive, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings
             by Contemporary Artists, MIT, Cambridge MA 1989, p. 127.
        2    Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance”, in Archival Science, Vol. 2, nos. 1-
             2, 2002, pp. 87-109. The seminal reflection on the archive as a cultural phenomenon is Jacques Derrida’s
             Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz, University of
             Chicago, Chicago 1996.
        3    As archival scholar Eric Ketelaar contends, «archives are spaces of memory-practice, where people’s
             experiences can be transformed into meaning» (Eric Ketelaar, The Archives of the United Nations
             International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Joint Heritage, Shared by
             Communities of Records, unpublished paper presented at the I-Chora 2 conference, Amsterdam, August
             31-September 2, 2005).
        4    Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, in October, no. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3-22.
        5    Jay Leyda was the first to distinguish archive-based films as “compilation films”, see Jay Leyda, Films
             Beget Films, George Allen & Unwin, London 1964. These films are also referred to as “found footage
             films”, or “archival films”. Michael Zryd distinguishes between “found footage films” – based on non-
             archived material, literally “found” in private collections, commercial stock shot agencies, garbage bins,
             etc. – and “archival films” – based on material from archival institutions. I do not share Zryd’s distinc-
             tion because I actually doubt whether, as he claims, «the archive is an official institution that separates
             historical record from the outtake» (Michael Zryd, “Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory”, in
             The Moving Image, Vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, p. 41). Besides, film programmer Gertjan Zuilhof has remarked
             that the use of the term “found footage” is not always appropriate, because most artists are actively
             searching for specific material rather than just accidentally finding it (Gertjan Zuilhof, Welt Spiegel
             Kino/World Mirror Cinema: Gustav Deutsch, in Catalogue 34th International Film Festival Rotterdam,
             IFFR, Rotterdam 2005, p. 226).
        6    William C. Wees, Found Footage and Question of Representation, in Cecilia Hausheer, Christoph
             Settele (eds.), Found Footage Film, Viper/Zyklop, Luzern 1992, p. 39.
        7    Fiona Tan, Kingdom of Shadows, in Mariska Van den Berg, Gabriele Franziska Götz (eds.), Scenario.
             Fiona Tan, Van den Berg & Wallroth/NAi, Amsterdam-Rotterdam 2000, p. 127.
        8    Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, cit., p. 17.
        9    Idem, p. 4.
        10   Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance”, cit., p. 92.
        11   See Sharon Sandusky’s discussion of Daniel Eisenberg’s compilation film Displaced Person:
             «Displaced Person asks the audience to consider that since the film material isn’t gone, perhaps the
             meaning behind it also remains. This leaves the audience with the project of confronting the underlying
             meaning, precisely because earlier generations did not» (Sharon Sandusky, “The Archaeology of
             Redemption: Toward Archival Film”, in Millennium Film Journal, no. 26, 1992, p. 16). This search for
             earlier meanings in displaced footage is a means to retrieve what Mary-Ann Doane has called “subjec-
             tive residues” of cinematic texts that remain beyond the initial viewing. See Anne Friedberg, Window
             Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California, Berkeley CA 1994, p. 134.
        12   Ernst van Alphen, “Imagined Homelands: Re-mapping Cultural Identity”, in Thamyris/Intersecting, no.
             9, 2002, p. 54.
        13   Idem, p. 59.
        14   Boris Groys, “Media Art in the Museum”, in Last Call, Vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, http://www.belkin-
             gallery.ubc.ca/lastcall/past/pages2/page2.html, January 13, 2006. See Boris Groys, “Medienkunst im
             Museum”, in Id., Topologie der Kunst, Hanser, München-Wien 2003, pp. 59-76.
        15   Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, cit., p. 144. While Friedberg here dis-
             cusses the impact of virtual reality devices on cinema and televisual spectatorship, I think her argument
             also applies to the context of the gallery space.

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                                                                               FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE GALLERY

          16 Raymond Bellour, “D’un autre cinéma”, in Trafic, no. 34, 2000, p. 8.
          17 My view on spectatorship as constructed by film or video projection in the gallery space is thus more
             dynamic than that of David Joselit’s, who argues that compared to closed-circuit video installations, «in
             video projection the viewer is made more passive both in her consumption of spectacular imagery and
             in her ability to intervene within the space of the screen» (David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube”, in
             Artforum, Vol. 42, Fall 2004, p. 156).
          18 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, cit., p. 15.
          19 Idem, p. 21.
          20 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Zone Books, New York 2004, p. 235.
          21 Idem, p. 240.
          22 Idem, p. 253.
          23 Idem, p. 260.
          24 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby
             Warburg, Minuit, Paris 2002, pp. 459-60.
          25 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, cit., p. 232.
          26 Georges Didi-Huberman, Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies), foreword to
             Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, cit., p. 10.
          27 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, cit., p. 35.
          28 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Harcourt, San Diego 1978.
          29 Voice-over commentary in Facing Forward; after Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, cit., pp. 28-9.
          30 Ibidem.
          31 Ernst van Alphen, “Imagined Homelands: Re-mapping Cultural Identity”, cit., p. 64.
          32 Idem, p. 66.
          33 Hubert Damisch, quoted in Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with
             Hubert Damisch”, in October, no. 85, Summer 1998, p. 16.
          34 Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, Yolande Jansen (eds.), Diaspora and Memory: Figures of
             Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics, Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York 2007, p. 14.
          35 Voice-over commentary in Facing Forward; after Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, cit., p. 29.




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