Symposium Exploring Use of Archival and ‘Found’ Film and Video

Friday 12 May 2006, 18.30 - 20.00, Saturday 13 May 2006, 10.00 - 18.30; Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG; Book tickets online or call 020 7887 8888.

The experience of viewing projected archival or ‘found’ film and video can have a seductive, even spellbinding effect on the viewer. The moving image’s material and aesthetic qualities can act as a trigger to memories true or false, sharply evoke a sense of time and nostalgia, or conjure fantasies of history.

This international symposium draws together a collection of voices and perspectives to examine the work of artists and filmmakers who have purposefully manipulated these materials. In doing so, these practitioners have explored the archive and its inherent qualities, dislocated archival material from its original purpose and intention, and thereby revealed new readings, meanings and questions.

George Barber, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska, Alex Farquharson, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Patrick Keiller, Elizabeth McAlpine, Mark Nash, Marcel Odenbach, Pat OÂ’Neill, A L Rees, Heather Stewart, Benjamin Weil and Akram Zaatari.

On Friday 12 May, A L Rees introduces the imaginative re-cutting of found footage by film artists since the 1920s. Using short works and extracts, this talk reviews some of the ways in which ‘films beget films’ (Jay Leyda) in the
avant-garde.

On Saturday 13 May, further ideas on the uses of found footage and archival material will be explored in three different sessions:

Interrogating Archives asks what are archives other than passive repositories that catalogue the past following their own arcane criteria, and freeze it for posterity. Artists and curators will discuss their approaches to the ‘archive’, both as a concept and as an institution. In History and Politics discussion will focus on artists who interrogate newsreel and documentary images to reclaim some sense of humanity, or to pursue more fundamental truths, or to invent some missing pieces of a puzzle. Three generations of practitioners, interested in the humorous and disturbing subtexts beneath the polished surface of popular cinema, discuss their different methods and objectives towards moving-image collage in Remaking Hollywood. Screenings of individual work by Martin Arnold, Joseph Cornell and Malcolm Le Grice accompany extracts of work by the participants.