Choreographing The Archive: Image Gallery

electronic proposes a collection of stills from with footage. The initiative was born from the to etc.) and to highlight the visual evolution of one particular strand of screendance creation that focuses on choreographing and working with found and archival footage. The flm stills featured this continue to upon an approach that was frst recognized in screendance ago via archival compositions and his later collaborations with and Davies. The includes who explore diverse notions of found gestures, found footage, family contemporary news as well as historic images. A flm that merges what the director/choreographer refers to as three distinct types of archives. Archives of the present include digital images flmed between 2007 and 2012 that capture Auburtin’s grandmother’s fnal years in a medical center for people living with Alzheimer’s. These images trace the family’s personal interactions through touch, movement and spoken language. Photographic archives are used in the flm to capture earlier moments between grandmother and granddaughter, ofered by the flmmaker as a subjective recollection of her childhood memories. Super 8 and video archives were flmed in the 1960s-1980s by Auburtin’s grandfather, as well as by the families of the dance students who studied with Auburtin’s grandmother, a former ballerina. For the artist, these images are links to the past, to our own memories of family, but were also conceived as choreographic compositions that draw on the dance within the frame, the movements of the camera, and the choreography that emerges through editing. In combining these diferent approaches to archives, the artist creates a subtle and sensorial tribute to her grandmother who lives on in the memories and bodies of those she loved and taught. Via an intimate portrait of family, Les Robes Papillons ofers a universal refection on multiple approaches to transmission and archives, including personal memory, the body as an archive, as well as visual archives. Film trailer:


Les Robes Papillons (Butterfy Dresses), France, 2021, by Camille Auburtin
A flm that merges what the director/choreographer refers to as three distinct types of archives. Archives of the present include digital images flmed between 2007 and 2012 that capture Auburtin's grandmother's fnal years in a medical center for people living with Alzheimer's. These images trace the family's personal interactions through touch, movement and spoken language. Photographic archives are used in the flm to capture earlier moments between grandmother and granddaughter, ofered by the flmmaker as a subjective recollection of her childhood memories. Super 8 and video archives were flmed in the 1960s-1980s by Auburtin's grandfather, as well as by the families of the dance students who studied with Auburtin's grandmother, a former ballerina. For the artist, these images are links to the past, to our own memories of family, but were also conceived as choreographic compositions that draw on the dance within the frame, the movements of the camera, and the choreography that emerges through editing. In combining these diferent approaches to archives, the artist creates a subtle and sensorial tribute to her grandmother who lives on in the memories and bodies of those she loved and taught. Via an intimate portrait of family, Les Robes Papillons ofers a universal refection on multiple approaches to transmission and archives, including personal memory, the body as an archive, as well as visual archives. Film trailer: https://vimeo.com/474678046

Goodbye Love, UK, 2014, a flm by Becky Edmunds
A personal family archive flm.

To Be Continued (2020) by Becky Edmunds
To Be Continued is a 27 episode web series, based on the stories told in a collection of journals that were found in a pile of rubbish.
Written by a man called Dick Perceval, the journals cover the years 1925-1976. They vividly detail his life in Berlin in the 1920s, his work as a journalist and frustrated author, and the extraordinary events that brought him to work at Bletchley Park in WW2. They record the turbulence of his frst marriage and hint at dark secrets. They tell of love, loss, loneliness, ambition and disappointment.
To Be Continued brings this story to life using archive footage. A cast of hundreds is drawn from old Hollywood flms, public information broadcasts, cine club creations and home movies to deliver the extraordinary story of the life of an ordinary man.
To Be Continued is made in partnership with Screen Archive South East and is funded by Arts Council England. Made in collaboration with Gerard Bell and Scott Smith. Available to view at www.tobecontinued.online That Elusive Balance by Salvatore Insana (Italy), 9'40'', 2021, footage from Eva Braun 16mm reels Salvatore Insana writes: "The best days are made of elusive balances, of subliminal happiness, inexorable. Can the search for happiness be anything other than the search for balance? Happiness is made of eyes that feel observed, of eyes that see each other again, of eyes that discover for the frst time. Happiness is in the eyes of those who discover who we were, how we were. But what is its rhythm, what is its speed? What is its movement? When is an image happy?

Father-land (2018) by Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker Autoethnographic Memory Archive
Father-land (2018) is a 20-minute essay flm made collaboratively by Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker through an artist research residency hosted by the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC) in Cyprus. The story of Nicosia unfolds through a montage of views of the fractured landscape of the Bufer Zone and its accompanying ambient soundscape, as the voices of two unseen narrators share their recollections as children with fathers who served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) on the island and refect on images of confict and the legacies of colonialism, occupation and the Cold War. Father-land creates an autoethnographic memory archive that brings together the personal and the political in these post-Brexit and increasingly unstable times. (2018)  Image A-03I was running along the back streets with my friend who's a Cypriot boy… ah, whose name I can't remember now. I was about seven… and he took me to visit his grandmother who used to process… Image A-04…carobs in a caravan, a little old caravan. And she let us taste the carob syrup. That's one thing that's always stayed with me -the taste of the carob syrup… Image B-10 the call to prayer continues and fades away It's quite a strange feeling with the Bufer Zone, and thinking about my father coming here several times with the RAF.

Father-land
Image B-13but something which you're not really experiencing, you're just… beside it. So, you're without experience.

Fuori Programma (Italy, 2016) by Carla Oppo
Fuori Programma is a short archive flm by Carla Oppo, which won the Premio Zavattini in 2016.
Summer camps in the 1950s: a child's magic tricks entertain his camp friends. A mature voice recalls and travels through memories: games, duties, expectations, adults' intrusions into the youthful and juvenile universe. An intimate account of a holiday that lasts until memories lose their solidity and become onirical, liquid and free.
Images from Archivio Audiovisivo Del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (Audiovisual archive of the labour and democratic movement)

Toute la misère du monde (All the Misery in the World, France, 2015-2019) by Franck Boulègue
In a series of short videos, Franck Boulègue began exploring news and historic archival footage in response to the European migrant crisis, which erupted in 2015 as a result of the civil war in Syria and other acts of violence worldwide. Against the backdrop of multiple waves of asylum seekers braving extreme conditions to reach the European Union, the artist created his video works for an exhibition dedicated to the organization Reporters without Borders as a call to action, asking European governments to open their borders to refugees. His videos often feature politicians in public televised speeches. Using repetition and modifed speeds, as well as large blocks of text, the artist explores the gestures and absurd phrases that public fgures employ to justify their anti-immigration policies. The same series also explores found footage from uncredited advertisements and educational flms that address the theme of borders and movement. The video series takes its title from a highly mediatized phrase made famous by the former French prime minister Michel Rocard, "France cannot accommodate all the misery in the world," which became the subject of one of the series' installments.

Tango Brasileiro (UK/Brazil, 2014), by Billy Cowie and Gabriela Alcofra
Tango Brasileiro is a three-minute flm directed and choreographed by Billy Cowie and Brazilian artist and dancer Gabriela Alcofra, commissioned by UK Channel 4 TV and Brazilian TV in 2014. The work uses digital technology to superimpose contemporary live footage of dancer Gabriela seamlessly onto archive flm from 1930's Rio de Janeiro.
The piece takes on a classic Recitative/Aria structure where in the frst section, the young Gabriela explains in the form of a poem how she can stop time simply by saying the word Now, much to the distress of her little friends.

Dance Number 6 (USA, 1985), by Raphael Montañez Ortiz
Starting in 1985, Montañez Ortiz began a series of what he calls "digital/laser/videos"; he has made a large number of these "arresting, provocative and suggestive" works (Scott MacDonald). He selects excerpts of commercial flms on laser disc, which he deconstructs with the help of a computer program installed on one of the frst Apple models. Using a joystick, he experiments with cutting up the seconds of action of his choice and moving them back and forth at diferent speeds, while also modifying the sound. He manipulates these sequences as many times as necessary until the result is ready to be fxed on video tape. This approach to found footage is experimental not only in aesthetic terms. As the artist distorts a scene's temporal structure, he also deconstructs the cultural canons which are proper to cinema; he also does this, to some degree, to political ends, as he denounces colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy in Western society.