In search of a lost cinema

This article shows how creative approaches can contribute to a productive engagement with losses in film heritage. By (re)producing and (re)circulating images, sounds and narratives, documentaries on film heritage in particular relate to larger contexts of cultural and moving image memory. On the one hand, they are premediated by older productions, including feature films. On the other hand, they bring in new artistic, political and/or social perspectives. Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou, 2012), a documentary about Cambodia's lost film heritage before the Khmer Rouge period, serves as an example to illustrate these ideas. It carries a dual perspective that is simultaneously post-migratory and marked by (French) cinephilia as a cinematographic memory culture. In order to do justice to this complexity, dynamic concepts from the field of memory studies such as Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia (Boym 2001) and Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) are drawn on alongside literature on the history and theory of (French) cinephilia. In this way, cinephilia is reimagined as a multidirectional moving image memory culture that plays a particularly important but also complex role with regard to film heritage. In conclusion, several questions are outlined that need to be explored in further research.

Cinema memories in 3D modelling and virtual reality storytelling

This paper focuses on the project VR and AR in the valorisation of cultural and artistic heritage within the New Cinema History framework, aims to combine microhistory related to local cinema theatres and Cinema Heritage, and to investigate the possibilities that digital media – in this case Augmented and Virtual Reality – have in the valorisation and preservation of cultural heritage. The final output of the project is the Virtual Reality reconstruction of the Odeon cinema’s architecture and habits of cinemagoing that, thanks to an immersive experience via the Oculus Rift headset, could evoke and simulate historical spectatorship that dealt both with the moment of watching a movie and its peripheral practice. the development of the project, at least four different perspectives on the Odeon cinema converged to form the basis of the VR reconstruction: the literature on the topic, the consultation of public and private archives, the oral sources, and photographs taken on site. This paper focuses mostly on the documents and sources used in the VR project and it aims to investigate how various and heterogeneous documents can be woven together into a philologically reliable historical reconstruction, and how they can be used in 3D modelling and VR storytelling related to Cinema Heritage.

Queering cultural memory through technology

While cinema boasts of a long history that has placed the representation and aesthetics of memory at its centre, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are only starting to shape their own aesthetic and narrative engagement with memory. Through the analysis of Chez Moi (Caitlin Fisher and Tony Vieira, 2014), Queerskins: Ark (Illja Szilak, 2020), and Homestay (Paisley Smith, 2018), this essay shows how cinematic AR and VR involve the viewers’ movement to produce and transform collective memory and spatial habitation. Feminist digital geographies, film and media theory, and the concept of orientation developed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006) give sense to how sound, images and viewers’ movement participate to rewrite collective memory and cultural symbols. As these artworks present personal memories of struggles to find a home within present spaces, they queer hegemonic orientations of the subject, and invite viewers to re-align body and space within ever-changing virtual and digital spaces.

“Non-sites of memory”

This article analyses some of the 30 hours of location footage excluded from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. Although there has been some analysis of the outtake material in Lanzmann’s archive which consists of eyewitness interviews, very little attention has been paid to the footage of landscape, urban and camp settings, from which we have drawn these examples of Polish sites. We argue that it is possible to discern the presence of a specifically spatial memory by considering this excluded material in a way that draws on its outtake status, that is, its form of 11-minute reels unaccompanied by eyewitness presence or voiceover. The filmic construction of spaces to suit Lanzmann’s concerns is revealed if we attend to this material in its unedited state, with its constituent repetitions and exclusions, as a spatial version of the director’s customary interest in the reincarnation of the past in the present.