Looking for a “Now-Time” in Family Film Footage: Appropriating and Activating Archival Images in the Present

TitleLooking for a “Now-Time” in Family Film Footage: Appropriating and Activating Archival Images in the Present
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsGrossman, Alyssa, and Arine Kirstein Høgel
JournalVisual Anthropology Review
Volume36
Issue1
Pagination90-112
ISSN1548-7458
AbstractThis article presents an ongoing project, Mneme-Automaton/Memory-Machine, which involves collaborative interventions with an existing body of amateur family film footage and written texts. As an integral part of engaging with this material, we identify our different relationships to it: one author as a direct descendant of its producers, the other with no personal connection to the collection. Although both of us are remote in time and space from the original contexts of its production, our intention is to identify a Benjaminian “now-time” for the material to activate it in the present and render it visible and legible in new ways. In this article, we describe and appropriate selections of the film footage, thereby transforming it into an archive that evokes subjective and affective sensations and experiences that extend beyond the “historical index” of the source material.
URLhttps://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/var.12201
DOI10.1111/var.12201
Short TitleLooking for a “Now-Time” in Family Film Footage