Richard Misek / Norway, Uk / 2022 / 19’ / English | Italian and English Subtitles

ITALIAN PREVIEW

Getty Images is one of the largest commercial image libraries in the world. Many of the defining images of the last century are owned or managed by Getty. We are all familiar with these images: they live in our heads and form part of our collective memory. A History of the World According to Getty Images is a study of property, profit and power, made out of archive footage from Getty Images’ online catalogue. It forms an impassioned and meticulously crafted journey through some of the most significant moments of historical change ever caught on camera, while at the same time reflecting on how commercial archives influence what we see. The film also forms a direct resistance to this privatization of the past, and uses the process of image licensing against itself. It includes seven legally licensed clips, uncut and in full HD, and will itself be downloadable for the duration of each festival screening. In this way, it will liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and for future artistic uses.

Screenplay Richard Misek
Editing Richard Misek
Music Yo La Tengo, Sigurd Lie, Martin Radford, Tatsujiro Oto
Sound design and mix Tatsujiro Oto
Production Once Aurora
Producer Thorvald Nilsen
Exective producer Jan Aksel Angeltvedt
Archives Getty Images, The Internet Archive, Critical Past, NASA
Dramaturg Katia Nyqvist

Richard Misek

Richard Misek is a filmmaker and Associate Professor in Film and Media Arts at the University of Bergen in Norway. His nonfiction work has screened at festivals including Sundance, IDFA, CPH:DOX, and Rotterdam, and at venues including the National Museum of Art (Washington D.C.), the Barbican Centre and BFI Southbank (London), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), and Forum des images (Paris). His research focuses on digital inclusion, and he is currently leading a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project entitled ‘Digital Access to Arts and Culture Beyond COVID-19’.