UnArchive: persevering is diabolical, but it is beautiful
by Vincenzo Vita
President AAMOD Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement
The reuse festival has hit the ground running. This is the fourth edition of an initiative that has grown over the years and has become a reference point for found footage – refined aesthetic capable of wandering through the meanderings of time. Found footage is not a quantitative universe, but a crossroads of memory and supposed contemporaneity, of foreshadowing signs and alien traces. Of greatness and horror.
Collecting and inserting into our cognitive circuits this heritage of films – often extraordinary and yet underestimated by the mainstream mind – constitutes a value: in itself and of itself.
Cultures and knowledge are a common good, to be returned to the conscious collective use through transits and fault lines that are not traceable to mere sequences of the homologating serial coercion.
Paradoxically, to achieve the practice of the common good, it is necessary not to fall into the flatteries of common sense. Decades of commercial generalist television and productions imagined almost exclusively for Big Tech platforms have made us unaccustomed to dealing with the complexity of artistic messages, so far as these are from the dictatorship of contemporaneity.
In a season clad in dark and opaque colours, UnArchive wants to help light fires of transformative passion, as well as broaden the points and scope of our vision with a few rays of sunshine.
Today, memory is under attack, with the cuts made to public funding and with direct or indirect censorship; and with the flooding of our imagination with the monsters created by artificial intelligences not guided by a democratic science.
The Technofeudalism of the so-called Over The Top is immanent, but we will not surrender.
To those who thunder with drones of hypervelocity and with the post-humanity of robots, with the radioactive waste of surveillance and repression, we respond with the (invincible) bells of Audio-visual History. We are poor, but perhaps beautiful.
The archive as a common good: an opportunity for what can come to be
By Luca Ricciardi
Organizational direction
Film heritage (as established by UNESCO) is one of “assets” that are essential for preserving the collective memory, enhancing cultural diversity and facilitating the free exchange of ideas. Without forgetting the increasingly necessary role of “bulwark” that archives and their assets constitute in the face of the proliferation of artificially generated images, as well as more generally in the face of the pervasiveness of so-called post-truths.
However, it is perhaps time to consider images as a fundamental asset not only in their preservation, accessibility and use, but also in the possible reactivation and reuse that can stem from them: the rewriting of the past, that individuals and communities may carry out by appropriating images and sounds – or re-appropriating, as in the case with decolonial cinematography – to find answers to the questions of today.
Unarchiving is not just an artistic practice. It’s a critical stance. It means removing images from the risk of fossilization, reopening their stratifications, re-circulating the political energies that they contain and that still question us. Works of found footage and of artistic reuse of the archive offer reinterpretations of non-monumental, complex, plural, critical identities and history, capable of restoring visibility to marginalities and of proposing new narratives excluded from the official canon.
For these reasons, accessible and reusable audio-visual collections are to be considered, today more than ever, one of those intangible resources, may these be public or privately owned, that the community must take care of, manage, but also re-work and regenerate for the collective well-being: a common good.
Archiving and unarchiving practices involve a wide range of skills and actors: conservation institutes, archivists and documentalists, curators and programmers, scholars and researchers, training institutes, authors, artists, producers, distributors, technology and service providers.
The different parties involved in this field are many in Italy and across the world, but they often operate in worlds that do not dialogue with one another: on the one hand, that of the conservation and management of archival materials and, on the other, that of production and reuse.
Yet, in the genesis of every archive-based film and in its journey of production and circulation, a “reuse chain” is clearly visible: a complex and still very fragmented community of professionals. A community that does partly exist, but that is still largely to be “invented” by spreading more awareness of being part of a single great process, more opportunities to get to know the experiences of the other components and to empathize with their needs, and developing the aptitude to define common cultural policies that respect all different roles.
Alongside this 4th edition of the Festival, which promises to be lively and participated, UnArchive has chosen to launch the first edition of Forum: an unprecedented moment of international meeting dedicated to identifying, bringing out and enhancing a conscious, sustainable and cooperative reuse industry.
If the idea of the archive as a common good will remain central in its activities, the Forum may perhaps become a space for the construction of a new ecosystem of images. Not a space for what already exists, but an opportunity for what can come to be.
The archive, a common good for a cinema that dances
by Marco Bertozzi, Alina Marazzi
artistic direction
The fourth edition of UnArchive presents itself as a living space of crossing, encountering and transforming images. A place where cinema returns to question itself, its stories and its future possibilities through the gesture as simple as it is radical of the creative reuse of archival images. Also in this edition, the Festival tries to unhinge the chronological continuum of film history, its reassuring aesthetic-industrial journey, to lead us into archaeological wanderings filled with unexplored symptoms. Out of traditional memory, in corners forgotten by genres, the wandering wandering among abandoned images and sounds encounters a history at the margins, alien to cinema already mapped. Diachronic creations, retrospective prophecies of the majestic art of images lost and thrown away, in a tragic and sublime flanerie of the beastly eye. As a boundary horizon, found footage works on thresholds, on the disjunction of acquired laws, in an ongoing reflection on loss and the impossible return to origin. The confirmation that no closed identity is okay, that no “true” origin is possible. Ours remains this aimless itinerary, ready to make us wonder again, outside the connotations of chronology, rationality, direct metaphor and without escape. We are dowsers in search of revisited cine fragments, and precisely because fragmentary thinking is undermining systematic thinking, the cultural ecosystem of UnArchive tries to probe alternatives to the teleological history of cinema. In the vicissitudes of this edition’s films and performances lie few utopias and no redemption, so much as an attempt to grasp the urgencies of the present through fragments of the past, combining the local with the international, the autobiographical with the collective, without boundaries or pyramidal hierarchies. Images are temporal objects: they change with the viewer, and as the world races toward the precipice and the apocalypse of language is already underway, our “useless” Festival is not just a place of projection, but a space in which society reflects on its relationship with memory, with history, with the narratives of the present. A critical space. A collective gaze. A place to learn to look. Not simply to see, but to question, to doubt, to understand the processes through which images, and the world they represent, construct meaning. This is why, today more than ever, we believe in the value of the archive as a common good, an asset that is as material as it is immaterial, capable of traveling freely across geographic and aesthetic boundaries, a ceaseless engine of cinematic creativity and political reflection. This is confirmed by the practices of reuse at work in the films that reach us from different corners of the earth and find space in the festival’s sections. Personal stories and collective stories dialogue on the screen creating trans-temporal relationships and unexpected “spatial” connections. Some beloved and recognized authors of found footage cinema such as Maryam Tafakory, Miranda Pennel, Tomasz Wolski, Radu Jude, Bill Morrison, Sylvain L’Espèrance, flanked by other filmmakers who bring their cinema to UnArchive for the first time, return in the competitive sections dedicated to long and short films. We travel amidst Argentine or Lebanese archives, photographs found in Chile or Finland, amateur videotapes and digital home movies, films that have remained dormant for decades and are now edited into renewed narratives, to perform together a true “common march” through Cinema. Italian Frontiers and Panoramas are inhabited by films that challenge both the idea of frontier, geographic and aesthetic, and the postcard-like representation-view of the bel paese. And we inaugurate Urban Footage, a section that reflects on urban imaginaries through the re-appropriation of archival materials, this year dedicated to the city of Montreal. Special Screenings host valuable filmic evidence on the “long road” taken by female directors, as well as diaries and testimonies of a master like Roberto Rossellini. Best of Fest consolidates collaborations with other international found footage film festivals by offering us the “open-hearted” Remake of a great first-person filmmaker, Ross McElwee. Then we pay tribute to Giuseppe Bertolucci, an eclectic filmmaker and curious experimenter who, in the late 1990s, had grappled with archival work. The retrospective curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Director of the Experimental Cinema Collection of the Centre Pompidou, is this year dedicated to the artist Cécile Fontaine who – also the protagonist of a masterclass – with her collages and décollages of hand-treated film fragments makes pyrotechnical visions explode on the screen, corresponding with the Archival Choreographies dedicated to archival “dances.” We also feel it necessary to continue the reflection begun in 2025 around the use of artificial intelligence in the practice of archival reuse by dedicating a section to works that integrate archive with AI. As usual, UnArchive also spreads outside the cinema hall, involving spaces adjacent to the cinema with installations and live performances, confirming the experimental attitude of the Festival. It so happens that Jonas Mekas meets Elvira Notari and that vintage cartoons duet dancing with “movie postcards” from a century ago. Because the “deep meaning” of images is not something stable or definitive, but a form of potential memory, a promise of meaning still open. In a world saturated with images, learning to relate critically to existing ones means triggering acts of thought capable of evading simple media nostalgia in order to enter into dialogue with the urgencies of the contemporary. To interweave filmic horizons and soundscapes, to make them porous territories, open to the fragmentary as an agent of estrangement from the mythologies of the present: UnArchive Found Footage Fest is also this.
www.unarchivefest.it
segreteria@unarchive.it
06 5730 5447