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 for the passage, encounter and transformation of images. A place where cinema, once again, interrogates itself, its own history and its future possibilities through the simple yet radical action of creatively reusing archive images.
As in every previous edition, the Festival will try to undo the chronological continuum of the history of cinema, its reassuring aesthetic-industrial journey, to lead us instead on archaeological meanderings full of unexplored symptoms. Outside of traditional memory, in corners forgotten by genres, the erratic wandering among abandoned images and sounds meets with a story on the margins, alien to neatly-defined cinema. Diachronic creations, retrospective prophecies of the majestic art of lost and discarded images, in a tragic and sublime flanerie of the wild eye.
As a borderline horizon, found footage works on thresholds, on the disconnection of acquired laws, in a constant reflection on loss and on the impossibility of returning to the origin. The confirmation that no closed identity is right, that no “true” origin is possible. This aimless itinerary is still the one we are on, and is ready to amaze us again, outside the features of chronology, of rationality, of direct and unambiguous metaphors. We are diviners in search of revisited cinematic fragments; and precisely because fragmentary thinking challenges systematic thinking, UnArchive’s cultural ecosystem explores alternatives to the teleological history of cinema.
In the vicissitudes of this edition’s films and performances there are few utopias and no redemption, but rather an attempt to grasp today’s urgencies through fragments of the past, combining the local with the international, the autobiographical with the collective, with no boundaries nor pyramidal hierarchies. Images are temporal objects: they change together with the observer and, while the world rushes towards the precipice, and the apocalypse of language is underway, our “useless” Festival is not only a place for projection, but also a space where society can reflect on its relationship with memory, with history, with the narratives of the present. A critical space. A collective gaze. A place to learn how to observe. It’s not simply seeing, but questioning, doubting, understanding the processes through which images, and the world they represent, build meaning.
For this reason, today more than ever we believe in the value of the archive as a common good, a material as well as immaterial good, capable of traveling freely across geographical and aesthetic borders, an incessant engine of cinematographic creativity and political reflection. This is confirmed by the reuse practices found in the films that come to us from different corners of the earth and that find space in the festival’s different sections. Personal stories and collective stories dialogue on the screen, creating trans-temporal relationships and unexpected “spatial” connections.
In the competition sections for feature films and shorts, some beloved and renowned authors of found-footage films return, such as Maryam Tafakory, Miranda Pennel, Tomasz Wolski, Radu Jude, Bill Morrison, Sylvain L’Espèrance, alongside filmmakers who are at UnArchive for the first time. We will be travelling through Argentine or Lebanese archives, photographs from Chile and Finland, amateur videotapes and digital home movies, films that were dormant for decades and have now been edited into renewed narratives, and together we will go on a true “common march” through Cinema.
The Frontiere and Panorami italiani sections are populated by films that challenge both the idea of frontiers, geographical and aesthetic ones, as well as the postcard representation of Italy as the Bel Paese. We will also be inaugurating Urban Footage, a section that reflects on urban imagery through the re-appropriation of archive material, and this year it is dedicated to the city of Montreal. Proiezioni speciali will host valuable cinematic evidence on the “long road” covered by female directors, as well as diaries and testimonies of a master like Roberto Rossellini.
Best of Fest consolidates its collaborations with other international film festivals of found footage by offering us an “open-hearted” Remake by a great director of first-person cinema, Ross McElwee. We will also pay tribute to Giuseppe Bertolucci, the eclectic director and curious experimenter, who dealt with archival work at the end of the 1990s.
The retrospective curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Director of the Experimental Film Collection of the Centre Pompidou, is dedicated this year to the artist Cécile Fontaine, who will also be holding a masterclass. With her collage and décollage of hand-treated film fragments Cécile Fontaine will make pyrotechnic visions explode on the screen, in correspondence with the Coreografie d’Archivio section dedicated to archival “dances”.
It is also necessary to continue the reflection started in 2025 on the use of artificial intelligence in the practice of archival reuse, dedicating a section to works that integrate archives with AI.
As usual, UnArchive also expands outside the cinema hall, involving adjacent spaces with installations and live performances, confirming the Festival’s experimental attitude. Here, Jonas Mekas will meet Elvira Notari, period cartoons duet dance with the “cinematic postcards” of a century ago. Because the “deep meaning” of images is not something stable or definitive, but a form of potential memory, an open-ended promise of meaning. In a world flooded with images, learning to relate critically to existing ones means triggering acts of thought capable of escaping from simple media nostalgia, to enter into dialogue with the urgencies of the contemporary. Interweaving filmic horizons and soundscapes, making them porous territories, open to fragmentation as an agent of estrangement from the mythologies of the present: this is also what UnArchive Found Footage Fest is about.
www.unarchivefest.it
segreteria@unarchive.it
06 5730 5447