Historically, cinema has been associated with migration phenomena since its earliest days, when it became the first form of audiovisual entertainment to transcend boundaries and language barriers and be established as an essentially mobile medium, in terms of both production (from the first Lumière camera operators to the large waves of immigrants working in Hollywood, for example) and consumption (with large numbers of displaced peoples and exiles being among the first regular film-goers around the world, as a form of socialisation through a public event) (Allen, Gomery, 1995). In general, apart from some attention to specific cases (e.g. the massive emigration of German directors and cinematographers to Hollywood during the interwar period), it would not be until the 1990s that film studies would begin focusing on phenomena of human mobility as an essential component for understanding the history of cinema. Research in this area would be associated specifically with multiculturalism and post-colonialism, with particular importance given to studies centred on exile, diaspora and migrant experiences (Shohat, Stam, 1994, 2003; Naficy, 1999, 2001). It was no coincidence that studies like these should begin to appear around the same time as the rise to prominence of work by professional filmmakers creating filmic discourses related to their experience as migrants (or that of their families) in countries with consolidated film industries like the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States. Collectively these filmmakers have developed a set of concepts that are fundamental to the idea of “cinema of mobility” as a political movement, both in terms of access to representations of migrants and at the level of the potential development of alternative modes of production and distribution that can destabilise the hegemony of Hollywood and the big media corporations (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, Vidal, 2010).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this new field of research lies in the step forward made by researchers in connecting and transferring knowledge to the social sphere. In other words, driven by the eminently social focus of the research on migrant, exile and refugee processes, at a certain point film studies dealing with cinema of mobility began advocating a critical intervention in the public space. This intervention is underpinned by the creation of a “living archive” out of sounds and images of mobility (Grossman, O’Brien, 2007) and responds to the need to compile, analyse and render visible the migration practices mediated by the cinema, understood as a socio-cultural institution and as a way of life (Biletereyst, Maltby, Meers, 2019).
In this context, the intersection between human migrations and film and audiovisual archives becomes a key element for analysing the ways in which cinema and audiovisual media have mediated the construction of identities, political conflicts and historiographic readings of different phenomena associated with human displacement and film cultures. With this in mind, recent (and not so recent) research on found footage, cinema of appropriation and “archivology” (Bonet, 1993; Baron, 2014; Russell, 2018) as historiographic, creative and narrative ways of examining migration flows constitutes one of the pivotal points for this issue of L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos. At the same time, these aesthetic readings will be complemented in this issue by perspectives that expand and reassess the use of film archives as a cultural heritage, in terms of both exhibition and access. In the case of archives on migration, these perspectives expand on concepts and values related to the role of film libraries beyond their traditional national boundaries (Fossati, 2009; García Casado, Alberich Pascual, 2014; Andersson, Sundholm, 2019) and constitute the other main focus that this issue seeks to explore. In short, the issue will consider how different archives frame, organise and give meaning to international migrations and how we can intervene in these processes as communication researchers and scholars.
Submissions dealing with the following areas are welcome:
- Case studies of film archives and collections related to migration.
- Aesthetic questions and issues related to the use of archives on migration in films and creative works.
- Methods for examining and organising the archive as a repository or database of films and materials that deal with migration, including processes of digitalisation, geolocation, or datafication of migrant archives.
- Archives as a trigger for migrant history and memory, both through their creative use in found footage films as well as through the writing of critical historiographies that question the different national and local histories.
- Self-archiving among migrant populations.
- Experiences of dissemination, presentation, education, programming and curating of archives on migration.
- De-colonial, post-colonial, racial, queer, feminist and/or ecocritical perspectives on film archives related to migration.
- Analysis of tropes, motifs and narratives in migrant archives.
- Studies of migrant archives as part of broader film cultures, including distribution and reception processes of those archives.
- Research on the affects, subjectivities and institutional dynamics of migrant archives.
One aim of this issue is to open migrant archives to all kinds of transnational connections, critical historiographies and political practices that reflect and act on processes of creation, consolidation, preservation and dissemination of migration cinema. In this sense, the migrant archive is understood as a “research laboratory” (Fossati, Van Den Oever, 2016), inviting academics, creators, archivists and cultural managers to share their experiences of film collections and migration.
Acceptance of submissions for the Notebook section: 1 November 2021 to 10 December 2021
Date of publication: July 2022
Coordinators: Josetxo Cerdán, Miguel Fernández Labayen and Olga García-Defez
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