The 2019 Summer Institute in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts presents four free public presentations dedicated to media archives and archiving practices. The events are the result of a partnership with Archive/Counter-Archive, York cinema & media arts Professor Janine Marchessault‘s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Grant project.
Tell Me What You See! Found Footage Films by Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller
May 8, 7 to 9:10 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King Street W., Toronto.
As part of an exploration into working with found materials, German experimental filmmaker and curator Matthias Müller joins the summer institute to introduce a selection of the more recent short films he co-directed with Christoph Girardet, followed by an onstage conversation with Concordia University film studies Professor Catherine Russell.
The short films to be screened are: METEOR (2011 \ 15 min.), KRISTALL (2006 \ 15 min.), CONTRE-JOUR (2009 \ 11 min.), PERSONNE (2016 \ 15 min.) and SCREEN (2018 \ 18 min.).
Tickets are free and can be reserved online.
Screening and Discussion of Ali Kazimi’s film CONTINUOUS JOURNEY (2004)
May 14, 2 to 5 p.m., Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building, York University
Ali Kazimi
York University film Professor Ali Kazimi is a filmmaker whose work deals with race, social justice migration, history, and memory. He is the recipient of the 2019 Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts.
CONTINUOUS JOURNEY (2004) is an inquiry into the largely ignored history of Canada’s exclusion of the South Asians by a little known immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people from British India were excluded by a regulation that appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948. By examining the global context and repercussions of a Canadian event, CONTINUOUS JOURNEY challenges us to reflect on contemporary events, and raises critical questions about how the past shapes the present.
Following the screening there will be a discussion with Kazimi.
Video Archive Master Class with Yvonne Ng
May 21, 2 to 4 p.m., Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building, York University
Yvonne Ng
Yvonne Ng, senior archivist at WITNESS, an international non-profit organization that supports activists using video and technology to protect human rights delivers a video archive masterclass.
Ng is an audiovisual archivist and has been part of the WITNESS team since 2009. In collaboration with WITNESS regional leads, she trains and supports partners on collecting, managing and preserving video documentation for human rights advocacy and evidence.
She develops training resources related to archiving and preservation, such as the groundbreaking Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video. Ng also manages WITNESS’s own archive of human rights video.
Spotlight on Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking with Suzanne Morrissette
June 13, 6 to 10 p.m., York University
Suzanne Morrissette
OCAD University Assistant Professor Suzanne Morrissette (PhD ’18) is a Métis artist, curator and scholar from Winnipeg researching reactions to Indigenous political thought and curatorial strategies for centering Indigenous knowledge.
6 to 7:30 p.m. – Curator Talk, Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building, York University
9 to 10 p.m. – Outdoor Projections, Jacob Stong House and Barn, York University
Archive/Counter-Archives is a SSHRC project led by Marchessault, dedicated to researching and remediating audiovisual archives created by women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBTQ2+ community, and immigrant communities. Political, resistant and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories.
2019 Summer Institute: Archive/Counter-Archives is convened by Professors Philip Hoffman, Marchessault and Michael Zryd in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University. The public events are accompanied by graduate courses 5021 Process Cinema (Activating the Archive) which explores a creative tradition of found footage filmmaking and remixing in alternative filmmaking that depends on archival materials (taught by Hoffman) and 6320B Living Archives: Curatorial Approaches to Mediated History, which focuses on new theoretical models of the moving image archive, digital experiments with memory images along with diverse curatorial approaches to situating archives in public places (taught by Marchessault and Zryd).