Archival Assembly #3 Resounding Archives: The Politics of Listening to the Moving Image

September 17-22, 2024

Locations: Kino Arsenal, silent green Kuppelhalle, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, Gerichtstraße 53 and migas, a listening bar

The bi-annual festival Archival Assembly takes a shapeshifting look at international film archives as living innovation spaces for the future of cinema.
The third edition, taking place a year earlier due to Arsenal’s upcoming move, focuses on the meaning of sound and language in the archiving and presentation of international film history. The program aims to question the dominance of images in the study of the film medium, which also impacts debates around film heritage.
We are interested in live translations and live narration, alternative language versions, oral history, talking over films, and, last but not least, the gaps that arise when all that survives in the archive is only a film’s sound or picture. Asynchronicity throws existing narratives off balance and creates new perspectives: Between the aural and the visual, a new space of the imaginary opens. An archive of possibilities for envisioning different pasts and futures.
The festival presents restorations and films addressing this topic, some of which will be live translated, commented, or accompanied by music. An exhibition, listening sessions, and a reading room will allow visitors to dive deeper into the subject, and a symposium and a series of project presentations at silent green and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA will provide space for collective exchange.

Here is a first look at the festival’s sections and its highlights:

Restorations and Live Narration at Kino Arsenal

These programs feature films that are relevant to the theme of the festival and the premiere of three new restorations: BADNAM BASTI (Prem Kapoor, India, 1971) deals with human trafficking and homosexuality, probably why it was rated “Adults Only” by India’s censorship board. The original 132-minute cut is now lost and all that survives is the version in Arsenal’s archive (83 min.) along with an incomplete, but longer picture and sound negative at the NFDC – National Film Archive of India. We will show the 112-minute digital restoration with a sequence only preserved in the sound negative.
Originally shot in 1970, the film YOU HIDE ME was re-worked this year by its director Nii Kwate Owoo. This version is based on the original 16mm picture negative and was made possible by a collaboration between Arsenal, the BFI (British Film Institute), and Owoo. Owoo is currently at work on dubbing the film in multiple African languages and has added a second part which was shot just a few weeks ago not during the return, but rather at the transfer on loan of artefacts from the British Museum to Ghana.
Robina Rose’s NIGHTSHIFT was shown at the 1982 Berlinale Forum. The film stages the aural setting of a receptionist working the nightshift in London’s legendary Hotel Portobello. The restoration was carried out by Ross Lipman and commissioned by Cinenova, London. It will screen on the opening night with Robina Rose in person.
More program highlights: Olena Honcharuk, acting director of the Ukrainian film archive Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, will present the digitization of KVITKA NA KAMENI/CVETOK NA KAMNE by Sergei Parajanov. Invited by Cecilia Cenciarelli, Honcharuk introduced Parajanov’s work at the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in June. Chalida Uabumrungjit, director of the Thai Film Archive in Bangkok, will present Rangsi Thatsanaphayak’s 16mm silent film MAE NAK PHRAKANONG from 1959 with live dubbing by a Thai narrator and English subtitles. Ugandan live film narrator VJ Junior will accompany a film of his choice, Edward Zwick’s BLOOD DIAMOND (USA, 2006), and take part in a post-screening talk on the practice of narrating film with director Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, who had a retrospective at Archival Assembly #2 in 2023 and whose new film KATASUMBIKA will be premiered during this edition.

Exhibition, September 17-22 at Gerichtstraße 53

Part of Arsenal’s future offices will be turned into a one-time-only exhibition space:
The installation WHOSE VOICE IS THIS? by Kazakh artist Dana Iskakova was created in close collaboration with Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Berlinale audiences have known Ismailova since her film Chilla (40 Days of Silence) premiered in the 2014 Forum. In 2022, she participated in the Venice Biennale and, in 2023, in documenta 15. In 2024, she was selected for a Living Archive residency with the support of the Goethe Institut Uzbekistan, which she, along with Iskakova, used to explore soundtracks of 45 films from Central Asia in Arsenal’s archive. Dubbing voices, background sound effects, and soundtracks of films from the 1960s through the 1990s testify to the effects of Soviet ideology, its gradual weakening, and the rise of Perestroika.
The installation ORIGINAL SIN: DER GANG DER FRAU IM SOZIALISMUS by Berlin-based artist Susanne Sachsse transforms the story of her conflict-laden awe for her grandmother Luise Brand into a radio drama/road movie revue.
UMAM Documentation & Research, an organization dedicated to collecting memories and archives from Lebanon, provides a glimpse into the history of Baalbeck Studios, once a flourishing institution at the intersection of Lebanon’s progressive and booming business and arts sectors.
In the lobby of Kino Arsenal, a piece created by composer and pianist Eunice Martins and sound and video artist Andre Bartetzki in 2013 as part of the project “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” will be presented again. THE SOUNDING ARCHIVE is a sonification of the entire database of Arsenal’s film collection through real-time sound synthesis and algorithmic composition.

Symposium, September 18-22 at silent green

As in the first two editions, the symposium remains a key component of the festival. It is organized in collaboration with the master’s program Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation at Goethe University Frankfurt. The title Resounding Archives: The Politics of Listening to the Moving Image is programmatic: Going into the archive means not only viewing images, but also hearing them, listening closely to them, as Godard defines the task of cinema itself (“ausculter,” listening to the world in images and sound). Ten panels will take different geographic, historical, and curatorial perspectives on the question: How do the lingering sounds of the archive change film and media history and artistic practices?

Found Futures, September 18-22 at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

In the series Found Futures, participants will present projects, ideas, knowledge, and questions related to precarious archives, archival projects, and archival discoveries, and exchange ideas with the audience. Topics will include radio broadcasts about cinema, audio recordings of historical and current Q&As, like the presentation of ARchipelago, an archival project on the Yugoslav Wars; the vision of an AIDS film archive in collaboration with Edition Salzgeber; oral history projects from Iran and Lebanon; and sound archives from Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau. The final event is a collaboration with “Goethe im Exil” and focuses on the partially lost film archives of Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Listening Sessions, September 18-22 at migas, a listening bar

For the first time, the newly opened listening bar migas in Berlin-Wedding will count among the event spaces. Each day of the festival, two-hour audio recordings will be heard while drinks and snacks are served: These will include revival presentations of radio dramas produced for the cinema in 2011 by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dani Gal and Achim Lengerer as well as Tony Conrad and Keren Cytter under the title “Screen Off – Action for Cinema on Air” upon the invitation of Forum Expanded and “Klangkunst im Deutschlandradio”. Didi Cheeka, Filipa César, and Marinho de Pina will curate programs from audio archives in Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau. There will be a program of radio broadcasts about cinema that Hanswolfgang Bergs produced for German public broadcaster SWF between 1946 and 1969 and that were given to Goethe University Frankfurt. Finally, we will also present recordings of film talks from the Berlinale Forum, made at Delphi Kino since the 1970s, as well as foley sounds from Národní film archive in Prague, selected and arranged by Jonáš Kucharský.

Archival Assembly #3 is organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in collaboration with the master’s program Film Culture at Goethe University Frankfurt, the Goethe Institut, silent green, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, and migas, a listening bar. Funding is provided by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.