Guest Presenter: Andrea Pócsik - "The Intermediality of the Peter Forgacs Holdings at Blinken Open Society Archive"
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar! Wednesday 14 Oct, 10.15-12
This week we are visited by Andrea Pócsik, PhD., cultural researcher, film historian, at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest.
Pócsik will give a talk on The Intermediality of the Peter Forgacs Holdings at Blinken Open Society Archive.
About the talk:
In this research, my initial aim was to reveal the functioning of some recently opened OSA holdings, the audio interviews with amateur filmmakers and / or their family members and the original amateur footages in the works of Péter Forgács, Hungarian video artist, filmmaker. I put a large stress on the changing role of the archive itself, and the analyses of the Forgács-material became crucial examples that shed light on this transformation. I pointed out the growing importance of moving images and the new critical method of archiveology (a term defined by Catherine Russell, my crucial reference) in approaching the archive not just as “an image bank from which collective memories can be retrieved”.
Dagmar Brunow, film historian, points out “the theoretical shift from the notion of the ‘archive’ to the process of ‘archiving’” and the paradigmatic turn from the storage of knowledge to its production, and the new role of the archivist as “agents who can contribute to renegotiating audiovisual memory—they do not determine, but can influence whether it will be perpetuated or subverted.” Through my interpretational framework as a “researcher-archivist”, or as an “archiveologist” deeply influenced by the Derridean understanding of the archive, I tried to “gender and decolonize the patriarchive”.
My work also revealed both the multimodality and the intermediality of the rich research material. Examining the audio interviews recorded with family members while watching the original amateur footages, the fragmented pieces of the home movies, and the new palimpsestic narratives created by Peter Forgács, give us a unique opportunity for new insights. The truth produced on the borderline of fiction and documentary is not just the most precious one (as many important thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Gábor Bódy and Jacques Ranciere argued) but - as I suspect - is closer to “the Freudian historical truth than to the material one”.
In my presentation, I will try to summarize the overlapping fields of archiveology, memory, trauma, gender, and film studies, I have been mapping during my OSA Visegrad fellowship hoping that it can contribute to the research agendas of the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies.
The seminar is Wednesday 14 Oct, 10.15-12 am CEST. The seminar is open for distance participants, contact us at ims@lnu.se, if you want to participate and need the zoom room number.
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen