Cancelled: Circulating cinema: distributed mobilities in the Anglo-German archive

Please note that the BAFTSS 2020 Conference is now cancelled

As part of this year’s BAFTSS Conference, our panel contributes perspectives from Circulating Cinema (CIRCE), to debates on the retrieval and remediation of transnational media histories. CIRCE members have explored archival holdings whose transnational movements are arrested by their ‘stranding’ in national archives, but that may be reanimated by their reframing within historical cartographies mapping transnational epistolary, migratory, (co)-production and distribution networks, and/or by film readings attuned to questions of mobility, stasis and global flow.

The panel presents CIRCE case studies spanning European, West African and Indian screen cultures, while also exploring broader questions of mobility in the transnational archive.

The three papers are:

Erica Carter’s paper, “Mobility and stillness in the decolonial archive: Kwame Nkrumah and the market women,” sets out to map archival traces from documentary and newsreel holdings in East German and British archives that focus on post-independence Ghana.

In “Showcase of the Free World”. Inter-German Rivalries at the Berlin Film Festival, Elizabeth Ward pieces together the complex and often contradictory priorities that shaped the Berlin Film Festival during the Cold War – the story of which is spread across four different archives across Germany.

Focusing on the activities in Berlin of three Indian filmmakers, Himansu Rai, Mohan Bhavnani and Krishna Hirlekar, Eleanor Halsall explores how transnational research can trace migratory histories and increase our understanding of the cinematic entanglements of these early decades: Vermisstes Archivgut: Indian journeys through absent German archives.

To join the BAFTSS 2020 Conference, please register here.