Archive Tales: Negotiating the Radical Personal Film Archive

I discuss the way I draw on my personal film archive, much of it digitized from analogue formats, including 16mm film, to make new autobiographical films that critically engage with a radical past. The aim of my archive footage is to support the construction of films in reclaiming what has been hidden or lost and remains only in traces, and where the images and sounds inevitably bear “the traces of the moment at which they were produced” (Doane, 2002). In my autobiographical essay feature film, Resisters, located in Berlin - a city with an immense number of public memorials dedicated to a traumatic past - I draw on two previous films, Breathing Still and Breathing Still 2020 to document the small memorials, stolpersteines dedicated to individual resisters to fascism in the past and the activities of the political activist group Omas Gegen Rechts (Grandmothers Against the Right) in the struggle against the right-wing nationalist organisation AfD. My filmic experimentation with hybrid strategies of critical realism - including conversations with individual resisters - and the imagined witness to significant events, combined with the use of footage from my archive and archive footage made by others, aims to uncover and unpack political narratives that still haunt the present. In my current film, 1948: What We Knew, an autobiographical essay film about Jewish women of East European heritage born in 1948 in the UK (the same year as the Israeli state was born, facilitated by the British colonial power), I explore the (fairy) tales they were told by their families about Israel, including archive footage from my film, Skin Deep, and setting these in conversation with footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrations held in the heart of capitalist London against the backdrop of buildings of political power.