Call for papers
7th Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference
THE POLITICS, PRACTICES, AND POETICS OF THE ARCHIVE
SINGAPORE
19 – 22 JUNE, 2012
Eight years since the first Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference which heralded the resurgence of cinematic new waves in the region, we turn our eyes to the state of film archiving and the relationship between cinema and the archives. Filipino film critic Alexis Tioseco’s 2009 open letter to the Film Development Council of the Philippines mentions current holdings stored in ‘deplorable conditions’. In his letter, Tioseco praises the National Film Archive of Thailand for its work in doing so much with so little. In Indonesia, the Sinematek Indonesia which was established in the early 1970s has also seen cuts that make the archive a shadow of its former glory. It is only in Singapore that a young Asian Film Archive (est. 2005) has taken root.
The 7th Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (2012) emphasizes the politics, practices, and poetics of the archive. How does one define an archive? And who can be said to do archival work? Might DVD pirates, private collectors, cinephiles, film bloggers and film societies be considered film archivists of a sort when governments do not or no longer perceive the need to fund national film archives? If so, how does this change the public nature of an archive, and what implications does it have on the production of knowledge? What might film curators take into consideration when they select and preserve films for the archive? What are the social, political, aesthetic, and scholarly roles of the archive? How does the archive negotiate issues of power and accessibility? What is the role of the archive in the digital age of new media?
