Footage Films, Or Narrating a Dataset

Aug. 27, 2024 - Dec. 20, 2024
Center For Experimental Ethnography, UPENN

with Visiting Scholars CAMP
(Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)

We begin this fall semester's film class with a moratorium on audio-video capture.
100 days without your own images:)

We will attempt instead, a collectively - authored set of video essays that engage with material that we are deeply enmeshed in, that are typically too vast, "thin", that either overflow or flow beneath representational or affective media. Examples of what we could make here would be: a video essay on the Wikileaks dataset of global US Embassy shopping lists, a film made from the Radia phone taps, and so on. This course draws on CAMP's learnings from running an open-access footage archive, Pad.ma and related projects, since 2007. Pad.ma asked: what is the ethical and political relation between the category footage ("found", shot in large quantities, with good intentions, left in shoe boxes or dying hard disks) and the category "film". Footage is the raw material, but does it also tell us how film is made, and whether it is beautiful on the inside.

That film is made from footage, seems tautological. But in the process we will follow, any simple relation between footage and film is shattered into a multitude of moves by imagers, sounders, writers, editors, narrators and materials. We are inspired by Elizaveta Svilova, editor of "Man with the Movie Camera" carefully indexing, splicing and assembling pieces of film (intercutting them with images of women's work - patching phone lines, sewing, or painting fingernails), and that of her contemporary, Esfir Shub who was foraging cellars, gathering, restoring and compiling footage into films, a hundred years ago. Extending the footage metaphor to other media, we enter a vast terrain of over-collected materials. Health, insurance and other management databases, surveillance data, cctv streams, most of what the modern media industry is made of and which Matt Fuller and Andrew Goffey called Evil Media. Archive or be archived, we said in 2010. But the questions have moved beyond archival ones, to questions of what can be done with archives by situated subjects.

We begin by identifying footage collections or datasets that we can situate ourselves in, individually or as a group. We evolve narrative and editorial strategies within a Pad.ma - like interface via group annotations in a process called three-ing. In the second half of the course the participants develop a series of video essays. We see this as a counter-AI process of assimilation. At the end, we may also recognise that there are missing images - and if there is need for us to film, and if so why, with whom, and how. This prepares participants ethically and formally to go forth in the world to create really new images. The course is interdisciplinary and open to graduate students who have interests in film, ethnography, film studies, digital archives and contemporary art, and who like to work collectively and processually to realise ambitious projects.