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Origins of Audiovisual Collecting and Archiving at the Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution is one of the most important cultural organizations in the United States, yet it took the institution much longer than the Library of Congress and the National Archives to recognize the historic and cultural value of collecting and preserving moving images. This article examines the history of collecting and maintaining audiovisual collections within the institution, focusing on the origin and development of moving image collections from their beginnings as separate and distinct efforts to a collaborative and coordinated pan-institutional approach that has recently evolved. This special Forum piece includes contributions from staff as they reflect on the history and current state of moving image collections at Smithsonian Institution.

This paper draws upon a current project focussed on the preservation and digitisation of an outstanding archive comprising the complete recordings of a Guinean “literary magazine” television programme, “Parole, plume, papier”, which examines an impressive range of creative and critical activity throughout West Africa over a period of more than twenty years. Of particular interest to the wider research community is unique interview material with many of the region’s canonical writers and film directors, though a key point is that the programme’s local focus means that it is not just the world-renowned artists that feature here, but also those who remain important within the West African context. One of the principal questions raised in the work of this project is over how such material can be brought to the widest possible audience, but more specifically to younger domestic audiences in West Africa, as the encouragement of literacy and engagement with literature remain central concerns for the curators. This paper examines firstly the processes and problems of preserving and diffusing such an archive where there are serious problems of finance, infrastructure and accessibility, before questioning what it means to be “inclusive” in this context. Where a certain stream of criticism and presentation of ‘modern’ African literature tends to focus on the tensions between a projected ‘Western reader’ and ‘African writer’, this project indicates a much deeper and more complex set of questions that involve multiple linguistic and national identities, African ‘readers’ of the audiovisual text, and ‘African readers’ that cannot be seen as a homogenous group.

Analyzes the audiovisual heritage in the South East Asia/Pacific region. Focuses on the establishment of a new organization called SEAPAVAA (South East Asia/Pacific Audio Visual Archives Federation) in 1996. Considers the factors that make archival work more difficult in this region than in the United States and Europe. Comments on the essential nature of the association, listing its major objectives. Touches on such issues as standards brought about by SEAOAVAA, communication between archivists in the region, and professional development.

About an hour and twenty minutes into Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-winningUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives(Loong Boonmee raleuk chat, 2010, hereafterUncle Boonmee), the titular character lies in a cave, close to death, being looked after by members of his family. Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) describes a dream that he had the previous night, of having arrived in the future by a time machine: The future city was ruled by an authority able to make anybody disappear. When they found ‘past people’, they shone a light on them. That light projected images of them onto the screen.

In 2011, Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli’s family comedyAlmanya—Willkommen in Deutschland(Almanya: Welcome to Germany, 2011) burst onto German screens with a comedic yet nostalgic re-telling of the history of fifty years of Turkish labor migration to Germany.¹ A surprise hit at theBerlinalefilm festival,Almanyahas been referred to as “AGood Bye Lenin!for migration histories” by a number of reviewers.² Indeed, elements common to both films include a nostalgic representation of a difficult history, a rich and warm visual style which combines fiction with documentary footage, and an assertion of the place of previously marginalized

At the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2001, a large display screen flanked the entrance to the Berlinale Palast, located at the point where Alte Potsdamer Straße runs into Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. At the top of the frame, journalists, festival guests, and fans encountered the simple question, “Do you remember?” Beneath the text was the still image of a construction site, labeled “Potsdamer Platz, 1994.” Despite the square’s widely circulating associations with the traffic and cosmopolitan entertainments of the Weimar metropolis and the urban rupture of the Berlin Wall, the city marketing firm Partner für Berlin GmbH was not asking passersby

What role can artists play in re-imagining nationalism – or imagining an alternative – in a time when the term takes on increasingly toxic shades? During my week atUtopian Pulse, I drew from the project ‘What we left unfinished’, a long-term research into the archives of Afghanistan’s national imaginaries, to look at some of the ways in which the shifting self-definitions of the Afghan state have always been reflected, anticipated or even defined by the visions of its artists. The originalSalon-e-Girdbad(Salon of the Whirlwind) represents a key moment in this history. TheGirdbadliterary meetings in Kandahar during the