Author: Lily

Petroula Asimakis reading handwritten Greek text on the back of a photograph from the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University. Photo by Magdalyn Asimakis.

This is the penultimate guest submission, this time exploring the positionality of the researcher in the archive. Magdalyn Asimakis encounters the presence of Greek women in the photographs of the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University.

Two years ago, I began looking at a series of photographs in the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Searching simply the word “Greece” in the database, 1202 results came up, most of which were not photographed. I only made one visit to view the collection before the pandemic, and I brought my mother, Petroula, with me. We were both interested in the surprising fact that many of the photographs were of rural settings, and often of agrarian peasant women, much like the ones we are descended from. 

It is perhaps true that the selection we were shown (we did not view all 1202 works before the pandemic) gave the impression that there is a greater representation of Greek women in this collection. However, this did not concern us. We were instead interested in the question of why they were there in the first place, and for what reason the photographs were taken.

Because there is currently no accompanying research to these photographs, we were presented only with the evidence of something through images. Their existence, to us, seemed highly unusual, as in our experience there has been little to no Western interest in the rural mainland Greece, nor the woman’s role in that context. This is partially due to the regional nature of Greece and an almost exclusive Western interest in Athenian antiquity. That is to say, we had never seen evidence of our past outside of private family documents, and we wondered why these photographs were taken. Were they a voyeuristic project? Anthropological documentation? We hoped it was a political gesture. I suspect it was something in between.

Outside of our speculation, my material experience with my mother and this part of the Black Star collection became a critical document in itself. The photographs in the Black Star Collection are a material archive that bridged a dialogue between my mother and I. At the same time, because of her fluency in Greek and experience living in a small mountain village in the south Peloponnese, my mother was able to provide a connective tissue between these photographs that is not present in the institutional archive. This visit became an ephemeral document that revealed the cross-generational feminist potentials of encounters with archives. This seemed to me to be an embodied indexing away from the institution and back into (and an awakening of) matriarchal knowledge.

Magdalyn Asimakis is a curator and writer. Her practice explores embodied experience in relation to Western display practices and methods of knowing, taking into account familial knowledge, folklore, spirituality, and generational trauma. She has organized exhibitions and programs in Toronto and New York, and co-founded the roving project space and collective ma ma in 2018. She is currently completing a curatorial residency with ma ma and Mercer Union Center for Contemporary Art in Toronto, and is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University where she is studying the display of ‘global’ modernisms in museums.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, still from First Person Plural, the Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman(1984–96). Source: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany.

This post is the third in our series of guest submissions thinking about positionality in the archive. Jessica focuses on the work of Lynn Hershmann Leeson and the diaristic as an archival mode.

The diary is consciously unboundaried, alluding to the constraints that tether its literary counterparts, it can be private or public, controlled or chaotic, factual or fictive.  Capturing the capaciousness of the genre, Virginia Woolf describes her own diary thus: ‘Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind… I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection has sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced.’[1]

Woolf attests not only to the effusiveness of diaristic practice but also to the possibilities it presents for recording, preserving and organising – archiving – lived experience. Seizing on these possibilities, feminist authors have embraced the diary, traditionally derided as benignly feminine, as a subversive mode of documentation. An obvious example exists in Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick in which Kraus chronicles her thinly fictionalised libidinal desires and abjection in a series of letters formally constructed as diary entries written to the man, Dick, she transgressively obsesses over.[2]

Like her literary equivalents, feminist filmmaker, activist and artist Lynn Hershman Leeson espoused the formal potential of the diary in her own Electronic Diaries (1984-2019). Emerging from her 1970s art performances, her film diaries were conceived of as comprising four components – surveying four distinct periods of her life – but have since been amalgamated, exhibited in gallery contexts as a single entity.

Installation view of Lynn Hershman Leeson,Electronic Diaries, six video segments, 1984–2019, KW Institute for Contemporary Arts, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist (Source: Bomb magazine)

Hershman Leeson introduces the Electronic Diaries, announcing her intention to ‘reconstruct myself by talking to the video camera’ and to ‘examine foundational memories of violence and physiological harm’.[3] The result is an unflinching and at times disquieting document of her life in which she reports on body dysmorphia, unsated hunger, relationship breakdowns, sexual abuse and violence. Juxtaposing her recordings with stock footage of global events – the Cold War, South African apartheid, news reports on the ozone layer – Hershman Leeson anchors her subjective testimonies within wider socio-political frameworks, painstakingly situating the personal within the structural. In its confessionalism the project radically prefigures present-day new media formats such as the vlog but also resembles the structure of the archive, bringing together disparate materials which together function as testament to her past. 

Jacques Derrida understood the appeal of the archive as a mechanism for remembrance, writing in 1996 ‘[we] have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute beginning.'[4]  Importantly, he goes on to address the archive not as a static site of veracity but rather as an ambiguous, fragmented entity which constructs rather than merely conveys knowledge. With Derrida’s testimony in mind, Hershman Leeson’s project might be categorised thus, as a speculative archive, created out of ‘a nostalgic desire’ to, in her terms, ‘go to some depth of my own personal history.’[5]

In the same essay Derrida advocates a fundamental rethinking of the archive on the basis that the pervasive impact of new technologies threatens to transform its essential character.[6] Again, Derrida’s thesis proves illuminating, for Hershman Leeson, eschewing the limitations of the diary as purely literary, mobilises technology – the video camera – for purposes of self-preservation, conserving not only her thoughts and emotions but her corporality and, relatedly, sexuality, via moving image. This is evident when she performs seductively to the camera: knowingly inviting scopophilia and acknowledging herself as ‘the surveyed female’, she adheres to both John Berger’s dictum that ‘men act and women appear’ and Laura Mulvey’s notion of ‘Male Gaze’, seemingly understanding herself – including her body – as mediated by cultural systems and representations of gender.[7]

In 2019 Hershman Leeson went a step further in her strategies of preservation, encoding the archive of the Electronic Diaries onto a strand of DNA digital storage. She explains her motivations for doing so in practical terms, reasoning that the life span of DNA is far superior to that of a hard drive but then, more emotionally, remarks on a desire to enact agency over the repositories of her past, explaining: ‘I think having control over what the memory is and what the history is and the artifacts we choose to be represented by is a way of ensuring how we’re viewed in history.’[8] A fitting culmination to the Electronic Diaries, this final act speaks to the deeply personal nature of archives, encouraging those who work with them to appreciate that an archive need not be mediated by museums nor formalised by institutions but rather, like diaries, can be animated as a subjective mechanism by which an individual might navigate their past and ensure their future legacy via the technologies of their choosing.

Lynn Hersman Leeson, Lynn Hershman DNA, 2018, archival pigment print, 20 x 36.” (Source: Artforum)

Jessica Boyall is a researcher based in London. She’s currently a PhD candidate in the department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London where she is writing on the culture and politics of experimental film collectives in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. Alongside her PhD, she has worked on numerous curatorial projects for the Victoria and Albert Museum (including on an archive project dedicated to researching and encoding the manuscripts, working notes and proofs of Charles Dickens), edited catalogues for the Design Museum and curated displays at the Museum of London. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications including the Guardian, New Left Review and ARTUK. 

Endnotes

1. Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. New York: New American Library, 1968. p. 13. 

2. Chris Kraus. I Love Dick, Semiotext(e): New York, 1997. Kraus writes to Dick in the formula of a diary, beginning her letters ‘Dear Dick, replicating the formula ‘Dear Diary’.

3. Lynn Hershman Leeson. Electronic Diaries Part 1. 1984. Accessed:  (6 May 2021); Lynn Hershman Leeson. Electronic Diaries Introduction. Accessed: (6 May 2021).

4. Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago 1996 (modified translation).

5. Lynn Hershman Leeson. “They Said Media Wasn’t Art” In The Works, The Shed, 2019. (Accessed: 6 May 2021)

6. Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago 1996.

7. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 32; Laura Mulvey. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (1975), pp. 6- 18. 

8. ‘Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Artist discusses her work with antibodies and DNA,’ ArtForum, June 29, 2020. (Accessed: 6 May 2021); Lynn Hershman Leeson. “They Said Media Wasn’t Art” In The Works, The Shed, 2019. (Accessed: 6 May 2021).

Rio Cinema facade, 1985 (Rio Cinema Archive)

This is the second of our guest submissions that consider the positionality of the researcher in the archive. Selina Robertson uses archival research, re-imaginings and re-screenings to trace absented histories of lesbian and feminist cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. 

Whenever I think about my research, I always seem to return to the same lines of dialogue from Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Seidelman’s great feminist film from 1985 that was screened at the Rio Cinema in East London on its release (see Fig 1). 

The dialogue goes,

Cigarette Girl: Susan! My god we thought you were dead! 

Susan: No, just in New Jersey

The lines are funny to read out and I always enjoy hearing people (and myself) laugh out loud when I attempt to perform a faux downtown New York City accent. I also have a vague memory of going to the cinema to see the film when it came out, possibly in New York or London. I can’t be sure. The fallibility of memory, cinema-going, women’s film histories and the archive remain a central preoccupation of my research, I am drawn to Cigarette Girl and Susan’s quick-fire exchange because they take me back to my memory of watching the film as a young teen, but they also speak directly the issue of feminist film historiography and the ways in which we might critically, discursively, affectively and creatively engage with absented histories in the archive. In effect, where and how do we look for the story? 

Rio’s ‘Archive room’, 12 December, 2020 (Image: Selina Robertson)

I have been working in the archive at the Rio, a two-screen art deco cinema which has been operating as a community cinema since 1979. Over ten years ago, Charles Rubenstein (the Rio’s former film programmer and general manager) told me about the Rio’s history in the 1980s and the women’s film screenings, parties and events that took place in the basement. After speaking to a few people who were there at the time, I realised that the Rio held the grassroots radical archives of Hackney’s many local communities (in 2020 these histories were turned into a book). The ephemera I was interested in excavating was the Rio’s feminist and lesbian film archive, specifically the distinctive film programming and curating work carried out by the Rio’s film programmers in 1979/80 as well as two feminist collectives, the Rio Women’s Cinema and the Women’s Media Resource Project, who were active at the Rio during the 1980s. 

As I started to look through the historical documents and talked to more people, I realised that this unorthodox, fragmented archive held the cultural memory of a dynamic, political, community focused feminist and lesbian film programming and curating practice, a history that was directly linked to Club des Femmes (of which I am founder member) and our practice of ethical curating, whereby we position queer feminist film curation as a critical, theoretical and activist tool. Since 2010, Club des Femmes had been programming special film screenings and events at the Rio without any historical knowledge or memory about our predecessors’ film programming activist work.  My research is, in effect, a chance to find out more about Club des Femmes’ pre-history in London, to write new scholarship through practice based research on the often perceived ‘invisible’ work of film programming, drawing on the memories of the women who there at the time. With a focus on how cultural memory as knowledge in the archive gets passed down through affects and cultural objects, I am mapping a material history of how feminists, lesbians and queer people working in cultural film exhibition instigated and shaped the reception and circulation of a dynamic feminist, lesbian and queer moving image culture in the United Kingdom. 

The question remains, how can there be a feminist and lesbian film history without a history of how films were exhibited and viewed? These 1970s and 1980s film festivals and screenings formed the basis and starting point for heated discussion and debate, and for the genesis of feminist and lesbian film theory and writings on film history. A queer feminist archival practice can open up a space of dialogue, reflection as well as participation for these vital intergenerational conversations to take place. Film programming and curation as queer feminist film historiography contributes to a wider understanding of how we might do feminist film history today. By keeping these feminist and lesbian moving image histories public, we give them back to cinema audiences and by doing so we secure their queer feminist film future(s). 

Gay Pride Week at the Rio, June 1980. (Rio Cinema Archive)

Rio Women’s Cinema Poster (Rio Cinema archive)

Rio Women’s Cinema

We want to show the work of contemporary filmmakers, including shorts and animation, as well as rediscovering early women directors such as Maya Deren, Alice Guy and Lois Weber and occasionally comparing them to Hollywood’s “women’s” film. We will invite the filmmakers to some of the showings for discussion. (Rio Women’s Cinema archive, 1984)

Women’s Media Resource Project. (Maggie Thacker archive, 1986)

Women’s Media Resource Project

Our aim is to provide practice expertise using all forms of the media with the intention of creating an alternative to male-defined cultural propaganda. To create an expanding network of information and education by and for women. To provide and make accessible through outreach work our facilities to all women and, in doing so, to bridge the gap-dividing women by class, race, education, age, occupation, ability and sexual orientation. We hope to offer a friendly and relaxed workspace in which women can use the media resource. 

(Women’s Media Resource Project archive, 1983)

Feminist Re-Imaginings at the Rio 1980-2020

Feminist Re-Imaginings at the Rio-1980-2020 flyer. Designed by Sarah Wood.

From 22 February – 30 May 2020, as part of my practice-based research at the Rio I had planned a series of feminist re-imaginings, re-screenings, archival activations and reflections. I was able to facilitate the February event but because of the pandemic I cancelled the rest of the project before the Rio was ordered to close at end of March 2020.  

Selina Robertson is a PhD practice based researcher at Birkbeck College in the Film, Media and Cultural Studies department. Her research focuses on the intersection between feminist, lesbian and queer film historiography, cultural memory and the archive. In 2007 she co-founded queer feminist film curating collective Club des Femmes. She works part time as a film programmer at the Independent Cinema Office.

Image: Film poster for The Way We Live, dir. Jill Craigie (IMDB)

This is the first of our guest submissions that consider the positionality of the researcher in the archive. Henry Mulhall’s post thinks about locality and the archive, considering the city planning of his home town of Plymouth alongside Jill Craigie’s Film The Way We Live (1946).

Growing up in Plymouth, I don’t remember having a sense that the city centre was planned. The vaguely uniform style of building, the long parades and central vein that runs through the centre, from the train station to the sea, were just the backdrop of my life, rather than a “vista.” Now that I’m doing a PhD exploring cultural production in a specific area of Plymouth, it’s become necessary to distance myself from long embedded ideas of the spaces I inhabited while growing up. To gain a more nuanced view of the city, I’ve looked at town plans, at a film about town planning, but most significantly, at archives that offer insights beyond the determined historical discourse they provide.

A Plan for Plymouth ^[2] was written in 1943 by city engineer James Paton-Watson and town planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie. It was a design to rebuild a city devastated by the Blitz. My focus sits just outside the centre and therefore outside the vision of the plan, so my interest lies in the process of planning, the consultation and discourse surrounding the design, rather than the design itself. Jill Craigie’s 1946 film The Way We Live ^[3] (TWWL) and the discourse surrounding its production have been highly informative as it details the plan and the planners’ efforts to consult the public. 

The connection between individual, community and organisational voice, and how people are heard and listened to within cultural policy and discourse is the backbone of my research. Craigie had similar interests and through TWWL wanted to activate people to take civic responsibility and push forward a plan that would, she believed at the time, make life better for everyone, regardless of class and gender (race doesn’t seem to have played much part). To understand her motivations, the discussions and disagreements surrounding the project, and the effect the film had on Plymouth, the film is not enough, nor are academic texts on planning and film making. To understand how Craigie as a young, female, socialist filmmaker navigated a male, conservative-dominated field, I have engaged with three archives: The British Newspaper Archive, Plymouth City Archives, and The British Entertainment History Project, all of which have complicated my view of the city, the plan and the film. 

Coming at the backend of the British realist documentary tradition, Craigie combined an informative documentary style with a narrative based around a family of actors cast from non-professional Plymothians sitting alongside a professional actor cast as the protagonist. Paton-Watson, Abercrombie, City Councillors and members of the public played themselves. On the 14^th of August 1945, the Western Morning News reported the excitement and enthusiasm shown by a group of mothers as they “repeated their own actual conversations in front of glaring lights in all the atmosphere of a film studio.” ^[4] Craigie’s patience with using ‘real people’ is evident in a report in the same paper describing the filming of an exact re-enactment of a council deliberation. She made these men repeat their lines over and over until they got it right, as the crew kept powdering their bald heads for the camera’s lights ^.[5]

Production was mired in a long-term internal dispute at The Rank Organisation, who funded the project, to the point where production was almost halted. This is where Craigie’s engagement with the Plymouth community as a whole served her well. Looking back in 1995, Craigie described how she’d “stirred up the whole of Plymouth – the local council, the traffic, we’d got the whole of the town of Plymouth involved in this film,” ^[6] for good measure she’d played to Arthur Rank’s ego by mentioning him in many news reports. Rank personally and the company generally couldn’t face the embarrassment of pulling the plug, so filming proceeded.

While looking through a box of Lord Astor’s letters in the Plymouth City Archive, I came across a telling piece of information. This was a letter written by Craigie to Lord Astor, who was Mayor of Plymouth during the war and held influence on a national scale. She describes her vision for British documentaries taking a greater role in cinema and that the public could be entertained and informed, rather than fed low-grade Hollywood productions. She expresses frustration and surprise that a film about planning “should be so fraught with purely personal politics.” ^[7] Ironically at the top of this letter is a handwritten note that says, “told you she was labour!!”, while it is unclear who wrote this note – perhaps it was an assistant – it serves as an apt depiction of how the personal and political interact, and how an articulate and informed letter can be reduced by a single line. While Craigie was reduced to her gender or politics, TWWL offered a pluralistic perspective. It is debatable if the film is successful, but my engagement with the film through archives has offered multiple perspectives of a city I’ve struggled to see in a different light. 

These first-hand and synchronic accounts bring to the fore Craigie’s sense of the interaction between politics and culture, and her struggle to realise her creativity in practice. She said “It was too tough. It was a marriage, you know, really. I’m sure that if I had been brilliant or really dedicated, I could have made it.” ^[8] The idea of marriage has two aspects here. On the one hand, she thinks for an artist to flourish they must be married to their work, on the other, because she was married, she could never fully commit to filmmaking. Just as a handwritten note on a letter highlights a contextual detail beyond the prevailing discourse of the time, the particularly withering tone Craigie’s voice has as she utters ‘marriage’ injects a performative detail to the significance of her words. The archival material I’ve used show the limits of my ability to interpret a plan, film or city, and remind me that performing research requires accepting a plurality of meaning. 

The Way We Live is available to watch on the BFIPlayer. 

Henry Mulhall is a practice-based PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. His research looks at how art and cultural organisations connect with community groups in the Union Street area of Plymouth.

Henry Mulhall will be speaking about the film with Allister Gall and Dan Paolantonio from Imperfect Cinema on 11th June at Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image.

Endnotes

^[1] I would like to highlight the incredible work done on Jill Craigie through the ACRH funded project Jill Craigie, Film Pioneer and the accompanying film Independent Miss Craigie

^[2] Abercrombie, P., Paton Watson, J., Astor, W., Winant, John. G., 1943. A Plan for Plymouth. Plymouth City Council, Plymouth, UK.

^[3] Craigie, Jill. Two Cities Films and The Rank Corporation, 1946

^[4] ‘Mothers Voice Views’, Western Morning News, 14th August 1945. In British News Paper Archive. Accessed 2019

^[5] ‘Council is Shot’, Western Morning News, 23 July 1945. In British News Paper Archive. Accessed 2019

^[6] Jill Craigie interviewed by Rodney Geisler for BECTU History Project, 1995.

^[7] Letter between Jill Craigie Lord Astor, 1946 (Lord Astor’s records), Plymouth Museums Galleries Archive (186/22/12 (PT) Q

^[8] Jill Craigie interviewed by Rodney Geisler for The Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union History Project, 1995.