Archive Fever
Truls Lie asks, how do art and film festivals using archives influence our interpretations, ethics and conception of truth?
I ask myself, why do archives really matter? Old and contemporary archives are all over the place nowadays – used in documentaries, incorporated into artists’ artworks, featured in academic discussions, and, of course, in galleries and museums. But do the archives really matter when it comes to what they were intended to do?
Reasons to use archives can be political and ethical. As I met the famous Greek filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura late one night at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival this spring, in the city where she was born long ago, I discussed her work with her. The festival gave her a retrospective tribute, showing her life as a filmmaker. Her films are like collages, fragmented, artistic, but also using archive material. Poetical films? She took my arm and said that all her films were about war. This, I think, is not evident when you see them, as many are about a particular person with biographic material, and preferably poets.
We all remember what was said after World War II: «Never again». But as I said to Skoura, maybe more now it is «ever again» – her last film, UTOPIA. The Poetics of Borders: Berlin – Nicoisa (2025) expands into landscapes of neutral zones, green lines, walls, checkpoints, and barbed wire. Also seen as urban disasters from war, and how they have to be followed by reconstruction and economic development. Bombed buildings in Libya, and today’s skyscrapers in Berlin, the city was really bombed in World War II. We talk about the now ruined urban Gaza, the same, enormous destruction – witnessed by us all. Then the archives and old photos will document who owned what, what was before, and what to expect from this ‘evidence’.
In this way, archives, as documents of atrocities, have an ethical dimension. The same for another film I saw at Thessaloniki. Alain Resnais’ film Night & Fog (1956) showed the terrible concentration camps of the Second World War.
Somehow different is how Bill Morrison has been creatively using archival material in his films. Earlier industrialised cities and urban peoples’ activities are shown as what was and has passed – but here with the aesthetics of degrading film reels, artistically shown by repeating clips, juxtaposing them, slowing reels – as he showed in his masterclass in Thessaloniki. Like him, Skoura underlined her poetic mode of expression in her masterclass. I would call this their ‘essayistic’ approach, as they use old reels and archives.
Beyond the typical conventional biographical documentaries, it is maybe more natural today to include different interpretations of the facts of the past.
Koura uses a tangential, metaphorical, and immensely associative focus on personalities, places, objects, buildings, and voices as they relate to literary texts. Her poetic mode of expression is rooted in painting, audiovisual art, and transfigured photography. She draws inspiration from writers such as Edel Adnan, James Joyce, and Antonin Artaud. Or dramas like Medea or plays of Bertolt Brecht.
Koura also knows what it means to be an exile. She is multilingual – speaking English, French, Greek, Arabic and German. So again, here comes the archival topic of diary-like personal notes, from her cross-fertilisation of travel literature. She and others document people fleeing war into exile (as in her Exile trilogy). Reflections on migration, human wandering and displacement – as well as the umbilical cord between memory and journey. In a book on the archive published at the festival, she is described as follows: «She wanted to signify the epic magnitudes of a historic period marked by global conflict and unsparing catastrophe, political utopias, and the struggle against fascism.»
Interpretation
Well, just think, what actual situation could such an approach be applied to today? Israel, Russia/Ukraine, and the US – as we speak. People displaced by war. What memories or old photos mean for them, for their identities, when their homes are destroyed, and their past is hard to get back to?
Archives and cinematic images have a ‘double vision’ – both of what we look at, but also what ‘looks’ at us. Memories require the power of interpretation and judgement. When you use old film material from a concentration or extermination camp – like Renoir did – we must interpret what we see, as it is nearly inconceivable.
And we do not see everything, because since the newsreels appeared (1910–), they have also been used as biased propaganda by those in power. State archives, lists, and documents of people, as in the old East Germany and in ‘Stasi’ organisations today (NSA, etc.), are used for surveillance and control, replaced by selections by digital algorithms today. And the way we look at information stored from yesterday or years back, we can now access billions of web pages on the internet.
It is hard to see how interpretations can be truthful when images, texts, and sounds float all around us in an abundance never seen before, and are just expanding. These enormous ‘archives’ at your fingertips are no longer quality-checked by serious editors, as before, although some still try to maintain the truthfulness or importance of what is communicated.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote about what happens when truth and falsehood can no longer be distinguished. With fake news, obvious lies and manipulated facts on Truth Social from a well-known president (or the narcissistic kid), it is hard for the majority to know what to believe. Although it is evident that the archives of the paedophiles, now in The Epstein files, show what happened. But when in February did they compromise approximately six million pages? The Archive on the assassination of John F. Kennedy contains roughly the same (the last one declassified a year ago, and 40,000 books have been written …). Who can get to the bottom of such? So, as Arendt wrote, when you can no longer distinguish between true and false, you stop believing in the real world. With the consequence of being easily manipulated, with powers doing whatever they want, with no respect for what history has taught us or the International Law anymore.
Still, old and contemporary archives can be used to oppose power and disclose power. For example, what a filmmaker like Harun Farocki or the contemporary Johan Grimonprez [see interview] has done. Here, archives are seen not as ‘objective’ facts, but as a means of revealing hidden traces and treating trauma.
When filmmakers like Koury or Grimonprez (dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997 or Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, 2024) repurpose archival footage (newsreels, diaries, found footage), they engage in exactly the processes Derrida described: re-consignation, reinterpretation, exclusion, and the creation of new ‘impressions’. This ‘archive effect’ in documentaries – that jolt of authenticity mixed with unease – echoes the feverish tension between preservation and destruction, nostalgia and violence.
Venice Art Biennale
Two months after Thessaloniki, at the Venice Art Biennale now, artists in several pavilions again use archives. In the Spanish pavilion, thousands of postcards are glued to the walls by Oriol Vilnova – postcards he assembled over 20 years, as he says, «acting as an archive of the remains of a shared imagination». One wall was filled with only Venice postcards. A huge collection of travelling humans happy on their holidays – a practice that has nearly disappeared with sms and social media.
Several of the 99 pavilions are developing their artwork from memories – and fractures. At the German Pavilion, two women deal with the past: Henrike Naumann’s The German Reunification, which explores German reunification, and Sung Tieu’s Sung Tieu, which explores post-Cold War migration and globalisation. And the Chinese pavilion on their millennial past and contemporary, taking shape in a constant flow of images, memories and visions – from calligraphy to digital, from painting to gaming – a crossover between culture and technology.
The Arab Emirates Pavilion uses sound as space and self-expression to reveal a multilayered culture, while the Kazakhstani Pavilion creates an archive of silence, comprising memories, cultural legacies, and fractures of the post-Soviet context. And let me add that the Indian Pavilion analyses what we call ‘home’ not as a physical space but as a deposit of relations, images and signs that even persist after its loss. Like the artist Sumakshi Singh, who ‘documented’ her grandma’s house in New Delhi before its demolition, as the intensive processes of urbanisation, diaspora and impossible returns.
A lot of memories. Palestinians were also a huge topic, as ‘archives’ of 75 years of suppression are now increasingly evident, topping up with Gaza. In Venice, there were large demonstrations in the streets around the Biennale, as people protested the presence of an Israeli pavilion. «No Artwashing Genocide» was one of the banners. But again, the police couldn’t keep away, running into the masses, with their black gear and blue helmets against peaceful protesters of the ongoing genocide.
Archiveology’ and aesthetisation
Let me end here with some theory, as the word ‘Archiveology’ has been used by some. Regarding film or video practice, the concept refers to the use of the archive as a language. But also the study of archives, as the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have done: Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995).
The book Archive Fever meditates on remembrance, religion, time, and technology. It suggests that archives are never closed or complete – they are haunted by what they exclude, and by the future. In our digital age, the fever intensifies with accessible storage, but with greater risks of an overload and loss of context. Derrida refers to Freud about this feverish, compulsive, repetitive desire to return to the origin, to preserve and consign (gather and deposit) traces of the past in an archive (or photo album) – while simultaneously being haunted by the fear of loss, forgetting, or destruction. It has become a desire to archive everything.
The book Archive Fever has been hugely influential in cultural studies, digital humanities, archival science, and discussions of memory in film, documentary and video art.
‘Conceptual’ curators have long favoured archives, such as at Documenta in Kassel – one with the most obsessively favoured archival art since 1997 (and 2002, 2012).
The point is that the archive, unfortunately, also gets aestheticised as only an object of observation. Make up your own opinion in Venice – if you go there. Do the videos and films of the misuse of power really matter, given how often we see atrocities? Today, «ever again» is the new normal.
«My films are all about wars», said Vouvoula Skoura. The question for new filmmakers and artists today is maybe how to really be heard in the chaos – remember, as Marshall McLuhan said, we live in the global village and are numbed down by all the images.
Is it about what is true or false, but maybe more now about being overwhelmingly numbed down? Will truthfulness and caring love only happen by some minorities of humanists, some festival goers, and those few left who protest and demonstrate, as in Venice, who are still able to really interpret and distinguish things of value?
Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.