Programme of Eyewitnessing the Past. Questioning Film and Media Agency in Collective Memory and Public History

Tuesday, November 10 th

9.00 – 10.00

Keynote Address
Digits, Memories, Conflicts. Researching into WW2 through Digital Archives
Andrea Pető (Central European University, Budapest)

Chair: Francesco Pitassio (Universita degli Studi di Udine)

10.15 – 11.15

Keynote Address
Curating Audiovisual Memories: Archival Ethics of Circulating Film Heritage
Dagmar Brunow (Linne universitetet)

Chair: Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)

11.30 – 12.30

Panel: Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in Post-World War II Europe.

Both recently institutionalised as research fields, Memory Studies and Public History can hardly be investigated without referring to mass-communication networks and audiovisual representations. Mass media are crucial in publicly circulating historical information and in sharing memories of the past, but the way in which they performed, and still perform today, this function has a history and a specificity that requires adequate framing. In this sense, cultural historians should learn to handle audiovisual contents related to past events with care, confronting the challenges of their “multilayered mediation”, considering them as both representations of the past and products of that past, and therefore actively shaping collective memory and public knowledge. To acknowledge the manifold agency of media in shaping our awareness of the past, we intend to survey how mediation operates, focusing on the functions performed by film and media as historical agents, as products of history, as historical sources validated by public institutions (archives, schools, museums, exhibitions, and so on), in their connections with oral testimonies, educational purposes, frames of “publicness”.

The symposium will serve as an occasion to present the first research outputs of this ongoing project, and to reflect on some of its major methodological and theoretical concerns.
 

Between Sobriety and Resentment: A Note on Documentary Form, Democracy, and Affect
Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)

Non Fictionalized Narrative? The Specificity of Documentary and Newsreel Films as Historical Sources
Perrine Val (Universite Paris 1 - Sorbonne Pantheon)

Living and Mediated Sources. Media History and Oral History
Lucie Česalkova (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague)

Teaching by Seeing. Media and Archival Sources for School Education
Francesco Pitassio (Universita degli Studi di Udine)

Chair: Rossella Catanese, Paolo Villa (Universita degli Studi di Udine)

For more info, abstracts and bio of the participant go directly to https://ff2020.filmforumfestival.it/e-symposium-eyewitnessing-the-past-questioning-film-and-media-agency-in-collective-memory-and-public-history

To attend the Symposium register for the ZOOM webinar here!

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_g-hpoO1CQO-pEaqe4N6vuw