In this digital golden age, people who restore motion pictures have powerful new tools to deflicker, clean, remove scratches, and color-correct existing films—and to then create high-resolution exhibition copies. Now, preservationists around the world are using these technologies to rediscover and restore the work of non-mainstream filmmakers, overlooked genres, student films, home movies, and experimental cinema, expanding access to stories by marginalized communities and under-appreciated artists. Four experts—Ina Archer, Margaret Bodde, Amy Heller, and Todd Wiener—weigh in on this work’s impact on cinematic history moving forward.
"Jim Crow of the North has helped break the silence on the history and impact of northern segregation as the film has been carried across the community as a catalyst for convening, conversation, consternation, and change." Filmmaker and Twin Cities PBS producer Daniel Bergin on documentary's power in “restorative storytelling.”
Documentary Practices Can Give Visibility to Trans History
Oral history projects offer rich fodder for documentarians "who emphasize the voices of their subjects using their own words, no matter how odious they may be to power structures involved," writes Andrea Jenkins, a poet, Minneapolis City Council member, and transgender oral historian at the University of Minnesota’s Jean Nicholas Tretter Collection Archives in GLBT Studies.
Documentary Can Reveal an America Hiding in Plain Sight
"Documentary hails its viewers. In the words of Louis Althusser, it interpellates us, bringing us into the world we can see on screen, one often invisible, forgotten, left out of the picture." Author and English professor Paula Rabinowitz on the ways documentary films can burst our political bubbles.
Documentary Can Shift the Paradigm in Labor History
"Documentary film provided a means to bring the stories of past workers to the attention of contemporary workers." East Side Freedom Library co-founder Peter Rachleff on the power of documentary in the fight for fair labor practices.
Documentary Can Reflect the Complexities of Working-Class Life
Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert’s American Factory shows "how workers and managers inhabit a world of fragmentation, in which there is no single working-class tale nor even a unified story among those who manage and own the factory." Historian Elizabeth Faue on how documentaries can tell complicated stories of working-class life.
Movement artist Miguel Gutierrez notices that, especially in the US, more and more people are starting their bios by naming their nationality, sexual orientation, or race. "While I understand this kind of specification as a call to consciousness around minoritarian presence, I also wonder if it ends up making their/our position…. inert?" As guest editor of a new edition of Soundboard, he invites four Latinx voices in performance—Brianna Figueroa, Xandra Ibarra, Pedro Pablo Lander, and Sebastián Castro Niculescu—to consider the question of identity.
"When I identify myself, please read it as a personal ad and not a biographical fact." Writer, artist, organizer-curator, and performer Sebastián Castro Niculescu on identity and performance.
Identity Is a Bureaucratic Nothing Attempting to Be Vital
"Creating work about conditions and structures that shape my body is not always helpful for me as an artist. I am not interested in making my pain and my body consumable for liberal satisfaction." Artist Xandra Ibarra on identity and performance.
"Identity is all at once stable and fluid, grounding and brittle, entirely bullshit and undeniably real." Dance historian, performance scholar, dramaturg, and choreographer Brianna Figueroa on identity and performance.
Instead of Smashing Icons, Film Restoration F*cks with the Canon
"At Milestone Films, we sought out films that reflected the lives and work of African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, and Native Americans. Rather than smashing icons, we decided to work to radically reshape and enlarge the pantheon." In a four-part Soundboard feature, Amy Heller discusses how her company's restoration work amplifies traditionally marginalized voices in cinema.
Institutions Must Ask: Who Has to Work Too Hard to Be Heard?
How can art institutions respond to #MeToo? Rashayla Marie Brown offers her perspective as a queer, Black artist: "For the institutions that want to critically engage the names they’ve been given, I ask, 'How can we redistribute power to those who rightfully distrust what we stand for?' or 'Who has to work too hard to be heard, too?'"
What should art institutions consider when presenting work by artists accused of wrongdoing? Deborah Cullinan, CEO of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, embraces the complexity: "As opposed to limiting the experience of art-making to its final product, we can think of the artworks and the lives of artists as the cultural material we have as a society that allows us to engage in provocative, multifaceted conversation that leads to progress."
As the #MeToo movement hits the art world, we invite five experts to weigh in on what museums must consider when showing or contextualizing work by artists accused of wrongdoing. Sharing perspectives are: artist Rashayla Marie Brown, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts CEO Deborah Cullinan, critic/historian Tyler Green, Hammer Museum Associate Director of Academic Programs Theresa Sotto, and journalist/editor Jillian Steinhauer.
