From the Archive

The Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Project

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A collaborative team at the Getty Research Institute has been working to digitize and analyze the influential Los Angeles street photography of Ed Ruscha. Mark Shiel provides an overview of the project and discusses parallels between Ruscha’s photographs and LA cinema in the 1960s.

Reinventing Film Festival Space: Notes on the Radical Geography of the Barrios y Pueblos Project at the San Sebastian Film Festival (1977–1985)

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Pablo La Parra-Pérez and Ekain Olaizola Lizarralde discuss new research initiatives to construct a historical cartography of the San Sebastian International Film Festival (SIFF). Archival traces of the Barrios y Pueblos project (1977-1985) reveal how it brought film screenings and discussions from luxury downtown venues to working-class neighborhoods and peripheral municipalities.

A NEW(S) STAND: UNFOLDING LAYERS OF MEANING – archival praxis, between observation, projection and imagination

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In this installment of ‘from the archive’, Swiss artist Giorgia Piffaretti focuses on the subject of ‘personal archive’. Starting from her own archive, she recognizes potential in everyday objects and situations, based on the observation of a newsstand at the border between Italy and Switzerland. Persisting in a digital era, Piffaretti has examined its archival features, for the way it provides access to the world through its papers and magazines.

Moving Image Archives as Urban Palimpsest

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In this installment of our From the Archives section, Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen explores the history of the Echo Park Film Center and its relationship to the city of Los Angeles, suggesting that we can observe the process of urban change at work through the holdings of film archives.

The Extended City Symphony

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Welcome to the first installment of “From the Archive,” a new recurring section highlighting archival-based scholarship and practice in urban media studies. To start things off, Floris Paalman discusses how the ideas of “database cinema”  informed the curation of the Extended City Symphony Program at EYE Filmmuseum’s ResarchLab.