Creative Response: Reactivation
Reactivation is a way to creatively respond to archival material:
Referring to a practice of both restoration and of setting-in-motion, this term provides a useful metaphor for a reflexive process to working with archival community videos and the processes used to produce them, in order to facilitate contemporary video projects.
For the film challenge, this might mean a dynamic process of appropriating and translating community video practices, in order to initiate a contemporary community video project. Archival materials and practices or processes adapted and adopted from those developed in the past invite participants and audiences to situate themselves in relation to a history and draw lines between then and now, whilst allowing them to critique, construct and develop new projects based on these past projects.
Writing on the reactivation of what he refers to as ‘political documentaries,’ film theorist Thomas Waugh suggests it is important to ‘recover films whose original political context and thus “use-value” may have lapsed, but which may find new uses and engage new aesthetics in new contexts.’
Similarly, a description of the re-appropriation of archival materials by art historian Paolo Magagnoli suggests that such works provide ‘a resource and strategy central to struggles of all subaltern cultural and social groups… and show possibilities which are still valid in the present.’
What follows are four examples of creative responses to working with the material held in the London Community Video Archive. We hope these provide alternatives to more traditional uses of archival material, such as essay films and historical documentaries – not there is anything wrong with these!
1. Screening events with contemporary groups to engage in discussions, leading to the production of new videos
2. Reactivation of past projects to produce new videos that reflect on the past, present and possible futures.
3. Adapting the methods used to produce archival videos to make new videos
4. Drawing attention to gaps in the archive
Method One: Discussion Screenings
This is a method borrowed from the early days of community video making, which can be adapted as follows:
Step 1: You decide to work with a group/You are invited to work with a group
Step 2: Watch a relevant archival video together
Step 3: Together, reflect on what has changed and what has stayed the same
Step 4: Use a video camera to mediate and record your individual and collective responses
Step 5: Develop a video project based on your initial responses
Step 6: Screen this video for other groups
Step 7: At the screening invite the audience to get involved in a new video project
Through this process, you can collectively and actively develop a relationship to the past through the creation of a new video project that takes the original video and its associated production techniques as triggers and tools.
For community video projects, creating spaces where videos can be screened and the audience are able to share and reflect on their experiences is as integral to the process as making the video. At these events, people involved in the original production or else people impacted by similar themes often present the videos. The discussion after the screening provides a space for the audience to share their reflections on the videos together. For these events, post-screening discussions often lead to further meetings, subsequent screenings and activities being planned, sometimes with a view to making a new video or other project such as a zine or poster.
Method Two: Reactivation to produce new videos that reflect on the past, present and possible futures
Reframed Youth, made in 2013 in collaboration with an LGBTQ Community Centre and the BFI, London, took as its starting point an archival video made in 1983 about and by Lesbian and Gay Youth entitled Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts.
This video was showed to a group of self-identified LGBTQ young people in order to ask the question: What would a film made by LGBTQ youth look like today? Who would it be for? Does it need to be made? The results of the video project were shot by the group over three days and premiered at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the BFI a month later. As well as the young people who made the film, a number of participants of the original video project came to the screening, their involvement in the post screening discussion initiated an unexpected and exciting inter generational exchange, which added an extra layer to the video project.
Through the reactivation of a community video and the techniques used to produce it, the participants were able to express their voices as individuals whilst coming together as a group. The unique aesthetic and practical advantages of community video practices were beneficial for this project, as they provided myriad ways to share and reflect on our experiences and develop our own forms of self-representation.
Projects that develop in response to archival videos allow them to be more than simply archival nostalgia and instead be of contemporary interest and importance, enabling participants to recognise where these archival videos have come from and their own place in this rich history, whilst placing them very much in the present and looking forwards.
Method Three: Filmmaking workshops using community video methodologies
Starting your project by watching a number of archival videos made in similar ways will mean you will be able to identify an approach to making community videos that can then be adapted to produce a new video project. As well as establishing a better understanding of 1970s community video practices, this approach also helps to ascertain whether these practices remain useful and distinctive as approaches to develop community video projects with groups in the current moment.
One process that has been identified and adapted from the approaches used by community video makers in the 1970s and 80s is made up of two stages. The first stage involves spending time in the neighbourhood or with different groups where the project is taking place and facilitating short screening events and video-making workshops with a residents from the neighbourhood or members of these groups.
What follows next is a public screening, bringing all of the different groups together for group sharing and evaluation in order to plan what the next steps of the project might be. The second stage then focuses on the production of self-organised video projects based on the outcome of this evaluation process, where new groups might form to support one another in the production process.
Method Four: Gaps in the Archive
A project might emerge when you are looking for something in the archive and can not find it. Questions arise about why this might be; Is it an oversight? Was there material but it has since been lost or recorded over? Was that material ever made? If that material existed what would it look like and who would have made it? What happens next might be a research project gathering materials together to acknowledge this gap. This might involve the production of new material that reflects on this gap in the archive, the material you gather might directly address the gap you found in the archive. This might be a chance to bring together a community group who might want to develop a project together or contribute to the production of a new community video project. We are always looking for ways to address gaps in the London Community Video Archive.
It is clear that archives can be used to encourage the production of new moving image work, where screening events afford opportunities for collective reflection and shared conversations about the past and the present and to speculate on possible futures. The videos and the methods used to produce them both provide a means to make new video projects that centre the development of new forms of self-representation that are specific to the experiences of the participants involved in their production.