This talk will take place in-person at Oldham Theatre and will be free. Please check out a free ticket to register your place. 

The work of archives in preserving and providing access to film/s and its related materials enable users such as scholars and researchers in re-contextualising these archival collections and presenting the knowledge to future generations. The activation of the archive establishes its sustainability and highlights archiving as a future-oriented practice that is shaped as much by its collections, as it is by its users and stakeholders.

In conjunction with the AFA’s July 2022 RECIPROCAL programme, Professor Rosalind Galt, Film Studies at King’s College London and Professor Gerald Sim, Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University, share their research experiences and thoughts on utilising archival materials as part of their recent book publications. Apart from speaking about institutional libraries and archives like the AFA, the speakers will also examine how informal living “archives” like collectors and online archives established by individuals interact, relate, complement, and compare to traditional institutional archives in (re)framing history.

The discussion will be moderated by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Wijaya, East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.

About the Speakers

Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research addresses the relationships between cinema and historical change, with a particular focus on political aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of several books including Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011) and co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (2016). Her most recent book is Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (2021).

Gerald Sim is Professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University, a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, and Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia. He is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014) and his most recent publication is Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). His current work includes an essay about how Singapore cinema aestheticizes the national identity of being an infrastructural hub in the global supply chain, and a separate study of film genre in the age of AI. He is working on a third book that takes a technopolitical look at films that shape our algorithmic imaginaries.

Moderator
Elizabeth Wijaya is Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) and received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University.