Risking the Archive: Film Heritage and the Aesthetic Virtue of Challenging Norms

Keynote Speech
With: Vinzenz Hediger (Cinematèque suisse)

In the modern ‘Western’ world, artworks are valued for their novelty and originality – for the risk that artists take when they challenge aesthetic and, by extension, social norms. As the polymath John Ruskin wrote in the 19th century, taste is not a question of morality: it is the only morality.

How are archival practices being shaped by the pervasive concept of risk as an aesthetic virtue? Is regarding risk in this way a coercive or, conversely, a liberating framework for archival practices? Does it result in works of the historical avant-garde being given preference at the expense of other parts of film heritage? Or does it, on the contrary, open a space for archival risk-taking beyond the canon of modernity? And which historical narratives of shared provenance and futures will be produced as a result of archival risk-taking?

‘Risking the archive’ can mean putting the archive at risk, i.e. taking risks with the archive; but it can also mean taking risks within the archive itself. This presentation explores these two aspects with a view to both archival practices and heritage policy.

In English