This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in- person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
This presentation will discuss my current work with a collection of 16mm home movie footage taken in the 1920s and ‘30s by a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York. The footage was shot by my great-grandfather’s brother, an amateur filmmaker who owned a Cine-Kodak, one of the first commercially available film cameras. Returning to this material nearly one century after it was first captured, I am now repurposing it and editing it into a new film. As a visual anthropologist who has been researching social and material processes of memory, I approach this archive not as mere source material for a ‘domestic ethnography’ (Renov 2004), but as an avenue for intervening with it in new ways and instigating alternative practices of remembrance in the present. By focusing on the haptic qualities of the footage, and specifically drawing on Surrealist methods of automatism in my editing process, my project adds new layers to the entangled relationship between domestic archives, personal memory and collective history. In this seminar I will screen excerpts from my work-in-progress and explore how audio-visual tools can both reflect and evoke embodied and affective memories through automatist treatments of archival and present-day filmic spaces.
Biography
Alyssa Grossman is a social and visual anthropologist whose research explores issues of cultural memory, critical heritage, material and visual culture, and the intersections between anthropology and contemporary art. Her work involves creative and experimental approaches to research, often incorporating audio-visual, trans-disciplinary and artistic methodologies. She has conducted fieldwork in Romania, Sweden and the US, investigating everyday objects and discourses of memorialization, amateur filmmaking, family remembrance work, and decolonizing practices of classification in ethnographic museums and archives. She is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool.
Read more: Alyssa Grossman - University of Liverpool