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  1. FILM (AND) HISTORY: THE PRACTICES AND EFFECTS OF FOUND AND ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE CINEMA 

    In my study of the multidirectional relation between film and history I approsch different sides of it. I am particularly interested in meta-questions of how cinema can change, extend or deconstruct dominant images of the past and inquiry into a linearity and causality of its own history. An examination of various critical concepts of both history of film and history in film was my primary goal I tried to achieve during the instruction of the graduate level course "Film Histories" at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2012 and 2013. 

    I suggest that archival and found footage-based films, each of them in a different way, exemplify a repetition of the new order that helps to achieve a new open image of the past. As Jean-Luc Godard, Gustav Deutsch, Peter Delpeut, Martin Arnold, Harun Farocki, Deimantas Narkevicius, among many other filmmakers and video artists, demonstrate in their found and archival footage films, the cinema had to acquire a memory - archive of the moving images - before it could reappropriate its own history and produce infinity of new histories (of cinema as well as of the 20th century) for contemporary viewer's sight and thought. My involvement with the contemporary films compiled out of the Socialist archival footage resulted in a few paper presentations and academic writings. In my study of post-Socialist found footage films I seek to emphasize the outcomes instigated by a break from a linear and closed structure of the Soviet propaganda narratives in the archival footage films by the filmmakers and video artists from the post-Communist bloc countries. For this I analyze found and archival footage-based films by contemporary filmmakers from the post-Socialist countries, including Deimantas Narkevičius (Lithuania), Andrei Ujică (Romania), Maciej Drygas (Poland), Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine) and others. The concepts of technical temporal object, time-image, repetition, rhizome, assemblage, smooth and striated memory, alongside reverberations of Foucaultian concepts of genealogy and archeology stand for a theoretical background in my ongoing research of the cinematic reusage of found or archival footage.

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