The EU-funded DE-BIAS project (January 2023 – December 2024) tackles outdated and harmful language in cultural heritage collections. Led by the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, in collaboration with thematic and domain aggregators and technical partners in the Europeana network, DE-BIAS aims to foster inclusivity and respect in digital collections.
DE-BIAS will develop an AI-powered tool to automatically detect problematic terms in metadata. It will provide information on their problematic nature and suggest appropriate alternatives using contextual vocabularies.
These vocabularies will focus on migration and colonial history, gender and sexual identity, and ethnicity and ethnoreligious identity. Collaboratively developed with marginalized communities, these vocabularies empower communities to reshape historical descriptions affected by outdated colonial, patriarchal, and hegemonic structures.
By fostering collaboration, DE-BIAS aims to enhance representation, participation, and inclusivity in museums and archives. It will provide capacity-building workshops and a knowledge base for cultural heritage professionals to address bias in their collections. The project will analyze over 4.5 million records in English, Italian, German, French, and Dutch, including metadata coming from film archives through the European Film Gateway to Europeana.
Derogatory language in item descriptions on Europeana will be automatically identified and flagged. The DFF is looking forward to delivering relevant project findings and results to the ACE membership in due course.
Full programme and award of the Joint Film Restoration Grant announced at Cannes
ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) unveiled May 19 at the Dutch Pavilion in Cannes details of the fourth A Season of Classic Films, a series of free screenings designed to attract younger audiences to our shared cinematic cultural heritage. The 2023 programme will run June to December 2023 across European cinemas and online.
The initiative also seeks to raise awareness of the work of European film archives, connecting the public with cinema history and the significance of film preservation.
European film heritage
The fourth edition of A Season of Classic Films will comprise a diverse programme curated by more than 20 European film heritage institutions. The world premiere restorations will be presented as free screenings across Europe until the end of 2023 and will be supplemented by educational tools to attract younger audiences to European film heritage, such as live music, introductions by filmmakers etc.
The films span early silent classics, thrillers and romantic comedies, to works focusing on current topics such as feminism or the impact of urban planning to environment. Many of the films will be globally accessible online for free for a limited time to further promote European film heritage to international audiences. All films are available with English subtitles.
A Season of Classic Films is supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.
Joint Restoration Grant
During the Cannes event, ACE also presented a Joint Restoration Grant of €40,000 for the restoration of the Hungarian ghost story After Death (1920) by Alfréd Deésy. The esteemed jury, made up of filmmakers Radu Jude and Saodat Ismailova, ARTE France general director Olivier Père and film curator-educator Cecilia Barrionuevo, chose After Deathfrom an array of proposals submitted by Europe’s film heritage institutions.
An international collaboration between The National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, the Belgian National Film Archive and La Cinémathèque française will enable the new restoration of one of the few ghost stories to have survived from the silent film era. There is only one known remaining copy of the film and it features richly tinted images. Adapted from a novel written by Phantom of the Opera author Gaston Leroux, the film will be presented in a new 4K edition as part of A Season of Classic Films.
Launch event at Cannes
The Cannes A Season of Classic Films presentation and award of the Joint Restoration Grant took place 19 May at 10am at the Dutch Pavilion in Cannes. The event was moderated by Paulina Reizi (Eye Filmmuseum, Coordinator of A Season of Classic Films). Special guests included Sarah Brunet (Policy Officer, MEDIA and Audiovisual Support Programmes, DG Connect, European Commission), Michal Bregant (ACE President), Olivier Père (General Director ARTE France) and Cecilia Barrionuevo (Film at Lincoln Center – Programmer at-large / ECAM Industria).
Joint Film Restoration Grant 2023 – Jury Members
CECILIA BARRIONUEVO – film curator and educator
Cecilia Barrionuevo is currently Head of Seminars and International Relations at the Madrid Film School (ECAM) and film programmer at Lincoln Center. Barrionuevo was the artistic director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival (2018 – 2021) and a member of the festival’s programming team since 2010. Barrionuevo also co-edited several publications, including the bilingual collection of “Las Naves Cine”, and has taught film classes around the world. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Film Study Center at Harvard University. In 2020, she was awarded with the honorary title of Chevalier of the Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.
SAODAT ISMAILOVA – filmmaker
Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker, based in Tashkent and Paris. She is an important voice within the first generation of Central Asian artists to come of age in the post-Soviet era. She studied film and has made fiction films and documentaries, which have won awards at various international festivals. Her work focusses on the intersection of cinema and visual art. The use of archival footage is a recurring feature of Ismailova’s work. Her films and artwork have been featured in the Venice Biennale, Documenta (Kassel), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Berlin International Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum and Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam).
RADU JUDE – filmmaker
Radu Jude is one of the most renowned European directors of today. His work has been recognised with numerous awards from international film festivals, including the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn in 2021 and the Silver Berlin Bear for Aferim! in 2015 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Jude graduated from the Film Directing Department of the Media University of Bucharest. He started his career as a director’s assistant, including for films by Costa-Gavra and Cristi Puiu. Jude also directed several award-winning short films, among them The Tube with a Hat (2006) – the most successful Romanian short film ever. Most recently, his short film The Potemkinists was screened in 2022 at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes.
OLIVIER PÈRE – General Director ARTE France Cinéma
Olivier Père joined the French Cinémathèque in 1995, and soon became in charge of the programme, organising numerous retrospectives. Since 1997, he has been writing for the cultural publication “Les Inrockuptibles” on film and television programmes. Between 2004 and 2009, Père headed the Directors’ Fortnight, independent section at the Cannes Film Festival. From 2009 until 2012, he served as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival. In 2012, he became General Director of ARTE France Cinéma. He is also the Artistic Director of ArteKino and collaborates with the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes for the ArteKino Classics programme.
Today, 20 March 2023, ARTE launched the second edition of ArteKino Classics. Under this label, ARTE will be showing rarely seen European films – true gems of the 7th art – as part of its linear and non-linear catalogue.
This year’s programme includes some 20 films, including major works by Hungarian director Márta Mészáros, Swedish director Mai Zetterling and Czech director Vera Chytilová. This eclectic collection will be broadcast in Germany and France and made available online at arte.tv, where a rotation of films will be available throughout Europe with subtitles in six European languages.
Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker, which brought Isabelle Huppert to the attention of a wider audience, will open the festivities on the TV channel.
With this initiative – a hitherto unique event for public television – ARTE is taking a fresh look at the history of European cinema from 1945 to 1995. The programme invites European audiences to (re)discover both popular classics and films that broke new ground in cinematography and social discourse. Making them available online and in multiple languages also allows new and younger audiences to discover classic films easily.
Since last year, ArteKino Classics has been an integral part of ArteKino, which, together with ArteKino Festival and ArteKino Selection, has been presenting young European filmmakers and their take on our times since 2016, providing a bridge between the young cinema of today and heritage cinema.
The ARTE Group selects the works, in cooperation with the Association of European Cinematheques (ACE). All these films have been recently restored, many of them in the framework of ACE’s A Season of Classic Films, and about one third of them were made by women.
Supported by the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme, the ArteKino project is delivered by the ARTE Group and ACE.
Join the conversation on social media using the #ArteKinoClassics hashtag!
The National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive is happy to share that our latest restoration Szürkület /Twilight (1990) by György Fehér will have its world premiere as part of Berlinale Classics.
For those heading to the Berlinale this year, please feel very welcome to join us for this ArteKino panel discussion at theDeutsche Kinemathek!
Monday, 20.02.2023, 15:00-16:00 Veranstaltungsraum 4. Etage, Deutsche Kinemathek
Panel: Nadav Lapid (Filmregisseur / Berlinale Retrospektive), Olivier Père (ARTE France), Nina Goslar (ARTE / ZDF), Michal Bregant (ACE / Národní filmový archiv, Prague), Paulina Reizi (ACE / Eye Filmmuseum). Moderation: Elisa Jochum (Deutsche Kinemathek).
Being young in today’s world means growing up with digital technology; in the past few years, the younger generation has also developed a renewed consciousness of socio-political issues. At the intersection of these two developments, digitally restored films on – and from – past societal transformations bear the potential to enrich cultural discourse. ArteKino Classics, a new pan-European streaming venture of ARTE, with a special focus on the modern film heritage of 1945-1995, tries to realize this potential. Over a period of three months, ARTE provides 20 national film classics from almost as many European countries with subtitles in six languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish). The 20 recently restored films were selected in close consultation with the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE). The programme invites a young European audience to (re)discover both popular classics and films that broke new ground in cinematography and social discourse.
A message from Giovanna Fossati, Annie van den Oever and Erkki Huhtamo:
In 2016 we published Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory, which sprang from a workshop in 2013 under this title. It addresses the rather new awareness of the prominence of media technologies in culture and discusses how such an awareness impacts the archival and curatorial consciousness of those working in film archives, science, technology, and media museums at the time. It seems to us though that there have been significant changes in the field of archives, apparatus collections as well as in the world of the arts, museums, teaching, and research since then, raising newly relevant questions that need to be addressed. We recognize three fields which we would want to focus our attention on in this upcoming volume: (1) archiving and curating, (2) research and teaching, and (3) artist practices and experimentation. Our aim is to contribute to the mapping of these developments in the fields of collecting, curating, archiving, exhibiting, and the use of apparatus collections in research and teaching.
We want to focus on new developments from a fresh, global, diverse and inclusive post-colonial perspective and we are specifically interested in topics and questions understudied so far – and we hope that you will bring examples to this project we might have missed otherwise. We also want to address a series of simple, general, practical questions: which public and private entities prioritize the apparatus collections today and how? Who studies these collections? How are they archived and curated? How (if at all) are apparatuses kept operational in a time they were (technically) not made for?
Furthermore, we want to take the impact of the covid-19 pandemic into account as it has evoked new questions and concerns in all three of these fields.
Sections of the book will be dedicated to different themes — archiving & curating, research & teaching, artist practices — and each section will be introduced with an essay by one of the editors. In line with the format adopted for the 2016 book, we will feature thirty contributions in total, each focusing on a different device. The length of each separate contribution will be about six pages (2400 words). A full-page illustration of the technology discussed will be included with each essay as a focal point. Moreover, a short technical description and a theoretical framework will be added to each essay to announce its topic and approach.
This call for papers addresses archivists, curators, projectionists, theorists, film and media historians, media artists, archaeologists, educationists, and new media scholars.
Each contributor is invited to reflect upon a specific device. The technical and theoretical reflection on the device will differ (depending on the author’s interests and expertise. We stimulate and support a great variety of different approaches. Proposals may include the following topics:
Histories of use and representation
Global media cultures: non-Western media archaeology and histories of use
Best practices in archiving histories of use
Sustainable approaches for demonstrating working devices in heritage
institutions
The reception and evaluation of a device by critics or specific audiences
Object-oriented archaeologies of media technologies
Hands-on media history in practice-based research or education
Intersectional media archaeology
The development of a certain dispositif
Artist practices and experimentation
Artist-driven media archaeologies
Changing policies and priorities in acquiring, preserving and curating film apparatus collections
Of further importance are ever-relevant questions about the role of apparatus collections or archival devices in the history and development of film and cinema, or their role and significance as an object of teaching and research, restoration, and archiving both inside and outside of the archive or museum.
This book is meant for use in film archives, film, technology, media and modern art museums, libraries and universities. We aim at a visually attractive book that stands out in art museums and art schools, presenting a detailed and relevant inventory of devices used by artists, scholars, amateurs, and cinematographers.
Submissions
We invite you to submit a 300-word proposal, including 3 bibliographic references, 3 keywords, as well as a short biography of 100 words at the following email address: exposingthefilmapparatus2024@gmail.com. The deadline for proposal submissions is 10 January 2023. On the basis of the proposals, writers will be invited to submit full manuscripts (2400 words) – you will be contacted no later than 1 February 2023. The deadline for the full manuscript is 1 September 2023, after which each contribution will be peer-reviewed. We aim to present the book at the Eye International Conference in May 2024.
Please note that we do not accept complete manuscripts for consideration without an invitation.
Time frame publication:
Presentation book: May 2024 Peer feedback: 15 November 2023 Peer reviews: (6 weeks) until 15 October 2023 Submission all individual manuscripts: 1 September 2023 Response proposal: no later than 1 February 2023 Submission abstract: 10 January 2023 Call for papers: 22 November 2022
It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden death of our colleague Marleen Labijt on December 19th, 2022. Marleen was a faithful staff member of Eye Filmmuseum for the last 30 years. She started as a booker for our distribution branch before moving on to a pool responsible for both producing programs and archival loans. She took full responsibility for Archival Loans 20 years ago, and many colleagues abroad have known her in this capacity.
Marleen was an important contact between Eye Filmmuseum and the outside world. She was passionate about providing access to our film collection for our FIAF colleagues, for many festivals and for countless theaters, both in the Netherlands and abroad. She advocated for our film heritage, prepared programs and promoted our restorations. To her colleagues inside Eye Filmmuseum, she was always a dedicated supporter of her outside clients, always trying to help with every request. No program was too big that she couldn’t handle it, and no theater was too small that it didn’t deserve her full cooperation. To her clients, she was always a staunch protector of the integrity of the films on loan and a relentless guardian of good programming practice. She has facilitated countless presentations of films from our collection over the whole world. We shall miss her.
Archival Loans will continue in the spirit that Marleen showed us. You can still reach us at ArchivalLoans@eyefilm.nl.
For those who wish to send condolences to her family, you can use the same address and we will make sure that your message reaches them.
Maureen Mens Corporate Communicatie Eye Filmmuseum
This year, the Hungarian National Film Institute (NFI) presents the newly restored opera film Orfeusz és Eurydiké (Orpheus and Eurydice, 1985) as part of the European project A Season of Classic Films. Enikő Eszenyi and Sándor Téry star in István Gaál’s version of the mythological work. The premiere will take place in the recently renovated screening room of the Film Archive on 21 December, the winter solstice. It will then also be available to view online for a week between the two holidays. The cinema screening is free of charge but registration is required.
With his final cinema piece made in 1985, István Gaál not only set Gluck’s iconic opera to film but he transformed it into an incisive auteur movie through rich visual images and intense symbolism. He portrays Orpheus not as a hero of mythology but rather as a fallible, struggling human who is confronted by the mystery of death. Sándor Sára was cinematographer on this spectacular film. It ranks among the classics of auteur opera films alongside Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni.
The movie Orfeusz és Eurydiké was made on the basis of the Vienna version (1762) of the opera that concludes in tragedy. However, Gaál made radical changes to the Gluck work: his Orpheus sings not in a castrato tenor or alto but instead – in line with ancient Greek mythology – in a masculine baritone, sung by Lajos Miller. Eurydice is sung by Maddalena Bonifaccio, Ámor by Veronika Kincses, while the part of Orpheus is played by Sándor Téry, Eurydice by a youthful Enikő Eszenyi and Amor by Ákos Sebestyén. The Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra and Hungarian Radio and Television Choir, with Tamás Vásáry in the role of conductor, provide musical accompaniment.
The film presentation is realised within the framework of the international project A Season of Classic Films organised by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes – Association of European Cinematheques) and sponsored by Creative Europe. The objective of this international project is to promote the digital restoration of gems of European film art and, by ensuring their widespread presentation, to draw attention to the work of European film archives.
In 2021, the NFI – Film Archive presented György Kovásznai’s animation cult movie Habfürdő (Bubble Bath) in the framework of this programme. This year, it is making István Gaál’s recently restored opera film available on the big screen and online.
For dates and access links of the upcoming free screenings of A Season of Classic Films in cinemas across Europe and online, please follow ACE’s website and social media pages on Instagram | Facebook | Twitter.
ABOUT THE ASSOCIATION DES CINÉMATHÈQUES EUROPÉENNES (ACE)
The Association of European Cinematheques (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes – ACE) is an affiliation of 49 European national and regional film archives. Its role is to safeguard the European film heritage and make the rich audiovisual records collected and preserved by the various film archives accessible to the public. ACE members are non-profit institutions committed to the FIAF Code of Ethics.
Available in English, Czech, French, German and Italian and providing access through a variety of different thematic, temporal and spatial entry points, the exhibition is the result of the EU-funded research project ViCTOR-E. Frames of Reconstruction tells a visual history of the European postwar reconstruction efforts through non-fiction films that functioned as witnesses and political agents alike. A crucial tool of communication of the transformative era, newsreels, short documentaries, and amateur films, are the main focus of the exhibition that also features oral history videos recorded with eye witnesses from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Italy. The exhibition also features focused e-learning activities, model lessons and sources for teaching Post-War history with and through film.
Several ACE member archives as well as other heritage institutions have contributed film clips, among them Narodni Filmovy Archiv, CSC – Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa, DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, who together with ACE and EFG – European Film Gateway were associated partners of the project.
The exhibition is connected to the European Film Gateway and gives access to a larger thematic collection of over 600 films relevant to the project theme.
The ViCTOR-E project ran from 2019 through 2022 and was coordinated by the Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). Other project partners were the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, the Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The online exhibition was designed by Athena Research Center, Athens. Funded by the HERA Joint Research Programme which is co-funded by BMBF via DLR-PT, CAS, ANR, MUR and the European Commission through Horizon 2020.
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak – long connected to the broadcaster VPRO as a programme maker, editor of the Tegenlicht programme and editor-in-chief – will succeed the current director Sandra den Hamer on 1 April 2023. Van der Haak was appointed by Eye’s supervisory board. The new director looks forward to leading a contemporary museum for cinema with a world-class collection that provides a unique opportunity to connect past, present and future as well as to question the world in transition around us on the basis of images, and to discuss film’s role in digital image culture.
Much like her magnificent contributions to ACE, Sandra den Hamer – ACE President 2018-2022 and member of its Executive Committee 2010-2022 – leaves a museum that, since ‘crossing the IJ River’ in 2012, has undergone impressive development.
Over the past 15 years, Eye Filmmuseum has transformed into a bustling centre for film culture and a museum with international allure. Bregtje van der Haak (1966) will continue to further the museum’s ‘kaleidoscopic assignment’ to be a meeting place that showcases film in all its guises and provides context, from the earliest films to the most contemporary developments, and from meticulously restored classics to the latest digital experiments as well as exhibitions on contemporary artists and filmmakers.
Career
Van der Haak studied dance in Paris, law and politology in Amsterdam, and political theory and journalism in New York. She was a member of the board of the Prins Claus Fonds [arts and culture NGO] and the Erasmusprijs [a prize for the humanities, social sciences and the arts], a member of travelling biennial Manifesta X in Palermo’s artistic team. Van der Haak is also a member of IDFA [International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam] and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten [state academy of fine arts] in Amsterdam’s supervisory boards.
As the editor-in-chief for VPRO Television (2006/2007 with Frank Wiering) she initiated programmes including: Metropolis TV, Eeuw van de Stad and the 3D archive on urbanisation T_visonarium OPEN CITY (with Jeffrey Shaw). Van der Haak has been a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong and at USC in Los Angeles. In 2005, she made Lagos Wide & Close (with Silke Wawro, Rem Koolhaas & The Harvard Project on the City), one of the first interactive documentaries. During the economic crisis she reported on its societal consequences for sociologist Manuel Castells’ Aftermath Network. Until 2022, Van der Haak worked as a director and editor-in-chief for the TV programme VPRO Tegenlicht, where she recently presented the innovative project Archief van de Toekomst [archive of the future].
Lex ter Braak, (interim) chair of Eye Filmmuseum’s supervisory board: ‘The supervisory board has found its dream candidate in the shape of Bregtje van der Haak. With her knowledge of film and new media, and her educated convictions concerning the collection’s importance and societal impact, Bregtje van der Haak will create new options for Eye and its audience. She will intensify the dynamic between the museum and society, creating an urgent programme around it. Bregtje van der Haak will make Eye a multicoloured prism, a place for everyone.’
Bregtje van der Haak:
‘Under Sandra den Hamer, Eye became a fabulous public institute, an essential meeting place for everyone who thinks and dreams in images. I am very enthusiastic about the opportunity to further her work, cooperating with a team of excellent professionals who highlight film culture at ever level with passion and dedication. In my dreams I see Eye, the oyster on the IJ River, further opening itself to the world like a ‘brave space’ where cinema reveals itself in many ways and everyone feels welcome to enter into dialogue with the collection and the international film community: jointly arriving at a highly personal, yet shared diagnosis of our times.’
For more information, please contact: Maria Lam, Publicity Manager Eye Filmmuseum. marialam@eyefilm.nl. +31630444429
