PASTS UNKNOWN
Speculative Histories in the Film Archive
April 3 鈥� 15, 2025
Second Floor Hallway
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Curated by the students of CA216/CA316
In this exhibit, the students of CA216/CA316 Imagining the Past: Film, Memory, History speculate on the gaps in the film archive. The digitization of home movies, newsreels, educational films and other ephemeral moving pictures means our filmed past is more accessible than ever before. Despite this abundance, the unequal distribution of technology, power, and privilege means that there remain large silences within the archive.
Students searched for individuals who, though present in the archive, remain unknown to us. They reviewed the digital collections of the Eye Museum, the Fox Movietone News Collection, the Travel Film Archive, the Centre for Home Movies, Home Made Visible and the Otherness Archive. In each case they identified someone on film about whom they wished there was more information: someone shown only briefly on screen, someone from the background of a shot, perhaps someone from a group that has been marginalized, excluded, or erased from film histories: women, workers, children, queer folks, colonized people, etc.
Inspired by Saidiya Hartman鈥檚 method of critical fabulation and recent special issues of Feminist Media Histories edited by Allyson Nadia Field, PASTS UNKNOWN speculates on the many people present in the film archive about whom history is silent. Students consider how these individuals have come to be in the archive and why it is we know so little about them. As Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak write in "Why We Curate Feminist Film Archives," "the problem of systemic erasure requires speculative and unorthodox strategies to fill the void, or to 'feel' it." By focusing on the silences and charting the contours what is missing, the speculative histories of PASTS UNKNOWN don鈥檛 so much fill the gaps in the film archive as they help us to feel them.