Bundesarchiv, Fehrbelliner Platz 3

My name is Emma Kelly and I’ve recently written a book on Jonathan Dennis, founding director of the Film Archive of New Zealand. The book was launched at Nga Taonga Sound and Vision on the 23rd September 2015, and the Northern Hemisphere book launch was at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy on 6 October. The book is published by John Libbey and distributed by Indiana University Press. It’s called ‘The Adventures of Jonathan Dennis: Bicultural film archiving in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (2015) http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807819.

Thanks to a lovely group of Jonathan Dennis’ friends, I’ve been able to travel to Europe for the launch and visit film archives in Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris to see how they are similar and different to our own.

The Berlin Film Archive Bundesarchiv is of course interesting because in the early 1990s two very different archives amalgamated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They had different collection policies and their focuses and goals varied. Today they have about 1 million titles, roughly a third of which are able to be viewed. They are a government archive and have, as you’d imagine, some pretty sensitive material related to the Nazi era and WWII which they endeavor to contextualise appropriately for audiences. About 500 new films are produced in Germany each year and they try to collect them all.

I am interested in the performance of the archive – how are materials in the archive remembered or forgotten based upon how they are treated by archivists? For this reason after I’ve visited the Archive I’ve gone to see some examples of the Stolpersteine which I’ve been told about by a friend. These are brass plaques in the pavement of Berlin streets which Gunter Demnig has created to remember those killed by the Nazis. Here are some outside the Humboldt University. They include the names of the students killed and where they were killed.