Welcome to Issue Five of Related Materials
where we're never not thinking about archives
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
This week marks a year since I left my full-time job for a somewhat nebulous mix of part-time and freelance work, and the last twelve months have been more fun than I could possibly have anticipated. However the one aspect of my old role that I really missed was teaching, and the way it forced me to engage with my profession rather than simply going through the motions.
Starting this newsletter was a way to put myself back into the same position, of both having opinions and having to justify them to an audience. I'd like to thank all of you for being that audience, and sticking with me so far.
Watching: Jill, Uncredited (2023) [Available on Mubi and Prime Video in the UK - international distribution may vary]
This short film takes the simple premise of documenting the on-screen work of prolific extra Jill Goldston. Over 60 years Jill has appeared in almost 2000 film and television programmes, but always in the background. The film starts in a way you might anticipate - a shot clip plays from a film, pauses on Jill's momentary entrance and then continues to the next work. After a few of these, you kind of feel like, 'ok I get that point' and if this was showing in a gallery I'd have probably moved on. However the film shifts, starting to draw together patterns within Jill's roles. I found myself drawn in, ignoring the action in the centre of the screen, looking for her in the background. You start to notice how good she is as an extra - consummately ignoring the cameras - and by the end of the film it seems that she’s a better actor than those at the centre of the shot whose actions start to look false and contrived.
You can see a trailer here on Youtube and there's also an interview with Jill on The Guardian, which is where I first learnt about the film. However in many ways the interview rather misses the point as it re-centres the stars of the films as the story. Jill is fascinating not because she once shared a meal with David Bowie in a canteen but because of her importance to the film: “I had self-worth, because I was part of the film. Films would be very boring without extras.”
When we talk about the canon of film history, we talk about directors and leading actors, even though often the cameramen and set designers (amongst others) played a huge role is the success or otherwise of the film. I remember watching The Revenant (2015) at the cinema and, as a dressmaker myself, being completely distracted by the stitching on Leonardo Di Caprio's shirt throughout. The costume designer, Jacqueline West, was nominated for an Oscar for her work on the film but you wouldn't know from looking at the film's wikipedia page.
Jill, Uncredited provides a different perspective on the film archive. Could these films have been made without her? Yes of course, but they weren't. She was there. Similarly, in a professional practice where archives are grouped by the person who society has decided is worthy of preserving, what other stories are captured? Who else was there?
Listening: Glass Eye: episode 1 : Kodak Women
This new podcast series - episode 2 was just released - looks at visual culture in South Asia and is just a total treat. Not least because Episode 1 includes a cat doing the audio equivalent of photo-bombing.
In Kodak Women Sabeena Gadihoke looks at the lives of two women photographers in India around the middle of the 20th century - the timing is significant as these archives represent some of the first produced outside of the rule of the British Empire. Earlier records not only represent a colonial viewpoint but are stored in the UK and so are inaccessible to Indian researchers. Gadihoke argues for the importance of looking at the work of amateurs alongside that of professional photographers because women, and many men, were excluded from the professional sphere.
This means reconsidering photographs previously been dismissed as just family snapshots to be part of the visual history of the country. Gadihoke co-curated an exhibition of the photographic work of two sisters, Manobina Roy & Debalina Mazumder, which was exhibited in a domestic interior. Their families were, broadly speaking, supportive of their photographic work as long as it took place within the home. They were encouraged to photograph the family elders who might not be able to travel to a photographic studio, creating a record of a generation who might otherwise not have been captured.
The podcast also looks at how Kodak specifically appealed to Indian women, and shifted their advertising to represent them, featuring a woman in a striped saree. The website linked above includes a huge array of resources to follow-up on some of the people and themes mentioned in the recording, while the instagram hosts some of the photos they discuss. This series looks set to be an exciting resource for shifting the axis away from the West.
Reading: Next Slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation [MIT Technology Review - paywalled site with limited free access]
This article is so much more than its title suggests. It’s about the introduction of Powerpoint to the world, but it isn’t. It’s about the giddy period before the introduction of Powerpoint to the world when corporate presentations were razzle dazzle multi-media affairs - but constructed using carefully timed static slides. Static slides on 80 carefully timed projectors to produce the effect of moving images.
If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s because the entire industry started, grew and died within 20 years. The technology relied on computers to programme the projectors, and was eventually replaced by them. The emphasis, as with so many technologies, moved from the professional to the individual. The original proposal for Powerpoint included one italicised bullet point:
Allows the content-originator to control the presentation.
Whether you think this is a positive or not probably depends how bad the last Powerpoint (or, god forbid, Prezi) was.
This article is archives-adjacent in as much as it involves technology and its intersection with the creation of documents, but I’ve also been saving it up for my end-of-year edition because it’s just a really fun story. Enjoy.
Bonus track: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Riot in Lagos [YouTube link to the 2019 remastering, original version 1980]
Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died earlier this year, had an enormously broad musical output which encompassed both the music for The Revenant and this 1980 electronic masterpiece. There’s easily a hundred Sakamoto tracks I could have chosen but this one forms the starting point for an interesting essay by Owen Hatherley on how Japan does and doesn’t fit with the narratives of postmodernism. If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo, a retrospective of Sakamoto’s work has just been announced for December 2024-March 2025. I was lucky to see an exhibition at the same gallery 8 years ago featuring merchandise and costumes from Sakamoto’s band, Yellow Magic Orchestra. On the strength of that memory, I have no hesitation in urging you to see this show if you can.
Shortly after drafting this newsletter I saw the International Council on Archives statement on the reported bombing of archives in Gaza. Archives support the memory and rights of a community and, while their destruction is in no way comparable to the enormous loss of human life, when seen alongside it’s clear that this is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire people. While digital archives are often seen within the archival community as more fragile than physical collections, the Palestine Online project is highlighting the voices of the Palestinian community from pages originally hosted on old web platforms like GeoCities, Angelfire, and AOL Hometown, now stored within the Internet Archive. “Welcome To Reality”, as one of the captured sites reads, in flaming text.
Wishing everyone a peaceful 2024,
Anna