Welcome to Issue Seven of Related Materials
which admittedly is slightly more infrequent than I intended this year
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
Slightly behind schedule again this month, but I’m back with three recommendations of things that made me think about archives (when I should have probably been thinking about something else).
Watching: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Dir: Wim Wenders, 1989) [Available on steaming services in the UK, other countries may vary]
After being blown away by Perfect Days (Dir: Wim Wenders, 2023) at the cinema this month, I decided to go back and re-watch one of his other Tokyo films, Notebook on Cities and Clothes. Described on the DVD case as a documentary about Yohji Yamamoto, I remember being a bit disappointed when I first watched it a decade ago, not feeling like I’d learned a great deal about Yamamoto’s processes or ideas. However this time, the opening monologue made me sit up and pay attention.
“With painting, the thing was simple. The original was unique, and each copy was a copy, a fake. With the picture and after the film, it started to get complicated. The original was a negative, and without a copy does not exist. On the contrary: each copy was the original. But now, with the electronic image, and soon the digital, there is no more negative or positive. The very notion of "original" is obsolete. Everything is a copy. All distinctions have become arbitrary. It is not unlikely then that the idea of identity is found in such a state of fragility.”
Just as Perfect Days was a commission to make a documentary about the Tokyo Toilet Project that Wenders turned into a feature film, Notebook On Cities and Clothes was a commission from the Pompidou Centre to make a film about ‘the fashion world’. Instead, they got an essay on the nature of film, digital and identity, framed around a series of interviews with Yamamoto.
Wenders arrives in Tokyo intending to shoot the project on a small hand-held film camera but in the quiet of the atelier, he becomes conscious of the camera’s noise and switches to a new, quieter, video camera. Relinquishing his tool of choice forces Wenders to reflect on the process of film-making itself at the same time as he is trying to understand the process of fashion. Having discovered that they both share a love of photographer August Sander, Wenders wonders “Will there be ever a electronic art, a craftsman digital? Will this new electronic language be as capable of showing the men of the twentieth century as the fixed camera of August Sander?”.
As its title suggests, Notebook on Cities and Clothes is a snapshot of Tokyo, Paris and their respective fashion scenes at the end of the 1980s, but it’s also an intriguing insight into thinking about digital and authenticity. As well as hearing Wenders wrestling with the idea of digital, he plays with the medium in an analogue way, showing screens inside screens and making us aware of his process, alongside Yamamoto’s.
Reading: Ella Finer & Vibeke Mascini : Silent Whale Letters (Sternberg Press, 2023)
I picked this book up in the ICA bookshop after spotting both Ella Finer and Kate Briggs (who edited the volume) on the cover. I’ve read, and adored, several of Kate Briggs’ books and have been fortunate to meet Ella through my work at The Cosmic House where she voiced a sound installation by Marysia Lewandowska, so it was an easy purchase for me, even before I saw the word ‘archive’ on the back.
Comprised of ‘letters’ [actually emails] between Finer and Mascini written between 2020 and 2023, the project takes as its starting point a recording in the British Library Sound Archive of a whale. The recording cannot be perceived by humans unless it is manipulated, either with the speed changed or rendered into a physical representation. Their correspondence bounces through a series of ideas relating to whales, waves, voices, and silence, while referring in passing to the backdrop of the covid pandemic happening around them.
Although an archival document (the whale recording) is at the heart of this book, for me the particular interest was in the structure of the book itself. Finer and Mascini write in their introduction: “The overlaps in, and sometimes confusion around, what we have shared with each other and where (in speech, in writing) mean that the letters also refer outside themselves to sites of conversation we have no record of”. This will, of course, be increasingly true of the contemporary archive.
In previous decades a correspondence consisted of written letters, occasionally interspersed with phone calls and real life meetings. Today it’s fragmented across emails, videos calls, messages and voice notes, many of which are on proprietary platforms. Learning to gather this information - from where, how, and what limits to place on it - is going to be the task of archivists but it will be up to researchers to understand how to interpret that patchwork of data. This book provides an excellent introduction to thinking about how we communicate in the early 21st century, alongside what it means for us to archive other species.
Listening: Keeping Dad Alive podcast : ‘Archives, Sibs and Toss’
I came across this episode last year when I was spending some time researching personal papers. It’s the finale of a podcast during the pandemic - I confess I haven’t listened to the rest of the episodes but this one functions as a standalone story, and a very moving one at that. Richard and Eunice Blanchard Poethig were both retired Presbyterian ministers. This episode explains both the practical and emotional process that their children went through in first sorting their archive, and then seeing it transferred to a memory institution.
They assign material to three disposition categories - Archive (which will go to a memory institution), Toss (which will go in the bin) and Sibs. The Sibs category includes all material about each of Richard and Eunice’s 5 children - letters they sent, certificates, drawings - ‘like shrines to each of our identities’.Of course, archivists we are well aware that archives are weeded but this podcast really lays bare some of those decisions about what does and doesn’t make it into an archive. Some are easy decisions, others end up in a 4th category for things they can’t quite bring themselves to get rid of.
As a profession we talk about ‘personal papers’, as opposed to those of businesses and organisations, and yet it’s often the personal that gets removed. There is obviously good reason for this, in terms of space, research interest and the privacy of others, but I’m not sure that the term ‘personal papers’ really conveys what researchers can expect to find. I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made here to Silent Whale Letters where Finer and Mascini adopt the mode of correspondence for its air of intimacy, despite always intending to publish. Looking through Eunice’s neatly written journals, her daughter remarks “She’s writing this for herself but she’s always writing this for it to be included in our legacy”.
In the end, 22 boxes (out of an initial 100) are taken to the Presbyterian Historical Society, despite the sisters confessing they know very little about what will happen to the material once it is in the archive. The podcast includes the sisters having a tour of the strongroom, and their surprise and delight at seeing the acid-free boxes in ‘the modern archive’. They remark: “we are, at some point, going to have to decide where their ashes go but this is where they really are resting, this is their intellectual work”.
The sisters head back, thinking they have completed their work but archivists won’t be surprised that there is one more box waiting for them. I won’t spoil it for you.
Bonus track: Undercover Autumn/Winter 2024 womenswear show [YouTube link]
Not quite a music recommendation this time but - as a nice postscript to Notebook on Cities and Clothes - Wenders not only walked in Yamamoto’s catwalk show this season, but also wrote and read a piece of prose which formed the backing track for Undercover’s womenswear show, ‘Watching A Working Woman’.
That’s all for this issue - work permitting I hope to get back on track with my newsletter schedule for the rest of the year. Although as we’ve just adopted two cats there are likely to be a lot of reading recommendations, as I can’t bear to leave the house anymore.
Anna