The Body, the Film, the Archive and the Monster

Paper presented during the roundtable “The Exquisite Corpus: Film Heritage and Found Footage Films. Passing Through/Across Medias and Film Bodies” at the XIV MAGIS – Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School in Gorizia, Italy, March 9-15 2016

In the digital age, the body of the film resonates as a new cinematic experience. Digital angst is represented by “archival excess” and brings researchers back to the core object of their disciplines: the film and the archive. Far from weighing down this argument, some artists are playing with the materiality of analogue film as much as they work on the virtual materiality of digital films. These works incarnate some kind of monstrous knowledge, at the fringe of sublime and dread, and reminding us of the film as an archive, as a cinematic and affective body, ruled by a physical, technical and institutional realm.