![]() ![]() ( 2 ) It enables us to think beyond recuperation and preservation, beyond text and context, beyond physical artefacts and archives. Like the “flâneuse” in Catherine Russell’s parallax historiography, the remix is an “impossible concept” and a hyperbolic counter-model. In taking early and silent film as its raw material, the remix reveals, albeit imperfectly and indirectly, the false analogies and figures that have inhabited these histories for more than three decades. I argue that the remix is a metahistorical work, a mode of historical expression that is fundamentally about film artefacts and historical telling. ![]() Rather, I explore what the remix tells us about film objects and film historiography. I do not read the remix as the genealogical descendent of early twentieth-century film forms or the re-emergence of a cinematic lineage that has been hibernating underground. That is, I am not interested in what remixing might share with historical film practices like montage, collage, and bricolage, with modernist modes of fragmentation and détournement. I rethink the historical continuities and affinities that have been drawn between old and new media, film history and digital technology. In this essay, I take the remix as a starting point for engaging the intersection between film objects, early and silent film historiographies, and contemporary visual culture. What do these revisions do to and for the film object? What kind of histories do they tell (or repeat)? And: where does the remix belong in the archive? For its part, the EYE Film Institute uses its remix platform as a form of community outreach and a promotional tool for its “real” archival content, an approach that both confirms a hierarchy of historical value and inadvertently generates new forms of digital detritus: the orphan offspring of orphaned originals. But the remix also raises crucial questions for film historians. These remixes mark the contemporary proliferation of digital film archives and video-sharing platforms as numerous film institutes have joined the Netherlands and made significant portions of their collections digital, streamable, and downloadable. Youtube and Vimeo are bursting with audiovisual experiments in early and orphan film, as well as reassemblages of the silent canon. ![]() Hundreds (maybe thousands) of amateur remixes have multiplied alongside these institutional and professional adventures in remix culture. ![]() This is only the beginning of new beginnings for the origins of the moving image. Whyte refers to these works as “glitches” and describes them as “rhythmic events” that reveal the impermanence of both audio and visual artefacts. More recently, Scottish electro-acoustic musician Ross Whyte has joined early archival images with the sounds of audio accidents and mechanical malfunctions. The work was automatically generated by custom software that matched the length of each frame to the audio data from the soundtrack. That same year, Chandler McWilliams, an independent artist and software designer created Silent, a flickering combination of frames from the canon of silent cinema. Miller (aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) debuted a remix of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Glaz (1924) and Kino Pravda series at the State Hermitage Museum in St. The site allows users to download and upload films, remix this content using EYE’s own online software, and share remixed works through Open Images, a platform developed by the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision. In 2012, EYE Film launched, a website devoted to expanding the collection of EYE film fragments, as well as the participatory practice of remixing. The remixes were shared using Creative Commons licenses, inviting future users to remix the remixes ad infinitum. In 2009, Amsterdam’s EYE Film Institute invited the public to remix twenty-one film fragments from its collection of early Dutch films. I hope history can realize that its significance is not in universal ideas, like some sort of blossom or fruit, but that its value comes directly from reworking a well-known, perhaps habitual theme, a daily melody, in a stimulating way, elevating it, intensifying it to an inclusive symbol, and thus allowing one to make out in the original theme an entire world of profundity, power, and beauty. ![]()
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