By Coraline Refort, with Rose Albayat, David Besson, Yuki Irikura, Alexandra Moralesova, Graham Paull, Vanessa Weller, and Silvia Zoppis
In 2016, Domitor inaugurated a new tradition: organizing a two-day graduate workshop preceding the society’s biennial conference. After two successful events in 2016 in Stockholm and 2018 in Rochester, the workshop was put on pause in 2020 and 2022, as the conference was hosted virtually. Returning in 2024, preceding the conference in Vienna, the workshop gave thirteen master’s and doctoral students with a wide range of research interests and backgrounds the opportunity to discover certain practical aspects of early cinema as well as present their research and receive advice from eminent scholars in the field. This blog post recounts their experiences.
We met Monday morning at the Austrian Film Museum, our hosts for the conference. After a round of brief introductions, we set off for Laxenburg, a town about 20 km south of Vienna, to see the film collections of Filmarchiv Austria. We had the opportunity to meet the archive’s director, Dr. Nikolaus Wostry, who welcomed us warmly into his office, where he displayed a portion of the archive’s remarkable collection of projectors. We learned more about the workings of the archives and their recent discoveries, and a great deal of attention was devoted to projection equipment, which was a rare opportunity to learn more about an aspect of early cinema that is all too often neglected. The intricate details and historical significance of the projectors were particularly captivating for Coraline Refort, research fellow at University of Sassari (Sardinia), who just completed her PhD focused on the French filmography of Alice Guy, as the projectors offered her a deeper insight into the technological challenges likely faced by early filmmakers like Guy. Dr. Wostry’s discussion of the archive’s activities was also of great interest to Silvia Zoppis, a third-year PhD student at the University of Udine, who appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the dynamics of collection management of a significant archive.
Visiting the Filmarchiv’s nitrate film repository on the first day of the workshop.
After admiring the projectors, we were escorted to the building housing the archive’s collection of nitrate films, which has a unique design feature in being made entirely of wood: paradoxically, this is a safer material in case of a nitrate fire, as the building “just” burns down instead of exploding… The Filmarchiv’s nitrate vault is the first film archive depot using wood for its construction, and the design was inspired by finding nitrate films that had been stored in Japanese wooden boxes to be in very good condition. This contemporary construction combines the natural properties of wood with the practice of ecologically sustainable architecture to create an energetically passive building. Vanessa Weller, a third-year PhD student at Michigan State University, found this particularly enlightening, and wondered whether this type of design could or should be adopted more widely by other national film archives.
After our tour, we returned to the main building one last time, to watch a carbon arc projection of some early films. Dr. Wostry carefully explained the carbon arc projection mechanism, before giving us a demonstration and allowing volunteers to carefully turn on and run the projector. The hands-on experience with this robust opto-mechanical and electric apparatus of projection was intriguing for Alexandra Moralesova, a PhD student at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague about to complete her dissertation on the materialist gesture within contemporary photochemical experimental film, whose interest in technologies’ shift from operativity to performativity is inspired by media archaeology. Similarly, the hands-on experience was especially stimulating for Rose Albayat, an independent researcher whose research-based creative practice is informed by and engages with the history of early media technologies. Finally, Dr. Wostry took us to a Heuriger (an Austrian small wine bar), where we discussed the highlights of our visit and got to know each other better, before heading back to Vienna.
Workshop participants Alex Lilburn, Sancler Ebert, and Baoqi Liu operating a carbon arc projector under Nikolaus Wostry’s supervision.
On the following day, back at the Austrian Film Museum, we each had the opportunity to give brief presentations about our research. Dr. Ian Christie, co-convener of this year’s workshop, provided indispensable feedback for each individual presentation, asking incisive questions and pointing us in new directions. In the afternoon, we were also joined by Drs. Dimitrios Latsis, Louis Pelletier, and Céline Ruivo, who presented some of their own research and answered our questions. Thanks to this part of the workshop, each student received valuable feedback from these mentors and the other participants, which helped provide our projects with new perspectives.
In the afternoon, we visited the Prater Museum, dedicated to the eventful past of the Prater Vienna amusement park. Until May 2023, the museum was located inside the park’s planetarium, before moving to its new location, which we had the privilege of visiting just a few weeks after its inauguration. Visiting these two disparate places—the Filmarchiv and the Prater Museum—was like binding together two ends of the phenomenon of cinema, one end corresponding to the preconditions of cinema and the other to its material fate and future. David Besson, a first-year PhD student at Université Lumière-Lyon-II, particularly appreciated this concrete re-contextualization of early cinema: it was a chance to reconnect and revisit the primordial conditions of cinema’s emergence, namely fairground attractions, especially as his research into the pirate film genre led him to observe the endurance of a link between cinema and attractions that still goes on today.
In the Prater Museum lobby on the second day of the workshop. From left to right: Martin Kos, Sancler Ebert, Hugo Ljungbäck (Domitor secretary), David Besson, Vanessa Weller, Silvia Zoppis, Graham Paull, Coraline Refort, Baoqi Liu, Yuki Irikura, Ana Szel, Alex Lilburn, Rose Albayat, and Céline Ruivo (Domitor vice president).
The next day, the intensive four-day conference began, with eighteen panels and five screening sessions hosted throughout the rest of the week. The conference’s theme, “A Long Early Cinema?” opened the field for a diverse reflection on the meaning and impact of early cinema today. Papers and screenings focusing on avant-garde perspectives and practices drawing on early cinema were among the most inspiring contributions for Moralesova, whose work on contemporary materialist experimental cinema explores the return to the film pioneers and reinvention of artisanal practices. The panel on sound was particularly helpful for Yuki Irikura, who recently completed her PhD on the American film company Bluebird Photoplays, Inc. and its influence in Japan, and whose current work focuses on the soundscapes of early Japanese cinema and the film industry’s relationship to radio broadcasting and gramophone records.
Graham Paull, a recent Columbia University M.A. graduate whose work centers on human-animal relations as mediated by the cinema, was struck by a moment of collective laughter during Oliver Gaycken’s presentation on scientific film, instigated by a jumping frog, which helped him think through audiences’ affectual responses to animals on screen. The presentations on videographic and digital scholarship were also particularly inspiring for Albayat, whose own research-based practice has included reconstructing Georges Méliès’ studio using 3D modeling and virtual reality.
While the workshop itself was an invaluable experience, we believe future iterations could be enhanced by incorporating a few suggestions. For instance, we would appreciate the opportunity to present our work to a broader Domitor audience and to be introduced at the beginning of the conference to ensure greater visibility, making it easier for us to connect with other scholars throughout the rest of the conference. More structured guidelines for our own presentations, and the possibility of being paired with a mentor specializing in our research areas to provide tailored advice, would also make for a more beneficial experience.
That said, we would like to conclude by underlining the remarkably eclectic nature of the workshop’s members. Indeed, the group of graduate students who participated in the Domitor workshop was remarkable in the great variety of profiles, nationalities, and research interests represented. Meeting with people at different stages in their academic lives and coming from different cultures and countries was a priceless and enriching experience. The thirteen of us came from all parts of the globe, including Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Japan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, with many people studying abroad. Having the opportunity to talk about our projects was a great pleasure, and those of us who are not native speakers of English appreciated being able to express ourselves in a non-native language without worrying about criticism. The workshop also allowed us to see the possibilities of our scholarship reaching a wide audience and showed us the wonderful camaraderie available in the early cinema community. The most impactful part of the workshop was exchanging about our life experiences and cultures, either on the way to the archives and the museum, around a drink in a picturesque Austrian winery, or at a restaurant in the city center later in the week, which gave us invaluable insight into the global nature of both early cinema studies and of the current and future membership of Domitor.