Minoru: Memory of Exile. Dir. Michael Fukushima. DVD. National Film Board of Canada, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

Images and Texts Reproduced, XIth International IAWIS/AIERTI Conference. University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 10–14, 2017.

Founded in July 1987, the International Association of Word and Image Studies/Association Internationale pour l’Etude des Rapports entre Texte et Image (IAWIS/AIERTI) seeks to foster word and image studies within visual culture. The eleventh triennial IAWIS conference focused on the topic of "Images and Texts Reproduced" and explored the impact of reproduction/reproducibility on artistic and literary creation.

In this conference presentation, I discussed the implications of re-representing archival and photographic documents via animation in the autobiographical films I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010) and Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992). Below is my paper abstract.

ABSTRACT

“Unstoppable Development”: The Symbiosis Between Photography and Animated Film

Photography and animated film have long shared a common language. Developed in the dark room, drawn on a light box, both media are entrenched in a philosophical oratory of life and death. Through a close visual analysis of contemporary animated documentaries that incorporate photography – including Michael Fukushima’s Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992) and Ann Marie Fleming’s I Was A Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010) – this paper examines how animation can disrupt photographic materiality and process, what film theorist Kaja Silverman describes as the medium’s “unstoppable development.” Though the photograph is seemingly immobile, Silverman asserts that it is always a work in progress. If not through an evolution by light or through the fluctuations in its chemical stabilization, photographs continuously reconstitute themselves. This perspective complicates traditional valuations that relate photography to the death of the image. The photograph is envisioned not as a decaying representational mode but as a dynamic form in the midst of an ongoing evolution. The relationship between photography and animation in the cinematic examples explored in this research underscores this process of becoming. In these films, animation creates an additional lens through which we may view the photographic image: not only is the past ever present, it is ever changing.