During processing, the question arose of how images and especially cinematographic images shape our visual memory and how we can intervene in this process with digital means. With international science and research guests, questions about the ethical handling of these images, the importance of witnessing to the culture of remembrance, and the “life after death” of images in the collective memory of cinema will be discussed in film screenings, lectures and debates .
international partners
It will start on January 27th at the Austrian Film Museum with the presentation entitled “Of Images of Extreme Violence and Digital Curating”, followed by the film “Remember” by Atom Agoyan. The 29th will be followed by a presentation “The Fortunoff Video Archive, Survivors and ‘Archival Activism'” and another film screening.
Over the past four years, the Visual History of the Holocaust project, coordinated by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History and the Austrian Film Museum, has explored media memory of the Holocaust together with partners from Germany, France, Israel and the United States. The focus was on the traces that recordings and photographs filmed by Allied cameramen, made during the liberation of concentration camps and other sites of National Socialist mass crimes, left in the audiovisual media.
445 reels of film and internet memes
Using newly partially developed digital technologies, 445 rolls of film totaling 67 hours of archives in the USA, Britain, Estonia and Russia were digitised, analyzed and cataloged and combined with later visual representations of the Holocaust – for example in feature films. and documentaries, but also in literature, video games and Internet memes – linked. An online database has been created in which researchers, students, educators, media designers and artists, as well as interested laypeople, can find the most important primary sources on the visual history of the Holocaust in one place for the first time.
“The technologies used in indexing go far beyond Holocaust research and are fundamentally changing the curatorial work of archives, libraries, museums and other institutions for the preservation of cultural heritage,” as Michael Loebenstein, director of the Austrian Film Museum, explained in advance. .