Keywords

This contribution is conceived as a call to document festivals and cinematic events organized during the Covid-19 pandemic. As this volume makes clear, most festival organizers and curators were forced to stay at home: they pivoted to new platforms, experimented with digital possibilities, and reimagined the festival format. I argue that this proliferation of immediate, innovative online or hybrid festivals poses specific challenges for both amateur and professional archivists: most of the documents and webpages created by these festivals may be lost in the near future.

My insistence on the need to historicize Covid-19 may at first seem counter-intuitive: after all, most of us have experienced this pandemic as a somewhat traumatic historical “moment”—as something we will never “forget.” To that end, I am convinced that the affective dimensions, epidemiological facts, and political debates around Covid-19 will be properly documented and historicized. However, we may not fully remember how cultural organizers responded to the Covid-19 crisis: ephemeral and fleeting modes of cultural organizing are particularly difficult to archive (on archiving ephemeral cultural production; see Cvetkovich 2003; Eichhorn 2013).

This concern with the (gaps in the) festival archives largely stems from an interest in the methodological and epistemological parameters of festival studies. As scholars have recently made clear, archives matter not only because they contain historical “evidence” but also because they exemplify the mechanisms through which history can be thought and mobilized (see among others Scott 1991; Eichhorn 2013). Dagmar Brunow elegantly summarizes this issue:

Archives are not only storehouses of neutral material but play a crucial role in the construction of ‘historical sources’, of documents through selection, classification and categorization, for instance through meta-data. Thus, the archive itself is an agent in its own right. It entails a performative dimension in constructing documents and sources and, as a consequence, in creating the grounds from which history is written. (2015, 40)

These questions take on a particular significance when researching identity-related cultural production. As scholars working on minoritized histories know all too well, something always seems to be missing from the archives. Indeed, archives have historically neglected—and at times actively erased—the contributions of marginalized groups. In that content, researching minoritized cultural production often means having to both confront the “colonial, racist, and patriarchal structures that define which histories are deemed worthy of preservation” and imagine a wide array of documents that were never archived in the first place (Chew et al. 2018, 6; see also: Stoler 2009; Stone and Cantrell 2015; Dunbar 2006; Ramirez 2015; Thompson 2018).

Similarly, any conceptualization of festival archives requires us to ask a set of larger questions regarding the very status of festivals in the cultural sphere. Most crucially, we are urged to think about why some festivals ended up being archived and why others have been forgotten. In turn, these interrogations enable us to question our work as scholars: Which festivals do we center in our historical and theoretical endeavors? What seems to be missing from the historical record? What does this marginalization of some festivals says about knowledge production institutions?

I took on some of these historiographical and epistemological issues in my book, LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness (2020): I became fascinated with a wide range of cultural events that do not fit neatly with contemporary definitions of film festivals and that were not properly archived. In examining both the principles of organization of archives and the historiographical project of festival studies, I argued that the operative definitions used by both academic and archival practitioners participate in the marginalization of queer cinematic culture.Footnote 1 To put it succinctly: scholars and archives tend to prioritize festivals that happened several times (emphasizing longevity over ephemerality), that are organized by independent institutions (often neglecting events organized by businesses or by anonymous, diffuse collectives) and that adhere to a specific format (five to ten days of screenings organized in discrete units). A lot of cinematic events are usually overlooked because they do not correspond to preconceived ideas of film festivals. My goal, then, was to effectively “queer” festival studies: in taking seriously these ephemeral festivals, often only existing as archival traces, I hoped to both bring light to events overlooked by festival scholars and rework some of our main theoretical concepts.

While a full scope analysis of how these tacit parameters shape academic research on festivals clearly exceeds the scope of this chapter, I believe these questions are particularly urgent in pandemic times. Most festivals were forced to innovate—to experiment with or pivot to new format. However, festivals cannot be said to have been equally affected by Covid-19. As Marijke de Valck argues, large, international film festivals will likely survive the pandemic: as such, they benefit from major economic and social resources. Smaller and mid-sized festivals, however, may face additional difficulties. Mid-sized festivals are particularly at risk as they typically rely on ticket sales and sponsorships and may thus not be able to recover from a Covid-related lack of funds (de Valck 2020). Conversely, smaller festivals mostly depend on the precarious labor of volunteer organizers: they do not necessarily have the sort of resources that would be needed to access some of the professional services that are available to larger cultural events (see, in this book, Petrychyn).

In that context, this chapter is explicitly written as a call to focus on smaller, experimental, and/or minoritized festivals. To put it bluntly, no one will ever forget the history of major film festivals. There is, however, a risk that our archive won’t account for smaller festivals organized in Covid time—thus depriving us of a unique opportunity to consider these forms of cultural expression. Conversely, I argue that the current crisis provides us with a unique opportunity to expand our understanding of festivals: as such, most of the events organized at the height of the pandemic did not necessarily aim to replicate the offline festival format. This proliferation of innovative events will fundamentally complicate the work of historians: some events will likely not be archived as festivals.

A Few Elements of Context: Archiving Pre-digital Festivals

In arguing that we need to develop strategies for archiving and historicizing Covid-19-related cultural events, I do not aim to suggest that festivals were sufficiently archived before the onset of the crisis. Writing the history of festivals is a complicated matter: while a few large events are well documented, most festivals are not properly archived (Damiens 2020). In particular, the festival format does not lend itself well to archiving: festivals are ephemeral live events that cannot be reproduced at a later date (Harbord 2009). While archives contain documents edited by and written on festivals (Dayan 2000), they cannot account for the festival experience.Footnote 2 Archives necessarily offer a partial view of the festival phenomenon: they are often limited to specific textual discourses (such as catalogs, press releases, and newspaper articles) edited by the institution itself or, more rarely, by journalists. In that context, historians are forced to work with festival ephemera that tell us little about the actual festival as it happened (Zielinski 2016). These documents, for instance, rarely account for festival-goers’ experiences. As historical evidence, they mostly present us with an institutional perspective on festivals.

Most archives on festivals come from one of two sources: someone (usually a film critic or a scholar) who kept documents they gathered at various festivals they attended or a festival itself. In the first case, archival collections tend to reflect the collector’s participation in festival culture: typically, the archive will contain the catalogs of the festivals they attended, thereby documenting their movement in the festival circuit. In other words, these collections often exemplify connections among festivals. They rarely include organizational documents: their scope is often limited to a few catalogs from disparate festivals. Collections started by festivals tend to include a greater variety of documents: catalogs, of course, but also press releases, budgets, meeting minutes, and letters from and to other stakeholders. Unfortunately, these collections are quite rare: festival organizers often do not have the material resources needed to preserve their documents. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that not all festivals are committed to preserving their own history: a lot of festivals may, for one reason or another, not want to be historicized.Footnote 3

In any case, the preservation of a festival’s documents is largely a function of its material resources. Most festivals have relatively small operating budgets. They are often run by volunteers or underpaid cultural workers (Loist 2011) who do not have time to focus on preserving the history of a festival. In some cases, workers are the sole custodians of a festival’s institutional memory: a lot of information can be lost when festival workers retire or leave the organization.Footnote 4

Similarly, one must consider the capacity of an organization to stock physical documents: while festivals produce a plethora of documents, they do not necessarily have the physical space needed to preserve them (Dayan 2000; for a more general analysis of the challenges posed by proliferation of paper documents, see Gitelman 2014). In most cases, several festival workers share a small office—de facto limiting the amount of space that can be allocated to stocking paper. Furthermore, festivals are often forced to move their operation from one site to another. In the process, they may have to downsize and/or get rid of documents. Kay Armatage summarizes the situation:

With a few exceptions, women’s film festivals have usually existed on intermittent or volunteer labour, government grants and community centre venues and without permanent institutional homes. Like Toronto Women & Film 1973, often they have been one-off events. Thus they have come and gone, with their erstwhile founders caching old catalogues in their basements (if they had basements) or not at all. (Armatage 2009, 83)

Furthermore, the temporality of festival organizing isn’t particularly conducive to archiving. Indeed, festivals are cyclical events often ran with a sense of urgency (Harbord 2009, 2016). Festival workers’ priority is always the organization of a festival’s next edition. Working for a festival entails being constantly worried about the near-future—it is about securing films and venues, negotiating sponsors, and publicizing upcoming events. Put another way, there is a fundamental tension between the temporalities of archiving and historicizing (thinking of festivals as institutions solidified over the years; using documents as historical evidence) and the reality of festival organizing (constantly working on a festival’s next edition; using documents as a means to achieve near-future goals). Tellingly, some of the documents historians and archives rely on have little value to festival organizers: as Ger Zielinski argues, festivals are ephemeral by design; texts and catalogs are often discarded once a festival is over (2016).

“If It’s Not on Paper, It Doesn’t Exist At All”: Unintended Consequences of the Digital Revolution

Throughout my pre-Covid research, I was already struck by the fact that recent festival editions tend to be less documented than older ones. Since the archival collections I consulted were constituted quite recently, I had assumed that I would find a lot of contemporary documents: after all, festivals rarely preserve their own archive and paper documents are easy to lose or damage! This was not the case: these archives only contained a few documents on recent festival editions, in most cases just a catalog.

This relative absence of recent documents can be linked to major technological shifts that fundamentally altered festival organizers’ daily activities. Indeed, archives typically contain documents that organizers needed to preserve such as receipts, meeting minutes, internal memos, and phone logs. Most importantly, festivals often archived their correspondence with partner organizations: the letters they sent to and received from filmmakers and stakeholders were often preserved in labeled folders. In other words, festival organizers kept these documents not because they wanted to constitute an archival collection, but because they were useful and could be easily sorted and stored in folders and boxes. These preserved documents constitute the bulk of archival collections. Importantly, they often ended up in archival collections by happenstance: “forgotten” boxes of documents can be, for instance, donated years after they were written. This typically happens when a festival moves its office location, stops its operation, or when someone who collected documents moves or dies.

With the popularization of the personal computer and the Internet, a lot of these documents no longer need to be safeguarded on physical paper: they can be typed and saved on hard drives and servers. The ability to easily create and stock organizational files on a device often paradoxically creates a gap in the archive: dematerialized files are rarely archived. Indeed, archiving digital files requires a lot of conscious decisions on the part of both archivists and festival organizers: after all, working computers and hard drive need to be given to an archival collection. Given that computers and hard drives can break easily, they cannot be “found” and donated years after the fact. These strategies affect not only the volume of documents given to archives but also the content of archival collections. In particular, the dematerialization of festival operation may lead to new ethical concerns around privacy: for instance, while traditional archives often contain personal correspondences, organizers rarely archive or give access to their email accounts.

Furthermore, dematerialized documents pose specific challenges to archival institutions. As such, digital files are not particularly archival friendly: computers and hard drives are time-sensitive media that can easily become unusable. Technology can quickly be outdated. Files written a decade ago may no longer be readable. The history of audiovisual formats is here a fascinating example: a lot of archives cannot read (let alone transfer) some of their holdings as the devices needed to play them are no longer manufactured. The situation is quite similar for digital files: archives may not be equipped to read files contained on floppy disks or ZIP drives (McKinney 2020, 167–71; Astle and Muir 2002). Furthermore, files can be corrupted or may no longer be compatible with contemporary software.

Overall, archiving dematerialized files requires a lot of financial and human resources: these documents have to be stocked on costly archival servers or drives and to be migrated to new formats on a regular basis to avoid becoming damaged or unreadable. Since this process takes a lot of time, archives will be forced to prioritize some documents over others. This may be an issue for documents pertaining to smaller festivals or preserved at smaller archives. This constant obsolescence of technology is important to keep in mind, especially given that we traditionally think of computers as machines that can almost perpetually stock a large number of documents—as archiving our textual production.

In addition to changing festivals’ relationship to archives, technology has led to the development of new forms of festival documents. In particular, festivals’ social media accounts and websites have quickly become a major source of information for festival scholars: they contain a wealth of information that can be accessed everywhere. Furthermore, festival websites often aim to narrate a festival’s history. They may even include an “archive” section, typically containing scanned pdfs of past catalogs or links toward older versions of a website. Unfortunately, these “archive” sections are never truly archival: as such, there is no guarantee that these documents will be available in the future. Websites are not a stable entity: they can be updated and rewritten, thus erasing earlier content. Similarly, organizers have generally no interest in renewing the domain name and server of festivals that ceased to exist: it is often impossible to access the website of defunct festivals.Footnote 5

In that context, the dematerialization of festival documents may lead to a new archival crisis. Indeed, festivals are increasingly uploading a maximum of documents online in an effort to reduce printing costs and to offer innovative, user-friendly experiences. For instance, the experimental queer film festival MIX NYC decided in 2015 to get rid of their paper catalog: hoping to save money, they created a mobile-friendly website that enabled festival-goers to conveniently read film synopses, create a custom festival schedule, and buy tickets. In 2016, the festival was confronted to a major institutional crisis, which lead to the election of a new board and to a complete overhaul of MIX NYC’s mission and communication. The website was entirely redesigned: the 2015 catalog can no longer be accessed. This gap in the MIX NYC archive may be particularly damaging for international curators and filmmakers: since MIX NYC was one of the main venues for experimental queer shorts, catalogs were a treasured resource that could be used as a sort of archive of experimental and/or short cinematic production.

Archiving Festivals Organized During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Festivals organized during the Covid-19 pandemic also poses specific challenges to historians and archivists. Indeed, the pandemic forges an interesting momentum because it accelerates the crisis of archiving that is linked to the digitization of film festivals. Most notably, the popularity of online screenings will force us to think about festivals’ relationship to platform economies. Indeed, most festival organizers decided to host their event on already established streaming platforms such as Vimeo and Eventive (or, in the context of adult film festivals, PinkLabel, see Chap. 8), de facto shifting part of their organizational burden to private companies. Although these platforms are often rhetorically positioned as the virtual equivalent of the theater (a site of exhibition), they cannot be thought of as neutral intermediaries. As Marc Steinberg and Joshua Neves make clear (2020), these platforms are fundamentally in the business of convenience: offering a sense of immediacy and comfort, they position themselves as a form of essential service (a “safer” option than the theaters) that “set the terms for how we inhabit and respond to the current crisis.” This, however, should not obscure the fact that these platforms are service providers: their relationship with festival organizers is clearly delimited in time. Given the cost of data storage, these platforms have no interest in preserving a festival’s content after the event: documents and webpages created for a festival only exist for a set amount of time. The tension between the convenience afforded by platforms and their ephemerality can be particularly damaging: some festivals, confronted to the crisis, did not even maintain their own website. In that context, a lot of materials created by festivals organized during Covid-19 may already be lost: unless they were saved by festival organizers, documents hosted on a platform (e.g., presentation videos created for the festival and post-screening chats with filmmakers and organizers) are no longer accessible.

Furthermore, archives were heavily impacted by the pandemic. As such, Covid-19 affected the volume and scope of information that can be processed and archived. Many libraries closed for a couple of months. Budgets (conditioning the acquisition of new collections) were frozen, staff members (who do the work of archiving) were furloughed (see, e.g., Roe 2020). While amateur archivists and festival enthusiasts may have collected some documents, these efforts were far from systematic. Furthermore, archiving digital content requires specific competences. Without consistent protocols and “without metadata, archives risk becoming attics, their contents perhaps preserved but largely unseen and unused” (Tebeau 2021). Rapid-response archival projects such as A Journal of the Plague Year aim to capture a wide range of digital materials that would otherwise be forgotten. These projects, which often pay particular attention to disenfranchised cultural expressions, will capture several ephemeral festivals. However, these collections are fundamentally detached from traditional archives and may thus be overlooked by future scholars.

In any case, archives are always partial: they will likely not include documents that detail festival-goers’ experiences with Covid-related festivals or that explain the decision processes and steps that led some festival organizers to pivot—two elements that will likely seem particularly relevant to future scholars. Conversely, we may need to find new ways of archiving absence: as such, we have yet to develop mechanisms to distinguish between what is not archived and the fact that there wasn’t anything to archive in the first place—between the absence of documents on festivals that happened and the fact a festival did not happen. This may pose a serious methodological issue to future scholars: a lack of documentation will not necessarily mean that a festival “skipped a year” (a similar issue is raised in Zielinski 2016).

Overall, this crisis will require us to think about the temporalities of crises in relationship to both archiving and knowledge production. To some extent, festivals organized during the Covid-19 pandemic have been understood to be “exceptional” responses to the pandemic—to be unusual, ephemeral events that, ultimately, won’t matter once the situation is resolved and we are back to “normal.” As a form of emotional labor, rapid-response archiving is marked by this same sense of urgency and exceptionality: we feel (rightly so) compelled to document our “moment” before it becomes “too late.” This focus on immediacy, on an unfolding crisis defined in opposition to “normal” times, may have unintended consequences. In particular, it is worth wondering what will happen when/if we become accustomed to a crisis that never seems to end: will we still work on theorizing and historicizing these festivals if they are revealed to be not “exceptional” but rather our “new normal”? Can we still find a sense of urgency and of value in our work once pandemic fatigue sets in? Conversely, our focus on pandemic festivals as anomalies somewhat detached from the longue durée of festival histories may prevent us from seeing some form of continuity and/or thinking about the afterlives of crises. As Marijke de Valck and I argued elsewhere, “Covid-19 cannot be understood apart from other crises. (…) The current pandemic precipitates, accentuates, and/or transforms other (social, economic, and political) crises” (2020). How do we account for the temporalities and the material effects of these intersecting crises—in particular in terms of how they affect both festival organizing and archiving?

In focusing on the intersection between two crises—epidemiological and archival—this chapter hopes to draw attention to the historiographical dimension of our own practice. As such, the pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to not only reassess the festival toolbox and question some of our theoretical assumptions, but also to develop a new commitment to historicizing and theorizing various ephemeral forms of cultural organizing that would otherwise likely be forgotten. In both pandemic and normal times, festival archiving cannot be left to the responsibility of festival organizations: it often requires the cooperation of a wide variety of stakeholders, including archivists and scholars.

Thinking about the temporality of academic writing may here be a good starting point: after all, our scholarship not only bring theoretical light to particular objects but also consecrate them as worthy of attention. In focusing on particular festivals, using them as case studies or examples, scholars participate in the symbolic economy of knowledge production and preservation: academic research fundamentally gives a new life to our objects of study—simultaneously validating and reproducing them through critical analysis (Wiegman 2011). Put another way, scholars focus on some festivals because they believe that these events matter. Our work legitimizes these events, presents them as paradigmatic examples that illustrate our theoretical endeavors, and in so doing ultimately grants them symbolic capital. In turn, our scholarship retrospectively becomes evidence of the importance of a festival: our books and articles will be read in the future as historical sources that contain detailed information on some festivals that mattered.Footnote 6 Here, my goal is not to position scholars as archivists, but rather to understand how our work contains a form of counterarchival impulse: our scholarship not only documents our present but also calls forth particular lifeworlds (Chew et al. 2018).Footnote 7

These questions take on a particular significance in pandemic times. The current pandemic makes clear that we should develop forms of scholarship that both “document and think through this ongoing crisis as it unfolds” (de Valck and Damiens 2020). Set somewhere between the longue durée of academic scholarship and the constant sense of urgency, such rapid-response projects provide us with already-outdated perspectives on already-forgotten festivals. Philipp Dominik Keidl and Laliv Melamed make a similar point in their introduction to the edited collection Pandemic Media:

Whilst the pandemic enabled the emergence of ephemeral and inchoate expressions, an outcome of a mode of transition that the crisis mobilizes, their ephemerality became evident while we were working on the volume between April and September 2020. Between the process of reviewing the essays throughout the summer and writing the introduction in early fall, some amateur videos have already disappeared from the virtual sphere, comments have been deleted from social media, new technologies designed to contain the virus have evolved, social responses have shifted from comprehension to anger, and conspiracy theories have questioned the validity of science and expert opinions. As such, this volume is the outcome of a form of “pandemic scholarship,” representing a certain moment of change as much as it is aware of the effects of the crisis on its own operations. (Keidl and Melamed 2020)

As a coherent edited collection, this book can largely be understood as an attempt to historicize an ongoing crisis: it simultaneously aims to theorize our present and to provide a partial account of some festivals organized during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In positioning this book as an archive of sorts—testifying to festival organizers’ resourcefulness and historicizing scholars’ responses to the crisis—I hope this contribution will incite readers to take seriously the need to document and theorize ephemeral festivals during and after pandemic times.