Dissolves/Thawing

The various strands of this project aimed to open new lines of enquiry regarding the understanding of archival practice, at a time when it has increasingly become the catalyst for a number of exhibitions and new writing on the subject. I produced a text and video suggesting new possibilities for artists and writers working in this field. My own particular avenue of investigation involved the consideration of the obscured or even dysfunctional archival practices that can be found within cinematic material. My text discussed the necessity of “thawing” cinematic archival material, detaching it from its rigid historical applications so that it can fulfil its true “potential” as a means of interrogating the structure of film narrative itself. This was further explored in the video “Dissolves” which was commissioned for the exhibition, in which all the dissolves from the 1946 film “A Stolen Life” were isolated and re-edited together to form a compressed version of this classic Hollywood film, revealing the “hidden” visual narratives “frozen” there