Keynote: A Plea for a Global Approach to Audiovisual Heritage

Giovanna Fossati, Eye Filmmuseum 
Thursday, November 18, 2021  |  9:00am (Pacific)

An alarming misrepresentation of our global audiovisual heritage is occurring in the digital space. While audiovisual archives in richer countries, in particular in Europe and North America, are eagerly digitizing their national heritage, their counterparts in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are lagging behind. The keynote will focus on one of the most urgent challenges for our field today: working together towards a truly global and inclusive approach to audiovisual heritage that overcomes national perspectives.

Giovanna Fossati is the Chief Curator at Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) where she supervises a collection of more than 50,000 titles. She is also Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam where she has taught in the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Program since it was established, in 2003.

Fossati is the author of From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press, 2009 and 2018 – revised edition), co-author with Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), co-editor with Annie van den Oever of Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), and co-editor of the volume The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Her book From Grain to Pixel has also been translated into Spanish (in Argentina and Spain) and into Italian.

Recently, Fossati has acted as guest editor, together with Floris Paalman and Eef Masson, for the special issue of The Moving Image journal focusing on “Activating the Archive” (Vol. 21, No. 1-2, 2021).