ABSTRACT: Premiered in a Stalinist show-trial in 1947, the overlooked East German Holocaust film Todeslager Sachsenhausen (Death Camp Sachsenhausen) is treated at length for the first time in English. Using the framework of Jaimie Baron’s archive effect and drawing on archival records to chart the film’s production and contested reception through the end of the twentieth century, this article maps the complex and contradictory discourses of authenticity and archivality that defined its use and reuse as they intersect with volatile notions of history during German division and reunification. Analysis of the film’s heterogeneously authentic sources leads to the discovery that it was the first Holocaust film written by a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

abstract: This article investigates how the Turkish Cinematheque Association (1965–80) fostered an idea of cinematic internationalization that resulted in a fierce criticism of the Yeşilçam period, the golden age of domestic film production in Turkey from the 1950s to the 1980s. Drawing on archival sources like journals and magazines, the article discusses how this criticism led to a heated debate in which different actors, groups, and institutions offered conflicting proposals for how a Turkish national cinema should be formed. I examine how this debate transformed into a conflict over cultural imperialism and Westernization, which deepened the rift within the Turkish intelligentsia.

abstract: This article reviews the configuration of Cinemateca Uruguaya, addressing the disputes between film club groups during its emergence as well as its film acquisition processes, relationships with peripheral film club circuits, early exhibition practices, and its role in the assembly of Latin American associations that housed film archives. For this purpose, we review the literature dealing with this process and analyze documentary materials that showcase its international links. By describing the limited functions of the organization during its first stage, from 1952 to the mid-1960s, we highlight the importance of the personal links through which the institutionalization of the created organization was sought. This journey enables us to account for the fragile regional alliances and roles of actors in the general geopolitics of the framework of the International Federation of Film Archives.

abstract: The film society in Shumen, founded in 1926, was among the first in Bulgaria to have an amateur-filmmaking club. The society's cameraman was a local photographer, and the projectionist from one of the town's cinemas became its film director. Two of Shumen's earliest amateur films survived: An Adventure in Indiana (1937), a naive "tribute" to Indian Westerns, and Madara (1940), a documentary about an ancient sanctuary and proto-Bulgarian cult center. Still in existence to this day, the film club in Shumen confirms the evolution of the amateur movement in Bulgaria: a trajectory that went from film culture dissemination to active filmmaking.

This article contributes to scholarship on small-gauge and home cinema by situating the advent of the Pathé Baby within interwar French politics and society. Through close analysis of period advertising, it argues that Pathé mobilized pronatalist and imperialist discourses to make 9.5mm home projection and filmmaking attractive to white, middle-class, metropolitan consumers, presenting home cinema as means of encountering the French Empire on the one hand and of promoting the so-called French race on the other. In drawing such connections, the study also seeks to enrich the growing body of scholarship on the entanglement of domestic cinema, gender, empire, and race.

This article defines the pursuing woman plot in romantic comedies and traces how this narrative trope developed in American silent cinema. Though scholars characterize the women in later screwball comedies as uniquely progressive for dominating their courtships with men, this assertive heroine first flourished in the 1910s as part of a larger industry effort to craft feature-length comedies for female viewers. As the film industry increasingly relied upon romantic comedies for feature-length humor, depictions of sexually aggressive women shifted from grotesque inconveniences to modern role models. The films' reliance upon changing dating practices complicates notions of silent situation comedies' genteel humor.

Federal funding increases under the Kennedy-Johnson administration allowed art museums to produce videos that were intended to provide a useful experience to museum visitors. Educators at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago drew from experience with film and slides while creating video presentation spaces. At the same time, reliance on public funding left useful video open to negative economic impacts during the 1980s and 1990s. Andrea Fraser's Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) and Inaugural Speech (1997) appropriate institutional video to critique the paternalistic legacy of educational media and the corporatization of museums.

This article explores the complex response to Italian neorealism and the various roles the movement assumed in Soviet culture, particularly during the Khrushchev thaw (1956–64). I propose that neorealism threatened the primacy of socialist realism, functioned to reinforce the position of the Soviet Union as the global authority on realism, activated rehabilitation discourse of the 1920s avant-garde, and illuminated the role film criticism had in knowledge production around neorealist cinema. In particular, the article focuses on the notion of curious absence, referring to the films that were viewed at rare screenings, such as special events, leaving momentary traces in a range of discourses that informed the local vibrant film culture of the 1950s and early 1960s.