Stefan Ramstedt

I am a doctoral student in museology and am working on a project that focuses on the musealization of film. In this project, I am examining the changes that film underwent as it became a museum or archival object to be collected, preserved, and exhibited rather than discarded—something that often happened to film prints during the first decades of the 20th century.

Broadly speaking, the dissertation project consists of three parts, the first of which deals with the emergence of the Swedish Film Archive. The Swedish discourse on film preservation is here placed in relation to an international one, which forms the basis for an analysis of the Swedish Film Archive’s development from 1933 until the founding of the Swedish Film Institute and the establishment of a practice for collecting, preserving, and exhibiting film as museum objects in the country. This sub-study will examine how ideas about preservation and exhibition were established discursively by attributing artistic value to film, and how these ideas were later largely developed through practice.

This is followed by two more theoretical studies concerning the screening and restoration of film as museum objects. Taking the architectural design of the Filmhuset and its cinemas as a starting point, questions will be raised about what a museum film screening might entail. An attempt to synthesize a psychoanalytically and Marxistically informed film-theoretical conceptualization of film screening with an intellectual-historical and philosophical conceptualization of the museum exhibition (both of which have been treated as dispositif and apparatus) will constitute a central part of this sub-study.

The third and concluding part of the dissertation addresses issues of film preservation and restoration. Unlike many museum objects, film is something that is generally preserved through reproduction. Film is an object without an original, and since copies wear out when screened, reproduction is required for continued accessibility. This chapter, too, takes its starting point in the history of the Swedish Film Archive, and in particular the period when analog reproduction was supplemented by various forms of migration or transfer to analog video formats. Walter Benjamin was one of the first to discuss the political implications of the reproducibility of film (and photography), an issue that has gained even greater significance with the digitization of cultural heritage.

A direct and practical consequence of digitization is that the individual film print gets imbued with an aura of authenticity that Benjamin believed was alien to film as a reproducible art form. Despite the centrality of this issue and its significance for archival policy, it has been neglected in research on film archives and film museums; therefore, insights and questions here will instead be drawn from art history and the history of photography. The broader perspectives and technical diversity that emerge through these disciplinary horizons will later form the basis for a discussion of film’s reproducibility and whether the migration, transfer, conversion of digitization are compatible with current film museum practices, or whether we might instead view them as a regression to a pre-film-archival era when the content of specific films was ascribed certain instrumental values, at the same time as the material of digitization becomes ahistorical “content” in an algorithm-driven semiocapitalist reality.