Hybrid europeana
Notes on (Theatre) Photo Archives
Jan Baetens and Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Abstract
Archives are cultural practices rather than just an accumulation of historical paraphernalia. Moreover, they are characterized by a fundamentally performative nature: rather than documenting historical reality, they co-create that very same reality. This is even more true for theatre archives that document events that have since long disappeared. Taking the recently digitized photo collection of the Slovakian Theatre Institute as its starting point, this article will address different questions pertaining to one specific type of archival source, the theatre photo, while at the same time analyzing the different methodological questions relevant to these types of archival collections and the ways in which these questions are necessarily entangled with questions of national identity and cultural memory. By means of a contextual analysis of the phenomenon of the photo archive, we will analyse different questions such as the actual status of the ‘users’ and ‘makers’ of these kinds of archives, the nature of the material object to be found in this collection and the digitization of these same objects.
Résumé
Une archive est une pratique culturelle, non la simple accumulation de documents historiques. De plus, une archive est une structure fondamentale performative : elle ne se contente pas de garder des traces de l’histoire, elle est aussi ce qui crée cette histoire. Cette leçon s’applique aussi aux archives théâtrales, qui conservent des documents sur des événements oubliés ou évanouis. Cet article prend comme exemple la collection récemment numérisée de l’Institut théâtral de Slovaquie pour poser une série de questions que soulève un type d’archive singulière, la photographie théâtrale, tout en examinant un certain nombre de problèmes méthodologiques liés à ce genre d’archives et aux questions d’identité nationales et de mémoire culturelle qui s’y trouvent inextricablement liées. À l’aide d’une analyse contextuelle, on essaiera ici d’analyser plus en détail le statut de ceux qui « faisaient » tout comme de ceux qui « utilisaient » ce type d’archives, la nature exacte des objets matériels qui s’y trouvent ainsi que les politiques de numérisation contemporaines.
Keywords
cultural memory, digitization, event, national identity, performance, Slovakian Republic, theatre, theatre photography
Different Archives, Different Questions
In both critical theory and cultural studies, theoretical research on the notion of the archive is since long a well-established field of inquiry as well as a locus of social, political, philosophical contestation. From the late 1970s on, new interest in this age-old topic was raised at the encounter of several, mutually enriching research dimensions. First, Michel Foucault’s work on the archaeology of knowledge and the determining influence of the underlying rules, which he called the archive, about what could be said and hence thought within a given discursive framework (Foucault 1982). Second, Jürgen Habermas’s thinking on the public sphere, and his efforts to reinvent new forms of democracy (Habermas 1991). Third, more specifically in the field of aesthetics, the rise of institutional critique, namely the critical reflection on the role played by institutions in the making and unmaking of artistic as well as commercial value (Meyer 1993). Four, and perhaps more generally, the dramatic scholarly, pedagogic, and political interest for heritage and memory studies (Erll and Nünning, 2008).
Almost immediately, this return to the archive as an object of historical analysis became one of the key issues in the resistance against formalist, art-historical, technological and semiotic perspectives, in short the non-contextual and socially non-committed approaches that had proved vital to the promotion of photography as a serious object of study in the post-World War II period. Authors such as Victor Burgin, Alan Sekula, and John Tagg, to name just the most influential ones, published ground-breaking essays emphasizing the constructive and performative function of the archive’s identification, classification, and analysis, as a way of disciplining, first the content of the archive itself, second the society to which the archive was addressed (for an overview, see Wells 2003 and 2004).
Since this initial outburst of creative and critical thinking on the archive, two major shifts have occurred, which both continue and question the typical postmodern view of archive studies. On the one hand, the very notion of the archive has been subjected to deep philosophical and medium-theoretical rereading, chiefly in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, which reinterprets the archive in terms of the Freudian death drive (1998), and in Wolfgang Ernst Digital Memory and the Archive (2012), whose concept of the ‘anarchive’ makes the claim that in modern (i.e. digital and digitally searchable) archives, it is no longer the archive that pre-exists to query but the query that creates an always ephemeral archive within the no longer manageable amount of data. Both works have had a major impact on the philosophical consideration of the archive and the dominating interpretation of the archive as an instrument of direct manipulation, streamlining, controlling, and disciplinarization.
On the other hand, the digitization of most archival practices, a phenomenon also stressed by Derrida and Ernst, the necessity to rethink the archive according to the new technologies has come to the fore as an even more important change, the impact of which does not only deconstruct postmodern ideas on the archive, but forces us to make a new start. A typical example of the digitization of the archive is the surfacing of grassroots archives, no longer made by representatives of existing institutions but elaborated and implemented by users and permanently updated with user-generated, crowd-sourced material and adapted in a spirit of DIY, folksonomy, open source, and open access. In the more narrow field of photographical archives, this new approach has immediately given birth to a focus on the
vernacular, such as for instance in the remarkable study by Elizabeth Edwards on the photographic survey movement in England, when amateur photographers sought to record the material remains of the English past so that it might be preserved for future generations (2012). Although not directly concerned by the problem of digitization, Edwards’s book is clearly indebted to the interest in popular archival methods and practices made possible by the digital turn.
As these first examples suggest, thinking anew about the meanings and stakes of an archive does not mean at all that one should take a technological or even techno-determinist stance. The fact that little time continues to be spent on discussions about the supposedly ontological differences between analogue and digital images is the proof that the new types of archives engender really different types of questions, the scope of which cannot be limited to the technological layer alone. Archives are cultural practices, and it is in this perspective that they ought to be addressed.
All of these problems – which are at the very same time a number of intriguing challenges – are extremely relevant to theatre archives in general and to archival collections of theatre photographs in particular. Archives are, as we have seen, fundamentally performative entities: they actually create the reality they (or to be more precise: the responsible institutions) claim to document. Theatre archives do not in the first place document a specific historical reality, they produce – or rather: co-produce – this same reality and thus theatre practice itself. Theatre archives are, in other words, not a heap of material waiting to be discovered and/or described. On the contrary, their characteristics, their institutional history, their organization, all of these features have a direct impact on the way theatre history and thus our knowledge and perception of our theatrical past is constructed. When dealing with theatre archives – and this accounts for just any other archive – the researcher cannot limit his work to a careful analysis of the material sources present, but he will also have to pay attention to the ways in which these very same sources constitute the archive and thus to the institutional history of the archive itself.
Moreover, this same researcher working in the field of theatre history will be confronted with a self-evident but fundamental problem: the archival sources he will work with (press clippings, costume and set designs, director’s notes – if he’s lucky – and, of course, photographs) are so-called peripheral sources, only indirectly documenting the actual object of research, i.e. the ephemeral and by nature one-off event called theatre. Theatre is representation, in a very literal sense: making an absent reality present again. In his seminal book Performance studies (2002), Richard Schechner defines performance as a very broad term which does not only include different forms of artistic representation (theatre, dance, etc.) but also ceremonies, rituals, festivities, in short: any kind of cultural behaviour. Performances, argues Schechner, are “restored behaviours” or “twice-behaved behaviours”, “performed actions that people train for and rehearse” (28), they are “physical, verbal, or virtual actions that are not-for-the-first time; that are prepared or rehearsed” (29). In sum, Schechner proposes, performance is “showing doing” (28), pointing to, displaying, underlying your actions; it is an action performed in the full awareness that it is being observed in one way or another (the observer is not necessary present at the same time, for example when we “perform” our public identity on our Facebook profile). Archival sources, and especially theatre photographs, could then be considered as performances to the second degree, as a conscious meta-reflection on the performance observed and thus they always entail a specific perspective
on this very same performance. And the more this perspective is reiterated, the more persistent the image of the documented practice will be. In other words (and this ideal will prove to be of crucial importance in the case of our example) the more coherent the perspective of the archive on the theatre practice that it is documenting, the more homogeneous that same practice will seem to be. Archives, certainly those created and sponsored by national entities, thus play an important role in the creation of a coherent national identity through the intermediary of its theatrical past. Theatre archives do not document but actually create theatre heritage. Dealing with archives hence always requires a self-reflexive attitude. It is for that reason no coincidence that more and more artists consider the documentation of their own work (and more specifically of the process leading to the actual result) as an integral part of their oeuvre, as illustrated, for example, by two recent publications on the work of Belgian choreographer Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker, in which the actual scores of her choreographies are combined with a detailed verbal account, illustrated with drawings, schemes, photos and post-performance documents, and with demonstrations danced by the choreographer and excerpts from the performances. In sum, both artists and researchers are increasingly aware of the fundamentally performative nature of any theatre archive. But rather than considering this as a problem or an obstacle, they take the double representational nature of the archive as the very starting point of their research.
What are the major characteristics of the paradigm shift that has taken place in archival practices and, of course, of the new scholarship that goes along with it? As already stated, a decisive change concerns the fact that archives are nowadays no longer produced and managed by (larger) institutions, but created and made available by theoretically anybody. And although it is true that these non-institutional initiatives do not live in a separate world (technology and copyright, for instance, are not owned by the many amateur-archivists), it should be clear that the digital turn in photo-archives has dramatically impacted the way archives are being made and, above all, used. Yet the modifications are no less important when one takes as one’s point of departure the scholarly interest in the archive. Two evolutions are crucial in this regard. First big data, which fosters numerous new questions (for a good survey and many excellent case studies, see Gitelman 2013). A second, even more radical shift is taking place within the digital humanities movement, which is redefining the very heart of humanist research by bridging the gap between theory and practice. Digital humanists are not (only) scholars who work with big data ‒ actually, in many cases their data set is even very small‒ or who study physical material with the help of computers, but who invent, build, disclose, and disseminate in collective projects new objects, new forms, new content matter, new ways of thinking and doing (see Burdick et al. 2012; similar positions are held by Hayles and Pressman, 2013).
Humans, Objects, Technologies
Taking together these two strands (grassroots archival practices on the one hand, digital humanities research on the other hand), we could summarize the evolution in the following way. If the classic, i.e. poststructuralist research question on the archive was: What is an archive, and what does it do to us (as subjects and victims, so to speak)?, the new research question is: Which archive do we want, and what are we going to do with it?
In certain fields, this perspective has already opened new and exciting investigations, for instance in the historical work by Paula Amad on Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète” of the 1910s and 20s (Amad 2010, Baetens 2011), in which the open and creative construction of the archive is considered to be a new, Bergson-inspired attempt to mutually reshape time and space. Similarly innovative, but more art-historically inspired work has been done by Robin Kelsey. His study of the US geographic photography surveys of the West in the second half of the 19th century displays the permanent and creative tension between the individual manners of the photographers commissioned to document the recently explored and rapidly colonized Western territories on the one hand and the economic, military and political expectations from a wide and sometimes quite heterogeneous set of patrons on the other hand (Kelsey 2007).
In the following pages, we would like to start mapping some basic questions of a research agenda for photo archives in theatre studies. These questions have emerged from the digitization of the Slovak Theatre Institute archives on the website of Divadelný ústav Bratislava (http://www. europeana-photography.eu/index.php?en/75/divadeln-stav), a member of Europeana Photography, the major network of photo archive institutions in Europe (http://www.europeana-photography.eu/; within Europeana, Divadelný ústav is the only institution that focuses exclusively on theatre). The specific chronological scope of the Europeana project is limited to photography’s first century: 1839-1939 (the terminus a quo is a technological one: the simultaneous divulgation of the two competing photographic techniques of Daguerre and Talbot; the terminus ad quem is a political one).
As we have explained, archives of theatre photographs bring about specific questions and challenges. Theatre photos are cultural objects in which the complex relation between reality and illusion, between ‘being’ and ‘acting’ is problematized. Moreover, every theatre photo is, just as is the archive, a performative object: rather than documenting the theatrical event as such (which actually never took place in the form suggested by the pictures), theatre photographs construct this reality, reaffirm a specific vision on theatre practice and theatre history. They are in other words all but ‘neutral’. A theatre photo always imposes a certain perspective on the historical reality it is representing, a reality that in its turn is a representation itself. In other words: it presents us with a vision on another vision. Theatre photography thus operates in, as Inge Henneman (2011) eloquently explains in her introduction to a series of interviews with Belgian theatre photographers (unfortunately these texts are only available in Dutch), “an in-between zone, between the documentary and the interpretative, between objectifying and subjective, between subservient and commenting, between being true to what you see and suggesting what remains hidden”. Moreover, these pictures function as some sort of mirror for the practitioners themselves: photos create an imaginary representation of the work of a company, a director or of a national tradition and this representation functions in its turn as a point of reference to the work of the artist, limiting, as it were, the number of future options. Theatre photos have a direct influence on subsequent theatrical representations and thus on the course of theatre history itself. For example, 19th century realistic theatre has been influenced to a certain extent by the photographic representations of early realistic plays or social comedies: the costumes worn by certain social archetypes, the set design representing a certain socio-cultural ‘milieu’, etc. (figure 1). Theatre and photography share an intimately connected history: theatre photos are not only crucial documents to theatre scholars, they also contribute
to theatre history in itself. A noteworthy example can be found in the influence of the famous photos of the Paris-based Salpêtrière Hospital on the way late 19th-century actors like Mounet-Sully and Sarah Bernhardt enacted madness and psychiatric distress (Vanhaesebrouck 2010). The famous photographic collection of the hospital of Charcot was not only meant to provide the new science of psychiatry with an aura of scientific objectivity, it also had a profound influence on the popular imagination of the era which in its turn constituted the horizon of expectancy of the then public. In other words, theatre spectators had a certain (albeit vulgarized) idea of what phenomena like hysteria, epileptic fits and melancholy looked like and expected to see a theatrical representation that conformed to these preconceived ideas. As a consequence actors adapted their choices in acting to the photographic representation of madness. Photographic portraits of the same actors enacting the madness of Nero or hysteria of Medea in turn reconfirmed this very same image.
Figure 1: Hana Melièková - Olga Sýkorová - Olga Borodáèová - Andrej Bagar - Jozef Kello in Slovak National Theatre, Jozef Gregor Tajovský: Statky zmätky (Estates-Confusions), Bratislava 1928
©Di-vadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
Theatre photos are of course a crucial source for any theatre history scholar. Every photograph brings about new methodological questions. Was it taken before, during or after the performance? Is it a (stage?) depiction of the performance as intended by the artists or a rendition of an actual performance? Who was the commissioner? What was the intended function of the photograph (an inventory of set and props, archive, promotion or press, publication or not, etc.)? A theatre photograph is not only a fundamentally unreliable source as far as the actual performance is concerned, at the same time it provides us with crucial information on the broader context in which this performance functioned. When skimming through the Divadelný ústav Bratislava archive which covers a century of theatre history ranging from 1839 to 1939, one will quickly notice that this theatre photo archive contains different types of pictures: pictures of empty sets, staged photographs in which different scenes are combined in order to depict the cast in its entirety (figure 2), frontal pictures of the complete cast on stage (figure 3), photos showing the actors as they pose in a representative scene (figure 4) or as they enact a representative scene (figure 5) and portraits of actors, in their everyday outfit or dressed in the costume of the character they are playing,
sometimes in a prototypical pose (figures 6, 7 and 8). As in many other European archives, portraits of actors take up an important part of the collection: in the course of the 2nd half of the 19th century, the actor/actress became the most important commodity of theatre, as theatre directors competed with one another featuring new (self-proclaimed or not) stars on their program. The portraits commissioned by the theatres or by the actors themselves heavily contributed to the star aura of the actor, his charm, magnetism and charisma (Roach 2007).
Figure 2: Slovak National Theatre, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: The Government Inspector 1936 ©Divadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
Figure 3: Hendrik Ibsen Nora, 1928, 13,8 cm x 8,9 cm ©Divadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
Figure 4: Hendrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, 1929, with Jan Sykora, Hanus Malimanek and Hana Melockova, 1929, 22,30 cm x 12,90 ©Divadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
[http://is.theatre.sk:9090/du-euph/permalink?xid=52a950afa43a4f969547eadee8789077]
Figure 5: Andrej Bagar and Hana Melckova in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, 1929, 8,90 x 12,90 cm ©Di-vadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
Figure 6: Margita Èesányiová in Slovak National Theatre, Charles Gounod: Faust (Maragrethe) 1938 ©Divadelný ústav/Theatre Institute Bratislava
Figure 7: Comic quartett Poverty. 2nd half of the 19. century ©Divadelný ústav/Theatre Institute Bratislava
Figure 8: Hana Melickova ale Hedda Gabler, 1929, 17,80 cm x 12,90 ©Divadelný ústav /Theatre Institute Bratislava
http://is.theatre.sk:9090/du-euph/permalink?xid=8ecf1b6a398248a3b00db8b2059546ed
Archives do not in the first place provide us with information on the actual event as it took place, they help us first and foremost to understand the complexity of theatre history itself and the confines of the cultural context in which theatre functioned at a specific moment in history. Moreover, they reveal to us the complexity of a history in which artistic practices, spectators (both of the plays and the pictures) and reproduction technologies (and the cultural codes that went with them) mutually influenced one another. Since an archive is indeed a typical hybrid, made of interactive relationships between humans, objects and technologies, it can be useful to structure the questions according to three major perspectives, which in-depth close-readings will then have to re-link, obviously. Archives cannot be separated from their makers and users. Therefore a first group of questions should refer to “who” is actually working with this kind of archives. Second, archives do contain material objects, analogical and digital. Therefore a second set of questions should tackle issues such as: do archives reflect, and to which degree, the specificity of their object, which is neither photography nor theatre, but theatre photography? Archives are also inextricably linked with machines and technologies, and the institutional practices that make them possible. Therefore a third category of question has to address problems concerning the digitization of specific objects and specific usages.
Makers versus Users?
The easiest question to start with is perhaps the one related to the actual persons that make and use a digital archive. As quoted on the home page of Divadelný ústav, the mission statement reads:
The mission of the state supported Theatre Institute (founded 1961) is to provide the Slovak and international public with complete information services regarding theatre in Slovakia.
Theatre Documentation, Information and Digitization Department collects preserves and presents
documentation of the Slovak professional theatre from its establishing in 1920 until present days, but also from previous periods.(...)
As a partner of the project Europeana Photography, the Theatre Institute in Bratislava plans to submit a collection of 10 000 historical images focused mostly on theatrical and para-theatrical culture in the Slovak territory between 1839 and 1939.
This statement makes a clear distinction between makers and users: funded by the Slovakian government, the institute offers information services to both the local and the international public on all things related to theatre “in Slovakia” (today) and, from a more historical point of view, “in Slovak territory” (Slovakia was not established as an independent republic before 1992, hence the difficulty to disentangle for instance the Czech and the Slovakian component between 1918 and 1992, during the existence of Czechoslovakia, or between the Hungarian and Slovakian element in the previous period, when Slovakia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). This historical issue, very familiar to most “national” institutions in Europe, highlights from the very beginning the complex definition of the makers’ identity: “We, the Slovaks” is a simple sentence, the meaning of which is however far from unproblematic. It does not certainly come as a surprise that a young nation such as post-communist Slovakia manages this slippery issue in a very affirmative, self-confident, if not implicitly militant way. But that does not mean however that the clear and loud public affirmation of Slovak identity and heritage solves all questions in this regard. This question is far from being characteristic of the current archive, on the contrary, but the Slovakian example is a perfect instrument to identify a question that appears in all archives that rely on institutional patrons (a political one in this case, but it can also be a commercial one, as in the case of company archives).
National theatre archives are indeed intimately connected to issues of national identity and cultural memory. In most cases, they were founded for specific institutional reasons, namely conserving and re-actualizing a nation’s theatrical past. That past is then represented as having a clear genealogy, from original sources to gradual complexification, and in most cases this genealogy corresponds with a growing obsession with realistic illusionism in which stage and auditorium become two different, clearly separated symbolic realms. In that sense national theatre archives are often, even in most cases, organized along two complementary narrative lines: (1) national theatre history as an emanation of a growing national self-awareness (and all the representational codes that go with it) and (2) the growing importance of artistic strategies that should enable the spectators to partake in an experience similar to cinematographic illusionism. Archiving is not only about remembering but also about forgetting: national archives obliterate heterogeneity, their collections function as carriers of cultural identity. Or more precisely: they invite their users to be addressed and thus consulted in this way, as carriers of a coherent national identity and of a narrative of growing sophistication that goes with it. The sources in a theatre archive are always of spectral nature: they refer to something that is no longer there. But at the same time this archive is not a reservoir in which the past is waiting to be excavated: when used it also re-activates cultural memory, it invites the user to re-negotiate one’s own history, knowing that archiving is not only about remembering but also (and maybe in the first place) about forgetting and that
any archive is by nature selective.
Indeed, any user should be aware that an archive always supposes a specific relation with the institutional (national) entity responsible. Archives are always made, they have been “constructed” in order to be used. Every archive is thus characterized by a specific relationship between its “makers” and its “users”. And this, of course, also pertains to our case in point, the theatre archive in Bratislava. At first sight, the division of the respective roles of makers and users seems unambiguous. The Slovakian government and the theatre institute are those who make the archive, the local and international public represents those who are invited to use it. Such a divide, rather traditional in the digital era, is however challenged here by the particular status of the EU, which is both the addressee of the archive and its co-funding partner. An intended user of the archive, the EU assumes also a productive function in the inevitable interaction and exchange of roles between makers and users. Although not directly visible, the impact of Europe permeates the whole archive. The downsizing, if not putting between brackets of all conflicts with neighbouring states is a possible argument in this sense: Europe does promote good relationships between its member states, hence the avoidance of any possibly delicate issue in the probably not always totally idyllic relations between the Slovak and the Czech components. The complete silence on the history of the archive and its use before the current digital version may be a symptom of that sanitization. Once again, this is anything but exceptional, and our idea is not at all to criticize the absence of this dimension in the archive as it can be accessed today, but to use it as an invitation to new questions on the study of “who” works with archives. The same is probably true as well as far as the selection of the images is concerned. In spite of the aesthetic quality of the Bratislava images, most of which are “gorgeous”, the general spirit of Europeana is not that of the individual masterpiece (there would be an almost ontological contradiction between the desire to show ‘the best of’ and the necessity of digitizing as many images as possible of each participating archive), but that of the social and historical relevance and accuracy of the selected images (the aim of the images is to give an idea of Europe’s past through photographic documents). This intention contributes also, and perhaps more paradoxically, to the ‘de-nationalizing’ of the pictures, which do showcase of course national Slovak theatre history but which do it in such a way that it may become meaningful to EU eyes. This signifies that the blurring of boundaries between users and makers does not necessarily depend on the technical possibility of prosumer protocols, but that prosumer culture is actually something that informs any archive policy whatsoever. Even if the user remains totally silent, with no possibility at all to “interact” with the archive, the very existence of such a user position transforms the position and hence the identity of the maker of an archive. As Jorge Luis Borges stated somewhere (and please do forgive us for having lost the precise quotation in the Borgesian labyrinth): writing is not thinking, for when one writes one thinks of the reader...
Photography, Theatre, Theatre Photography
It is not difficult to describe the content of the Bratislava archive. Most of it belongs to the (apparently bizarre) category of “staged theatre photography”: scenes or tableaux of famous representations are restaged for photographic reproduction purposes, as well as pictures of anonymous or renowned actors and actresses, often posing in the roles that made them famous with often a strong emphasis on group portraits. It is easy as well to notice what seems to lack: pictures of rehearsals, documentary pictures used
for the necessities of setting and staging, commercial celeb photography, (allegedly) private pictures of the theatre personnel, and of course pictures of the audience, probably because it was sufficiently homogeneous to go literally unnoticed. Such a description, however, misses part of the point. The study of a photographic theatre archive should also address other, more general problems, of which we would like to underline two.
On the one hand, a photographic theatre archive does not archive theatre itself, but pictures of theatre, and this type of pictures is not something that is defined by its content only (namely theatre), but by the specific rules and norms of its specific subgenre (namely the photographic representation of theatre). The major question in this regard is then to examine how the Slovak archive echoes or does not echo the metamorphoses of the genre, the history of which, as that of any other photographic genre, has known many dramatic revolutions. The work by David A. Shields on film photography (Shields 2013, Baetens 2014), which contains many interesting analyses of the gradual emancipation of film photography from stage photography, is a wonderful example of how one might study the historical transformations of stage photography in the expanded field (in his case the expansion brings us to the domain of cinema, here it would introduce us to the world of archives).
In most cases, the photographers of the pictures in this archive seemed to have chosen this option, by depicting a representative moment of the play and its dynamics (cf. figures 2, 4 and 5). Through a re-staged scene, which in some cases was invented by the photographer himself by combining several elements of the play within one and the same scene, he hoped to represent the intended performance, i.e. the performance as intended by its creator, while at the same time hinting at the actual live performance and thus suggesting that something is actually taking place at that very moment. In other words these pictures try to combine two seemingly opposite logics, a synthetic perspective on the play on the hand and an evocation of the unique moment, of the live aura of theatre in itself. They present the user of the archive with an over-all perspective on the play and simultaneously suggest – or simulate – what disappears at the moment it is reproduced: the ‘liveness’ of theatre.
Alongside this first connection with the genre of theatre photography, the study of this kind of archives must also take into account the history of photography itself, or rather the histories of photography, for, from the very moment that one tries to grasp the situation of a local form of photography, it appears immediately that there is not, nor can there be, any overarching, all-encompassing history of photography. In the case of the Slovak archive, the possibly crucial importance of Czech photography, one of the key players in interwar modernism, might raise intriguing questions on the either positive (reactive) or negative (counter-reactive) exchanges between Czech photography, itself split between the input of the capital, Prague, and its Bohemian hinterland, as cleverly analysed in Sayer (2013), and Slovak traditionalism in theatre (yet as already stated above, it may be slightly absurd to make up something like “Slovak” theatre in the “pre-Slovak” era that Europeana is documenting). As such, this perspective is not supposed to interfere with the Divadelný ústav archival practice, which does not aim at displaying this kind of relationships within the larger visual culture of a territory and a period. At the same time however, the added value for the analysis of the Bratislava archive, which users may question from exactly that point of view, cannot be denied.
Archives Extra Muros
As in the paragraphs on users and objects, it would be easy to list some basic questions on the technological aspect of the Divadelný ústav website, all relevant to the study of digital archives. How do the images relate to the specific design of the site (and that of the meta-site of Europeana Photography, itself part of the larger Europeana portal)? How does the site’s architecture enable interactivity: feedback, production of user-generated content, community-building, networking with other archives, metadata management, possibilities of upgrading the site in order to meet new and perhaps unforeseen demands, sustainability, etc..
All these questions are structured along the same implicit claim, namely the difference between the traditional archive on the one hand and the digital archive on the other (which means here: digitized archive, for as far as we can see Europeana Photography does not include yet completely digital-born archives). Despite the relevance of this claim, its strong binary approach may harm different forms of thinking about the archive, more specifically the archive as a tool of public dissemination (for this is what the open access and open source philosophy of Europeana Photography tends to stimulate as much as possible). We would like to argue instead that it is more fruitful to consider the digital archive not as an absolute novelty, but as something that it is crucial to historicize and contextualize (after all, more and more scholars tend to follow Lew Manovich’s (2000) provocative declaration that digital culture is much older than the digital turn of the computer age).
In this case, the most stimulating context is of course that of the technological dissemination of images, which in recent history would entail the comparative analysis of technological frameworks such as distant projection-on-demand, one of the many utopian ideas of Paul Otlet, the major forerunner of the later Internet (Levie 2006), film and television, obviously, but also André Malraux’s “museum without walls” (Malraux 1967), an attempt to use photography for the geographical reproduction and distribution of unique artworks, in books as well as in other locations such as museums (filled no longer with ‘originals’ but with ‘copies’). Malraux’s thinking on art in the age of its technological reproduction, more or less contemporaneous of McLuhan’s dreaming of the global village, was both revolutionary and highly pragmatic (that was probably the reason why this writer became a politician, rather than one more arm-chair philosopher). Rather than comparing electronic archives with paper archives only, it is therefore absolutely necessary to replace the digital changes within the larger context of the opening of art (often unique and individually owned artefacts) to different forms, not just of distribution, but of reuse and appropriation. This apparently very unsexy, for non-technological view of the Divadelný ústav archive may however shed new light on what it means to do research on, in, and with theatrical archives.
Literature quoted
Paula Amad, Paula (2010). Counterarchive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s ‘Archives de la planète’. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Jan Baetens teaches cultural and literary studies at the University of Leuven. He is chief editor of Image (&) Narrative. Email: jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Karel Vanhaesebrouck teaches theatre and performance studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He also teaches theatre history and cultural history at Rits | School of Arts.
The research for this article has been supported by the BELSPO funded IAP program on Literature and Media Innovations (http://lmi.arts.kuleuven.be/).
