Archival Spaces

316: The Berlinale

Archival Spaces 316

Berlinale Competition

Uploaded 3 March 2023

The 73^rd Berlinale took place between 16 – 26 February. I attended for the first time since 2019 because the COVID pandemic had kept me away. The largest film festival in the world, after Cannes and Venice, the Berlinale presents approximately 450 films in various programs, including the Competition, Encounters, Berlin Specials, Panorama, Generation (Kids), Forum, Retrospective, Homage, and Perspective German Cinema. In past years I’ve focused on the retrospective, which made up the archival portion of the festival. However, under festival directors Mariëtte Rissenbeck and Carlo Chatrien there has been a marked deemphasis on historical programming – past festival retrospectives under the aegis of the Deutsche Kinemathek not only discovered film historical terra incognita but published ground-breaking catalogs – in favor of reprising audience favorites. As a result, I turned my attention to the Competition, which featured 19 films from eleven countries. The highlights:

Bai Ta Zhi Guang (The Shadowless Tower, Zhang Lu) begins in a cemetery, as a Chinese family visits the grave of the grandmother. We see an image of Confucian piety, but as the narrative reveals, it is an illusion. The father is not the father, the mother not the mother, rather the attached brother is the father to the little girl, and the absent, divorced mother lies dying in hospital; the family was estranged from the grandfather because he had been possibly unjustly accused of molesting a woman and sent to prison. Soon the brother discovers his father is alive while beginning a relationship with a young woman who was herself adopted as an orphan. All seemingly struggle to make ends meet. The story is revealed in quiet, contemplative images, shot in one of the few remaining old quarters of Beijing, Chinese modernity has taken its toll on traditional family relationships, their economic security, and the city itself.

Tótem (Lila Avilés) brings an extended family in Mexico City together to celebrate the 40^th birthday of a young painter who is near death from cancer. As the painter’s sisters, parents, brothers, and various children gather in the hours before the party, emotions run high vacillating between hope and despair; worrying about the family’s overwhelming debt due to hospital bills, shielding the children from the inevitable, drinking too much to dull the pain, all the while putting on a brave face for the celebrant. The film’s final images are of the empty house which we assume had to be sold to cover the debts, but also reveal the break-up of the family. The female director who is particularly sensitive to the children’s performances won the Ecumenical Jury Prize.

Le grand chariot (The Plough, Phillippe Garrel) visualizes a different kind of dissolution as a family of French puppeteers attempt to stay faithful to their archaic craft, as first the mother (before the film begins), then the father and grandmother die, while the brother decides to become a stage actor, the troupe’s only non-relative descends into madness after deciding to return to painting, and the remaining sisters are defeated by dwindling audiences and a storm that destroys their theater. With an on-again-off-again voiceover reminiscent of the French New Wave, the film’s pacing is deliberately slow, unspooling like time itself in an age when puppets rather than video games could spark the imagination of children. Veteran director Garrel won the Silver Bear for direction.

Christian Petzold’s Roter Himmel (Afire) begins with two friends traveling to a family vacation home on the Baltic German coast, one a writer, the other preparing a portfolio for an art school application. There they unexpectedly meet another house guest, a young woman who becomes the object of the writer’s aggression – he’s worried about his latest novel – while the budding art student falls in love with a local lifeguard. When wildfires break out, leading to tragedy for the gay couple, the writer must reassess not only his failed novel but his relationship with the woman.

Possibly a first for the Berlinale Competition, the Japanese animé, Suzume (Makato Shinkai), looks and feels like a Miyazaki film. The story of a 17-year-old girl who lost her mother when she was a small child and now lives with her aunt. Mixing realism and mythological fantasy as Miyazaki had, the film follows Suzume who falls in love with a beautiful young man, one of the gatekeepers to the doors of a nether world, where a giant worm periodically breaks to the surface to cause havoc through massive earthquakes. As the pair chase from one gate to the next, Susume realizes that she had passed through a portal as a child during the earthquake that killed her mother.

Just how quickly modernity’s technological advancement can upend even digital innovations is illustrated in the Canadian feature, Blackberry (Matt Johnson). Initially engineered by a group of super nerds more interested in endlessly rewatching Star Wars, the Blackberry smartphone’s rise to a 45% share of the market is organized by an unscrupulous salesman before the iPhone and the SEC – the CEO had back-dated stock options – kill the product literally overnight. Told as a rise-and-fall farce, the film’s rapid pacing matches the relentless competition that has characterized the digital world.

315: Survey of American Archivists

Archival Spaces 315

A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey

Uploaded 17 February 2023

Recently, ITHAKA and the Society of American Archivists published their findings of “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey,” authored by Makala Skinner and financially supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS). A*CENSUS II had previously published the „All Archivists Survey“ in August 2022, which gathered data on individual archivists and their experience in the field. The present study compiled data from “746 archives administrators representing academic institutions, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, for-profit organizations, and community archives across the United States.“ Among the participating organizations was the Association of Moving Image Media (AMIA). The survey’s goal was to create a snapshot of the archives field from the perspective of archive heads, key issues, and problems. Furthermore, the new study shared findings on “archives’ budget and collection sizes, staff recruitment and retention, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility practices.” Having been an archives administrator for 28 years, including at UCLA Film & Television Archive until March 2020, many of the findings were no surprise to me, but rather confirmed issues with which I was consistently confronted, whether in a non-profit or government archive. The survey is available at: https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.318227

**Ford Motor Company Archives, Dearborn, MI**

The great majority of participating archive administrators came from non-profit organizations (36%) and academic institutions (35%), while government agencies (18%), for-profit organizations (3%), and non-specified archives (7%) supplied the remaining participants. Fully 88% of the responding administrators head archives within larger organizations. More surprisingly, 75% of archives have no more than five full-time employees (FTEs) with 38% having only one FTE, namely the administrator themselves. In order to make up for the labor shortfall, 39% of archive administrators rely on volunteer help, while 32% employ students and 19% unpaid interns. While 52% of non-profit archives responded that they employ volunteers and unpaid interns (16%), only 25% of academic archives utilized volunteers and unpaid interns (22%).

If one excludes staff salaries, the operating budget for 72% of archives was under $100,000, while 44% had budgets under $20,000. With a budget of approximately $ 6.2 million in FY19, UCLA Film and Television Archive belonged to an exclusive club of 1% of respondents with budgets between $ 5-9 million. Of those responding with budgets larger than $100,000, 55% belong to government agencies. Income for operating budgets came primarily from endowments, government, and university funds (earned income) for academic institutions, from federal, state, and local governments for government archives, while donations and foundation grants accounted for 5% of income for academic institutions and 7% for government agencies. Non-profits, on the other hand, raised 15% of their funding from donations (11%) and foundation grants (4%), while memberships made up another 5%.

How did archive administrators allocate funds in their annual budgets? Supplies and office administration gobbled up 24%, while digital asset management accounted for 15% of budgets, collections/acquisitions merely 12%, 11% for preservation /conservation, and 10% for facilities. When asked how they would spend a 10% increase in budget in the next fiscal year, 50% would invest in digital preservation, 45% in staffing, and 36% in technologies and systems. This indicates that most archives are lagging behind in digital infrastructures for access, and are also seriously understaffed.

In terms of digital archives collections, 40% of administrators maintain four terabytes or less of digital collections, with 21% concentrated at 1-4 TB. Surprisingly, 28% do not currently measure the number of digital collections in their archives. Meanwhile, 45% of archives have made their archives publically visible (not accessible) through standard online public access catalogs. However, nearly one-quarter of all archives have no or less than 10% of their collections accessible online, and only 12% have more than 90% of their collections visible online. Given the accelerating move to digital archives and digitizing analog collections, administrators place a high premium on digital skills for new hires with 81% listing digital competency as the most important.

At the same time, staffing and operating budgets remain critical issues that are slowing down digitization and access to archival collections. Administrators listed as primary constraints to executing archival strategy, a lack of staff (75%) and a lack of financial resources (63%). The pandemic has only exasperated this situation: 28% of archives administrators experienced staffing budget cuts, while 30% reported budget cuts to operations. Less than a third of all institutions have seen their budgets return to pre-pandemic levels, while as we know, inflation has significantly increased all costs. Given these issues, staff retention is a major problem. Reasons for leaving the field include limited compensation /salary (37%), retirement (35%), and lack of opportunity for career advancement (30%). Interestingly, the previous “All Archivists Survey” listed staff burnout (35%) as an important reason for attrition but was not listed in the administrator responses.

My own conclusion, based on this survey and my own decades of experience, is that although the archival profession is seen as desirable, archivists are for the most part underpaid, overworked, and under-appreciated by both the larger institutions that house them and the public at large.

314: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Archival Spaces 314

Schächten (2022)

Uploaded 3 February 2023

Marking Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January), the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival under Hilary Helstein, in cooperation with the German and Austrian Consulates, mounted the L.A. premiere of a new Holocaust-themed film, Schächten (2022), which deals not so much with the Holocaust, but with its utterly shameful aftermath. For decades after the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps, the Germans and Austrians collectively swept their culpability under the carpet, allowing most of the participants in the genocide of European Jewry, to live in peace and prosperity.

Except for a relatively small group at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, and concentration camp officers, few were prosecuted: the “soldiers” in the Einsatzgruppen who gunned down tens of thousands, the staff in the Concentration camps, the Nazi officials that ran the railroads to the death camps, others that carried out the “Aryanization” of Jewish capital and property, the judges who sentenced tens of thousands to death, the police forces that rounded up Jews for deportation, at least not until the late 1960s, but even then only those with real blood on their hands. Austrians and Germans had turned themselves from a nation of perpetrators to a nation of victims who had suffered under allied bombs and a dictatorship. They were supported in that endeavor by the American government which categorized Austria as a country occupied by the Nazis, rather than an enthusiastic German province, while also cutting de-Nazification short in favor of bolstering American-led anti-Communism.

Schächten opens in Winter 1944 in the mountains of Austria, where a very young Viktor Dessauer watches his grandparents being hunted down and killed by the SS, while he survives alone in a cave. Cut to Vienna in 1962, Viktor has come home from his schooling in England to celebrate his birthday and take his place as the head of the family textile business, both he and his father the sole survivors of the Holocaust in his family. Through friends, they learn that Kurt Gogl, the SS officer who shot Viktor’s sister and mother in front of the father is alive and leading a quiet life under an assumed name as a school teacher in romantic St. Wolfgang Lake, near Salzburg. With the help of Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Viennese Nazi hunter, they go to court to bring Gogl to justice, but the justice system and the police are filled with former Nazis and younger anti-Semites, so Gogl is acquitted, despite Viktor’s father giving eye witness testimony. Viktor continues to harass Gogl and is brutally beaten by Gogl’s Nazi friends, leading him finally to kidnap the SS officer and trap him in the same cave he had hidden in during the war.

Starring Jeff Wilbusch (Unorthodox, 2020) as Viktor, Christian Berkel (Downfall, 2004) as Simon Wiesenthal, and Paul Manker (The People Vs. Fritz Bauer, 2015) as Gogl, the film is directed by Austrian Thomas Roth who also wrote the script. It is based on the true case of Johann Gogl, a former SS man who was acquitted on 12 February 1975 at his last trial for crimes committed in the Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration camps. However, most of the characters and events are fictional, although aspects of the Dessauer family are based on a similar Viennese Jewish family.

Having lived in Germany as a teenager in the 1960s, the child of a concentration camp survivor, I’m very familiar with the feeling that you are surrounded by former Nazis. I used to sit in the tram and wonder just how many of the 40-70 year-olds around me had committed crimes in the war; my 8th-grade German teacher in my Gymnasium constantly droned on about being a soldier fighting the “Ivan” on the Russian front. In the film, there are a couple of very uncomfortable scenes between Viktor, his Catholic girlfriend, Anna (Miriam Fussenegger), and her parents, where the daughter insists on knowing what her father did during the war, but doesn’t get an answer; the parent’s fear and repressed anti-Semitism is palatable. Her father eventually forbids Anna from seeing Viktor, but she joins him anyway when he emigrates to America. The scenes also reminded me of when the broadcast of the American tv-miniseries, Holocaust (1979, Marvin J. Chomsky) on German television led to countless such discussions around German dinner tables, at that time the first such national discussion of German’s culpability for the Holocaust.

**Heinrich Himmler, Commandant Franz Ziereis inspecting Mauthhausen KZ**

To the film’s credit, the relationship between Victor and Gogl is complicated and nuanced. After the trial fails, Viktor attempts to kill Gogl and even has him in his gunsight, but then thinks twice about committing murder. Gogl keeps his friends from killing Viktor. When he kidnaps the old, fat, and out-of-shape Gogl, he must literally help him across a stream and up a mountain, taking his hand, an image of perpetrator and victim that is poignant in its irony. On the other hand, when Viktor returns to the scene of the crime and finds the cave empty, the scene seems to serve no other purpose than to absolve the central character of guilt for the disappearance of Gogl.

Like The People Vs. Fritz Bauer, which covers much of the same territory from a German perspective, Schächten – the title refers to the ritual kosher slaughter of animals – is relevant not only as a correction of history but also applicable to Europe today, when anti-Semitism, racism, and the exclusion of minorities are still virulent.

Postscript: In 1946, the largest trial by the American Military Government of crimes committed at the Mauthausen concentration camp took place in Dachau, during which sixty-one defendants were convicted, of which 58 were sentenced to death and 49 were actually hanged. The selection of defendants was intended to represent a cross-section of perpetrators. After the end of the Allied occupation of Austria, the Austrians rapidly ended any further prosecutions of Nazis. Of the former members of the SS given prison sentences, by 1955 all had been released. After 1955 the number of Austrian trials against Nazi perpetrators dropped dramatically.

313: Irmgard Keun

Archival Spaces 313

Irmgard Keun: Child of all Nations

Uploaded 20 January 2023

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague, Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert, announced on Facebook that a previously lost German film from the early 1930s, Eine von uns (1932), starring Brigitte Helm, had turned up on YouTube. The film was an adaption of the sensational, New Realist novel, Gilgi, eine von uns (1931), by Irmgard Keun. Her first novel had turned her into an icon of the new woman, independent, self-assured, sassy, and sexually liberated. Her second novel, Das kunstseidene Mädchen /The Silk Girl (1932), about the downward slide of a 20-year-old Berlin flapper, none too bright, was written in a stream-of-consciousness, slangy style – comparable to that of today’s Instagram influencers. It was another literary and commercial sensation. Then came Hitler, her books were banned, and her wealth confiscated, not because she was Jewish, but because her image of German womanhood contradicted Nazi ideology.

Coincidentally, I have just been reading Irmgard Keun’s 6th novel, Kind aller Länder (1938), published in Amsterdam in German. By that time, Keun had been in exile for several years, constantly looking for jobs, money, and visas, living on the edge in Belgium, later Holland. While her first two novels had been bestsellers, in the case of Silk Girl selling more than 50,000 copies before being banned, her exile novels reached only a few thousand. Amazingly, she managed to write four novels on the run. Kind aller Länder is narrated by Keun’s ten-year-old self, working through her adult experience of exile. Like The Silk Girl, Child of all Nations stylistically reproduces the voice of her female protagonist, in this case, the child Kully’s syntax, sentence structure, and unfiltered opinions of the adult world around her.

The novel begins in medias res, without chapter headings, without character introductions, a continuous stream of short sentences and even shorter paragraphs, in the first person voice of a very young girl: possibly writing in her diary about how the staff in her hotel treat her as a cute little thing, i.e. until her dad disappears to find money to pay the bill. She and her mother stay behind without a penny as „a security deposit.“ The novel’s first sentence ends with the statement that people say her father should have never married. Thus from its opening lines, the reader perceives a child who has grown old far beyond her years, constantly imperiled but innocently accepting her fate.

While her father travels to Prague, Budapest, Paris, and Poland, obsessively searching for work and cash, mother and daughter are stuck in a luxury hotel in Ostende, unable to buy food, often starving for days. When Kully’s birthday present arrives from her father, they can’t pay the import duty, so it remains in customs. Meanwhile, her mother cries, because she is unable to borrow money, unlike her husband who bums change from waiters, doormen, the mailman, friends, other women he seduces, fans of his writing, his Dutch publisher who pleads poverty. Kully understands that her father is a well-known novelist who hates Hitler and the Nazis hate him, so they can’t return to their home in Germany.

**Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth in Ostende, 1936. Keun was Roth’s lover**

Between her mostly absent and alcoholic father – he sometimes forgets her in cafes when he is drunk – and her emotionally paralyzed mother, Kully studies a bit in two school books, but doesn’t go to school, spending her time collecting stones, mussels, and sea stars on the beach, at least until they move on to Brussels. There, she and her mother take long walks “My mother says, that’s almost as healthy as eating.“ In the meantime, long letters from her father to her mother arrive and are quoted extensively, letters filled with hope and dreams that never go anywhere. Things hardly change when they move on to Amsterdam. And so it goes. At one point, Kully and her father travel to New York and Norfolk, VA, – her mother missed the boat and was left behind – but eventually return to Amsterdam, where the novel ends. We know her future is uncertain because the Wehrmacht will soon overrun the country.

*Kindertransport* arriving London, in 1938

On the novel’s last page, someone asks her, whether she is homesick. She says, she is, but always for a different country. Then she writes she is almost never homesick, if her mother is there, and never when her dad is with them. Child of all Nations is remarkable for its focus on children. While the autobiographical literature on German-Jewish intellectual refugees from Hitler is now voluminous, I know of no other work of fiction that describes the fate of their children in such an unsentimental fashion.

**Arrival of *Reichskomissar* Arthur Seyss-Inquart in Amsterdam, 1940**

Irmgard Keun’s own fate was unique. In 1940, with Germans in the streets of Amsterdam, Keun staged her own suicide – as reported in a British newspaper -, then got a SS officer to issue her a passport under her former husband‘s name, allowing her to return to her parent’s home in Cologne. She remained there in hiding for the duration of the war and lived the rest of her life in utter obscurity, unable to find publishers to reissue her famous novels. She was not republished until the 1970s in Germany, when feminist critics rediscovered her work, shortly before she died in 1982.

Happily, this century has seen the publication of much of Keun’s amazing work in English: Gilgi, One of Us (2002), The Artificial Silk Girl (2011), After Midnight (2020), Child of All Nations (2008), and Ferdinand, the Man with a Kind Heart (2020).