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In 2017, Stanford University acquired a portion of the filmmaker Amos Gitai’s archive. While portions of the Gitai Archive were traditional works on paper, the bulk of the material comprising the collection is digital. Indeed, one of the rationales for the acquisition was the opportunity to develop innovative technical approaches toward organizing and providing access to digital archives.
This paper examines one portion of the archive, Amos Gitai’s 2014 film, “Tsili.” The paper examines the film as an instance of Post-Vernacular Yiddish filmmaking, situating the specific film within Gitai’s broader, archive-focused approach to filmmaking. Yet the paper takes as its dual object the Archive itself. Always conceived as an international collaboration with multiple partners -- including the National Libraries of Israel and France, the peculiarities of the international project were revealed at a conference held in Paris in December, 2019. In these field notes from the archive and the earlier conference, the Amos Gitai Archive emerged as a flashpoint at the intersection of changing technologies and issues of cultural memory. The stable-seeming notion of an “Amos Gitai Archive” belies a complex political project that raises ongoing questions of cultural heritage and transmission.