Archival and Evidential Aesthetics in Cypriot Documentary Photography

• In Event: The Matter of Photography: Decay, Conservation, Afterlives

Abstract

The last fifteen years have seen an explosion in documentary films made in Cyprus by Cypriots addressing "the Cyprus conflict": the enduring partition of the island into a southern Greek-Cypriot region and a northern Turkish-Cypriot region since the war of 1974. In this paper, I explore how documentary filmmakers in Cyprus use archival photographs from that period to experiment with the visual representation of Cyprus’s violent history. This archival material is flexible, resonating in the phenomenological register of experience -- time, shock, confusion, haunting -- but also in the forensic register of evidence. Cypriot filmmakers draw from a common aesthetic tool-kit in their work with this material: insetting photographs within the screen of projection; scratching, color-treating, over- or under-exposing photographs; altering the speed and continuity of archival footage; stroboscopic sampling; creating photographic "stills" from film sequences to overlay and generate disjointed passages. These aesthetic devices signal the special status of archival photographs as artifacts that have survived not only the passage of time but also violent conflict. Characters in these films are likewise often shown engaging in their own archival projects with photographs from the 1960s-70s, recovered or discovered after many years. A special thematization and aesthetics of the visual archive have thus developed around Cypriot documentary. I examine these aesthetics in order to reflect on the materialities, the instrumentalities, and the aspirations of artistic work in relation to political work in contemporary Cyprus, and thus to explore resonances between photography, filmmaking, and other forms of archival research and knowledge production.

Author

• Elizabeth Anne Davis, Princeton University