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Film archaeology

Summary: The discipline name Mademli proposes in section 0.1 as the framing field of the dissertation. An amalgam of media archaeology and film heritage, film archaeology focuses on the manifestations of cinema across its existence — material properties, cultural histories inscribed on technical media, production practices, and archival treatment of the moving image — while resisting the postmodern "crisis of representation" framing that has dominated film studies. Where film heritage studies asks what films should be preserved, film archaeology asks what the medium preserves.

Sources: introduction-2026-06.txt, section 0.1 ("Film Archaeology as a Network of Associations"); cinema-of-marbles-draft-2026-06-10.txt, recurring.

Last updated: 2026-06-10.

Etymology and lineage

The term is a deliberate fusion of two emerging fields:

  • Media archaeology — Zielinski's deep time of media, Huhtamo and Parikka's recurrent themes, Elsaesser's "new film history" (1990s onward). The "pickaxe" of media archaeology is "not an extractivist tool but a rod of change, granting access to different subjects (practitioners and theorists alike) and allowing them to make different, multiple observations on a common field."
  • Film heritage — Fossati's monument / document / event framework, the work of the FIAF community, and the practical concerns of preservation, restoration, and exhibition.

Foucault's distinction between archaeology and genealogy is invoked. Archaeology embraces "discontinuity ... and ... fragmentation [that] can give the present access to the past" (Elsaesser 2004); genealogy traces a broken lineage. Film archaeology is positioned as both/and — the two are "not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary."

What the discipline studies

Film archaeology turns to:

  • Dead media (after Sterling 1995) — obsolete communication technologies whose initial function has lapsed but whose study reveals their cultural development.
  • Zombie media (Hertz and Parikka 2012) — obsolete media reanimated through research and reuse.
  • Inscriptions in a Latour-Woolgar sense (1986) — non-mental media representations that "codify the complex processes and networks of interaction between humans and non-humans" across historical time.

Why Greece, why now

The Greek case is doubly conditioned:

  1. Archaeology in Greece is a "national discipline" (Yannis Hamilakis 2016). Dimitris Plantzos (2023) coins archaeopolitics for the Foucauldian-biopolitics-inflected variant: state governance operating through wide public investment in past materialities. The "aura of the nation as a 'dream-work'" — Stathis Gourgouris's dream nation (2021) — relies on archaeology to materialize itself.

  2. Greek crisis cinema (2009 onward) is "appreciated for its inherent archival agency" (Mademli 2016; Papanikolaou 2021) — film works as containers of crisis narratives, as kinship networks, as a small-scale industry whose every film carries the weight of its national-imaginary inheritance.

The doubled conditioning is why film archaeology, rather than film heritage or media archaeology alone, is the right discipline-name for this dissertation. The Greek context demands attention to both the archaeology of the medium and the archaeology of the cultural-political framework the medium is read through.

Relation to other framings in the wiki

  • Against marmarization: film archaeology is the practice; marmarization is the bad outcome film archaeology tries to diagnose and resist.
  • In dialogue with the boundary-archive: the boundary archive is the institutional figure film archaeology hopes to recover.
  • In conversation with archipelagic-thinking: the archipelagic move is the ecological extension of film archaeology beyond institutional walls.
  • As distinct from the "crisis of representation": film archaeology metabolizes the crisis-of-representation discussion by shifting attention from referentiality to material-sociotechnical agency.

Sister terms the introduction introduces

  • Archaeopolitics (Plantzos 2023) — see glossary.
  • Archival impulse (Hal Foster 2004) — the post-2000s artistic drive to "unearth and share films, information, and processes with a wider public."
  • Archiveology (Catherine Russell 2018) — found-footage as critical method, the operative term for chapter 3's reading of Amnesia Diaries and spectres-are-haunting-europe.
  • Tacit narratives (Ketelaar 2002) — the smaller, more generative archival endeavors whose hidden power structures complicate their stated scope.