After being neglected for a long time, amateur films and other ephemeral films have become a challenge for both, scholars and archivists. As many of these films are lacking basic information about their provenance, their conditions of production and their content, scholars will want to watch them over and over again while archivists must be afraid of damaging or even destroying the only copy available. The sudden death of analogue film in 2011 put an end to this dilemma by leaving no other option for archives but going digital. The Austrian Film Museum, the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have joined forces to benefit from the advantages of digitization while trying to avoid its shortcomings at the same time. Ingo Zechner will speak about digitizing ephemeral films and present a digital film annotation tool that allows scholars to create frame-by-frame annotations and to conduct microanalysis of films.

Host: Mats Jönsson, Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg