KEYNOTE "Making Do: From Formal Archives to Informal Circulation"
Event Details
Please join us for the keynote address from Professor Bliss Cua Lim (University of Toronto), as part of the Biennial Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) Conference 2026.
The talk is free to attend, but registration is essential.
NB. Conference delegates do not need to register again.
This talk is supported by funding from the Faculty of Arts International Initiatives Funding Scheme and by the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, and the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Abstract
Archival crisis subtends Philippine cinema: lost films, collapsed archives, and limited access to surviving works expose national cinema’s fictive homogeneity. Rather than mourning archival loss, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024) foregrounds archivists’ resourceful practices of making do and their perseverance in the face of institutional constraints and state indifference. “Making do” — creative, improvisational workarounds that ensure the archival survival of Philippine cinema — are crucial expressions of archival power. Without such efforts, even fewer works would have survived to flow through the riverine system of Philippine film archiving.
This talk centers on examples of makeshift digitization as an archival practice of making do (paggawa ng paraan) employed by both formal and informal archives. In 2015, a handful of archivists from the Philippine Information Agency (PIA), the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA) collaborated to produce rushed digital access copies of 16mm propaganda films made in 1971-72, on the eve of the Marcos dictatorship’s declaration of Martial Law. Making do similarly underpins the work of informal archives like the Kalampag Tracking Agency, a micro-curatorial initiative and screening program helmed by Merv Espina and Shireen Seno that retrieves and recirculates short experimental and avant-garde films and videos from Manila’s alternative scene. Kalampag’s improvisational practices of making do broaden access in the face of a pronounced archival vacuum that major corporate and state collections have not been able to fill.
Speaker Bio
Professor Bliss Cua Lim
Bliss Cua Lim is a Professor at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (2009) and th book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press, and serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media and Society published by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.
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