Wales on Film: Memory, Identity, Politics

The paper will present a practice-based project that addresses the history of South Wales through the materials held at the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. Informed by critical realism, the work investigates the capacity of collage methods in negotiating archive film to uncover marginalised aspects of the past that are obscured by dominant narratives.
Consistent with the fluid, plural conditions of memory and identity, the research regards archive footage as a site of malleable social meanings that are contingent on varying contexts of appropriation, recontextualisation and reception.
In contrast to conventional documentary representation, the practice is underpinned by the argument that alternate, experimental strategies that foreground layering, fragmentation and ambiguity are better suited to represent the complexities of history. The project asks if a deeper understanding of the past can be apprehended through the construction and mediation offered by the vocabularies of archive film and collage.