Archive Film Collage and the Mediation of Marginalised Places

As a range of creative practices are applied in archival research, digital technologies are shaping how emerging methods contribute to the mediation of history. Specifically, digital imaging techniques provide new ways to reconfigure the contents of image and film archives. In this context, this paper presents a specific form of visual research and film production employing animation and digital compositing. It describes how this approach has been used to negotiate Welsh identity through the materials of the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. Digital compositing, used within visual effects, usually aims to erase the independence and separateness of image components produced at different locations and at different times. As they are subsumed into new, seamless wholes, the borders between images are obscured. Alternatively, experimental approaches to compositing can work to foreground the contrast and collision of its elements. In the fragmented aesthetic of collage, the photographic, as evidence of factual existence, provides an ontological link to events. The creative manipulation of this historical data is practised through layering and juxtaposition. In this way, compositing and collage engage the dialectical tension between the factual and the constructed. The interrelationship of indexical and the iconic, and the denotative and the connotative, generates new inferences and meanings. The paper asks what can be known through the synthesis of fact and creative intervention? How does this relate to notions of the visible and knowable? And what is the role of digital technology in revealing historical truths?