The cultural practice of minor cinema archiving: The case of immigrant filmmakers in Sweden

The aim of this article is to present the archival practice behind two extensive research projects that we have worked on during the last decade: the Stockholm Film Workshop and minor immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. Archive has become a general catchword in today’s academia that encompasses several practices of collecting, storing, distributing and displaying. We will stress in particular – partly against the idealism of digital activism – that the archive is a locus of power. The struggle for archival acknowledgement is a question of how to establish an archival artefact, an object that may be stored and repeated, and thus to affirm it as something that cannot be disregarded. This is a practice in the way that theory also constitutes a practice: a way of intervening that is case sensitive and that constantly cuts across those four principles that Giovanna Fossati famously coined as ‘film as original’, ‘film as art’, ‘film as dispositif’ and ‘film as state of the art’.