Hanna Stein; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
Biography:
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of History (Southeast European History and Anthropology) at the University of Graz and a DOC-fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In my dissertation, I am working on organized amateur film practices and productions from the period of the Long Sixties in Yugoslavia. With a perspective of everyday life, I am exploring how non-professional film makers made sense of, broached, coped with, and visualized the political, social and cultural aspects in a period of rapid transformation. Grounds to my research is a film corpus of nearly two hundred films from various Yugoslav ciné clubs, and a large corpus of (film-) journal articles and manuals about and for film amateurs. The analysis of formal aspects, subject matters, and discourses allows to understand the ambivalences of organized amateur film making at the intersection of a rationalized system of education and leisure on the one hand and the practices creative subjects on the other.
My research interests of visual, cultural and gender history stem from my education in history (MA), gender studies (MA) and cultural sciences (BA). A few years ago, I had the opportunity to combine my research and artistic work during a residency program in Maribor, where I was able to put my own amateur film ambitions in practice and enhance the ways of visualizing research processes: https://vimeo.com/252132280
Publications:
- Mapping and Grounding Visual History: Methodological Reflections on Historical Research and Amateur Films. In: Research in Film and History. 3. 2021.
- When Ships Don't Come Ashore - A Yugoslav cinema club production's dissent in-between the personal and the political. In: Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television. Special Issue. 2021. 527-540. doi:10.1080/01439685.2021.1936982
- “We are not Cineplex. We can wait” Memory and Self-Perception of an Amateur Community – Kino Klub Zagreb and the Amateur Film Movement in Yugoslavia. In: Kajet. 1. 2017. 88-97.
Motivation:
My stay at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana coincides with archival work for my research at the National Archive of Slovenia, the Cinematheque and +MSUM. Furthermore, I will work on the finalization of research chapters for my dissertation and a planned publication of a special issue on amateur film practices. However, the stay at INZ is especially interesting for me in terms of building of individual and institutional cooperation. The overlapping between my field of research and the work that is done at the institute, promises a productive and inspiring exchange. Additionally, I am interested in the ongoing building of a digital humanities research group, especially in the area of digital visual analysis and archives—such as the Graz based VASE (Visual Archive Southeastern Europe)—which I see as a great potential too also archive films and thus offer them to a wider public and researchers at the same time.
Visiting duration: March - May, 2023
