American artist Matthew Buckingham, has worked extensively with found footage of personal films and home movies taken by unknown individuals. In works such as Situation Leading to a Story (1999), as Balsom notes, ‘the artist plays archivist’, attempting to track down the original owner of a film from 1916 labelled ‘Peru’. Buckingham intersperses the imagery with a voiceover describing American monopolisation of mining in the Andes.⁴ Another film artist-archivist is the French Algerian Zineb Sedira whose installation, Dreams Have No Titles (2022), included a screening of a restored copy of Ennio Lorenzini’s film, Les Mains Libres (1964). This anti-colonial film shot in the early years of Algeria’s independence was thought to be lost until Sedira discovered a 35mm print in Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, in Rome. The work of Bill Morrison is also part of the analogue-archival turn, in particular his collage film Decasia: The State of Decay (2002), which is composed of footage taken from decaying silent films. The film shows footage of the process of developing analogue film but is visually structured around the progress of chemical decay. Due to its chemical properties analogue film is notoriously unstable and deteriorates if it is not stored in specific conditions or restored. Morrison states that he ‘became enamoured of the way time could ravage film’.⁵ Decasia directly addresses a central paradox of the analogue image’s archival capacity. Film’s photochemical base can indexically preserve time past but due to these very same material and chemical properties it is also subject to destruction. In order for its archival properties to survive, it, too, must be archived.

In the antipodean context this contradiction between preservation and decay has left its mark on Australian film history. Of the 250 silent films made in Australia between 1906 and 1930 just over fifty survive. Of these survivors many only exist as fragments. This fragmented condition is evident in the first feature film made in Australia, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), which originally ran for over an hour. As film historians Ray Edmondson and Andrew Pike note, ‘At a time when European and American films averaged 15 minutes it quite possibly introduced the concepts {of the feature film} to world cinema’.⁶ Yet only seventeen minutes of this ‘feature’ survive. One of the major reasons for the disappearance of Australian silent films was that prints were produced in very limited numbers. As Edmondson and Pike further note, in the case of a majority of films produced in Australia during the silent era, often only three or four copies were made due to the high cost of 35mm film stock.⁷ These copies were part of a schedule of circulation that took them around cities, into the suburbs, and out to rural theatres. They were finally sold to ‘itinerant picture showmen who exhibited films in outback towns’.⁸ Edmondson and Pike argue that ‘the prints were literally worked to death; they became worn, scratched, broken and incomplete’.⁹

The economic infrastructure of the silent film industry was as unstable as the film stock. Production companies often only made one or two films before folding and negatives were lost as film labs cleared out their back catalogues. In a manner anticipating the analogue experiments with found footage by artists like Buckingham and Morrison, films were often sold to another production company and re-cut to reuse footage for a new film. For example, another version of the Kelly Gang comprising footage from three different bushranger films was still circulating in Australian cinemas in the late 1920s. Given the notoriously flammable qualities of nitrate film stock, the remains of silent film were also used to spark fire scenes in later films. The coming of sound intensified this process of destruction as old silent prints were destroyed or sold to make way for the new technology.

There have been a number of attempts to locate this lost archive of Australian silent films. The National Film Archive of the National Library of Australia began collecting filmic material as early as 1935, creating a collection that would eventually become the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). This was one of the earliest cinematic archives in the world and by the 1950s the NFSA was actively searching for lost Australian silent films.¹⁰ In 1981 it launched, ‘The Last Film Search’, emphasising that ‘the chances of survival outside the National Library’s Film Archive diminish with each passing year’.¹¹ In a tone of urgency tinged with melancholia, Edmondson and Pike warn,

For some it is already too late. For others, preservation is possible—but only if they are found and copied in time. After a few short years, there will be no second chance—no hoping that a 60 or 70 year old film will have somehow survived.…How does one find those films—in thousands of forgotten storage places—in time?¹²

There were tales of miraculous recoveries such as Franklyn Barret’s The Breaking of the Drought (1920) which was found in a collection of books donated to the library in 1976. The Woman Suffers (1918), a stirring melodrama by Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, was found in an Adelaide film archive in 1983, with 61 of the 77 minutes recovered. Films were found in old sheds, in the walls of a theatre and even in a vault after the demolition of a building. Yet as we enter the third decade of the twenty first century it is unlikely that more lost films will ever be found. The film stock has long since expired, warped, gone brittle or succumbed to fungal growth.

What are we to make of the irretrievable archive at the origin of antipodean film history? We know that elements of this archive exist in other forms. One can still glimpse a trace of these films in production stills—photographs taken on set to advertise the picture. Such photographs provide a valuable fragment from which one can begin to reconstruct the visual world of these lost films. There are also a large number of posters in which one can see how films were promoted. The reviews which circulated in newspapers are another valuable source. They provide schematic outlines of lost film plots and give the reader a sense of the response of audiences at the time of their release.

Yet, still images and text cannot supplement the moving image. They are the trace of works which remain forever inaccessible to the antipodean archivist. Existing only as titles, images and fragments of plots, these films constitute the optical unconscious of antipodean film art. Walter Benjamin suggested that, ‘It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis’.¹³ Analogue cinema is part of this wider discovery of an unconscious composed of images which registers not only individual memories but social history through the accumulation of visual traces.

While for Benjamin all images form part of this photographic unconscious, antipodean cinematic culture is particularly charged, because, like the unconscious of the subject, it remains inaccessible except as traces. The lost silent films resonate within our filmic culture as a catalogue of names, as elusive as dreams we can barely grasp. It is perhaps for this reason that there has been such a strong connection to analogue filmmaking in projects like the Artist Film Workshop (AFW). This Melbourne-based group has not only fostered a culture of 16mm film production but also screens overlooked works from the National Film and Sound Archive, as well as canonical works of experimental cinema from across the globe. It is also for this reason that the National Film and Sound Archive has been so diligent in conserving whatever traces remain of Australian film history. Perhaps this absence also explains the difficulty Australian filmmakers face when trying to create original cinematic art works, often falling back into the repetition-compulsion of genre tropes which constitute the dominant trend of filmmaking in this country. While archival art usually faces the difficulty of the immensity of what has been preserved, the void at the heart of the antipodean film archive poses another insistent question: how do we work with the paradox of an irretrievable archive? There is a glimmer of utopianism in these fragments of a lost cinema, an archive of possibilities and cinematic roads still untaken.