The Asian Film Archive and its methodologies

Abstract

The Asian Film Archive is more than a site of repository for film—it curates collections, programmes, papers, and more to promote its mission: to Save, Share and Explore the art of Asian cinema. Impressions of an archive as a faceless institution—simply a giant repository or a site of knowledge—accordingly calls for an in-depth analysis of the grassroots methods and archival strategies employed by the very people who make up the organisation itself, and an undoing of the myths of archives as exhaustive and orderly collections which only house objective and neutral objects of a nation. As expected, a much more complicated reality shines through in this paper: archives, such as the AFA, straddle the different and sometimes competing facets of time, money and space, trying their best to save what they can while also trying to advocate for their cause. This thesis will therefore elucidate upon the social history of the AFA—the first and only transnational archive in the region—and its changes in archiving philosophies, methodologies, and challenges in its short 17 years of history.