Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, and Dale Hudson, Associate Professor of Cinema, New York University Abu Dhabi, have published a book chapter entitled “An Archive of Small Media during First Wave COVID-19:  Productive Memories of the Global Trauma,” in a book recently published in Portugal entitled Memory and Aesthetic Experience: Essays on Cinema, Media, and Cognition, edited by Filipe Martins (Porto, Portugal: Universidade do Porto Press, 2020). 

Analyzing twenty different online media projects from across the globe chronicling on-the-ground rather than official responses to the pandemic, the essay argues that during COVID-19 spread, small media has moved from the periphery of the media ecology to a central role in redefining cinema and documentary.  

The essay analyzes how these projects operate in liminal zones between life and death, presence and non-presence, actual and virtual, loss and hope, suggesting pandemic memory and trauma is a continual, active entanglement between the known and unknown. 

The essay derives from their ongoing curatorial project started in April 2020 to chronicle international small responses to the pandemic through a three-way collaborative project with the University of St. Andrews Scotland, Taiwan Film Institute, and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.