A ghost shifts through centuries of footage in attempts to piece together a memory....


Through the use of archival material and manipulated photographs to generate a memory, 'the archivist is dying' is a personal, experimental short, invoking the mystical and academic in composition of poetry. The project uses footage from American Folklife Center Archive, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, Black Film Archives, YouTube, LAPL, and is sound designed using Free Sound, The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection, and original audio.

The thesis of the "disturbed familiar" (a disrupted memory) is built out of filmmaker, Jonas Mekas' belief that “home movies are […] lyric poetry […] created by the people” 'the archivist is dying' is showing Blackness, often gentle as it is joyous with the constant disruption, threat.