Organised by Sophie Hartleib and Sabine Nessel, project: Rest of Cast: Film Credits as Spatiotemporally Dynamic Assemblies, Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters". 

The workshop raises the question of the hierarchising and differentiating function of film credits in the context of Racial Capitalism (Robinson 1983). Film credits assemble the names of those involved in the making of a film and provide information on production companies, funding and copyright. Within European film studies and following literature scholar Gérard Genette (1997), they are usually understood in the category of paratexts and have been analysed in terms of their narrative function, form and aesthetics (Betancourt 2018). The aim of the workshop is to expand this understanding and shift the focus towards the material and economic dimensions of film credits.

While the field of film studies has thus far paid little attention to those who are not named in the credits, it is especially these gaps and fissures that offer insights into the hierarchies and exclusion practices within the industry. This is especially true for Black entertainers and creatives: Not only did their direct contributions to music, dance, etc. often remain unnamed. Following Saidiya Hartman, Blackness circulates as a commodity and signifier to be used for enjoyment and financial profit (Hartman 1997), further complicating the question of crediting in the context of Black creative labor. Thus, if we understand film credits as a form of professional recognition and capital, the question emerges of who is considered a creative subject and whose labor is deemed credit-worthy in the first place.

The workshop looks at film credits from the perspective of film and media studies. Our discussion will cover both case studies from early cinema as well as Classical Hollywood and contemporary examples of (audio-) visual media. The workshop will focus on three main topics: Film credits and their omissions will be considered in the context of systems of racial capitalism that are built on the exploitation of racialised labor. Beyond matters of representation, film credits help us consider notions of copyright, intellectual property and creative agency and how they relate to Black subjectivity. Second, we will consider how (film-) archives take up, reproduce, question or even change original film credits. In order to appear and be credited, many names have to be made visible first. An outlook on the work on and with the archive will both consider the necessity for de-colonial/anti-racist modes of media and film-archaeology as well as the implications of such efforts. Third, we will consider online platforms such as IMDb, which will further open the discussion to questions of crediting and digital technologies and practices. Juxtaposing IMDb with digitally circulated (audio-) visual media such as Memes, GIFs and TikToks, we consider two opposing trends of online users, as they either retrospectively fill up the gaps of the uncredited or circulate media without any form of credit or copyright attached to them.