This talk brings Lars Elleström’s notion of transmediation as well as ideas of intermedial and multimodal truthfulness (Elleström, Schirrmacher)with my research on the curation of queer audiovisual memories in digital film archival collections (Brunow 2017, 2018). While visibility has been an important means for LGBTQI+ struggle, traces of queer lives and desires lie, above all, in archival silences and invisibilities. Queer lives can be traced in an empty note (Dever), in censored letters or diaries, in missing data and incomplete records. Can we mobilize the concept transmediation to grasp the spaces across and beyond media borders and as a way to theorize queerness? As José Esteban Muñoz reminds us, queerness lies in the in-between (in the ephemeral, the fleeting, the evasive). What does this mean for understanding queer audiovisual heritage? In its anti-positivist stance, queerness can be found in circulation and its reception.

This paper looks at archival practices as processes of meaning making or as signifying practices which make queer readings possible. Such framing is provided by multimodal archival processes, such as the use of metadata or other paratexts. Many of these archival practices, however, rely on textual or visual evidence. For queer film history, however, the truth-claim of gossip is higher than alleged facts such as heterosexual marriages or reported love affairs which production companies staged to cover up the star’s homo- or bisexuality (see Siegel, forthcoming). Via acts of transmediation and media representation queer archives turn gossip and communicative memory (Assmann) into cultural memory. My examples will stem from European national film archives as well as two minor archives: the Lesbian Home Movie Project and SAQMI – The Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images. Overall, this paper sets out to show how we can mobilize theorizations of transmediation and queerness and bring them into afruitful dialogue.