Situated at the intersection of archivology, film studies and memory studies, my paper offers critical perspectives on the archive as a site of knowledge production. It investigates the construction of audiovisual heritage in digital film archives, based on my research project “The Cultural Heritage of Moving Images” (VR, 2016–2018). Drawing on theorizations of the archive by Foucault and Derrida, I regard the archive as an agent in its own right. In order to challenge the ongoing tendencies in film studies to focus on the preservation of film stock, my talk will foreground the role of the archivist as a curator. In my paper I will examine the use of metadata for the creation of a polyvocal cultural memory.