Barbara Klinger

Barbara Klinger (born 1951) is an American film professor and theorist, who once served as the Provost Professor of Film and Media Studies at Indiana University until she retired in 2015. Besides that, she is also the author of various books (which includes the book Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, published in 1994); along with a number of scholarly articles, all of which have been published in various academic journals.

Quotes

• It’s especially interesting when you try to balance and people when you do archival and historical research today when you try to balance digital sources and everything that that means in terms of what’s available digitally with analog, old fashioned stuff like scripts that you, mysterious scripts that may or may not elude you with what’s located in archives here in the United States and elsewhere.
• That search, that charge after these floating ephemeral objects that you try not only to capture but then assemble into some reconstructed narrative that will not only make sense but also maintain some truth to the performer or the artist you’re studying or the film and media artifact at the same time.
• Lost, dead, never made, absent and more. We’ve heard a lot of those terms coursing through the various papers during this session and also during the course of the day, the ultimate challenge in many ways for the archivists as well as the film historian scholar.
• It’s just about the work of balancing between analog archival and/or digital sources that the contemporary media historian has to undertake and that everybody here has undertaken.
  • taken from a panel transcript by Indiana University