Sources of the unmade: media source criticism and the institutional record of unrealized films

What counts as a media source when the film was never made?

The talk introduces media source criticism a research perspective transferring the classical toolkit of source criticism from the historians workshop into media and communication studies. While unmade film studies approaches unrealized projects primarily as production histories of lost cinema (Fenwick and Foster 2026), films unmade by institutional control call for a different objectof inquiry: not the absent work, but the institutional record of the process that stopped it a record that opens the social history of cinema to source-critical scrutiny. Drawing on the records of the multi-tiered system of screenplay control in state-socialist Poland, preserved at the National Film Archive Audiovisual Institute (FINA) in Warsaw, the talk examines screenplays submitted in the 1960s by literary reportage writers authors whose verygenre claimed to record reality, and whose attempts to transfer that record to the screen were stopped.

A source-oriented reading of this institutional language reveals two distinct regimes of invisibility: political prohibition and internalized impossibility. The talk argues that the institutional record of the unmade constitutes a media source in its own right.