Archiving Loss, Learning, and Time in the Field

Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story. In this episode we’re excited to feature a History Unclassified article from the March 2025 issue. It’s titled “Archiving Loss, Learning, and Time in the Field.” It’s an exploration by historian Lily Pearl Balloffet of the real, live human relationships we historians form as we pursue our research in different places and contexts and, for Lily, how those relationships were decisively disrupted in the years of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In what follows, we have Lily reading her piece in its entirety with the addition of a brief epilogue specific to this episode. I worked with Lily to create a soundscape for the piece. And when it comes to ambient audio, most of what you hear in what follows was taken from recordings done by Lily on one or another of her many research trips to Argentina, with the one notable exception of sounds recorded by collaborator Milton Secchi Naput in Henry Cowell State Park just outside of Santa Cruz, California. It’s also worth noting here at the start that the piece moves backward and forward in time, so listen up for Lily signaling those temporal shifts. Ok, that’s enough to set the scene. Here’s Lily.

Lily Pearl Balloffet
“Archiving Loss, Learning, and Time in the Field.” December 2022. Archival work is often lonely work. Over the years that I spent researching my book, I sat for hundreds of hours in utter silence. I thumbed through stacks of old newspapers, log books, letters, and photo albums. I read miles of typed columns, record books, and hastily scrawled ink. In that world of text, the faces of my research subjects were most often a total mystery to me—they existed only in my imagination as I tapped out three-sentence descriptions of their lives in my research notes. Here and there, the grainy visage of one of the characters from my book would unexpectedly greet me when I turned the page of a brittle, yellowed newspaper. Suddenly, a face would stare up at me from an article or obituary. I remember these moments—the rapid drawing in of breath upon seeing the photo, a visceral giving way to the intricate worlds of the long dead.

Perhaps some historians are cut out for the pristine solitude of library basements and musty records rooms. I am not one of those individuals. Some days I find the solitude of research to be peaceful, but most days it ranges from disconcerting to lonely. Despite being in a profession that looks backwards for a living, my saving grace has always been the fact that my work inexorably connects me to living people. Over years of historical research, this constellation of individuals has become entangled in my social realm. This is not unique to my methods or training. The work that is “looking backwards” is intimately related to real-time lived experiences and the cultivation of social networks through the research process.

In my case, one such entanglement always stood out—a friendship that I formed early in my career. I spent years learning how to research and write about history, and this relationship has its fingerprints on every chapter and stage of that process. When Edgardo Bechara El Khoury (1970-2021) passed away in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself piecing together not only the archive of our friendship and his outsized support role in my career-long learning process, but also bigger questions of temporality and human connection.

November 2011. I met Edgardo (“Pipo” to his friends) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2011. We quickly connected over our mutual interest in cultural bridges between Latin America and the Middle East.  At the time, I was a new doctoral student, trying to find my way through the early stages of a History PhD. Pipo was the Executive Director of the LatinArab International Film Festival.

We met one evening at a fundraising event, over plates of food in a local church’s multipurpose room. In our initial conversation, I mentioned some stories that I had recently found in my archival work. Since Pipo worked in the world of film, I thought he might enjoy hearing about a band of early-twentieth century Middle Eastern cinematographers who worked in South America. The group referred to themselves as the “Oriente Film” company, and worked across the region in the 1920s to 1940s. Pipo was indeed intrigued by their story. He immediately felt a spark of connection, he told me, with these young filmmakers who lived and worked in Argentina but maintained strong ties to Lebanon—a place where he himself also had roots.

Upon hearing about Oriente Film, Pipo quickly introduced me to his colleague and friend, Christian Mouroux, the Artistic Director for LatinArab. The three of us immediately fell into an easy dialogue. I was equally interested in their work, and their experience founding what became an internationally-recognized annual event. After several successful iterations of LatinArab, they also launched a Co-production Forum as part of their larger mission to promote the development of academic and cultural networks, and global avenues for collaboration in the world of film. Central to their founding mission was a vision of intercultural dialogues grounded in equality and equity. I loved spending time with Pipo and Christian—brainstorming, laughing, getting disappointed again and again in our various searches for elusive archival film footage over the years. This synergy was central to the intellectual community that I built in Argentina while researching and writing my first book.

March, 2021. A year into the COVID-19 global pandemic, I felt pangs of hopefulness after receiving my first dose of the vaccine. When people asked me if I felt any side effects from the shot, I shrugged: I had a three-week-old newborn at home. My body already felt battered, my brain fogged. Blinding brightness and dark grief intermixed in those early days after my daughter’s birth, and I remember feeling a million miles away from my past life in which I was an internationally-mobile scholar. When Chistian sent me a message one morning asking to schedule a Zoom chat, I welcomed the opportunity to catch up with him and Pipo. Since meeting more than a decade earlier, this is how our communications always went: for weeks or months we would be immersed in our own projects, and then one day out of the blue someone would reach out, and the conversation would pick back up without missing a beat.

And so, as I logged onto Zoom that day, I was grinning, holding my infant daughter up to make sure she would be in view of my camera when Pipo and Christian’s faces appeared. But when the call connected, only Christian looked back at me, with a tired smile as he greeted my wide-eyed baby. Pipo was not there, he explained, my face falling as I realized what he was telling me. Earlier that month, Pipo had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a COVID-19 infection, and I had missed it entirely. My arms-length relationship with social media venues since the birth of my daughter meant that the death announcements and obituary had slipped by me.

As historians, we are trained to think deeply and critically about the passage of time—about how humans experience the passing of the years. There is nothing like the sudden news of death to suspend you in a rush of memories, a momentary collapse of the illusion that we are tethered safely to the present in any reliable way. The large-scale cyclical interruption to the basic workings of our world that COVID-19 wrought has also done a number on my perception of the passing of time. With the intervening nature of my life over the course of the first year of the pandemic, I fooled myself into thinking that this would all be a blip. My fieldwork was on hold, but I raced forward with my book’s publication in the Summer of 2020, submitted my tenure file to my university, and started a family. Part of me believed the pandemic would pass in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, even if this disease did manage to bring us to our knees for another year, two, three.. I presumed that some projects would be irrevocably changed by the pandemic, and others I would pick up where I left off.

Frozen in the shock of Pipo’s death, the grief over his passing and the pain of being useless and far away when it came to supporting Christian, I slowly began to dig through my own archives. I had ten years of emails, WhatsApp messages, recorded interview transcripts and a few vivid photographs. I began to piece together snapshots of our friendship, of our shared projects that would lie forever on the cutting room floor.

December, 2018. It was an overcast day with thick, warm December air. The gray palette of the sky made the city’s splashes of purple jacaranda trees even more vivid when I left my apartment near Parque Las Heras in Buenos Aires. As I made my way downtown, the bus careened through narrowing streets, the buildings pressing inward and the trees disappearing. For the last few blocks I walked down Teniente General Juan Domingo Perón, passing newsstands and chain supermarkets packed in among offices, residences, and impossibly tight parking lots. I was on my way to number 1669, to conduct an interview with Christian and Pipo that I hoped would illuminate some new dimensions of the final chapter of the book. My project was a historical take on the South-South connections that have long linked Latin America to the Middle East. At that time I had conducted field research in Argentina on and off for nine years, mostly in Buenos Aires but with forays into several other provinces.

My visits with Christian and Pipo had become a pillar of my trips to Buenos Aires. Our conversations were long, both rambling and purposeful all at once. Without fail we were always fueled by cafecitos drunk from styrofoam cups, or glasses of pale beer while ensconced at a smoky cafe down the block. I always left those visits with my head spinning, a profusion of ideas competing for space on my mental map. It wasn’t uncommon for me to absentmindedly turn the wrong way coming out of 1669 Tte. Gral. Juan Domingo Peron, only to realize my mistake several blocks later, awash in my thoughts about the South-South connections that lay at the heart of both their projects and my own, for all of their differences in the form that our work assumed.

That day in 2018, I rang the office doorbell, hoping that I had the right door. Pipo and Christian had recently moved to a new office in the same building, and this was my first visit to their new digs. From the other side of the door I could hear loud voices, several people from the sound of it. Soon enough, Pipo cracked the door open, smiled, and ushered me through a dimly lit space crowded with eight or so individuals who appeared to be engaged in some sort of theater rehearsal. I followed Pipo past head-high stacks of boxes, through a cramped passageway partitioned with file cabinets and makeshift curtains. There, the room opened up once again into a small office space plastered in film posters, smelling of hot beverages and notes of tobacco.

Christian sat at one of two large desks, and warmly greeted me, motioning for me to join him. As I took a seat in a stray rolling office chair, Pipo motioned to the space around us with a sweep of his wrist: “We’re sharing an office with an improvisational theater troupe. We had to move from the old space.” The crowded entryway theater rehearsal clicked into context for me, but before I could say anything, Pipo dove right into more pressing matters. He reported on their latest film festival, and pressed copies of beautifully designed promotional material into my hand, all the while digging through a pile of t-shirts that sported the LatinArab logo, trying to find my shirt size. “It’s not an ideal space . . . for an interview” he said, turning to me abruptly.

I looked around the office alcove, and on cue the actors next door erupted into a particularly exuberant scene. “We could use the old office,” Christian offered, “I still have the key.” We all looked at each other and nodded, and set out down the hall for their former space. Christian tried the key in the lock. It clicked right in, and he opened the door carefully, peeking inside before swinging the door wide for us to follow. There was the old office where I had spent so many hours over the years. Or, more exactly, there was its skeleton. It was devoid of furniture, the bare walls punctured by nail holes and stray staples from dozens of relocated movie posters and newspaper clippings. We walked across the scuffed carpet, heading toward the spot in the office where Pipo’s desk used to sit. Christian and I sat down, backs against the wall, while Pipo paced slowly around the room, and lit a cigarette. “I remember this place..” I said to them, catching Pipo’s gaze on one of his laps around the room. A sepia-tinged light bathed the empty space—the same filtered light that I noted in their new office alcove. I didn’t know if it was the overcast day outside, or something about the windows themselves, that made the palette one of an antique reel of silent film. My mind snapped back to the interview, and we quickly warmed the room with our conversation.

We spoke for nearly two hours. Pipo and Christian reminisced about their early days as students, and the first underground film screenings that they attended together. We talked about their current projects, and talked of future avenues for growth and collaboration. We didn’t travel in a straight line as we winded our way through the dialogue. Instead, pasts presents and futures existed together, nested, interwoven. This is how our conversations always unfurled.

May 2018. Pipo’s enthusiasm for my work was contagious, and it sustained me for years of research, writing, and navigating a new career. When I gave up on a research lead, he would push me to pick it back up. When someone dismissed my elevator pitch in those early days, Pipo would scold me and tell me to make a tighter pitch. “You can’t waste time! You need it on the tip of your tongue!” For years we chased the story of the “Oriente Film” crew—the subject of our very first conversation many years prior. We searched everywhere that we could think of for surviving copies of the footage that they shot across South America—libraries, archives, private collections.

We never found so much as a lead in our years-long goose chase. In the process of the hunt, however, we made a plan to create our own documentary about Oriente Film—or about our search for them at the very least. By 2018, we had decided to finally move forward with filming the trailer for our documentary, even if we still couldn’t find the Oriente Film reels. The search was its own story, we decided. And maybe there was something halfway poetic in casting about for a window into the past and never finding it. At any rate, the Oriente Film crew would remain fleeting specters. After coming up empty handed, we decided that we would just have to produce our own visual footage. On a sunny May afternoon, we headed to the place where I first ran across the story of Oriente Film: the periodicals archive at Argentina’s National Library.

Unsuccessfully, we attempted to convince Library security guards to allow us to bring our own film crew down into the subterranean newspaper archives. After our request was denied (and followed up by terse instructions to exit the premises), we surreptitiously set up our filming equipment across the street from the library on a nearby terrace, and rolled the cameras with the library as our backdrop. Satisfied with our takes, and still laughing about our guerilla filming setup, we packed it in, and rushed off to catch our various buses that would carry us off to our respective neighborhoods. “It’s okay if we need to film this again” said Pipo, in what I was sure was a gentle acknowledgement that I am not a natural in front of the camera. “This is just the first of many takes.” I nodded, and he jogged away down the street, toward a line of passengers boarding the #59 bus. In the end, that was our next-to-last take. I moved across the country, began a new job, and just as we had circled back to co-conspiring, the pandemic hit.

March, 2024. Coming up on the third anniversary of Pipo’s death, I found myself driving the winding highway that cuts through the mountains between my now home in Santa Cruz, California, and the airport in San Jose. I drove carefully as the wind whipped through the oaks and redwoods. Traffic was stop and go over the pass. I was on my way to pick up a colleague who I was meeting for the first time—Milton Secchi Naput, who had just flown in from Milwaukee. Milton and I had first started corresponding about a year and a half prior. He wrote to me, out of the blue, at a moment when Pipo and the shared projects we once envisioned were far from my mind. It was the beginning of a new academic year. I was churning on a new book project that had nothing to do with my earlier work, and I was scrambling to move into a new office space after my old office had been rendered unusable by a flood. I was charging, headlong, at new beginnings. I remember sorting things into boxes—things that could be salvaged vs. all that which had been waterlogged—when Milton’s first email popped up in my inbox.

At first, I was not inclined to respond. His introductory message explained that he was a cinematographer from Argentina who was currently completing a Masters in Fine Arts in Experimental Film at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He had stumbled across my work, and become intrigued by the story of the Oriente Film Crew (just as Pipo had been). Milton, too, was drawn to the story of these roving characters who had appeared fleetingly on the archival record before disappearing again after a few years. Like Pipo, Milton had roots in Lebanon but had lived his whole life in Argentina. He was interested in connecting, in chatting about the possibility of pursuing further research into the history of the Oriente Film crew, and taking another stab at searching for the lost reels of their documentary films.

“I don’t need this,” I thought to myself, after reading Milton’s email. I had moved on to other things, other horizons. I didn’t need to pull this thread and start looking backward.  But I hesitated. “Come to my Zoom office hours” I wrote. “Let’s talk.”

In the months that unfolded thereafter, we talked at length about Oriente Film, about working in archival settings. About the materiality of old newspapers and rolls of film, the sensory landscape of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. I told him how I had been digging through the old notes, messages, and photos from my years of friendship with Pipo, and how my attempts at committing anything to paper on this subject were painful, halting, directionless. Milton was a generous listener, observant, and patient. He encouraged me to send him a draft.  Another year went by, and I followed through. I managed to get this story out of my memory and onto a page, and in the process I had made a new friend.

By the end of Milton’s visit last March,  we had made plans to move forward with a short documentary on the story of Oriente Film. Once again I was looking ahead, looking to the horizon.  But things had shifted, life had changed—that which was in the past was suddenly in the future.

On our way back to the airport, I brought my daughter along for the ride, and together we showed Milton one of our favorite places to visit. We went to Henry Cowell State Park, to see the enormous California redwood trees—Sequoia sempervirens. Milton carried with him a microphone and windscreen, and we recorded the ambient sounds of our meandering path through the damp, pungent forest. My daughter showed off her favorite tree—a towering giant hollowed out by a lightning strike many decades earlier. Close to the base of the trunk, if you get down on all fours, you can actually crawl into the cavity of the tree. With a flashlight you can see the smooth, charred walls, deep black. Years ago, people would sign up for slots to camp in this tree, taking shelter in its dark solitude. As the three of us crouched there, I felt that I understood why someone might have jumped at the chance to bed down in the belly of this battered giant, whose green boughs shot stubbornly skyward, full of life.

Epilogue, 2020. I remember the day that my book arrived in the mail from my publisher. It was June of 2020, and I had spent the past six months trying to settle into the rhythms of pandemic quarantines, shutdowns, and a social life heavily mediated by video chats and wistful phone calls. I was pregnant with my daughter, and felt too ill to read the dizzying amount of words printed in the long-awaited hard copies of my book. I shelved it, only picking it back up several months later when it came time to prepare for a run of pandemic-friendly, online book talks.

The first thing that I read was my Acknowledgements section, my chest tightening at the thought of all those who had helped me cross the finish line with my years-long undertaking. Next, I flipped all the way to the back of the book, and read the Epilogue, smiling when I was reminded that I had chosen a quote by Pipo as the book’s closing epigraph: “We don’t need to create bridges between Latin America and the Middle East. They already exist—we just need to mobilize them.”

I decided right then not to send Pipo a digital copy of my book—I would deliver it in person once the pandemic was over. I would stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder, while he cracked open the book’s pages, grinning, maybe gently joking about something as he did so. Then, I would guide him to look at the Epigraph, and I would point out his name printed there. I would thank him for the years of friendship, of conversation, of laughter and wild goose chasing, of challenging me to keep digging and to look directly at the camera, and to give better elevator pitches when confronted with skeptics or doubters, and so much else. I could see this reunion in my mind’s eye. It was perfect. And so I sat on his copy of the book, and waited for pandemic travel bans and shutdowns to subside.

When I learned of Pipo’s death the following year, I grieved his loss deeply. I impotently raged, flailing at my decision not to send him my book, to not write him a note of gratitude when it went to press. We spoke plenty of times that summer after its publication, but I never mentioned it, preferring instead to be regaled by his descriptions of new projects—a music video they were shooting, an online film festival, and more.

These days, I often find myself reflecting on what it’s like to live suspended in many timelines at once—that of our memory, our daily experience, our imagination, and the horizons of dreams and aspirations. When I began my training as a historian, I understood that this work would contour my perception of time, and that I would learn to see the past as bound up in the present. I did not realize that the mechanism by which this would come to pass would be the friendships that I built in the field, not the stories that I poured over in library basements or amidst stacks of archival documents. In these past couple of years, the ups and downs of celebration and grief have shaken me to my core, and demanded that I grapple with how I want to do my work, how I want to be in this world. I wish I could tell all of this to Pipo. Perhaps most importantly, I want to tell him how he is still teaching me to mobilize bridges, to nurture friendships, and to look directly, unflinchingly, in the direction of the future that I want to inhabit.

Daniel Story
That was Lily Pearl Balloffet reading her History Unclassified article from the March 2025 issue of the AHR. That piece is titled “Archiving Loss, Learning, and Time in the Field.” History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.