Download PDF by Paula Amad: Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's

From 1908 to 1931, French banker Albert Kahn financed a enormous multimedia archive meant to list the "surface of the globe as inhabited and constructed through Man." saved in a world-themed backyard at the outskirts of Paris, the files de l. a. Planète contained 4,000 stereoscopic plates, 72,000 autochromes, and 183,000 meters of movie, composing one of many 20th century's such a lot extraordinary makes an attempt to maintain a reminiscence of the area via media.

Moving past a conventional specialize in fiction motion pictures screened for theatrical unlock, this publication introduces new views on movie heritage via an research of Kahn's infrequently screened, unedited nonfiction motion pictures. Kahn's fragmented photos unearths diversified highbrow affects, together with the philosophy of Henri Bergson (Kahn's lifelong mentor), the increase of human geography as practiced by way of Jean Brunhes (the director of the archive), and the clinical experiments of the biologist Jean Comandon (a pioneering microcinematographer who additionally contributed to Kahn's work). Amad additionally connects the Archive to an obsession with the standard in early French movie thought, the evolution of overseas documentary movie, the early Annales tuition of heritage, and the colonial impulses of visible mapping tasks. reworking our perception of the archive within the age of cinema, Amad advances an leading edge thought of film's counter-archival power in accordance with the problem it poses to what counts as history.