1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458595503321

Autore

Amad Paula

Titolo

Counter-Archive : Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète / / Paula Amad

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Columbia University Press, , [2010]

©2010

ISBN

1-280-59812-3

9786613627957

0-231-50907-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (429 p.)

Collana

Film and Culture Series

Disciplina

791.43/3

Soggetti

Actualities (Motion pictures) - History and criticism

Actualities (Motion pictures) -- History and criticism

Archives de la Planete

Archives de la Planète

Kahn, Albert

Kahn, Albert, 1860-1940

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. World Souvenir -- 2. "Keep your eyes open" -- 3. The Counter-Archive of Cinematic Memory -- 4. "No more written archives, only films" -- 5. The "anecdotal side of History" -- 6. Seeing "for the first time" -- 7. Illuminations from the Darkened "Sanctuary" -- 8. The Aerial View -- Conclusion: Toute la Mémoire du monde -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher



Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory.