Counter-Archive

Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planete

By: Paula Amad

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Hardcover | 9 November 2010 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
408 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
24.11 x 16.05 x 2.43

Hardcover

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From 1908 to 1931, French banker Albert Kahn financed a monumental multimedia archive intended to capture the "surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man." Stored in a world-themed garden on the outskirts of Paris, the Archives de la Planète contained 4,000 stereoscopic plates, 72,000 autochromes, and 183,000 meters of film, making it one of the twentieth century's most impressive attempts to preserve a memory of the world through media.Moving beyond a traditional focus on fiction films screened for theatrical release, this book introduces new perspectives on motion picture history through an analysis of Kahn's rarely screened, unedited nonfiction films. Kahn's fragmented footage reveals diverse intellectual influences, including the philosophy of Henri Bergson (Kahn's lifelong mentor), the rise of human geography as practiced by Jean Brunhes (the director of the archive), and the scientific experiments of the biologist Jean Comandon (a pioneering microcinematographer who also contributed to the Archive). Amad also connects the Archive to an obsession with the everyday in early French film theory, the evolution of international documentary film, the early Annales School of history, and the colonial impulses of visual mapping projects. Transforming our conception of the archive in the age of cinema, Amad advances a new theory of film's counter-archival qualities based on the challenge they pose to what counts as history.

Industry Reviews

Counter-Archive is a groundbreaking, original and scholarly book, which is indispensable to a full understanding of the early and present history of the cinema and its relationship to the archive and the everyday. -- Barbara Creed H-France an ambitious and compelling book which elegantly ties meticulous archival detail to astute theoretical challenges, and its conceptual hook may well inspire further critical attention. -- Tara Blake Wilson New Formations A work of exceptional scholarly merit. -- Jan Baetens Biography ...rich and endearing study... -- Lisabeth During and Deborah Levitt Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

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