Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell Joshua Wiebe Catherine Russell. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Duke University Press, 2018. 280 pages. $26.95 There are two constitutive problems at the heart of Catherine Russell's 2018 book. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. The first is a definitional one, motivating Russell to return again and again to declarative statements intended to articulate just what 'archiveology' is and how it functions. For Russell, "archiveology is above all a means of returning to the images of the past that were produced to entertain, or produced for more serious purposes of documentary recording, and reviewing them for new ways of making history come alive in new forms."1 She explains: "Etymologically, archiveology might mean the study of archives, but the Greek suffix '-ology' actually refers to someone who speaks in a certain manner. When applied to film practice, it refers to the use of the image archive as a language."2 "Archiveology names the process by which the image bank in its fundamental contingency and instability becomes a means by which history can speak back to the present."3 The second concern centers around the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and the conceptual applicability his work on collecting, criticism, translation, memory, and aesthetics has for the extensive practices of archival/found footage filmmaking. Synthesizing the two interests, Russell contends that "archiveology as a cultural practice is a crucial point of convergence of many of Benjamin's central ideas," an argument which directly addresses film studies' thirty-year love affair with Benjamin.4 Drawing the neologism from a brief piece from 1991 by Joel Katz entitled "From Archive to Archiveology," Russell performs the very function she analyzes, re-purposing Katz's work to new, unpredictable ends. Conspicuously, the lineage of archiveology from Katz's essay is established through a single reference without direct quotation: Russell cites Katz in the first chapter and then he disappears. This mindful attention to the force of citational practices (demonstrated by omission, in this case) shows an affinity with Benjamin that goes beyond the instrumental. Russell's re-purposing of Katz's notion exemplifies her methodological attraction to Benjamin's style of citation. "Quotations in [Benjamin's] work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of [their] conviction."5 We might think of Katz in Archiveology as another kind of thief, trussed up and disarmed, left by the side of the road having been relieved of his weapons. In the case of Katz, 'archiveology' was intended to introduce an approach "more archaeological than historiographic," reflexively interrogating the "archival film […] as representation of history within particular economic, social and cultural constructs, and not as pure History itself."6 Russell here pushes further, insisting that images "are constitutive of historical experience and not merely a representation of it."7 Where Katz confines archiveology to "those who attempt to interrogate the archive in its own terms," Russell regards it as the very language of the archive itself.8 Interrogation being only one mode of enunciation, Russell's expanded terminology (though not so inclusive as to become what Derrida proposes-- "archiviology, […] designat[ing] a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive"9) enables her [End Page 10] to more attentively work through a larger filmography with broadened concerns informed by the vast and contentious discourse surrounding the archive. The most obvious reference point for Russell's work is Benjamin's never-ending opus, The Arcades Project, which sought to introduce "the principle of montage into history" by way of an immense network of references and criticism.10 Already a privileged element in theories of the cinematic, Benjamin's montage is elevated to that exclusive filmic means by which "the work of art" is produced.11 Following Benjamin's conjoining a theory of the cinematic to a theory of history, Russell closes the circuit by returning to the cinematic with all the benefits of having been steeped in Benjamin's historical analysis. In the famous "Work of Art" essay, Benjamin states: The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke. It is...