Abstract
Though Alain Resnais’ documentary film about the French National Library, All the World’s Memory (Toute la Memoir du Monde), is meant to celebrate the library’s scope and organization, anxiety seeps into its cinematic “language”: dim black-and-white footage, a restlessly prowling camera, close-ups that cut off object from context and detail from whole, discontinuous cuts, choppy bullet-like comments, and darkly foreboding orchestral music. It’s a beautiful film, but what does it say about Resnais’ feelings about the library? Certainly awe, but also high modernism’s anxiety about proliferating knowledge. “Man,” the authoritative male voice-over proclaims, “fears being engulfed by this mass of words.”
Highlights
Its books are stored in an “indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries,” each connected to its immediate neighbors in a mazelike array of unknown options
As more and more seekers set out to find the “books of Vindication” that will justify all actions for all times, as they believe, a mad stampede for the texts that offer that salvation ensues
Many other archives could have been included in this cluster, from archived African American history to the New England Textile Museum or Argentina’s Mothers of Plaza del
Summary
Many other archives could have been included in this cluster, from archived African American history to the New England Textile Museum or Argentina’s Mothers of Plaza del Other contributors discuss archives that consist of paper and other tangible objects, though their holdings are of more direct use to radicals: the Peace Archive at Haverford College, Asian-American zines, Interference Archive’s social movement collection, the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, oral histories of the India/Pakistan Partition, and iLand’s collection of performative movement “scores.”
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