Planetary Counter-Archive

Abstract

PLANETARY COUNTER-ARCHIVE Amad Paula, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kakn's Archives de la Planete, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010; 408pp, paperback £24 This first book-length study of Albert Kahn's multi-media Archives de la Planete (1908-1931) proclaims from the outset that what will follow is neither a catalogue nor manual but rather a 'cultural ethnography' of the Archive. Throughout the book, whose theoretical weight equals its empirical detail, Amad writes in intimate contact with the facts, in a sense enacting the principal rule of Jean Brunhes' geographical vision she describes in the final chapter (p289). Although she does not continue to deliver the rich ethnographic descriptions offered in the introduction of the 'techno-archival peepshow' (p3) she experienced whilst conducting research at the Albert Kahn Museum, Amad deftly weaves experience, biography and historical detail with Bergsonian philosophy, Annales Historiography and early French film tiieory (among other bodies of thought) to explore how the archive was transformed in the age of cinema. Counter-Archive's tight cultural-ethnographic focus on Archives de la Phnete affords Amad a great deal of theoretical manoeuvre which she utilises impressively, zooming out from die depths of the archive to rethink the relationship between memory, film and the everyday in French modernity in the light of the counter-archival challenge Kahn's project inspires. The Archives de la Phnete was one of the many botanical, publishing and philanthropic-related projects of the affluent and eccentric Jewish banker Albert Kahn, and is a unique case study for Amad's counter-archival thesis for several reasons. While Kahn's attempt to archive the world was in line with the pseudo-ethnographic aim to record apparently vanishing cultures popular in the early twentieth century, he took the unusual step of turning the camera on his own culture, the flea markets of Paris appearing in the Archive as a subject of nostalgic scrutiny as valid as the temple of Angkor Wat. Secondly, contra the commonly held assumption (made explicit in Carolyn Steedman's 2002 book Dust: The Archive and Cultural History) that documents are never born in an archive, they end up there, Kahn's recordings (that include over 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film) were produced solely for the ambitious purpose of making an archive of the world. They were, as Amad puts it, still-born. Their development was also arrested in the sense that the archive is unfinished due to Kahn losing his fortune during the Wall Street crash of 1929, forcing him to end the project in 1931. Related to this, the films were not intended to be shown to a (then) present-day audience, but rather crafted as a time-capsule, confiscated from die contemporary for the benefit of an imagined future audience, for us. One of the contradictions ?? Archives de L· Planete is that although its project was to capture everyday life, die ordinary man across the globe, in its heyday the only audience allowed to view it was a small handful of Kahn's intellectually and financially elite friends who attended rare screenings on his property among the world-themed gardens. Lastly, the archive stands out because of Albert Khan's, and by extension the Archive's, conceptual and personal connection with Henri Bergson. It is perhaps a mistake that the pre-eminent French philosopher is not included in the title of the book given that the critically attentive wedding of Bergson's personal connection to the Archive with his writings on film and memory (and its subsequent criticisms, particularly via Deleuze) is perhaps die strongest and most interesting thread in Counter-Archive. In Chapter 1 we discover that 'Mr. K', was a student of Bergson's and a close friend until the philosopher rose to fame and the correspondence between the two (contained in the archive) ceased. Nonetheless Amad makes a convincing case for the importance of the relationship between 'the millionaire and die philosopher'. …